MacBook Neo

They're pretty. I think Linux support on Apple Silicon Macs is generally not that great; otherwise, they would have made for nice Linux laptops.

Not sure I agree these are “surprisingly minimal” compromises for a $600 computer meant to be used every day. The processor, sure. But late-stage MacOS just doesn’t run well on 256 GB/8 GB.

It'll do well for the target market (Chromebook shoppers) and people who prefer a new low-end Mac (which can't run a quality OS like Sequoia) over a used older Mac. Otherwise the Neo is severely handicapped, on purpose or otherwise, to the point where nobody who can buy an Air will be tempted to consider the Neo, to Apple's financial benefit. Image this thing was super thin with nice bright colors (as in the BS "spy" photos), many would consider it for that alone despite some compromises, but these washed out colors, body thicker than an Air and other severe gimpings ensure that won't happen. Market segmentation doesn't happen by itself, you have to work hard on it, you have to beat some products with a stick to make sure they stay in their target customer lane.

In 2026 a hard disk with 2056 GB is utterly useless. I constantly have to remove unused apps and the garbage from Tahoe. And why only 8 GB of RAM?

I don't think this one is for me.

Question about the "it cannot run Sequoia" claim... making a bootable backup on an external SSD (I use SuperDuper! and am o longer sure if CCC works like this anymore) I was able to - last week - revert my M3 MBP from Tahoe to Sequoia. Provided my external SSD is 512G, why won't this work for this MB? The A18Pro chip?

Are we all running the same OS?

iStat Menus shows macOS takes 6.5GB RAM just to boot and show a desktop these days. (and I'm not even running Tahoe, because why would I)

I was considering that this could be a good computer for some of my non-technical family members, but 8 GB of RAM just doesn't sound like it will work very well at all, especially with Tahoe.

Re "Question about the "it cannot run Sequoia" claim..."

Each Mac when it launches runs on the current OS as of the launch date and does not run on earlier OS's. Apple does not provide support (drivers, hardware support etc) for older OS's for newer machines. So M5 will only ever run Tahoe and later OS's, M4 - Sequoia and later OS's etc. You'd need some backporting genius to manage to somehow create the hardware support components for the older OS for the newer machine, without access to Apple's source code i.e. good luck with that.

I don't know about some of these comments. My M1 Air with 8gb RAM and 256gb drive, running Tahoe, works great and does everything I ask it to with no trouble. If you think the Neo is useless, you probably aren't the target market.

@Dave That works because the M3 MacBook Pro didn’t originally ship with Tahoe. I’m not sure what the technical reason is—perhaps just not wanting to add drivers—but historically it hasn’t worked to “revert” a Mac to an older OS than what it came with.

@Mac Folklore Radio I have one of the Walmart M1 MacBook Airs, and it uses just under 5 GB of RAM to boot with Sequoia. It works fine for basic stuff.

Every single person commenting here that it's not fast enough, there's not enough memory, or there's not enough storage is not part of the target demographic. I think it's a great deal for normies who don't need more than the basics.

I am not the target demographic but I am the parent of two kids who are. I got them MacBook Airs last year with twice the memory and storage, and I do not regret that decision at all. Those computers will last for years, whereas I don't think this one would.

"Every single person commenting here that it's not fast enough, there's not enough memory, or there's not enough storage is not part of the target demographic. I think it's a great deal for normies who don't need more than the basics."

That argument never made any sense to me. I can work with an underpowered PC just fine. I can install Mint, put data I don't need on my NAS, use the shell instead of GUI apps, run intensive tasks on my server, and so on.

But I would never give an underpowered computer to a "normie," because when they run out of RAM or disk space, the computer is essentially broken for them.

The "normies" are precisely the people who should absolutely not buy this device.

USB 2? USB *2*???!!!

Come on! That's just taking the piss!

But, yes. An iPad in laptop form. Certainly, although it strains every sinew of my tech pride, I absolutely see the case. Not just in education, either—this could be the way to drag some Mac naysayers into the ecosystem, by way of a second machine, in a way that no other Mac laptop, or the Mac Mini, can. It's necessary.

But USB 2, FFS.

The target audience for the Neo will be fine with a second port that's "only" USB 2. Many (most?) of them would be fine if it just had 1 port, although since it uses one for charging, it's nice to have the second port. Many people only need a Mac for basic web access, email, and other office-type apps. Sure, you could go with an iPad Air, but the new one would cost twice as much by the time you add a keyboard. Even the base-model iPad is slightly more expensive than the Neo by the time you match the storage and add the Folio keyboard, and it only has an A16 processor.

I think Apple will sell a *lot* of these.

