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List of differences from the MacBook Air:

* Only supports 8 GB of unified memory

* No MagSafe

* One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s

* No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.

* “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air

* Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color

* No True Tone

* 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage

* No camera notch

* Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air

* Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods

* Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air

* The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones

* No keyboard backlighting

* Touch ID not included on base model

* Trackpad does not support Force Touch

* Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7

* No fast charging

* The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma...

You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)

Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.

Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open

Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."

I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.

Indeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?"

Because OoM errors are oh so fun.

I write algorithms that operate on predictable amounts of data. It's very easy to work out the maximum amount of things we need to have and then allocate it all in fixed size arrays. If you allocate all your memory at startup you can never OOM at runtime. Some containers need over 100GB but like the parent comment said we've already bought the RAM.

Caches are automatically released by the OS when demand for memory increases.

You eventually run out of caches to evict.

That is completely irrelevant to this discussion about using the RAM you’ve paid for.

At that point you can still fall back onto swap on NVME.

Doesn’t Apple use pretty damn quick NVME? I wonder how much of a performance drop it actually is. Certainly not as bad as running a swap file on a 5400 rpm HDD…

Isn't that NVME also very expensive to replace because it's tied to hardware identifiers? If you keep swapping all the time, surely NVME would be the first part to fail

This was heavily debated in the 11.4 timeframe because there was risk that this version of the OS could excessively wear NVME.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/04/apple-resolves-m1...

The issue was subsequently resolved but the consensus was with modern wear leveling this isn't so much a thing.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with the original drive. I use it heavily for development practically every day and just dumped the SMART data.

Model Number: APPLE SSD AP1024R

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Available Spare: 100%

Available Spare Threshold: 99%

As always, YMMV

How often are ooms caused by lack of ram rather than programming?

> How often are ooms caused by lack of ram rather than programming?

You're right, but in a production deployment, that extra ram might mean the difference between a close call that you patch the next day and an all hands emergency to call in devops and engineers together during peak usage.

source: been there

we're still talking about the MacBook, right?

> we're still talking about the MacBook, right?

na, this is just PTSD talking

I don't think MacOS OoMs as Linux

(and to be honest the way Linux does acts on OoMs are quite debatable)

macOS can OOM, ish.

If you don't have any more disk space for swap, or memory pressure gets too high, you get the "You've ran out of application memory" dialog box with a list of applications you can force quit, and macOS leaves it up to the user on what to kill instead of the system choosing automatically.

do you also say that about hdd space? about money in the bank?

It’s counterintuitive but I learned this best by playing RTS games. If you don’t spend money your opponent can outdo you on the map by simply spending their money. But the principle extends, everything you have doing nothing (buildings units etc) is losing. The most efficient process is to have all your resources working for you at all times.

If you don't have savings to spend for a potential change of tactics, larger players, groups or players with different strategies can easily overtake you as your perfectly efficient economy collapses.

Going to also echo the comment that this isn't an RTS

> this isn't an RTS

Yep. RTS is a context where the principles are more true.

In real life you aren’t in a 1-1 matchup with competitive success criteria.

It's why I wake up at 3am to make sure my agents aren't waiting on me :D

> It’s counterintuitive but I learned this best by playing RTS games. If you don’t spend money your opponent can outdo you on the map by simply spending their money.

OK, hear me out over here:

We are not in an RTS.

Edit: in real-world settings lacking redundancy tends to make systems incredibly fragile, in a way that just rarely matters in an RTS. Which we are _not in_.

Agreed. Real life is not an RTS. Optimizing computer or business resources - kind of like one.

Why he wouldn't say it about HDD space? You buy HDD to keep them empty?

And as for the money analogy, what's the idea there, that memory grows interest? Or that it's better to put your money in the bank and leave it there, as opposed to buy assets or stocks, and of course, pay for food, rent, and stuff you enjoy?

Money analogy could better be put as one of:

1. Store your money in a 0% interest account—leave RAM totally unused—or put it in an account that actually generates some interest—fill the RAM with something, anything that might be useful.

2. Store your money buried in your backyard or put it in a bank account? If you want to actually use your money, it's already loaded into the bank.

Imperfect analogies because money is fungible. In either case though, money getting spent day-to-day (e.g. the memory being used by running programs) is separate.

Then why do you have any hard drive space available at this moment?

It's the same in all three cases: using HDD space, money and RAM for good purposes (disk cache) is useful, wasting it (Electron) is bad.

(Weird side question: are you by any chance the Jason Farnon who wrote IBFT?)

> do you also say that about hdd space?

For slightly different reasons. My game drive is using about 900 GB out of 953 GB usable space - because while I have a fast connection, it's nicer to just have stuff available.

Same for some projects where we need to interface with cloud APIs to fetch data - even though the services are available and we could pull some of the data on demand, sometimes it's nicer to just have a 10 TB drive and to pull larger datasets (like satellite imagery) locally, just so that if you need to do something with it in a few weeks, you won't have to wait for an hour.

> about money in the bank?

Yes, generally. That's the entire idea behind the stock market.

because memory access performance is not O(1) but depends on the size of what's in memory (https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html). Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.

I am not following, isn't this just a graph that shows that how fast operations happen is largely dependent on the odds that it is in cache at various levels (CPU/Ram/Disk)?

The memory operation itself is O(1), around 100 ns, where at a certain point we are doing full ram fetches each time because the odds of it being in CPU cache are low?

Typically O notation is an upper bound, and it holds well there.

That said, due to cache hits, the lower bound is much lower than that.

You see similar performance degradation if you iterate in a double sided array the in the wrong index first.

O notation is technically meaningless for systems with bounded resources. That said, yes the performance is depending on the probability of cache hits, notably also the TLB. For large amounts of memory used and random access patterns, assuming logarithmic costs for memory access tends to model reality better.

Memory access performance depends on the _maximum size of memory you need to address_. You can clearly see it in the graph of that article where L1, L2, L3 and RAM are no longer enough to fit the linked list. However while the working set fits in them the performance scales much better. So as long as you give priority to the working set, you can fill the rest of the biggest memory with whatever you want without affecting performance.

RAM is always storing something, it’s just sometimes zeros or garbage. Nothing in how DRAM timings work is sensitive to what bits are encoded in each cell.

> Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.

This is an incorrect conclusion to make from the link you posted in the context of this discussion. That post is a very long-winded way of saying that the average speed of addressing N elements depends on N and the size of the caches, which isn't news to anyone. Key word: addressing.

Huh? There is nothing called "empty memory". There is always something being stored in the memory, the important thing is whether you care about that specific bits or not.

And no, the articles you linked is about caching, not RAM access. Hardware-wise, it doesn't matter what you have in the cells, access latency is the same. There is gonna be some degradation with #read/write cycles, but that is besides the point.

why is it not O(1)? It has to service within a deadline time, so it is still constant.

The author of that post effectively re-defines "memory"/"RAM" as "data", and uses that to say "accessing data in the limit scales to N x sqrt(N) as N increases". Which, like, yeah? Duh, I can't fit 200PB of data into the physical RAM of my computer and the more data I have to access the slower it'll be to access any part of it without working harder at other abstraction layers to bring the time taken down. That's true. It's also unrelated to what people are talking about when they say "memory access is O(1)". When people say "memory access is O(1)" they are talking about cases where their data fits in memory (RAM).

Their experimental results would in fact be a flat line IF they could disable all the CPU caches, even though performance would be slow.

In macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files"

I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.

In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.

When you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about.

On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.

You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.

In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)

> I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new

Wait what? How did you manage that?

MacBook Air M1 was released six years ago. That’s pretty expensive for such an old machine!

don't thinkpads from the similar time go for the same amount of money? seems like an alright price for a machine of that vintage, although thinkpad is obviously superior here since it would always be able to run linux or windows (well that one is not guaranteed) without much, if any, trouble

They hold value very well. Still a perfectly good machine today and probably a better deal than the neo if you find one in good condition

OpenClaw found some sweet deal? /s

Yes, the person you are replying to has explained that.

The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.

The old mental model doesn't fit how any OS manages RAM. Every OS plays all sorts of fun guessing games about caching, predicting what resources your program will actually need etc. The OS does a lot of work to ensure that everything just hums along as best as possible.

How do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.

I mean at that point (13 GB memory used), the "Swap used" is at several hundred megabytes.

And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow.

The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p

I remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch just precaching commonly used programs to give better application startup times.

Ha, wasn't it windows vista that allowed you to plug an SD card to use for swap space/fake ram?

SpeedBoost was supported by vista through windows 10, and although windows 11 regognises a speed boost USB, I do not know it it uses it. When I put windows 11 on two i5 8gb machines and plugged in two speed boost drives, it did not swap a lot to them, whereas in windows 7, under memory load it would use them, at least until I found ChacheMem v2.1 it would manage memory much better than windows ever could.

Windows back to window 2.1 386 supported swapdisks, i.e fake ram.

After several days of usage, Activity Monitor will usually shows that "WindowServer" is using 6 GB of RAM.

Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If your machine isn't reporting memory pressure and/or the user isn't experiencing pageouts, then the machine is well-suited to the user's workload.

I'd rather my ram go to my page cache, not have bloated apps hoarding it.

But I thought Electron was the future?

Probably a badly behaved app. Run `IOAccelMemory` to check.

Uptime of 13 days. My WindowServer is at 441Mb. ??? (32Gb RAM M2Max MBPro)

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.

I have heard this before and am curious what kind of sites you open in the tabs?

I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).

It was my son’s laptop , he’s in high school. General Google Classroom / Google Docs / Gmail / web research stuff. He’s not technical at all. I bought him the 8GB machine thinking it would be fine, but it became a big problem for him.

I do think part of the problem was number of tabs open. It was a little better when I taught him how to manage tabs and I also turned up all the memory saving features in chrome.

But even with all of that, it would still slow down with what looked like a pretty minimal workload.

I spent a few hours with him on it, but he still had these kinds of issues.

It just seems like it requires a decent level of sophistication to work with a small RAM budget if you’re using Google software.

Using an M2 8GB Mac Mini, I only ever ran into problems when trying generative fill in Photoshop. There I get insufficient memory errors if the selection is too large.

No you don't work just fine with all that or you aren't doing much.

Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.

Just rust plugin in vs code uses 3gb of ram.

