I’m curious what the use case for that would be. Where would someone opt for that over a Mac mini? They’re already pretty cheap ($500 on sale)

I wonder if this means a Mac Nano with an A-series chip is on the table now. Essentially a beefed up Apple TV that runs macOS.

I know, but that doesn&#x27;t mean there aren&#x27;t people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone&#x2F;Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.I used to only want black&#x2F;silver &quot;base&quot; colors for resale reasons but that has fallen far on my needs for a laptop since I keep&#x2F;repurpose them or cycle them through friends&#x2F;family instead of reselling in most cases now.

Pro = Business&#x2F;serious = Boring colors.

I&#x27;m kind of shocked that they don&#x27;t have much higher battery life. I&#x27;ll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?If&#x2F;when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I&#x27;d guess) I might consider one of these as a remote&#x2F;couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.

Definetly, my kids at different schools had iPad&#x27;s and Chromebooks. The kid with the iPad was using an external keyboard most of the time iirc.

&gt; 2.To an individual consumer perhaps, but schools need to buy hundreds at a time and the second-hand market isn&#x27;t really great for that.This is basically Apple taking a bite at the Chromebook market. Interested to see what reviewers have to say.

A used one probably has not-so-healthy battery and a bit worn keyboard. Maybe some scratches on the screen as well.At this price, a new device seems very tempting over dealing with a used hardware which is always a bit of a lottery.Performance-wise A18 would be plenty for casual stuff. IIRC it&#x27;s faster than M1.

That doesn&#x27;t make much sense. They do lean&#x2F;JIT manufacturing, so it&#x27;s unlikely that they have too many iPhone boards. Also, the tooling for a completely new alu unibody size for just selling a few iPhone boards does not make much sense.This is very clearly targeted at Chromebooks in education, where the iPad is not doing too great:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-apple-lost-the-k-12-education-market-to-google-2023-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-apple-lost-the-k-12-educ...</a>

2. Apple would know best no? lol, this screams Cook. Too many iphone boards? Existing laptop tooling. Bam, revenue.

2: I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s about the same, same RAM&#x2F;SSD sizes, maybe an M1 chip is faster than A18 but limitations will come from running out of ram&#x2F;disk Had an intern working with us, basically couldn&#x27;t have an browser running together with Figma due to ram shortage making it slow down to a crawl.

&gt; feels like I&#x27;m being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode.This is by design, who do you think the target market for this Macbook is?

1. Gawd damn, scrolling through that page full of all those bright colors with their saturation cranked up to 11, feels like I&#x27;m being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode. No other page from Apple is like that. wtf2. Would a used older hand-me-down Macbook Air&#x2F;Pro not be better performance&#x2F;value than this iPhone board in a cheap laptop shell? There was a guy here saying he bought a used Macbook Air M1 16GB for 250 Euros.

The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn&#x27;t want to cannibalize their own Pro line.

That&#x27;s the magic threshold.  Can&#x27;t complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.

&gt; you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers

What part(s) of the &quot;full experience&quot; are missing in this machine?

This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used&#x2F;older models.For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.

On the refurb market, you can get a Macbook Air at the 16-512 configuration for only a few hundred more, which is a better value.But! Then you&#x27;ll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.

I&#x27;m not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.Edit: TBH I&#x27;m disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I&#x27;m sure it will do well, financially.

&gt; The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it&#x27;s cheap to replace and to get back up and running.Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you&#x27;re responsible for the full cost of replacement.There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don&#x27;t know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it&#x27;s passed onto the family.

If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU.  The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it&#x27;s cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid&#x27;s entire school career.

I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won&#x27;t have.

The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14&quot; OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.

In my area, an Acer Chromebook Spin 514 has a faster processor, more RAM, and a touchscreen and costs only $100 more. With those specs, it&#x27;s much better for productivity, development, and games, so it&#x27;s well worth the price. It has better Android integration than the MacBook has iOS integration and even runs Android apps natively itself. The same people who didn&#x27;t know that Acer sold this before will still not know they sell it now. The people who knew Acer sold that device before will continue buying it.

It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB&#x2F;256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.

Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.

My son went to college with his Mac.  But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software.  So we had to get him a PC as well.

Student at a US Uni here. They still do very much own the space for both tablets and laptops, especially in CS

Looks like it&#x27;s aimed squarely at students.Apple used to own the space. I don&#x27;t think they do, anymore.They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.