We just finished being stuck for a decade in 8 GB hell and now we're back. 8 GB is enough to launch a browser and open a few tabs. For normies that don't do much, that's probably fine. But normies also use Electron apps that are all bloated browsers on their own…

sRGB-only kind of hurts. The display lineup except for one dumpy iPad was all P3. Maybe I just say "screw it" to sRGB and go all P3 and if anything looks discolored for them, oh well, everything will for them, so they can just deal with it. Basically like how Apple doesn't care about non-Retina displays, maybe it's time to stop caring much about non-P3 ones.

It's cool for the price. Definitely way better than anything running an iOS variant.

Re: "Every single person commenting here that it's not fast enough, there's not enough memory, or there's not enough storage is not part of the target demographic. I think it's a great deal for normies who don't need more than the basics."

I don't buy that. Do 'normies' only run a few non-electron apps at a time?

The person I was thinking about runs Chrome, Discord, Spotify, some messaging apps, and a few others I'm probably forgetting, on top of the 5-6 GB of RAM already used by the OS. Is 8 GB of memory really enough when we're dealing with memory hogging web apps? I suppose modern SSDs are good for memory paging but I wouldn't want to get them a computer that may already have trouble juggling these apps now, to say nothing of how much worse things are likely to be in a handful of years.

IIRC, there were 2 main reasons explaining why Apple lost the edu market:
- price
- lack of or bad management software.

Have they solved the second point?

Jamf would probably work well for management.

@Bri That's exactly what I'm thinking. Bloated macOS + multiple memory hogging web apps + any browser with more than a few tabs + the propensity of normies to never quit apps (only close windows) + laptops having fewer restarts (higher memory fragmentation) = no way these things aren't swapping to storage on day 1.

Maybe Apple tested normie workflows and measured Compressed Memory making effective RAM closer to 10 GB or 12 GB? Still not enough, esp considering the next 5 years (until Apple labels them "Vintage").

I hope their budget SSDs are not QLC trash.

I can't believe it: a Mac laptop without a notch. I thought Apple had forgotten that displays are meant to be uninterrupted rectangles. This automatically means that the notch-less Neo is the best-designed Mac laptop currently available.

Part of me wishes they had limited this model exclusively to education.

Apple used to represent the premium brand that resisted the race to the bottom. This compromises that in some ways.

I'm not opposed to the idea, they will likely sell a ton of these. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in a few years.

Apple doesn't really have the premium brand reputation they once had anyway. Increasingly they're the far more expensive, slightly better version of what everyone else is doing. Software-wise, anyway, which is why it's dangerous for them to flirt with low end hardware when it's the one thing they are doing extremely well right now.

MacBook 2017: 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 0.92 KG, macOS Sierra
MacBook 2026: 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1.23 KG, macOS Tahoe

Seems a regression to me.

This would be a fine deal if it didn't require liquid glASS. I'm the person in my family who generally recommends computers to family members who this is a great hardware fit for, but I will never recommend any Apple product that requires liquid glASS now, which is all of them.

People who wonder why there is only 8GB of RAM in this machine must be living under a rock. No, it's not good, but very understandable.

I’ve seen most people say it’s a big downgrade from the M1 MacBook

Wow. Some people here are just completely unhinged. I owned both a PowerBook 5300 and a Power Mac 4400. Now those were genuinely terrible Macs. I'd argue the absolute worst and whoever was responsible should be sent to the Hague. The MacBook Neo isn't just a good laptop, it's a good Mac. Just because it doesn't fit your needs doesn't mean it won't fit the needs of most people. If I were a betting man I'd put money on this going down as one of the best selling Macs ever.

The wedge had so much better ergonomics, my poor palms and RSI.

I'm not saying the MacBook Neo won't be a commercial success. It probably will. I'm just worried that it already won't perform well with just a few common Electron applications running at the same time.

And I'm even more worried that, given how software quality and efficiency continues degrade across the entire tech industry, within five years most common activities like going to any streaming site will be nigh unusable on it.

No surprise that a load of developers aren't impressed by a machine designed for regular folk.

It outperforms the M1 Air (Single Core) and that seemed to work well for most people. Think the Neo will be fine for people who don't code or edit 6K video.

The M1 Air 256/8 I daily drive for non work related stuff is still an excellent machine. If the Neo outperforms the M1 then, 256 GB of storage aside, I am sure it will be more than enough for most people

If they do annual updates of this (unclear, since the name has no suffix), the next version will probably get the A19 Pro, and consequently bump RAM to 12 GiB.

But since the iPhone has no real use for two USB 3.0 ports, that limitation will probably stick around on the Neo for quite a while.

Either way, this is a perfectly fine Mac, for $599. Would I recommend it to any random casual user? No; they should get the Air instead, just as before. But if they're on an especially constrained budget, and/or a student, give this one a shot. The high single-core benchmark numbers (presumably a few percent above the iPhone 16 Pro's, due to more thermal headroom) will make it feel a fair bit zippier than many other contemporary $600 laptops.