Add a browser, and you are already over 8GB.

> Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.

Just how quickly do you think the SSDs will die? Because there are a lot of 8GB M1 machines out there that have been getting daily use for five years, mostly with 256GB or 512GB storage configs. When do you expect them to fail?

Depends of the usage. I just know that with 48GB I have a few TB or tens of TB written within a couple of hours when playing with homomorphic search.

So you're predicting that 8GB machines will fail prematurely based on extrapolation from an extreme niche use case that doesn't remotely fit on those machines?

> I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine.

Most cool. Is it an M1?

Not the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP.

Same. I've been programming in Go on an M1 for years and perf is spectacular.

Early 2020 i3 macbook air

M2

Linux does this too. It uses 100% of your ram always, using free memory as cache.

Actually figuring out free RAM is kind of confusing.

It also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.

Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.

I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?

Because 8GB is literally enough? There are multiple 8GB Macs in this house and they are fine. I wouldn't use them for development work but they're completely competent at the basics.

What's basics? Of course one can always overbuy hardware compared to the tasks but we are discussing some usage more fitting to the laptop form factor. I would argue that for a laptop a basics is at least some kind of office white collar work or similar. And so it is most likely that at least 2-3 of the Electron monstrosities would be used, an office package or something along the lines, multiple loaded tabs in a browser a few of which will be memory leaking enterprise crap, a few communication apps etc. Nothing really outlandish, only handful of apps, but because they are all fat, they will eat the 3Gb margin super fast and start caching.

The storage is fast enough to not be too much of an issue, and the basics would be mostly a web browser, a lot of things can be done with only it, and if you need to do more than web browser, text editors, you probably should want more than the Neo in the first place

Tons of 8GB users out there who are happy. I'm on 16GB and its definitely enough for a power user - and running multiple coding environments, Docker, IDE's. MacOS is really good with caching.

> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners

This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised.

Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.

The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly.

8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.

Gruber said something[0] that parallels your point, and emphasizes the target audience for this Mac:

> If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want.

Apple has made extensive tradeoffs to make this price point, but they all seem to be reasonable tradeoffs for casual users.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

Perhaps because it's enough for a lot of things. I only came up against the 8GB limit when I ran a LLM locally using Ollama. It worked but wasn't workable.

8GB isn't ideal though and 16GB would've expanded its capacity to do more things. But soon as I want to do more things I shuffle over to my PC with it's dedicated GPU and 32GB o ram

I'm guessing Apple cuts capability to the lower end so as not to hurt sales of the higher end. Usage profile is often dependent on context. There are enough non-power users (when mobile) like me that 8GB isn't ideal but it's enough. And if it wasn't enough we could've paid more for the 16GB, but I personally decided it wasn't worth the ridiculous Apple ram price premium.

So these are my reasons for saying 8GB is enough. I'm also using an M1 MacBook Air, so the puniest of the lineup. Next laptop I'm considering is possibly a think pad with linux so I'm no macOS fanboi.

[flagged]

What are you slicing?

What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?

I'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed.

There's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms.

I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.

i think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue.

the keywords here are "depending on the workload".

edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.

> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip

i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):

    | device                      | cpu                                             | single core score | multi core score |
    |:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
    | iPhone 16 Pro Max           | Apple A18 Pro                                   |              3428 |             8531 |
    | iPhone 16 Pro               | Apple A18 Pro                                   |              3445 |             8624 |
    | MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) |              3708 |            14698 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores)  |              3696 |            14729 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) |              3696 |            14729 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) |              4228 |            17464 |

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

Put the M1 in your comparison - I think the A18 Pro compares favorably to it and it's a good baseline for people who bought in on Apple Silicon early and are still using it.

    | device                      | cpu                               | single core | multi core |
    |:----------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
    | iPhone 16 Pro Max           | Apple A18 Pro                     |        3428 |       8531 |
    | iPhone 16 Pro               | Apple A18 Pro                     |        3445 |       8624 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) | Apple M1 Pro @ 3.2 GHz (10 cores) |        2385 |      12345 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores) |        3696 |      14729 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores) |        4228 |      17464 |

My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.

That's an M1 Pro chip. Looking at the base MacBook Pro / Air models with the base M1 chip, the multi-core score is about the same, and those laptops are also still going strong:

    device                          | cpu                               | single core | multi core |
    |:------------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
     MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2020)| Apple M1 @ 3.2 GHz (8 cores)      |        2323 |       8186

My M1 Pro MacBook Pro is only just now occasionally feeling a little slow and showing me a beach ball occasionally but I’m being super picky due to new machine FOMO and it is the best laptop I’ve had by a country mile.

Still, I can’t justify an upgrade to myself!!

Surprising single core numbers notwithstanding !

My M1 macbook pro still handles everything I throw at it beautifully. I'd love an excuse to upgrade, but there's no reason to do yet. At least not for me.

I'm going to wait a few more years. The M1 is too good. So is my iphone 12. There's just nothing wrong with my phone other than the lightning port.

I have some clip-on USB-C to Lightning adapters that work really well for charging and Carplay. The connection got flaky at one point, but cleaning the port with some iFixit tools fixed that right up.

Clinging to my iPhone 13 Mini until it's natural death.

Do we think the iPhone 16 with A18 Pro chips are going to be the same as the A18 in the laptop though?

When you are not confined to a iPhone body, you have a bit more flexibility in thermals, heat and power consumption.

Would there be any chance the A18 Pro in a Macbook clocks higher? or maybe clocks higher for longer?

> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.

Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.

I'm using a (fairly crappy) HP laptop with 16 gig, running Linux.

I find that the combination of FireFox and Visual Studio gets to the point where it fills up to the point where things get killed (with swap filled as well).

Mate system monitor hilariously reports code using 71MB and firefox-bin using 1.1GB because it has a tree view that doesn't show the usage of collapsed nodes beneath it.

Using smem shows each using multi GB and at my current level I've got 6GB of cache to eat up before it kills code again. Ordering by size Ghostty is the first thing that is not firefox or code at 78MB total. (and about 1GB of non-cache kernel use) . So essentially it's only those two apps that are the problem. Can Macs get by simply because Safari is better with RAM?

Mac is good at managing low memory conditions. Linux is not. When I was on Linux, if I hit 16gb ram used the entire system would freeze for minutes. I would have to go in TTY2 to kill something to get it responsive again.

> running Linux

Problem exists between user and hardware. Applied the Firefox salt over the wound doesn't help either. It's a discussion about Macs btw.

> Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.

if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)

Thats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications.

Depends on which metric do you look, right? :)

Honestly, I don’t know which one to look at and was purposefully hand wavy. I just knew they were looking at the stone one…

  > macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup

What, in fact, is it doing? I'm of the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.

Right now with "green" memory pressure and not so many Safari+FF tabs open, I see 16GB physical, 13.41 used, 2.68 cached, 2.32 swap, 6.57 app, 2.52 wired, 3.89 compressed. Why is there swap used when I have free memory?

I don't know, long ago gave up on understanding this fully. Memory pressure is the only good signal. Or just how slow the Mac feels.

> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

Well for starters MacOS version is currently 26.3 (Tahoe).

Apple ecosystem, if you are not using RAM then it is wasted RAM. So it always optimise to use as much as possible.

The main point however is you are not the target audience. Apple realised that the majority of users don't do anything beyond the power of what the phone supplies. That who this is intended for.

Modern pcs use the ram given to them. Its not like a fixed quantity it requires.

This is a Mac Chromebook. You use it for cloud stuff and every now and then you can run a real application in a pinch.

You can also develop locally which is significant.

If you're concerned about the amount of RAM, this isn't the laptop for you. Grandma doesn't need 16GB to browse Facebook and look at family photos.

I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.

If your "market pressure" worked we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.

For $300 more the base MacBook Air is a significantly better machine than the Neo.

It's $500 more. Basically double the price.

My only real issue with this design is as far as I can tell there is no markings on exterior explaining which USB-C port is "the good one" - an important point given one port is dramatically slower than the other.

I suspect many users will probably accidentally plug stuff like external SSDs into the slow port without realizing. It's maybe too much to hope for at this price point, but would have been nice for a machine with only two ports to be able to offer the same spec USB on both ports.

My instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port - it's closest to the corner - but in doing so you use up the "good" USB-3 port leaving you with only USB2. It's not a huge deal, but charging in the other port to free up the USB3 one feels slightly weird to me. I suspect most users will charge off the USB3 port given its location.

Reading the spec sheet, it also looks like DisplayPort is only supported over the USB3 port too - again there appears no way to know just by looking at the ports. This has never been a problem on any of the Apple Silicon 2-port MacBook Airs, as those have always had the same specs on both ports and could drive a display over DisplayPort from either.

> ...instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port...it's closest to the corner...charging in the other port...feels slightly weird...I suspect most users will...

Ah, but, as I recall some vintage of 2016-2018 Macbook Pro users will remember that using the "backmost, corner" USB-C port for charging could cause the MBP to overheat and fans to sound like a helicopter.

Thus, the (admittedly probably vanishingly tiny minority of) MBP veterans with "back charging USB port PTSD" who learned to use the foremost USB port for charging, will know full well to stay away from using that backmost USB port, if all they need is power!

From Daring Fireball:

It was, I am reliably informed by Apple product marketing folks, a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC.

But yes, even just two dots above the USB3 and two dots above the USB2 wouldn't be rude.

> even just two dots above the USB3 and two dots above the USB2 wouldn't be rude.

But then they'd look the same! :-P You're reminding me of the old story about the leprechaun, commanded not to tamper with a marker over the location of his buried gold, nor to move the gold, instead filled the entire forest with identical markers.

> a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC.

I wonder if they plan far enough out that this was part of the A18 Pro

In fairness, it still sounds better than the 1st gen touchbar macs.

Those ran the CPU at 10% normal speed if you charged with the wrong USB port.

The 8GB max DRAM thing is a brutal limitation though.

You don't have a problem with no keyboard backlighting?

Reading the list of QoL they scrapped I guess Jobs was right all along that to hit a base level of features Apple just needs a certain price point.

Genuinely asking: if you are touch typing, do you really need keyboard backlighting?