Yea if you can find one for $500 new on sale.Maybe a slightly used one as well.But I think these are very tempting for brand new.

call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn&#x27;t $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?

A refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in &#x27;fair&#x27; condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck.  How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?

Doesn&#x27;t that M1 Air have a much, much slower CPU?

I&#x27;d rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8&#x2F;256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...

I&#x27;ve bought several touchscreen Chromebooks for that price.

Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.

Growing up in the 90s all my elementary school computers were Macs. They seemed to get more Windows as I got older. Not sure the current state.

Would be great deal in 5 years to buy those post-lease if Asahi&#x2F;others Linux catch up.

My kids school has been giving every kid in the upper school an m1 macbook air and they have to replace a LOT of them. Everything they do is in the cloud (Google classroom, docs etc) so they don&#x27;t need powerful machines. The school was considering moving to chromebooks but I can see them choosing this instead just to keep their current provisioning workflows etc.

&quot;Education customers can purchase it for $499.&quot;That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!

&gt; Noone is going to develop on this after all.Because it doesn&#x27;t have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don&#x27;t want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I&#x27;ve got both the m1 max and m3 max (16&quot;) and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would&#x27;ve been perfect at just twice the ram.

&gt; 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.Given the ridiculous speed of Apple&#x27;s almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.That&#x27;s the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can&#x27;t expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.

Depends what you&#x27;re developing. You could build a pretty powerful webapp as long as you don&#x27;t fall into &#x27;i need my blog running in kubernetes&#x27; trap.For a couple months I was on an 8gb m1 air, it was perfectly fine, even with docker containers. As long as i didn&#x27;t launch teams....

&gt; Noone is going to develop on this after all.Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I&#x27;m currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It&#x27;s fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you&#x27;re not using bloated software.

you must be joking sir. those gonna be paperweight in 2 years. 16 is usable minimum for music making, grpahics and web browsing

I&#x27;ve done web dev work on the 12&quot; retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.

My thoughts as well.8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.Fantastic value for money.Honestly what I am (pleasantly) surprised by is the minijack.

That or the 12&quot; Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!It&#x27;s disappointing they finally got the silicon for the &quot;thin and light at all costs&quot; form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!

The 13&quot; MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11&quot; MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I&#x27;ve had ever since I got my 11&quot; MBA.They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.

They already have! It&#x27;s essentially what you wished for.Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm<pre><code> - Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
 - Width: 30 vs 29.75
 - Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
 - Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23
</code></pre>
11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).Only thing they didn&#x27;t do was keep the taper model, but I think that&#x27;s a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.

Yup. The MBA11 is probably my favorite laptop of all time. It&#x27;s my daily driver. I have 4 of those now, running MacOS and Linux Mint.I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.

I still wish they would give back the 11&quot; Air dimensions with Apple Silicon.IMO that form factor was perfect for a small, low end laptop, it just needed a more power efficient chip, and a screen with smaller bezels.

I had to check because I&#x27;d genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.

No. It doesn&#x27;t. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB

It&#x27;s great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I&#x27;m more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer&#x2F;software use cases day-to-day.

8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.

I think it might be 2020 when the M1 was released since I remember i had bought a mac book in 2019 and it was still intel

$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It&#x27;s going to be very price-competitive.

I have one of those, it&#x27;s perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn&#x27;t a lot, but I&#x27;ve never run into issues with it not being enough.The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn&#x27;t as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.

$499 for education which a lot of target group would qualify.A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she&#x27;s perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!

$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I&#x27;m super-stoked.

1: Education market
2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products

I do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that.Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don&#x27;t have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.

It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It&#x27;s a &quot;netbook&quot; replacement, not for software development work.That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.

Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don&#x27;t want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it&#x27;s better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn&#x27;t use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.

The price is fantastic but 8GB RAM feels like going backwards again, but oh well, ram shortage and beggars can&#x27;t be chosers

Lol, that&#x27;ll never happen. And it&#x27;s still 2x a Chromebook, while being far more fragile because Apple doesn&#x27;t believe in plastic. If this is ever bought by a school, it&#x27;ll be bought for teachers, or maybe in a very rich district.

The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.

RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;tech-industry&#x2F;hp-says-memory-costs-doubled-to-35-percent-of-pc-build-materials-in-one-quarter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;tech-industry&#x2F;hp-says-memory-co...</a>

My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.

Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.

Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can&#x27;t do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16&#x2F;32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won&#x27;t last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.