"I owned both a PowerBook 5300 and a Power Mac 4400. Now those were genuinely terrible Macs"

Not nearly as bad as an 8 GB device running Tahoe in 2026.

"If I were a betting man I'd put money on this going down as one of the best selling Macs ever."

I agree, a lot of people will fall for this and then regret it immensely. I hope Apple won't actually have any in stock and only use these to upsell people to a working configuration.

"a machine designed for regular folk."

This is not a machine designed for regular folk. Open the online version of Word in Chrome, open Facebook, open a file in SharePoint, open one or two other websites, and use them for an hour or two. That alone will use more memory than this machine has in total.

These 8 GB machines will be "Your system has run out of application memory" central, particularly because there is also not much swap space. If the 8 GB machines at least had a bunch of storage, they'd just be slow, but with a 256 GB SSD, they'll be unusable for everyone but the lightest users.

This would be an amazing system for running a lightweight Linux distro, but not for Tahoe.

People seem to be forgetting that macOS has this feature where it can swap memory out to disk... and with modern flash storage it's pretty fast these days.

I have a M2 MBA with 8GB of memory that I use occasionally for work (Xcode, Emacs, browser etc) and you know, it's totally fine. Sure it's not the fastest. But surprisingly it is rarely memory constrained and always feels snappy. So I think for a lot of folks 8GB is very workable, even on Tahoe ;-)

People's reports of older Macs working well in 2026 with 8 GB of memory makes me more hopeful that this will be a workable system for common uses. My main reason for that concern is because I'd love for some of my friends and family to have a low cost MacBook as an actually reasonable option. (The fun colors help too.)

And if we break this down, 8 GB of RAM should be PLENTY for a modern computer, and it's *absurd*, utterly absurd, that there's any question about it. If we were still running the software we were 10+ years ago, software that was by and large *better* than what we have now in that it didn't do anything all that much more complicated but was a lot more efficiently written, less buggy, less likely to have pointless online anti-features, and *wasn't* an Electron app, then 8 GB would be a lot. It just goes to show how bad software has gotten over the last decade or two that you need at minimum 8 GB of RAM to just browse the web, send messages and watch videos.

"People seem to be forgetting that macOS has this feature where it can swap memory out to disk"

If only this device actually had an SSD large enough to make that work.

"8 GB of RAM should be PLENTY for a modern computer"

One other thing is that these MacBooks don't have 8GB of RAM, they have 8GB of shared memory. I guess at least 1-2 GB of that will be allocated as VRAM?

I'm guessing there will be plenty of "real world" benchmarks starting next week, so I'll reserve judgment until then.

@nhoj … All that swapping takes a toll on the longevity of SSD hardware.

But I guess it’s no different for iPads, which IIRC gained Mac-style virtual memory in a recent iPadOS update.

@nhoj: All that swapping takes its toll on SSD modules.

Howard Oakley wrote last week about how long Mac SSDs should be expected to last:

"To work out how long you can expect your Mac’s internal SSD to last before it reaches that cycle limit, all you need do is to measure how much data is written to it, and once that is 3,000 times the capacity of the SSD, you should expect it to fail through wear. Fortunately, SSDs keep track of the amount of data written to them over their lifetime.

[...]

"My iMac Pro is now well over 7 years old, as it was bought new in December 2018. It has a 1 TB internal SSD (I wanted 2 TB, but couldn’t wait for a BTO), and has run pretty well 24/7 since I got it. As I work every day, even over Christmas, and it has been my main production system, it has probably been in use for over 2,500 days now.

"According to the SSD’s records, over that period its 1 TB SSD has written about 150 TB in total, from its total expected lifetime of 3,000 TB, if it reaches 3,000 erase-write cycles. At current usage rates that would take another century, or 133 years if you want to be precise. In reality, it’s generally believed that most SSDs will cease functioning after about 10 years in any case."

https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/26/how-long-will-my-macs-ssd-last/

macOS running on an A18 Pro. Now where’s my iPhone that turns into a Mac when connected to a larger display and the usual desktop input devices?

Proving pretty conclusively that the iPad, especially the iPad Pro (16GB RAM on the 1TB M2 models) could have just had vanilla macOS ported to it, and it would work fine. And, given the touch targets are larger than many of the touch targets on the smallest supported iPhones, AND you have the Pencil, it would be a much better user experience than iPadOS.

@Someone that's my thought. Everything on iPadOS is a cheap facsimile of macOS -- windowing, menus, multitasking, Stage Manager when Expose exists, etc. iPadOS is just macOS if it were locked down to the App Store and created by interns who tried to recreate macOS from memory after using it one time. There's no point to it.

Will the removal of Intel frameworks and code in the next macOS version reduce system RAM consumption at all?