The typing part is easy. Honestly the backlighting is mainly useful for a few situations:

1. Hitting an FKey or the keys like brightness that use the Fkeys. 2. Locating the Fn key on PC laptops (honestly even on the Mac I forget that it's in the corner) 3. tapping a keyboard shortcut like `,` or `c` while watching YouTube

Yes. Especially if I'm typing 'y-o-u-t-u-b-e-.-c-o-m' with one hand while laying in bed at night.

I do. I touch type, but I still like being able to see the letters that I am pressing.

not the person you're replying to but that's the first feature I disable on any new computer

My guess is that if you plug a fast medium on the slow USB port the OS will give you a pop up letting you know. I have seen something similar in windows 11.

That's true for displays, at least. I don't know about external storage.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

Being limited to 8gb of ram is genuinely the only thing on that list I care about (no backlight and no fast charging are teetering on the edge of me caring, but they aren't worth multiple hundreds of dollars) - Apple silicone is so fast now that (at least for my purposes) the performance segmentation between price points is basically meaningless.

A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard, it feels insulting not to get it. I cannot believe this is one of the ways they decided to cheap out.

I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.

> A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard

Useless LEDs that burn battery budget.

The thing everyone seems to be missing is this isn't a laptop for you or me. It is to compete with Chromebooks in the educational market, and to have a SKU to sell in developing countries.

Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man.

As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home).

A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.

>> fantastic thing everyone wants

I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me.

(On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)

Why do you need to see your keyboard?

Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire.

Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.

You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed.

The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.

"everyone wants"? I am not even sure I understand the utility. Typing in the dark? For, idk, living in a cave?

14 seconds? Lights are expensive when to comes to batteries.

[dead]

> I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.

I think that’s pretty unreasonable when they’re using an iPhone SoC to keep it cheap because they have massive volume. It was only ever available in 8GB and never designed for user upgradable memory because it’s for a phone.

It’s basically a web browser machine, that’s fine.

No one has commented on the charger this thing comes with: It’s 20W! The sort of thing you’d plug a phone or iPad into, which seems crazy. I kind of wonder whether you could charge it with the built-in USB ports that are in newer wall sockets.

It basically is an iPhone or iPad, but with a keyboard. It’s really only the display that’s gonna consume significantly more power than its iPhone/iPad equivalent.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, and it occurred to me that even the display is probably pretty efficient since it’s not that much bigger than, say, a large iPad pro. It’s just wild to me how little power this thing uses.

At that point, why even include the charger? That would massively cut shipping weight like it did for the phone, and everyone already has a phone charger. I guess maybe they were worried some people would use a ultra cheap charger that can't even handle 20W reliably, but every OEM Android charger should have been fine with that for years, right?

I think this is part of why they don’t include chargers in the EU version of the Neo. If you have a charger from basically any time in the last ten years you’ll be fine with that.

That’s part of the EU USB-C regulation. You must offer a version of the laptop without a charger (unbundling) in order to reduce e-waste. Apple adheres to this by only shipping the MacBook without a charger.

> I kind of wonder whether you could charge it with the built-in USB ports that are in newer wall sockets.

Yes. There are 30W versions available for sure. I bought one to install in my kitchen, but the hole in the quartz was slightly too small to slide in the box, and I am too lazy to try to carve out enough space in the quartz myself, so I just returned it.

It's wild, my Xiaomi phone charger came with 120W two years ago already, Apple seems so behind in comparison.

Feels very negative! It costs 50% less than the air, in a time when everyone else’s prices are going up.

The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.

I don't think that was the intent. If anything, 90%+ of these features here feel nice-to-have, and I bet OP agrees (or is neutrally sharing the comp).

Feels negative because the positive of the cheaper price (it's half the price) is magically not listed

it reads like a 2026 version of CmdrTaco's famous iPod review, honestly

I want to see the person buying the Neo and pairing it with a new Studio Display.

A potential example that comes to mind would be you have a Studio Display in your house that you use for remote work with a beefy MacBook Pro, and then maybe a family member has a MacBook Neo that they’d like to plug into a monitor occasionally.

Tbh if you have a studio display you are probably used to most things not working with it. I get that it's apple, but the lack of a HDMI or Displayport input on the monitor is insane.

There is Displayport support. Over USB-C. If you need an adapter you can get one.

Just like no floppy on the iMac was insane.

When there is a better way, why would you spend money and effort supporting the old outdated way?

I wouldn't let a family member use my desk to plug into my Studio Display. What if they mess with my chair settings?

It won't drive a 5K monitor, 4K is the maximum.

I wonder if Apple should introduce a cheaper 24" 4K monitor to pair it with.

Even better, pairing it with a Vision Pro as your monitor.

And of course the screen: 13.0-inch vs 13.6

Weight is the same incidentally.

I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)

I'll keep adding to the list:

* Only one external display

* No haptic trackpad

No force touch doesn't necessarily mean no haptics. I would assume Apple didn't go backwards to a physically clicking touchpad.

Bad news. It's physical trackpad. https://youtu.be/mBkYho_4CSg?t=226

I can't go back, now that I've discovered the joys of "tap to click". But I doubt most new Mac users would notice.

A physical trackpad can also do 'tap to click'.

Really? Terrific.

> * No MagSafe

For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk.

But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare.

In case you didn't already know or haven't considered it, you can find right-angle usb-c MagSafe adaptors that basically allow the charging cable to disconnect from the device like MagSafe.

Most of these devices are a fire hazard. And in an environment where kids are needing magsafe, is probably the most dangerous for fire safety.

*edit

https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...

So true. Regarding those magnetic USB connectors: not just a fire hazard but also a tendency to eventually burn out whatever is on the other end of them IME.

Maybe ok for giving power if you are careful I think, I never had any fires, knock on wood.

But it's a bummer to zap/kill the data-functionality of USB ports on nice stuff just because a non-spec connector was used in between the two things being connected, for convenience.

So I don't trust them except for conveniently connecting power to low-cost devices. Whether Neo fits that... I doubt but YMMV.

oh, probably not enough contact pressure. resistance is inversely proportional to contact pressure after all.

I am now nerd sniped on the surface physics of connectors. Thanks!

Any you could recommend that are safe?

>No camera notch

Well, I see this as a very positive thing.

Instead, the screen has big bezel.

Yeah, it's funny how it's better than the other MacBooks in a way.

> No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays

Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.

No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...

What about the old Studio Display?

Honestly I stopped caring once I saw the max output is 4k/60 regardless of what you connect - the output is going to look bad with scaling on anything with 5k or 6k resolution, which is all of the recent standalone displays from Apple. It's certainly not going to be an experience worth the price tag of the displays.

The only one of those choices I disagree with is no Touch ID in the base spec. Otherwise, good corners to cut to get to the cheap price point.

Since it's just $100 to get 250 -> 500 GB and Touch ID, I think it's okay.

It means people who need the cheapest computer can get it, and people who want to upgrade pay a small amount and get all the upgrades in a package without jumping up to the MacBook Air, etc. for much more.

I would say "No keyboard backlighting" is a true show-stopper for a huge portion of the target audience (students).

My experience with students (outside of engineering) is that the most common show stopper for MacBooks is price. They’re not nit picking about keyboard backlighting.

Most people have no problem using a keyboard in the dark or with light from the screen.

Backlit keyboards are a nice-to-have, not a showstopper.

Learned touch typing just fine on a non-backlit keyboard. What would you feel would be the issue?

Can't see the keys in a dark classroom or bedroom.

https://xkcd.com/333/

...the skill of touch typing is that you don't need to look at the keyboard.

And the keys are still labeled...

The F and J keys still have bumps, to be able to locate them and position your hands correctly on the keyboard without looking.

I think different people will have one feature they feel should have been kept (other than the ram which is universal). For me not so much the Touch ID but the backlit keyboard.

Agree on the Touch ID. Love that feature for passwords etc.

Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well

I bet there are some paranoid people out there who will love that no touch-ID means no way for law enforcement to compel you to unlock the device.

You could just not set it up don't add your finger.

Yeah; but then the police will compel you to put your finger on the button + get pissed when it doesn't work.

https://xkcd.com/538/

In the United States, anything they beat out of you could be considered legally inadmissible evidence, and thrown out by the court.

(Whether or not that's a limit on law enforcement behavior depends on their particular aims.)

My current note taking machine is an M1 MacBook Air. If something happened to it, honestly, this seems like a really meaningful alternative - like for real work I'd still prefer a ThinkPad, but for being on the move and for having something to throw in my bad, the Neo would be great!

I used to have a Techbite Zin notebook that tbh had a really, really nice keyboard, but it was anemic when it came to literally anything else - and the 4 GB of RAM made even lightweight Linux distros struggle.

It's an A18 Pro cpu with a 60Hz retina display. So it's basically a iPhone 16 Pro with a larger display and physical keyboard.

and there's nothing wrong with that.

wish they enable the actual iphone 16 with a full-fledged OS that we can plug into an external monitor.. I think samsung tried it but didn't get mass appeal. Apple could do that IMO - would have even avoided launching neo as students own a device in the form of phone or tab anyway..

* Max storage is 512GB instead of 4TB.

I currently have 1TB and I'm pretty happy with it, but I've had 256GB and 512GB in the past and I was not happy with those. This might be the only reason I would not consider this laptop.

So no real issue at all for the target group

I would not buy an Apple laptop regardless, but they at least addressed one of my major complaints:

No camera notch

Praise the...market?!

> No camera notch

This is a positive though.

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

The light has stopped shining at Apple for a bit now

I think parent means reflective. In the videos it looks like just a slightly different color. On the other MacBooks it is polished metal.

I forgot about force touch as a feature until I read this comment.

I'm interested in seeing how these changes affect the supply chain of components. I would figure it would be cheaper to just use the existing components with all features, instead of making a different one with 1 or 2 parts less. Maybe this is just how good manufacturers are now?

Has anyone tried to use a laptop at night? It’s pretty hard without lit keys. Maybe this one has some super reflective letters so that the screen lights them up.

Skilled computer usage includes learning to type without looking at the keyboard

Just turn on a light?

I have light fixtures at home.

> No keyboard backlighting

When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?

2010. https://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/12/backlit-keyboard-to-ret...

Why didn't you list the number 1 difference, the price.