300*500 kids is 150k and the difference between a school choosing chromebooks again.  This is priced against the $450 Chromebook.

This is a 600 buck machine. &quot;Just $300-350 more&quot; is a 50% price hike!

Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it&#x27;s just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.I still really like it, but I&#x27;ll probably wait for a discount.12 GB would&#x27;ve been amazing to have though, oh well.

&gt; if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch IDYeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.

Apple Watch costs half this thing, but then again maybe there&#x27;s a large percentage of phone&#x2F;watch only users.

It&#x27;s nice to be able to authenticate sudo via biometric id with the help of Pam, or unlock your password manager like bitwarden.I don&#x27;t think an apple watch would help there?

Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.

CPU performance is about equal to the M1 multicore and a bit better single core.

How much of that 256GB is eaten by the factory install of MacOS?What&#x27;s the CPU performance like compared to an M1?

I believe the single core performance of the a18 pro  is a 50% boost, but the multi core performance is about the same as the m1. I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re already taking the ram limitations into account for longevity.

Yeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.

I would say that the look and feel of M1 MacBook Air is better, and you aren&#x27;t getting an upgrade in performance department either, so is it really an &quot;upgrade&quot;?Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren&#x27;t getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.

$599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch IDHonestly pretty fantastic product and price.This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)

They do allow you to run third party operating systems on Macs. For now.

Apple has never locked down the bootloader on a Mac-series product before.(But they have never not locked down a product with an A-series CPU - hence my concern)

Uhh... you know when the Mac&#x27;s were Intel they specifically made a tool for installing Windows on your Mac and shipped drivers for Windows.

Yes? This is a demonstrable fact?Lay off the hater-ade for a second.

Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn&#x27;t MacOS to be run on their hardware?

I wonder if the bootloader will be locked down, I hope not.

&gt;M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18.MacBook Neo is A18 Pro and if you look at benchmarks, the A18 Pro single core performance is 50% faster than the M1...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;v6&#x2F;cpu&#x2F;8650702" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;v6&#x2F;cpu&#x2F;8650702</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;macs&#x2F;macbook-air-late-2020" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;macs&#x2F;macbook-air-late-2020</a>

Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart&#x2F;BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.

That’s great, maybe someone will finally start optimizing their shitware.

8GB RAM, no apparent upgrade option.
Regardless, these will be insanely popular. Apple has finally made a play for the budget laptop market.

plenty of laptops run cables internally to device ports.

So presumably the small headphone jack is on a daughter board which could just as easily carry a USB 2 signal.

Because the motherboard is tiny and on the left?

I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port

they do it so that you&#x27;ll buy a MacBook Pro

Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?That&#x27;s one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.

Because it is a $599 ($499 for many) MacBook.

Because of course there&#x27;s no magsafe.

It&#x27;s probably cheaper to squish everything into one small PCB on one side of the machine.

Yeah, but most people will also be using Bluetooth pointing devices.

Most people won’t be using a mouse with their MacBook.

Most people use a mouse on the right so having a wire where a mouse will be can be annoying.

Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors&#x27; worth of stuff on it then you&#x27;re running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I&#x27;m sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there&#x27;s 18 gig of RAM gone for example.As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I&#x27;ve seen so many students struggling with them.

Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.

I still use my M1 Air with 8gb as well. I don&#x27;t do my daily dayjob work on it, but it&#x27;s more than fine for everything else I do.

&gt; 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world.Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.

FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still.  8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.

My kid&#x27;s school chromebook is 4GB and it&#x27;s barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn&#x27;t great but 8 with apple&#x27;s really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.

8Gb. Fuck off no chance.Not in a world of everyone shipping fat browsers with everything.Edit: everything my kids use in their educational side is browser based or thick web apps. This is going to suck.We shouldn&#x27;t be here and 8Gb should be absolutely fine, but that is not the case.

The 2015~2017 MacBook (I own one and love it) was a similar thing, but with a passively-cooled Intel chip. With Apple Silicon this will be amazing.

An iPhone in a laptop body to be an Apple &quot;Chromebook&quot;, I can only imagine this will be pretty popular.

&gt; Browsers, very light photo editing, and email&#x2F;school&#x2F;office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.I&#x27;m currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I&#x27;m at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I&#x27;m sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you&#x27;re an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.That&#x27;s why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don&#x27;t want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.

