They really said ‘Cheap’ and $600 in the same sentence.
They sell 4 wheels for $700. People buy it. Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit - Apple https://share.google/FCOp7IY3rKkfeIOth
“Adds improved mobility to your Mac Pro”
That’s absolutely ridiculous. Easy to see how Apple got to where it is now if people actually pay this amount for this crap.
Easy to see how America got to where it is today too… Grifting is the only American culture.
8GB RAM? No.
You are not the target audience
If you know what ‘8GB RAM’ means you’renot the target audience for this machine.
Question, what is the used market for Macs like?
I can’t check the prices for the USA, but I really wonder if getting an used M1 Air wouldn’t end up being better bang for your buck?Probably, so I would guess the core audience to be businesses or schools who need a few hundred a year, but had no need for the computational power of more expensive models.
If this is the regular price, schools can probably get them for $550 or less on a bulk contract. They seem to give 10% discount on any large school purchase.
Just checked eBay. ~200-250 for used M1 Air 8gb RAM and ~300-350 for used M1 with 16gb RAM.
Yeah it def would be. The laptop has a pretty slim target markt
As an IT person that’s worked at schools for 20 years I can say this has no place here for us. Too underpowered for adobe products or composer products that our arts/graphics/music labs are interested in and too expensive to replace the Chromebooks that the students use. This is for the wealthy to give to their 4 year olds instead of a MacBook pro like they usually would have. Or a really good porn machine 😁
That’s odd, because it is similar in performance to the M1 Air which is still pretty banging at basic introductory media production.
If you are running a proper production lab you aren’t using $600 computers anyway, or you are economizing guerilla-film style. If you wanted to introduce 1080p NLE or basic DAW to incoming noobs, probably an okay device… but a lab should be using desktops anyway or your curriculum is badly broken. Definitely get minis if you’re doing macs.
This basic laptop in a premium case with great battery life is for folks doing lots of admin or studying and running office, with Pixelmator or Affinity or other mid range production apps. It WILL run photoshop fine if you don’t work on large files.
RIP to the mid range Chromebook and windows laptop market.
funny joke
Why would anyone get a Chromebook for $600 over this
they wouldnt. they’d get a 200 dollar chromebook
Maybe in 2019. In 2026 8Gb of ram alone costs $150
sure a stick of ram, but this is not that. i can find chromebooks well under 300 dollars american, i dont know what to tell you.
But it’s 8 gigs of RAM on a Mac so It will perform like a Chromebook with 4 gigs of RAM.
I think you’re mixing things up here. Mac’s are actually VERY performant, both objectively and relative to the on board ram.
There are many critiques that can be made of macOS. But saying it runs inefficiently is not one of them.
i absolutely hate apple and i endorse this message.
Utter bullshit disinformation. SoC, look it up.
Just bought a PC laptop for $399. It does everything I need a laptop to do.
Don’t want to pay $200 more for street cred.
Street cred and spying on you
If the PC is running Windows, the spying is worse. Linux is a good choice, though.
Something I’m still curious about: can these new ARM Apple devices run arbitrary software? Or do you have to install things via the App Store only?
Could Apple someday decide that you’re not allowed to install whatever software you want and only install their approved software?
It runs macOS so you can install any stuff that you want. With asahi Linux showing you can also install other operating systems. I think a retrograde lockdown might be possible, but it’s unlikely.
this laptop running Asahi would be a great entry level machine
Honestly I’m expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).
Unless you’re buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.
I don’t like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.
makes it really good value
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor.
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
You can’t really use an iPad as a laptop. The hardware exists and should work, but the software is awful.
It’s often several seconds to switch to Safari on my iPad Pro with M series chip. We’ve had app switching in computers for 40 years. Why can’t iPad do it?
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
So form factor, not hardware internals should be the deciding factor in cost?
To a degree, yeah.
The laptop form factor is engineered with lid and palmrest assemblies, if you’re going to compare the two then you’ll want to add a nice keyboard to that iPad. Apple’s is $270.
Apple’s is $270.
Typical Apple tax, completely unrelated to the few dollars a keyboard costs to make for real.
You’re not entirely wrong, in that the Apple Tax is real.
Nonetheless, the quality of the Magic Keyboard is substantially higher than that of a keyboard you can get for “few dollars”
Ultimately, your assertion was:
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air with a keyboard that matches the form factor and build quality of a MacBook Neo does not actually cost the same, it costs an additional $270.
The MacBook doesn’t have a touchscreen. It cancels the keyboard cost out.
They don’t even put touch ID on the entry model.
What something should be priced at is what the market is willing to pay for it. People are definitely willing to pay more for a MacBook than an iPad. Also there are similar spec’ed Chromebooks on the market that cost around the same price and people buy them. The Neo is competing with Chromebook.
In addition to being more locked down, you’d also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?
It’s an iPhone 16 with a MacBook shell
I mean if by shell you mean KVM then yes.
It’s a pretty good price for those peripherals plus the low end phone though
I wouldn’t consider it low end, early benchmarks put it in the range of M1 which surpasses Intels N-Series.