Is Force Touch the thing that makes Macbook trackpad better than basically every other laptop trackpad? Because if so, that is actually "the" deal breaker.

They were great long before Force touch.

Still better than my Lenovo

It's pretty cool to see this machine come out. The Macbook Air is still my sweet spot though, I use a Thunderbolt audio interface, and need more RAM.

Great for a student or casual user though for sure.

Can’t expand it at all. Not for me.

Do you know if the A series processor supports virtualization?

The A-series has supported virtualization since long before the M-series existed. iOS disables it in early boot, though.

On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?

A lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249309

The hardware support was there for a while. Given that this runs macOS, i would guess (no insider knowledge) that it would work just fine and not be disabled like it is in iOS (by policy, not by technical reasons)

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=

Price difference?

* $500 = base model (250 GB SSD) (education)

* $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education)

* $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education)

While they are at it, they could bring back the $250 iPad Mini.

I can't quite figure out why the Mini became a luxury item ten years ago, leaving the kid's cheap tablet to Android.

"1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage"

That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.

A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.

Fantastic post, thank you. Answered pretty much every question i had. This is why I love hacker news.

No keyboard backlighting is itself a dealbreaker for me.

The Red Delicious of Macs.

Except nobody wants Red Delicious.

The last point made me chuckle, good catch :D

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

That’s been the case for 5+ years :)

I think they mean not reflective like current models, not that it isn't illuminated like the MacBooks of yore

I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it matte, but just a different matte from the rest of the case? I kind of want to see it in person. It looks very tasteful.

I thought they changed from glowing Apple to reflective Apple

> One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s

This is one of the things I never really expected Apple to do, since they've somehow managed to avoid the confusing black/blue colouring of USB-A ports, giving every laptop they've ever produced since 2012 USB 3.0 ports.

Seems like they're buying into hardware enshittification too (macOS and iOS 26 being software monstrosities with liquid glAss).

Confusing? Seems pretty straightforward, more so than the USB-C system of no indication at all. If you're lucky, you'll get a label.

like Neo from the Martix, it has only one interface port of real use.

Like Neo from the matrix, the other port is still useful for mice, printers, DACs, arduino projects, and little USB powered fans.

Can’t believe anyone this is targeted at is going to plug in a mouse in 2026.

Man, that's just gross!

— ...We believe that the customers will like it despite all that. We plan to market it as MacBook Nerfed.

— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.

— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?

Looks like a bunch of great trade-offs to give value to customers in this economy.

You can use 16Gb of ram on an 8Gb machine, anything more than that it will start creaking and have out of memory errors on applications.

fyi: "Gb" implies gigabit, used in network and RAM where 8 bits = 1 byte is not guaranteed. "GB" implies gigabyte.

"One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s"

Why? Did they stock-piled USB 2.0 controllers and now need to get it off their inventory or something?

Costs. gotta remember this thing is based on iPhone hardware...which doesnt have more than 1 usb port normally.

More like stockpiled a phone SoC with limited I/O

Center stage is dumb anyway

also, less space than a Nomad. Lame.

> * “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air

for pretty much half the price, though.

i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ laptop.

as somebody that has used both windows (at work), mac os (at work) and linux (at work and at home) the macbook neo could be an absolute steal of a laptop.

> * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

oh yeah, first world problems /s

> No camera notch

I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar?

The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple.

Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better.

The free rectangle area is a 16:10 screen, the space around the notch is a freebie.

"No keyboard backlighting" is a show-stopper. Nuts.

You're not the audience, obviously.

It just looks slightly nicer. Touch typists don’t look at the keyboard anyways. And if you care enough about looks, you’ll want RGB lighting.

Plenty of people work in dark or dim places, like school classrooms, where backlighting is great and RGB lighting is useless.

That you seem to think everyone shares your needs and goals makes you a far less effective participant in these kinds of discussions. Maybe think for a bit before asserting what people who care about backlighting need it for and don't.

Aren't classrooms usually well lit?

The biggest drawback is no Thunderbolt. The biggest sell for Macs right now is the ability to daisy chain them with the new RDMA update. A used M1 Mac Mini is more valuable than this.

I'm losing my mind. This is a BUDGET, entry-level laptop, and you're complaining about the lack of Thunderbolt daisy chaining?!

Listen I bought six Retina displays, I don't also have money for a new Mac. Of course I'm going to complain about the lack of Thunderbolt daisy chaining after my frivolous expenses come home to roost.

That's an extremely niche use case and not even a remotely selling point for probably 99% of buyers, much less the "biggest" one.

You get what a budget product is right?

The Neo is basically the mac flavor of an iPad meant for schoolchildren. It's a Chromebook competitor, not meant for whatever kooky AI shit you're doing at home.

> Powered by A18 Pro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18

So this is basically running on a phone CPU

I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.

But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.

The A18 Pro performs about on par with an M4 in terms of single threaded performance, and a little better than M1 in terms of multi threaded performance.

The MacBook Neo has one of the fastest processors on the market for single threaded tasks, which is what has the most impact on how "fast" a processor feels for day to day usage.

Netbooks had processors that were glacially slow.

I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.

People thinking I mentioned my (somewhat) disappointment about the CPU because it is also used in Phones, but actually what I meant is that I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.

But I don't really see doing that for the A18, personally; even though I don't doubt its a good chip!

> I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.

The reputation problem was kind of baked in. Vista launched the same year netbooks did, and even though Vista was a disaster, "runs the latest Windows" is the smell test normal people use for whether something is a real computer.

Netbooks didn't pass.

The storage situation made Windows users miserable anyway. The SSD models had 4-8GiB of flash, and XP alone ate well over half before you'd done anything. So people bought the HDD variant instead, more space, sure, but spinning at 4,200rpm, which wasn't even the slow-but-acceptable 5,400 of a normal laptop drive. Then pile the standard bloatware on top of that.

Bear in mind, people chose the HDD version because it ran Vista: the thing that made it a "real" computer. The SSD variant, the one that actually worked, got ignored for exactly that reason.

Run Linux on the SSD variants though, and the thing was actually great.

I suspect Asahi Linux would appreciate work to support A18 Macs as well!

    > I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.

That’s pretty impressive

I used a first-gen eeepc with Linux in college. I didn't have any problems with speed for normal use, though I ssh'd into servers for anything more intensive than running a browser.

I think I'd put a phone CPU running netbook-like costing $599 still in the "overpriced premium brand" bucket myself.

(Not sure if that's really an apt description though, but then I was out as soon as I read they're neutering one of the usb-c speeds.)

So long as you can use the slow port for charging, I think it’s an entirely tolerable trade-off. Remember, this is a machine for people with low technical requirements. It’s not a machine for someone who needs lots of high speed ports.

Of course it’s an iPhone chip, which is why it’s got just 8 gigs of RAM. I think it’s the same exact SoC that went into the 16 Pro Max.

There were some M-series chips with 8 gigs, iirc. There was a whole debate going on about that on the net when they were released. Not the M5 though, as it seems.

I think the M2 was the last one they made with 8 gigs of memory.

It's M3.

If so, it's a binned version with fewer working cores.

This suggests someone may be able to install MacOS on an iPhone with some modification.

It's not the first Mac that has an iPhone/iPad chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

And yes, absolutely. All you need is a bootchain exploit. However unlike in the old jailbreaking days when people found and publicized them for fun, these days they are worth millions. Apple will pay you $500k for sandbox escape into the kernel. If you nail the bootchain, it'll be in the millions. From Apple. And god knows how much such a thing would go for in the black market.

The A18Pro is a very powerful CPU, besting even the M1 in single-core performance (about even in multicore). Saying its just a "phone CPU" is disingenuous.

I do wish they used the A19 Pro which has better hardware based memory security.

They likely based this on the fab node with the best capacity to price ratio.

Funny that they put A19 pro in the new Studio Display XDR.

The product will stay in the market far longer. Good call on their part.

It just means the phone is massively overpowered :)

This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts.

Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.

The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt...

I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).

Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.

Now, if only Asahi was more complete.

I am a longtime Windows user and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that the M4 I am forced to use for work runs the Rust compiler a good bit faster than the big fancy gaming PC I just got with a 9800X3D.

Rust literally compiles ~4x faster on WSL than on the Windows command line, on the same hardware, so try that and see. Also set up the mold or wild linker as well as sccache, although sccache is OS agnostic so you can use it on macOS too. Make sure your code is on the WSL side not on /mnt/c which is the Windows side though, that will kill compilation speed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/CsEy9bLivK

That has not been my experience at all; I get pretty much the same times on the same machine on Linux and Windows. Something weird has happening to that person. Someone mentioned Defender, and that could certainly be it, as I have it totally disabled (forcibly, by deleting the executable).

WSL is fantastic - apart from the fact that you need to clear it intermittently via disk compression. I use it for work and it's great until you get something incredibly frustrating, like needing a pass-through for your hardware.

The one thing I can say with my macbook as someone who's switched from a decade of windows, is that stuff tends to just work, minus window swithcing.

At least 10 years ago, some IBM tools I was forced to use worked faster in a linux VM on Windows (through VirtualBox) than on Windows.

WSL is the best way to avoid all the Windows slowness as far as the VFS and the forking overhead.

I'd wager that's more likely due to Windows than the hardware. Like sure the hardware does play a part in that but its not the whole story or even most of it.

My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.

Afaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night.

No, it’s not NTFS, it’s the file system filter architecture of the NT kernel.

I had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years.

Windows Defender is a file system filter which you cannot disable. You may have others (but they're fortunately rare, now).

All that said, you cannot disable the architecture, i.e. bypass the file system filter code.

You can with Dev Drives now apparently, which don't use NTFS and disable ALL the filter drivers (including the Defender one)

I stopped using Windows just as these were added so now I'm curious if there's any actual performance benefit to using the.

This guy gets it. Yes bingo. It's the VFS' filters/ACLs support afaik.

Just deleting 40,000 files from the node_modules of a modest Javascript project can thoroughly hammer NTFS.

I think part of that is Explorer, rather than NTFS. Try doing it from the console instead. rd /q /s <dir>.

It still takes a lot longer than Linux or Mac OS X.

NTFS is definitely slower to modify file system structures than ext4.

A big part of it is that NT has to check with the security manager service every time it does a file operation.

The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.