I think that you&#x27;re drastically understating how great this is for actual general use.  The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is.  People that frequent places like HN think it&#x27;s light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments.  That&#x27;s not general use.  That&#x27;s power user stuff to the majority of users.  Browsers, very light photo editing, and email&#x2F;school&#x2F;office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they&#x27;ll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.

The ipad pro with keyboard is $1300, more than 2x the price of the Neo. Definitely not the same product category.

Because this way they sell two for the price of two.

Who wants it? On my iPad I want an iPad OS, MacOS is not good for touch operation. MS tried merging two OS-es (surface) and see how it went.

Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.

I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the &#x27;window&#x27; option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard &#x2F; trackpad &#x2F; etc. Anyway, for years I&#x27;ve been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests,  - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I&#x27;m not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.

Stating the obvious - because keeping them separate means Apple gets to double-dip on people buying more or less the same hardware twice.

all of apple’s devices with displays down to the watch run OS X with a form factor appropriate UI layer on top. iphone and mac are more unified than google’s android&#x2F;chromeosTahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.

in a competitive market they would have been unified a long time ago. google has been making slow steps at doing this apple wont until google does

Yeah but macOS has never been ran on a “A” series chip before which makes it all more so interesting.

It is a given on Windows land, Apple is the one that rather sells two for the price of two.

Hasn’t that been the discussion since the laptops&#x2F;desktops went arm?

From what I&#x27;ve seen people have mostly been asking for Mac OS features on the iPad, not phone apps on the Mac.The increased compatibility is great and kind of obvious given the switch to ARM, but if it went both ways then the M4 chip in iPads would be a lot less bored.

Haven&#x27;t they? I can download iOS apps from the app store, sign them again with my own keys for MacOS, run them natively on my MacBook without any issues. Same binaries, same APIs. It all just works.

Why would that mean that, when iPads have had A series and M series chips for ages now?

I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.The M-chip with that balance is the A-chip.

I think it&#x27;s purely a pricing &amp; supply chain thing. Certain iPads have M-series chips in them, now certain MacBooks have A-series chips in them.Also, the chip used has no impact on the viability of merging macOS and iOS anyway.

no? it’s neck and neck with the M1 on benchmarks, plenty of people seem to still love their M1 airsM1 evolved from the A cpu line.

Seeing as it&#x27;s the A18, are there any concerns about third-party &quot;desktop&quot; software not running on this new platform?

I don&#x27;t think they would; I&#x27;m sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.

Shipping macOS on iPads will near instantly vanish a very large cohort of their macbook users.

Interesting how it runs on the A18. I wonder if this means they will try to unify macOS and iOS within this decade.

You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They&#x27;ve really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.

... with build quality to match. Apple outclasses everyone else when it comes to the build quality of their laptops.

The problem with a $200 laptop is that you get a laptop that&#x27;s worth $200.

Not only can you buy two and a half Chromebooks with this, they never had much uptake outside a few countries school system.

IMO the biggest sell for Chromebooks in the education market (which is where they shine) is the software. It&#x27;s a locked down OS with a cloud login that means when you encounter the slightest hardware issue you can swap out for another device seamlessly. macOS doesn&#x27;t have anything comparable to that.

I agree. Especially now, with the insane RAM prices.

how much money I have lost to this damn ladder

That&#x27;s called &quot;Apple price ladder&quot;. Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with &quot; but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!&quot; until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.

The newest entry-level Air is $1100, this is $600, or $500 difference. It&#x27;s significant.Apple released the M1 MBA for $999 and it was considered insane value, and it had 8GB of RAM as well.I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s criminal, sufficient for plenty of casual users. Of course not for everyone.

8gb ram is criminal. For $100 more Air is the one to buy.

I see a lot of young people on that page.

But it shows USB ports on the other side?

Speaker grilles, one on each side. Shame it&#x27;s not an SD card slot.

What&#x27;s that slot on the side? Antenna?

Reminds me of when every college kid had those plastic Macbooks. Quite a smart product.

IMO it’s not that big of a feature. People touch type.

Funny; for me, a backlit keyboard is one of the most unnecessary features I can think of. Even for those who can&#x27;t touch type, the keyboard is just inches away from the bright screen which sort of illuminates them.

Wait did I read that correctly? There&#x27;s no backlit keyboard? I don&#x27;t recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they&#x27;re marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.

The DKK5499 is with VAT. If I enter a San Francisco zip code, it still only comes out to about USD654.