IMO it’s the perfect typewriter/frontline worker machine when personal computing is getting more expensive by the day
Yeah sorry I was thinking more of the other specs than the chip itself. As you say, a pretty good little A chip, I suspect the first real go to market one given M comparisons. Perfect as you say for heavy keyboard users.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook
One has a keyboard (cheap components), the other has a touchscreen. The cost cancel each other out.
Better specs sure, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi’s memory management wasn’t as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).
For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?
I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.
Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it’s still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn’t surprise me given Apple’s laptop history
They were talking about memory not storage
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we’re pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
I seriously doubt many people using this will be doing much video editing with 40 tabs open. Your expectations are unrealistic for the type of user who will be buying these.
Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.
Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.
It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.
This is a step backwards from M1 in terms of cores, core speed and bus speed. This is not going to feel like an m1 base even.
We’ll see when the reviews hit. It’d be pretty dumb for it to be worse than an M1 when older airs get discounted down to similar prices.
8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn’t great, but it’s not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn’t so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.
Honestly, it might be a wakeup call for laptop vendors, or it might just put a lot of them out of business. This is not a good economy for them to suddenly have to compete with Apple on value…
They should have done so from the beginning. If they vanish because they waited too long to compete, so be it.
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.
Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It’s GRIM out there.
Agree. Probably best notebook for students and also for smaller companies, if you’re not relying on high end hardware.
I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!
No, 8gb of RAM (obviously older DDR but still) and 256gb or storage.
Of course the CPU and other older components will be less powerful, but like… What do we use computers for now that we didn’t in 2017? AI? Oh nooooo, what will I ever do without local AI… It all works the same, at a pretty decent speed running Bazzite (cause I wanted to see how it ran games. It topped out at Skyrim Special Edition running at 15fps, did good at fallout New Vegas though).
I got a bargain, but say you can only get it now for double what I paid. That’s 1/6 the price. Why pay 600% more for a computer that’s not even that much better?
this MacBook is going to have 10x the battery life of your used laptop, and weigh less.
plus, it’s brand new so it has a warranty and doesn’t require people to spend time searching for a good deal.
this is an excellent product launch at a good price and it is gonna sell like hotcakes
Mine has a replaceable battery, in theory I can buy whatever quality level of battery I want :3
Again, 1200% the price.
You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?
Do those things warrant 6x the price? Or, in reality, 12x the price? Let’s be real here, the exact hardware specs down to material aside, is it?
Just to be clear in regard to your original comment:
600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You expect manufacturers to sell laptops for fifty bucks?
I expect people to be able to obtain a laptop for 50 or 100 bucks, which they apparently can. Manufacturers should have to reckon with that fairly, or lose business.
I want to destroy new device culture.
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Not usually an Apple guy, but it’s hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)
This is the opposite of “own nothing and be happy” and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.
Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡
Eh, you can just buy $200 ThinkPad and it’ll be fine :)
I know you didn’t mean it like that, but at $599 it is not a “$500 device”. It is a $600 device. Which maybe isn’t much worse but still quite a price difference.
It’s $499 for students.
Also microcenter usually sells apple products at the student price to non students too
Hell, Apple themselves usually sell Apple products at the student price to non-students, as long as you nod and wink when you click the Checkout button.
Asahi Linux on MacBook Neo? A man can dream…
I think this will definitely come. It’s just a matter of time.
Affordability and battery life. I am team linux and android normally, but you really cannot beat a MacBook as an SSH terminal or remote development terminal because they are reliable and the battery lasts all day.
Macs do not respect your privacy. In comparison to windows it’s better but they still log and send every application you open to Apple.
That claim seems like it’d be trivial to fact check, and indeed does seem to be false.
I am not ever trusting a proprietary OS, specially when it has been actively advertised as “caring about your privacy”
It is the advertising of any market differentiator or specifically when it’s for security.
indeed does seem to be false.
That’s from 5 years ago. Let’s look what Apple themselves say about that topic:
Personal Data Apple Collects from You
Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data
this is HIGHLY misleading. The page you linked is for Apple’s global/web properties (hence “within our services”); device-level settings govern app and OS telemetry separately. You can opt out of telemetry on apple devices you own.
Which apps are launched from their website?
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)
If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face
If your mom is going to install facebook, X and instagram to post all personal details and photos away along with all the permissions app requests. I don’t think it matters?
Are you talking about security? What else is Android secretly supplying these apps?
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
“Let’s just giveaway more leeway for corporations, so we can get more accustomed to losing our rights, until we have to jump off the cliff for the lesser evil”
Apple fanboys were proud they had no ads, Apple put on ads. They said they fight the government, they work with authoritarian governments around the world. They said they care about user privacy, they were funneling notifications to directly to the US government.
Yea, keep defending these knucklefucks, they’re totally not trying to manufacture consent for global surveillance while you’re given the illusion of “lesser evil” and losing ownership of devices you bought.
Downvote away, cult.