I don't know about ugly. Virtualization seems like a more elegant solution to the problem, as I see it. Though it also makes WSL pointless; I don't get why people use it instead of just using Hyper-V.

Honestly, just cause it's easier if you've never done any kind of container or virtual os stuff before. It comes out of the box with windows, it's like a 3 click install and it usually "just works". Most people just want to run Linux things and don't care too much about the rest of the process

Try adding your working directory to the exclusions for windows defender, or creating a Dev Drive instead in settings (will create a separate partition, or VHD using ReFS and exclude it from Windows defender). Should give it a bit of a boost.

Apple buries this info but the memory bandwidth on the M series is very high. Doubly and triply so for the Pro & Max variants which are insanely high.

Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.

They don't bury it. It's literally on the spec page these days. And LPCAMM2 falls somewhere between the base M and Pro CPUs while still being replaceable.

The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.

That's most likely because windows indexes and scans files rustc produces. My linux machines demolish my iMac in rust compilation.

Intel iMac?

M4. To be fair I bought it as a pretty ssh terminal in living room into compute in another room.

This shouldn't be surprising. macOS has a faster filesystem+VFS than Windows, and the single thread perf of the M4 beats most PC cpus. I'm not sure what linker rust uses, but the apple native ld64/ldPrime is also pretty fast as far as linkers go.

Windows is also slow enough at forking, that clang has "in-process CC1" mode because of it.

You’re running Windows unironically?

This is how opinions differ. IMO plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible, MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).

The metal is more "luxury", though.

> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot

This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon

I have an Air. Maybe active cooling prevents it from getting too hot. With the Air, the metal body is kind of the heatsink.

I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...

If the body was a heatsink, it would be extremely hot to the touch.

https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...

From your link:

Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink

Anyway, the author claims:

you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before.

Does toasty mean extremely hot?

The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle.

Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees?

You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could.

Everything’s a trade off.

In a Notebookcheck test, they got the bottom plate up to 43C, and top plate near the screen up to 45C: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-passively-cooled-M4-SoC-ma...

hence the Neo and the iPhone chip!

YOU GUYS IT HAS A HEADPHONE JACK

Don't all macbooks have one?

Makes me wonder if this is an ADA requirement for education devices. (assistive listening devices)

Not even ADA - kids all get headphones to listen to education materials. Wired headphones are way, way easier to manage.

There’s also plenty of room for it which is why it continues to appear on all MacBooks.

It's almost as if they weren't lying when they said dropping it in the phone was a waterproofing measure. I guess people aren't dropping their laptops in pools all the time.

This isn't news, all MacBooks have one.

> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).

My body is the heatsink

Also for males it is natural birth control. Can be a plus depending on your situation

> plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible

Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.

Plastic is better if done right. I do not know a single manufacturer today which does plastic right.

I'd go further and suggest that metal is a lousy substance for laptop enclosures.

> I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.

~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal

Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.

The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.

The same is also true within the Macbook line. The 14" Pro is smaller and nearly 2lbs lighter than the first 13" unibodies. I have my 2009 college laptop on a shelf as a memento and it feels pretty chunky. This hasn't changed much in the M-series though, and the M5 is slightly heavier than the M1.

Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.

My Sony Vaio Z from 2009 or 2010 looks at your Dell in contempt: 13.1" FullHD screen at 314mm x 210mm (we'll pretend the thickness does not matter ;)) and 1.36kg. Vaio TT was even smaller footprint.

But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.

What about something like [1].

1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/

One thing Apple seems to do very well compared to other vendors is make all their hardware available in all markets on release. Companies like Dell, Asus, Lenovo, they have a confusingly large array of models, and they never release the best ones worldwide, or it takes so long to get to New Zealand that I already gave up and bought an Apple computer instead.

I might be a dinosaur but I just can't stand laptops that have touch screen...

I, too, am a dinosaur, but touchscreens on removable screens/tablets are the way to go!

My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.

When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.

It's awesome!

You might want to actually click the links and spent a couple of minutes before typing comments. This is not a laptop with a touch screen - it's a tablet with a kickstand and detachable keyboard.

That's just a broken, compromised Windows laptop. A true "master of nothing" device. Windows is a miserable tablet OS and a tablet that uses a kickstand makes it a pain to use in desktop mode.

Windows is a miserable OS, period. But these devices are rather well supported by Linux.

Touchscreens can be disabled in software.

I accidentally got a pair of ThinkPads that happened to have touch screens, and I absolutely love the touch screen, often it's easier than the touchpad or keyboard nub.

> (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.

ASUS ROG G14 is as close as you're going to get on the x86 side of things or that new chonk of a surface with the Ryzen 395+ and 128gb of ram. both are like $2500+

I have the chonk. 10/10 would chonk again. I miss the 12" MacBook form factor for an email/web/dumb terminal machine, though. Would love something like that with great Linux support. Bonus points for cellular.

> ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop

Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.

I have so many questions.

- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?

- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

Shh... we don't talk about those dark ages any more. Times were different.

> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

The hard part of beating someone to death with a z16 is lifting and swinging a z16; if you can manage that, though...

> - Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.

(Hey, Eric!)

We test these things in production.

The best laptop that I ever had was an Thinkpad T530 back in ~2012 - that chunky brick felt like it was made from recycled soviet tanks.

Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.

Thinkpad build quality depends heavily on the model. The flagship T-series are still tough as nails, generally speaking

They built a reputation on that and silently replaced the plastic with crap abs. Thinkpads have been garbage since 2012. Not specs wise but build quality wise. Spec wise it’s always been a beefy machine.

[dead]

The HP Zbook G1A is what you wanted. It's Strix Halo with up to 128GB of unified RAM and built like a MBP.

Did you check what Framework offers?

Which Thinkpad do you have? Lenovo have introduced some lines with the name but diminished quality.

For a someone looking to switch from a M-series MacBook to a Thinkpad, which one would you recommend? Preferably not of a diminished quality, so I can daily-drive Ubuntu without missing Apple.

P1 comes to mind

What are your use-cases for 128gb of RAM? I find it hard to imagine what you could be doing with that, so it must be interesting :)

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:

- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.

- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.

- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.

Yeah, I have a 64GB M1 Max and can run local models pretty well. I bought it on release and even now it never feels slow. I may upgrade just because I want to move to the 14” since I travel more now.

Unreal + blender + ide.

Fusion + blender + slicers.

Virt machines / docker + dev env

iOS Android web development

16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro

Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex

My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use

My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.

My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping

I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.

You mean all of that running all the time is 70gb?

I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.

Each line gets me over 50gb.

I'm assuming your not doing much in those apps.

Fusion is not free cad and is a hog.

So is kicad.

The language server for many things I work on sits at 28gb per copy.. I work for twitch, our code base is not small for the website. Moving all engineers to min spec 48gb.

I'll do stuff all day prototyping data analysis approaches that will fill ram with a pandas cross join.

I put my4 into thermal shutdown 2x in the last month and hard locked it due to swap use 3 times in the last month. I keep records so I can talk with IT about or dev machine specs. Apparently you can't run 30 concurrent yarn builds on a 3gb codebase... Who knew.

This isn't a works on my box competition I'm glad your workloads are that small, you can be a lot more efficient than me. I'm also lucky I bought all this ram before it became absurdly expensive.

It doesn't negate that I'm constantly over 64gb and that I'm super happy I have 128+ on my machines.

Unclear for a laptop, but for a workstation 1tb+ is what you want for any sort data science stuff.

Yeah, good luck with that at current RAM prices though. DDR5 RDIMMs are going for $20/gb+ right now which means 1tb is $20k, and that's with fairly conservative pricing too.

I've been looking at building a high memory workstation recently but the RAM prices are just prohibitive. Best option atm for 1tb+ seems to be to go back a couple gen and buy DDR4, you can get 1tb at under $5/gb right now. But obviously you're giving up some performance in the process.

most people who are into graphics processing e.g video-games, 3d for films/entertainment industry etc need these "PRO-workstation" machines, or doing fluid mechanics

if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient

Running FatLTO on Chrome.

You do have 13" options, though 14" is much wider. If I was going for 13" workstation, I'd go for Asus ProArt PX13 with Ryzen AI Max 395 (if I got that right, there might be a plus somewhere) and 128GiB of RAM. They've got ROG Flow X13 with older hardware or Z13 with same hw as above, but that's a tablet computer instead.

At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.

Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).

> decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

Thinkpads don't show off their build materials like Apple does. I've had several over the years, variously made of magnesium alloy and carbon fibre.

Screen bending is not a great metric of 'decent build'. My Thinkpads have suffered people stepping on them, being dropped etc, and I think the lid flexibility is partly why it has survived all this time - they often use carbon fibre on the back of the screen.

> This is a major challenge to Microsoft.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.

It definitely feels that way. Microsoft has made it clear they don't care about the consumer market anymore. Xbox is dying or already dead, they've done nothing with the game studios they acquired, Windows laptop OEMs still ship plastic 1080p crap targeted at general office workers.

They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.

And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.

Indeed they haven't, Microsoft is only one of the biggest publishers in the world, and regardless of XBox the console, Microsoft Games Studios is doing great.

Are you sure they're doing great? By what metric?

What have they produced recently? I found a few lists online and looked at Wikipedia, and their big hits are all > 10-15 years old (or sequels/re-releases). Many of those are decade-old acquisitions of franchises that were ancient at acquisition.

Revenue, or forward revenue? Their most recent quarterly games revenue was down 9% YoY. XBox console sales (leading indicator) are down 32%: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/xbox/microsofts-gam...

Market share? The top N companies from this list have $197B in annual revenue. MS Studios is toward the top of the list, but they only have 12% market share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...

Distribution and marketing? I wouldn't even know how to buy one of their games. I have a Linux gaming PC, a Mac, a switch, an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and a XBone. We spend a few hundred dollars a year on video games, but I haven't seen anything suggesting any MS studio products work on any of our hardware, or are available on any distribution channels that reach any of our devices. Maybe they're on iPad, iPhone or Android? I haven't checked because we don't use those for gaming.

I don't think we're that strange for having zero windows machines. It's down to ~ 30% of web browser market share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Windows is at ~ 95% of steam market share, so I guess that's one bright point for MS studios. However, many game developers release on Steam and console, so it doesn't imply that 95% of those other studios' customers could run a MS studio game.