With or without VAT? The USD price is without VAT.

That&#x27;s around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.

The US price doesn&#x27;t include tax, Denmark price I assume does.

It&#x27;s the 25% VAT. Pre VAT, it&#x27;s ~$685.With state sales tax of 8% where I live, the base would cost me $648.So not a huge difference.

Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.

Taking the German price of 699 Eur and accounting for the extra VAT in Denmark (25%) vs Germany (19%) I get 853 USD which means you&#x27;re basically in line with the price for Germany which I expect is close to the price for the rest of the EU +&#x2F;- VAT.So the higher price in Denmark looks like VAT + some extra costs for being in the EU market; import duties, corporate taxes, etc.

That&#x27;s only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750

The Danish version has two years of warranty.

Europeans (I&#x27;m German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.

Vote for politicians who&#x27;ll lower VAT from 25% (!!!) to the same about as we pay in sales tax (5-9% depending on locale, 0% in some states) -- see lower prices :)

Ugh. Why is is so much more expensive in Denmark? Here it&#x27;s DKK5499 for the 256 GB version. That&#x27;s USD857.

Looks like there isn&#x27;t any indication in the photos.

I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.It&#x27;s interesting because the new studio display has 4 usb-c ports and 2 support thunderbolt, but they do indicate which ports are thunderbolt above the port.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;studio-display&#x2F;specs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;studio-display&#x2F;specs&#x2F;</a>

Tiny, silly, no good, minor, tedious complaint: can you visibly tell which port is USB 3 vs. USB 2 or do you have to just remember?

cute netbook, I appreciate the no notch designToo bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.

I was wondering if they were somewhat intentionally trying to harken back to those original iMacs and iBooks. The first thing I thought when I opened the page for these was that the colors were really giving me that vibe.

Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook &#x2F; education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.

I wish they had the green from the iMac lineup.  I like that color a lot.  Still this is a nice device at an excellent price.

$599 and available in a range of colors. My bet is this is going to be a hit with high schoolers and college students everywhere.Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby

You are totally right. Also, I think it&#x27;s basically to avoid only one port to charge and use for connectivity.

The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It&#x27;s really not a chip designed to be put into PCs

The M1 Air didn’t have MagSafe, but yeah agreed

Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.8&#x2F;256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.

It&#x27;s interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was- No touchID on the base model- 8GB of RAM- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2- No MagSafe.But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.

Built for Apple Intelligence. 8GB of RAM. It will be a struggle but I have no doubt it will sell really well.

If they plan to sell any volume, they can&#x27;t rely on leftovers.

Because this is probably using a bunch of old parts that didn&#x27;t get sold and are very cheap now (the a18 from last year&#x27;s iPhones, etc).It also probably doesn&#x27;t have a ~60% margin.

Maybe it&#x27;s cheaper to make something that doesn&#x27;t have be small as an iphone.

First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.

Don&#x27;t the new iPhones have Apple&#x27;s own modem in them?

For starters, no royalties to pay Qualcomm.

You&#x27;re confusing the sales price with the manufacturing cost. They will continue to set whatever prices people will pay because it&#x27;s a walled garden and there&#x27;s no other company building Apple (MacOS) compatible laptops.

It&#x27;s possible that they are selling it close to cost to get more young people into the macOS&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;iPadOS ecosystem. If you can translate each one of these into a &quot;Pro&quot; device sale down the line then it&#x27;s a win for Apple.

probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it&#x27;s not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.

Good question...  I wonder if the 5G chipset adds significantly to the price?  IP licensing?

Besides the phone CPU, they’re using less apple custom silicon: MediaTek wifi&#x2F;bluetooth, no cellular modem, generic 1080p camera.

Interesting. In Canada the 17e starts at $899, and the Neo starts at $799.

The MacBook Neo starts at the same price as the new iPhone 17e!I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.

There are bunch of expensive components in a phone that aren&#x27;t in this. The modem and camera system come to mind.

Much bigger screen, keyboard, big battery, lots of copper and aluminum, extra USB port, touchpad, a charger.

To name a few components:- Older chip (and with fewer thermal constraints)- Only one camera (and much cheaper)- Less RAM than 17pro and Air- No cell modem, FaceID, ProMotion, MagSafe, etc.

How is it Apple can make a whole laptop cheaper than the phones they sell? Phones are costing more while laptops are going down in price.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;macbook-neo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;macbook-neo&#x2F;</a>