Look - I can’t prevent my mom from being on facebook and playing candy crush. Nothing I say or do will make that happen. I can improve the situation by:
- Introducing alternatives and hope they spread (Chat with your mom on Signal)
- Reducing data harvesting during ”passive” behaviour (e.g. reduced permissions for apps. Graphene is probably the best here, but good luck getting your mom on that)
- Reducing data harvesting by the phone vendor (Samsung, Google, Apple). This is primarily done by buying an iPhone, simply due to incentives. (Again, good luck getting your mom on Graphene).
If I go too hard on my mom, she’ll just buy herself a cheap chinese android without telling me. Is that better?
It doesn’t seem much worse to me. As long as she doesn’t have too many ad-ridden spyware apps.
Only if you decide to send that telemetry, which is prompted to you clearly and unambiguously.
Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.
Reasonably priced Mac.
Phone CPU. Similar priced iPads come with a much better CPU.
Counterpoint: Phone CPUs can rival yesterday’s desktops.
Yes, but it’s still worth pointing out that the compromises run deeper than alternatives, including Apple’s own iPad Air.
Absolutely agree than phone socs can drive a viable experience, but it’s just still pricier even using iPad Air as a comparison.
I’ve been running an M1 for years now. So tired of the argument that Mac is underpowered. No, it’s not a video editing/compiling/gaming powerhouse, but it more than makes up for it with an 8+ hour battery life, best-in-class display, and silent running, going on 5 years now.
It still handles everything I throw at it just fine. If I need to bust out the compute power, Mac just isn’t the right rig for it. But that doesn’t make them useless.
But only run iPadOS, so they’re a glorified paperweight.
Regardless, I’m never buying another mac unless I can run asahi linux on it. Apple has progressively destroyed MacOS for the last 15 years, and will continue to do so. Most of Apples software design decisions are anti-consumer and monopolistic, and should be straight up illegal. Apple owns your device; not you.
It has comparable performance to laptop CPUs in its price bracket while being significantly more power efficient.
A18 Pro? Intel? Neither CPU is used in the MacBook Neo nor the 599 iPad.
A18 Pro? Intel? Neither CPU is used in the MacBook Neo nor the 599 iPad.
Did you read the post?
They seem to just really hate Apple.
Did you read the post?
You replied to my post and I compared Apple hardware to Apple hardware.
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
If you honestly think these justify the crap CPU, you’re absolutely out of touch with reality.
Please enlighten me then, if you don’t mind. Are there some good benchmarks out there that show the Inadequacies of the A18 chip?
Please enlighten me then, if you don’t mind. Are there some good benchmarks out there that show the Inadequacies of the A18 chip?
I found several after only 30 seconds of googling, including Apple fans’ favorite benchmark: Geekbench multicore where the A18 is about 40% slower.
Isn’t it about 40% cheaper than the M4 CPU macbook ?
Isn’t it about 40% cheaper than the M4 CPU macbook ?
It’s 100% the same price as another portable M4 computer sold by Apple
Probably means their normal go-to market has plateaued. In this price range they can still sell and profit.
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$899 was education price, $1099 is retail.
Don’t need to lie to make a point.
Or maybe it will come with some subscription model to get you more power, from the cloud of course.
If it wouldn’t carry just 8 GB of RAM, it would be a great deal. Sadly, it’s not even upgradable, so its usefulness is rather limited.
It would be. Even my pixel have 16gigs of ram, lol.
Testing was conducted by Apple in January and February 2026 using preproduction MacBook Neo systems with Apple A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 8GB of unified memory, and 256GB SSD.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Seriously? I have recently been working on my personal programming projects on my ThinkPad from 2014. That thing also has 8 GB RAM. It’s slow, but that’s only because the dedicated video card is no longer supported by NVIDIA. I was totally able to run PyCharm, my program (which was hungry for ram), and Firefox with quite some tabs open without any issues. And most people will be doing more basic stuff on this than what I was doing. Browsing around, editing some documents, viewing some photos. I’m not sure how heavy MacOS is, but I’ll assume it’s more like Linux than Windows. You can do a lot with 8GB if your OS isn’t gobbling up resources to spy on you, show you ads, or run some useless AI shit you didn’t ask for.
I agree that it’s not a lot, but this laptop is not meant for people who need to do more than what I mentioned, putting much more RAM in there would just creep up the price without really offering anything.
Note that I’m not an Apple fan or anything, I’ve never even used anything from Apple.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Most notably web browsing which one would think this thing is mostly for.
Nah chrome (worst case scenario) with about 80 tabs total on a M1 Air w/8gb is okay, I see it often doing IT support. This should be a bit better. A18pro is pretty efficient.
What is wrong with your computers that 8GB is unusable for a browser?
Probably Windows.
Tab hoarding I would guess.
This is basically Apple’s version of a Chromebook. It’s an iPhone in the shape of a laptop.
But it runs full macOS.
Considering Windows has become a complete dumpster fire recently, this $600 laptop could be a really appealing option for some if they’re mostly browsing the web.
It’d make for a great student laptop, reminds me of the old polycarbonate MacBooks actually. They did cut corners a lot, but retained all the niceties you’d expect from a MacBook.
And they finally added some colour; could’ve have gone with more vibrant colours IMO but it’s better than nothing.
I gotta say, I do like fuzzy wombats as well^^