Customer retention? The last time I plugged the XBone in, I spent 45 minutes screwing with bugs in the account password dialog, finally logged in, and then walked away. I unplugged it for good after the updates completed. In contrast, I spent less time than that installing Linux + Steam on my most recent PC. I guess they dropped support for XBox One at some point? I started having problems with it five years ago. I don't remember a big compatibility-break launch since I purchased it, so I'd expect it to be able to turn on + connect to their servers, or at least run the games it's already downloaded + installed.

I do own one MS game that still works: A copy of Minecraft. It took over 8 hours to figure out how to get it stop constantly asking my kids for my master MS account password. That did convince me to actually wipe all data from my Microsoft account, so I guess it was a win.

Doing great by the amount of game studios owned by Microsoft as a publisher, selling all over the place, especially after the ABK deal.

You focus too much on XBox when I haven't mentioned it at all.

Probably too late now but maybe they should have spun XBox and the game studios into a separate company.

Game studios are great, the problem is the multiple meanings of XBox.

There is XBox the console, XBox the online store for PC games, XBox the streaming platform, XBox the studios that are first party to the console.

Then there are the other studios acquired via Bathesda, ABK, or directly.

Finally all roots down under Microsot Gaming Studios as publisher.

Among the hardcore fans, they usually only see Xbox as the console.

With any luck, this new computer can usher in an era of folks not having to port anything to windows.

There are some decent-looking AMD + nvidia laptops from Razer. No idea if they run Linux well, or are reliable, but they seem to tick all the spec boxes. For instance, they have a higher resolution than the monitor I owned in 2001. (3200 × 1800 @ 120Hz minimum on their 14"); probably OK battery life if you don't use the discrete GPU.

From what I've seen of Win 11 in VMs, it doesn't seem compatible with the phrase "decent laptop".

Of course, they start at > $2000.

that really doesn't make sense to me. You need to have people use Windows in everyday life so that they don't need to be retrained when in the workforce for Windows to keep its stranglehold on the enterprise.

>That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable

That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.

You must be lucky. They have been well-documented. [1]

The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000098

Apple seemed to copy this one exactly as iCloud asks you the same all the time. Honestly these days Linux feels like the only sane platform as you can customize it properly.

I am a big fan of the command line, but running linux as my daily driver is like trying to daily a kit car -- it breaks all the time and i spend more time than i want fixing it. With macos, i get my beloved command line, nice hardware, and a reliable OS. Win win win.

> I am a big fan of the command line, but running linux as my daily driver is like trying to daily a kit car -- it breaks all the time and i spend more time than i want fixing it.

Linux powers the entire world. Billions if not tens of billions of devices. It doesn't "break all the time like a kit car". I switched my wife's desktop from Ubuntu to Debian about a year ago and I haven't heard a single complain. Not a single crash. She hardly reboots her computer. The thing is just rock solid and it needs to be: she works from home and she spends 8 hours+ on her (Linux) computer.

Fair. Last time I tried to daily Linux was 2016 with a crappy dell I had laying around, and I am pretty sure that I did not know what I was doing. I have been on Mac since 2012 and I tried windows in 2019 only to regret it, then went back to mac.

That is also far from my experience. I'm starting to think it's more about you than about the tech. I have 5 machines running Linux, and they never break (1 server and 4 VMs). I have 4 machines running Windows (3 physical, 1 VM), with zero problems for many years.

If you're in on AI though, instead of you having to fix it, you just ask Claude code to fix python or whatever shit.

In the Apple ecosystem, turning off iCloud's ability to send notifications is as simple as unchecking a box in settings.

Just as you can uncheck a box in settings to turn off Apple Intelligence.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't want Windows users to have the same level of control.

What a conveniently annoying default!

It helps to switch on your computer.

Microsoft's build quality is largely equivalent, but the press has already noticed that the value proposition at Microsoft is now lacking.

> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961

It really isn’t. The track pad on surface is terrible compared to Mac. The surface has some weird edges and other spots to get caught on. I’ve seen a few with serious damage from typical daily use. The surface I have is barely hanging together, the charger is extremely finicky and will stop charging randomly. It takes effort to get the charger to “sit” in the slot and make contact.

That said, my surface is pretty old so maybe some of these design flaws have been fixed.

But from my experience, the build quality of the MacBook is in a different league than the surface.

telling that this is flagged 1 minute into submission.

Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).

For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).

So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.

Dell Pro Max, I think the Latitude line disappeared. But I feel Lenovo is the last one too, the only brand I trust for a Windows or Linux machine these days. I like Apple hardware and have my reservations with macOS, but it is still better than Windows.

I can't think of another company on the PC side whose consumer line of hardware's build quality hasn't declined to the level of junk.

You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.

IMO "build quality" is not the right term here. At least to me, "build quality" refers to how evenly examples are made and how close the real world examples adheres to manufacturing blueprints.

If finishes and gaps are tight, all around bodies and across examples, the build quality is GOOD. If every units looked slightly different and some were outright broken straight out of the box, then the build quality is BAD. Even if they were worthy of included in the MoMA collection.

Both Microsoft and Apple(or their paid Chinese outsources) are top notch. Every units looks the same and flats on the bodies are really flat. Industrial design and usability, like sharp corners and fugly aesthetics, are different issues entirely.

You're right. "Build Quality" isn't the right term.

Maybe "Overall Quality" or "Device Quality" would work better. The point is that my MBP has held up MUCH better over time than my Surface, which is barely able to charge at this point.

No; "Build Quality" is the right term.

Manufacturing tolerance is the term for "how close are they all to being the same shape?" Good tolerances are usually a prerequisite to good build quality, but not always.

For instance, cast iron pans can have poor tolerances (be off by fractions of inches), but, as long as they're not warped, and the metallurgy is solid, they could last centuries, and people would say they have good build quality.

On the other hand, a stainless steel pan that's volumetrically-perfect, but has faulty internal welds on the laminated bottom could fall apart after a few uses due to heat strain snapping the welds. That'd be terrible build quality.

The camera on the Surface is nowhere near as good as on my M1 Macbook Air, either. That seems to be a weird blind spot on laptops in general, it's very obviously an afterthought on my personal Dell XPS as well.

> serious damage from typical daily use

Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...

Taking the laptop to the office and back home again daily. The hinge has gotten weak over time. The connection to take off the screen is very fragile, tapping the button to enable removal only works about half the time. Then, when re-attaching the screen sometimes it doesn't catch, or the keyboard connects but doesn't realize it is connected so the machine stays in tablet mode. The trackpad has gotten spongey and harder to click.

It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable. *Edit: This was covered under warranty, thankfully

This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.

I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.

You get free AI slop and mass-surveillance advertisements in your Start menu. Who would not like that!

[flagged]

Your Mac "fanboy" nonsense is tiring. The Surface 7 Laptop is an excellent machine, built well, and even gets a good iFixit rating (4 screws and you can replace the battery and M.2)

You left out the part where the build quality is not up to par with a MacBook, which is what is actually being discussed.

I'd rather have a thousand form-factors and build qualities to choose from than the one-size-fits-all that Apple offers. If Apple doesn't make it, then you can't run their software on it, and they don't make too many form factors.

I can run Windows on a USB stick form-factor if I want to. Or dozens of tablet sizes from various vendors. And every kind of laptop imaginable, with all kinds of features. And everything else up to massive rack-mount server hardware. But sure, if a Macbook is all you need, then go for it.

This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.

I am in education and speak to others at the (US) national level on a near-daily basis. This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.

- Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit.

- The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.

- For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks. Yes, this is a numbers game. The goal is every student has a device.

- Schools using Chromebooks to log in. If you want reliable Google logins on macOS, you have an additional big spend up front, along with per-seat licensing costs.

- This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.

I saw this today: https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1rk3t...

If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions

While I was in high school, as a punishment for a fake "hacking" prank [0], I had to spend half of my lunch breaks with the school IT guy for two weeks as he went around and fixed the damage students were doing to the school computers.

There wasn't actually THAT much going on and we mostly just sat in his office and chatted, but when he did have to deal with something, it was absurd the vandalism that happened. One kid had unplugged a mouse and managed to jam the plug into the floppy drive. The IT guy was like "It takes talent to be this much of a piece of shit" as he had to disassemble the case to get it out.

When it comes to issuing laptops to public school students, I'm torn. On one hand, people need computer skills, but on the other, I just don't think many students can be trusted with a piece of equipment costing hundreds of dollars. Hell, how many people can't even own a personal cell phone without somehow shattering the screen in just a few months?

[0] I had created a two-page slide deck with a black background and white text, then filled both slides with the same text that made it look like a DOS prompt and that Windows had been deleted. It had a C:\> prompt, and on one slide, there was an underscore after the prompt. I then made the slide show auto-play and loop, making the underscore blink, which made it look like an actual prompt. Keep in mind, these were Macs. There was no "C" drive, and certainly no Windows. A teacher insisted I broke the computer, despite showing that pressing any key ended the show, took me to the Principal's office, who gave me my punishment. My first time talking to the IT guy, he was like "you did what now?" and I showed him, and he thought it was funny as hell. Honestly, my "punishment" ended up being pretty fun. That was all 25 years ago. I wish I remembered his name so I could look him up.

I’m old, so all our computers were in the library or lab. But, kids will be kids. We would stick paper clips into the sockets to see if we could trigger the breaker, among other idiotic things.

That's hilarious! I can only remember winnuke being a thing in the shared computer lab.

Not just durability, but ergonomics. My kids have crappy screens, literally the worst trackpad I’ve ever used, and awful keys that hurt my hands minutes after typing (but I go all day on my personal computer).

If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).

> Not just durability, but ergonomics.

Somehow while spending the most per capita of any nation on the planet, American schools are in a perpetual budget crunch. It's about getting internet access not whether the trackpad is good. You think a chromepad is crappy - have you ever tried to do something in Blackboard?

> If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care

They won't be. Pizza sauce is considered a vegetable.

An aside: Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves? I believe they shouldn't.

> Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves?

The more and less cynical explanations (and both play a role, IMO):

(1) Because individuals in those roles have closer relationships to the people that set the salaries than do individual teachers, and

(2) Because otherwise people with experience in education would continue as teachers and not seek roles as superintendents or other administrators (or seek the advanced degrees sought for those roles whose only financial payoff is greater competitiveness for those higher paying roles.)

> Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves?

A couple reasons:

1. Because usually, superintendents and the administration are responsible and accountable for a lot more moving parts than teachers are. Aside from the many kids each teacher teachers, which leads us to point #2.

2. There is a lot more supply of teachers than demand. If a teacher doesn't like their objectively meager pay, they can quit. There are 10 applicants lined up waiting to take their position.

> I believe they shouldn't.

This is generally handled at your city level. Organize your like-minded constituents to lobby the board?

Are you actually asking why management makes more money than workers?

I think my school solves this by telling the parents to buy ‘something’ for the kids, as long as it has a webbrowser and keyboard.

Our district had BYOD and just got rid of it this year. We used it because the teachers couldn’t manage keeping kids off games or YouTube on their Chromebooks during class. Even then, personal devices could not be used for state testing.

Chromebooks don’t have a durability problem. I doubt the MacBook is any more durable, even with an all metal construction - if anything, that probably makes it worse at absorbing impact than nice soft bendy plastic.

This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.

Actually metal's pretty bendy when compared to plastic (most anyway...mmv based upon formula).

The metal construction is what prompted me to switch over to macbook pro's back in the day. The plastic dell laptops i used to use couldn't handle the abuse that it took during all of the travel i was doing at the time (cases kept cracking). I switched to a pro and was rewarded later with it surviving a 5 foot fall from a car rental counter. It bent part of the corner, but the screen was still in tact and it continued to work well enough to get me through the trip. I suspect the plastic alternative would have been toast.

Having kids today and seeing how rough they are with their toys, I'm not confident that a plastic laptop would survive them long.

Metal is technically more elastic than an elastic band. With a Young’s modulus of 69 GPa for aluminum versus just 2 GPa for ABS, metal has the "memory" to snap back from significant pressure. Plastic, true to its name, is far more likely to hit its limit and stay permanently deformed. (That’s why metal bars are used to provide “flexibility” to buildings. Concrete provides the strength)

https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished

Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition. It would take a restructuring of laptops within the school system to kids/families having a joint ownership over the laptop to stop them intentionally destroying them. Even then, there are complications like kids that will absolutely destroy anothers' for fun.

And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.

My kids have (insanely shitty) chromebooks from school and we are absolutely responsible for the cost if they break. We have to sign a release at the beginning of the year. Whether or not they’d be able to collect from the vast majority of families is a different question, granted. But the responsibility is there.

In practice, there's a huge difference in responsibility between buying and sending your kid with a laptop and signing a paper that says you're responsible if it breaks. I'd also guess it depends on where you go to school.

My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.

> Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition.

Very often they aren't (the school devices are in-school resources that aren't given to the kids any more than their desks are) and anything the kids have out of school is bought by the parents (and even if they are given the computers by the school, usually the replacement costs is on the parents if there is damage). But, either way, grade school kids are, on average, irresponsible as a matter of cognitive development (its a big part of why children are treated differently than adults legally.)

> school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.

A school district that can be described as having a “penal system” is, ipso facto, dysfunctional.

Who pays for the laptop when the school bully pours water on a kid's backpack? Or a kid has their bag in a seat and someone sits on it accidentally?

What happens when a kid's laptop is broken, regardless of the reason, and the family is unable to afford to repair it? Are we going to run into a similar situation that we had when kids couldn't pay for school lunch? Do teachers write "pay for a new laptop" in sharpie on the kid's arm for the parent?

A child's educational environment is a lot more chaotic, violent, and uncontrolled compared to an office environment. If you're issuing my child a $600 laptop and making me responsible for any damages, guess what's going to be kept at home in a secure location?

Making a child responsible for securing a laptop in an insecure environment isn't accountability, it's just a form of imprisonment.

What happens when a backpack full of paper books is destroyed? When I was a kid, we were charged between $50-100 for a book that was written in or destroyed. I bet these days it would be $200 each. Yeah we were running around with $500-600 of books in our backpacks all the time.

Back in the day it was also our (kids/parents) responsibility to provide book covers. We always used paper grocery bags, but you could buy some that were purpose built.

1) bully or bullys insurance 2) whoever sat on it Alternatively: Apple care? :)

That's a big if. Kids are little engines of chaos and destruction. The Neo might not be more durable, just more expensive.

I don't think institutions will care much about the enhanced durability since they treat laptops as disposable units anyway. Apple can only complete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.

No, we really care about durability. The amount of damage is crazy. So many units are damaged that it would be cost-prohibitive to dispose and replace them.

The screenshot in that Reddit post more or less looks like ours. Schools generally repair these, if they have the technicians. And everyone is cannibalizing parts out of last generation models. It's like a Jawa shop.

> Apple can only compete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.

I've never seen, nor heard of Apple providing competitive prices, even in quantities of ~10,000 units. They haven't even gotten close and they've largely given up on the idea of Macs as a standard K12 school device. ~$250 iPads are still strong in low primary grades and special education, though.

I worked in my High Schools repair room in Junior year, and the Jawa shop is an apt description haha

Can confirm Apple gave up on education. If they really cared you'd be able to have multiple accounts/profiles on iPad, and that's still not a thing that exists.

I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.

> you'd be able to have multiple accounts/profiles on iPad, and that's still not a thing that exists.

It does exist, it just requires the iPad to be managed via MDM, which most schools would have (and should implement if they don't have it). JamF, Mosyle, Business Essentials, InTune and probably any other MDM can put an iPad into shared iPad mode with multiple profiles.

Have you seen the classroom app? It allows for multiple profiles on an iPad. I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...

I could see the Neo as a viable option for teenage students. The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards. Most students feared seeking a replacement device when theirs would break without having done anything wrong. A device with higher build quality and software longevity has the potential to save these institutions a reasonable sum of money in the long run.

Younger students on the other hand, Chromebooks remain the way to go. Most of the time, kids'll win in a race between their destructive tendencies and crappy hardware giving out.

> I could see the Neo as a viable option for teenage students.

100% agreed. My statements weren't meant to indicate the Neo wasn't viable. They were meant to state that the Neo isn't going to replace Chromebooks in schools (as far as being District-purchased).

> The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards.

Build quality has been steadily improving over the years. It's all still budget (target ~$290), but is more and more durable with each new generation.

Even so I imagine your average person needing something for education would consider both. The Neo may cost more but from my past experience of Apple stuff they will likely be better made.

Certainly possible. But, in the US consider that Google and "one-to-one" Chromebooks are generally dominating and the curriculum more or less requires extensions and setting.

As an example, my kids try to do school work on one of the house Macs, but there's too many roadblocks so they just use their Chromebooks.

I used to buy my kids Chromebooks for school, but, since the pandemic, the school issues them, so I haven't bought any since.

> Apple stuff they will likely be better made

It depends on what you mean. Apple uses higher quality parts and is more sleek.

Chromebooks are more durable, take more abuse, are very repairable, and parts are cheap and plentiful. These are keys to schools. We're at a point where schools cycle out old models and either keep a bunch around, or strip parts from them, because some parts are interchangeable between generations.

The better question is why on earth do school kids need computers, especially anything beyond a robust desktop PC that they use extremely sparingly? No one ever seems to be able to give a good answer as to why we do this to ourselves, especially elementary school kids other than parents/teachers/schools are some combination of overwhelmed, lazy, or just outright massively derelict.

So what segment does it target in your opinion? The "surface" market is minuscule and compared to the edu market irrelevant, the "vendor lock in" angle with the google logins can easily change over night as it did with microsoft.

> So what segment does it target in your opinion?

- Low end consumer

- College students

- People who have a desktop computer, but want a cheap portable for on-the-go.

> The "surface" market is minuscule

Probably so, but then again, I see a lot of Surface devices out and about and they are fairly popular with non-teacher education staff. While they aren't competing with Chromebooks or Apple on volume, I'd bet they're doing well.

If the school is wealthy enough to provide free laptops, then you're right they're going to go for the cheapest option. But if the school expects the parents to provide laptops, then the parents are more likely to choose this.

> This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.

Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.

I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.

Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.

Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.

It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".

>a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.

Citation? I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts. Heck, there's someone in this very discussion saying the same with actual prices paid in their comment showing real first hand experience and yet you come in here with a hand wavy unsupported claim that Apple gives breaks for bulk buys.

> I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts.

When I worked in higher education at an Ivy Plus university for 14 years, we were able to get discounts. We also had a campus store where we sold and repaired Macs.

I understand that higher ed is quite different from K-12. It also seems like sales reps have much less leeway now than they used to. I have no doubt there's been multiple reorganizations, etc. and things could be completely different now.

It's not just discounts; even if you pay the normal education price, Apple could throw in some extras (software licenses, AppleCare, etc.) to sweeten the deal.

Not having to make a Google login would be a big benefit to me. Google is getting their data early

Completely agree. I hate kids being stuck in a Google ecosystem. Apple’s classroom app is really good.

How long do those chrome books last though?

I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.

Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.

> Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer.

An iPhone Pro is 3 times more expensive than an average Android phone too. If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.

> If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.

The hardware lasts but they usually stop getting software updates after a few years, especially if they're not high-end models.

Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/02/apple-releases-ios-16-7...

> Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.

How usable is an 8-year-old iPhone as a primary phone though? I agree that having 8 years of support is a good thing, but at that point the hardware is so degraded that it's not suitable for its original purpose anymore. At that point I'd rather have android just so I can root it and install Linux. Then again, with improvements to phones slowing down in recent years, this is becoming increasingly untrue.

Samsung's flagship Galaxy series get software support for 7 years. A, M, F mid-range and low end models get 6 years of software support. The worst case today for the most popular mid to low spec phones is twice the "a few years" you claim, which suggests you're out of touch with the changes in the industry over the last few years.

> The worst case today for the most popular mid to low spec phones is twice the "a few years" you claim, which suggests you're out of touch with the changes in the industry over the last few years.

Are you sure about that? Apparently nicer Android phones not getting updates for very long is real.

No Longer Receiving Updates

    Google Pixel [2], [3]

    | Phone         | Released |Updates Ended|
    |---------------|----------|-------------|
    | Pixel 3       | Oct 2018 | Oct 2021    |
    | Pixel 3 XL    | Oct 2018 | Oct 2021    |
    | Pixel 3a      | May 2019 | May 2022    |
    | Pixel 3a XL   | May 2019 | May 2022    |
    | Pixel 4       | Oct 2019 | Oct 2022    |
    | Pixel 4 XL    | Oct 2019 | Oct 2022    |
    | Pixel 4a      | Aug 2020 | Aug 2023    |
    | Pixel 4a (5G) | Nov 2020 | Nov 2023    |
    | Pixel 5       | Oct 2020 | Oct 2023    |
    | Pixel 5a      | Aug 2021 | Aug 2024    |

    Samsung Galaxy [1], [4]

    | Phone                |Released  | Updates Ended|
    |----------------------|----------|--------------|
    | Galaxy S9            | Mar 2018 | ~2022        |
    | Galaxy S9+           | Mar 2018 | ~2022        |
    | Galaxy Note 9        | Aug 2018 | ~2022        |
    | Galaxy S10           | Mar 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy S10+          | Mar 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy S10e          | Mar 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy Note 10       | Aug 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy Note 10+      | Aug 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy S20           | Feb 2020 | Early 2025   |
    | Galaxy S20+          | Feb 2020 | Early 2025   |
    | Galaxy S20 Ultra     | Feb 2020 | Early 2025   |
    | Galaxy Note 20       | Aug 2020 | ~2024–2025   |
    | Galaxy Note 20 Ultra | Aug 2020 | ~2024–2025   |
    | Galaxy S20 FE        | Oct 2020 | Mid 2025     |
    | Galaxy Z Fold 2      | Sep 2020 | ~2024        |
    | Galaxy Z Flip        | Feb 2020 | ~2023        |

On Their Last Legs (Security Updates Only, No More OS Upgrades)

These are still receiving quarterly security patches but will drop off soon:

- Galaxy S21 / S21+ / S21 Ultra — Final OS was Android 15; now on quarterly security patches only

- Galaxy S21 FE — Will receive Android 16 as its final major upgrade via One UI 8, after which it moves to quarterly patches with no further OS updates

- Pixel 6 / Pixel 6 Pro — Now updated to a 5-year support window, with final updates expected in October 2026

- Pixel 6a — Supported until at least July 2027

---

The main takeaway: if you're on a Samsung S20-era or Pixel 5a-or-older device, you're fully unprotected. The Galaxy S21 series and Pixel 6/7 families still have some runway left, though they're winding down.

[1]: Samsung Ends Software Updates for These Galaxy Phones in 2025 — https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/Tech-Talk/Samsung-Ends-S...

[2]: These Google Pixel Phones Will Not Get Android 16 — https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/google-pixel-phones-not-...

[3]: How long will my Google Pixel be supported? – https://9to5google.com/2024/12/10/how-long-will-my-google-pi...

[4]: Galaxy S20 series software updates run dry as Samsung ends support* – https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/samsung-galaxy/galaxy-...

Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.

Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.

Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.

Framework might be appealing as well. Being able to have parts on hand that can easily be swapped out sounds a lot better/easier than dealing Apple repair practices. The Framework Laptop 12[0] starts at $549 and has touchscreen/pen options. But that price goes up to $799 to have it pre-built with an OS on it, which schools would want, unless building your laptop and installing the OS is part of the curriculum. I wonder if having the kids do this would make them take better care of it, because they had a hand it making it?

[0] https://frame.work/laptop12

I have a $120 android for the last 3 years. Please tell me how excatly Iphone Pro can beat it.

somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).

Not every school is cash limited. Many schools have lots of money to invest in technology.

Some schools will gladly pay more.

Truth. I've seen some of them with carts full of MacBook Pros. But these schools are a small fraction of the overall population.

It should also be noted that Washington state schools are still generally heavily Microsoft and Windows, despite Google's dominance.

Similar to how MS helps their local schools, I think Apple does for schools in California.

> This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.

I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.

There used to be FleetSmith which was a very simple Apple-only MDM system.

It was great, very simple to use but still had all the features you needed.

They were acquired by Apple who then promptly killed the product.

Not to disagree too much with your assessment, one point stands out:

> The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.

We don't actually know this. It does at the level individual student purchasing themselves, but I'd imagine there is a substantial bulk discount for educational establishments. That is not a new trend for Apple, it dates back to the Apple II.

I do because we asked Apple about Neo pricing.

We do because this is historically the norm. Schools pay roughly the same as the "college student" pricing, aside from the occasional deals they toss us.

The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!

My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.

Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.

Chromebooks are the SaaS of hardware where the user is not the buyer. No one says “I would love to have a Chromebook at home” any more than they desire to run Salesforce at home.

A Chromebook at the same price point will get you similar if not better specs, 14" 16:10 FHD IPS display, convertible with touchscreen and pen input, backlit keyboard and 10h+ battery runtime.

The build quality of a $300 Chromebook is laughable.

[flagged]

This is not competing against Chromebooks, which have very little reach outside of institutions. The Macbook Neo will likely have very widespread appeal for anyone looking for what used to be a netbook.

I'm not sure that's true given that Chromebooks can be had for one third the price.

At this point the Macbook Neo is in competition with Chromebooks, Microsoft and the third party market for older Macbook Airs with M1s

It could compete well in both. Looks like Apple has a product that competes with Chromebooks on price and competes with Surface on performance at the same time. At least close enough on both counts to create headaches for anyone trying to sell either.

It needs a touch screen for elementary schools kids. Fine for older kids.

We started using computers with keyboards in class in grade 2-3.

Current school laptops also have touchscreens for drawing and other activities. It’s a cheap feature.

Pen input is the one factor that forced one of my kids to a Windows laptop for school (a Surface Pro). It was a required feature for his school. Seeing how much he uses it for note taking, I get it. So yes, drawing is a key feature for schools.

Another school uses iPads with keyboards for the same purpose, so I'm not sure where the school market is for these. Maybe only older kids, but a lot of edu-tech is expecting some kind of touch/pen input.

It might be a fine laptop when you are on the move. I have an educational Lenovo for that purpose, but I would appreciate a Mac for that same use. When I need more power away from my desk I can use the MacBook Pro or my Lenovo T series (both a lot heavier than I’d like).

I just wish the Mac had 16GB of RAM but my tiny Lenovo has 8 and it’s been working OK so far - I haven’t even set up a proper swap partition and it’s running on zram.

wow. are elementary school kids using chromebooks? my kids is in pre-K this year. i dont know about the elementary school chromebook thing.

Yes, my kids all started using one in Kindergarten, although it took to 4th grade before my oldest started bringing home one every night.

They take standardized tests on it. Questions have a button to speak the question. Same with answers.

It might be aimed at Chromebooks, but it’s also a low-end Surface killer.

The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.

[dead]

I think the 2 laptops you mentioned are targeting different markets.

The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)

The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.

8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps

At this point I think few people really will care about that spec difference.

The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.

Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.

> The accumulated brand trust of Apple

This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).

You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.

>They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience.

"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

And despite antenna gate, the iPhone 4 was still the best smartphone of that year and leaps ahead of it's closest competition (the Galaxy S), and remained the #1 best selling smartphone at year after launch

You can only buy hardware that runs Apple software from Apple, but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have. Apple is and always has been a minority player in the overall smartphone market (and desktop/laptop as well).

Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was the single most purchased smartphone model in the US between 2010 and 2011 (during antenna gate that we are talking about).

Android has the majority share because "Android" is anything from a $100 piece of junk to a $1200 phone. If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.

Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.

If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

>If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

Which means just *one* of the Android flagships - which are a much, much more segmentated market! - sold half as much as the iOS competitor.

>Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was the single most purchased smartphone model in the US between 2010 and 2011

Are you trying to give Apple some kind of tech participation trophy? Because that's all you're doing.

>If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.

Sure, Apple is a luxury brand, and so not many people can afford it. Nor should they be spending the ridiculous amount of money Apple normally charges.

>Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.

Reality distortion field still in effect in 2026.

>If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

I don't care about brands as much as you seem to, that much I'm sure about. Your precious Apple could never do you wrong, we get it.

> but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have

"far outsell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The iPhone has a market share of 60% in the US [1]. The leading Android manufacturer Samsung has a market share of 22% in the US.

These numbers are from last year; the iPhone sold like hotcakes in the European 5, the US (of course), Australia, Mainland China and Japan [2].

BTW, the European 5 consists of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Apple by itself globally makes up about 43% of the revenue in the smartphone market [3].

Yes, devices running the Android operating system sell a lot of units; the majority of them are no-frills devices from manufacturers most people have never heard of. Which is fine—having a phone is better than not having one.

But don’t act like Android is some kind of juggernaut; these five markets represent 2.24 billion people and 60% of the world's GDP. Android isn’t the bestselling phone in any of these countries.

# Top Selling Models

    European 5
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 2    | Samsung Galaxy A55 |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 16          |
    | 5    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    
    US
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 15         |
    | 5    | iPhone 14         |
    
    Australia
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 12         |
    | 5    | Samsung Galaxy A35|
    
    Mainland China
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 16          |
    | 4    | Huawei Mate 60 Pro |
    | 5    | Huawei Mate 60     |
    
    Japan
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16          |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 14          |
    | 5    | Google Pixel 8a    |

[2]: "iPhone 16 secures top-selling global smartphone model in competitive holiday period" — https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/technology/iphone-16-secu...

[3]: "iPhone rakes in 3 times the revenue of any rival" — https://www.cultofmac.com/news/iphone-rakes-in-3-times-the-r...

Cute that the Apple fanboys constantly want to make this about a brand, and not a platform, because the Apple platform is very low ranking in the larger world of Smartphones. So you will literally redefine the conversation just to give your favorite company a participation trophy award.

Apple certainly puts out experiences that leave much to be improved but to be pedantic the word 'subpar' implies below the 'par'. If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it.

Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

>If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it

That's clearly subjective. What you will accept from Apple is unacceptable to others as garbage, the same as you dismiss anything from Microsoft.

>Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

And yet Apple just copied Windows Vista with their "glass" monstrosity that is universally hated and has been lambasted widely. Again, you may love that, but that would put you in the minority.

Obviously it's a subjective discussion but it's still a meaningful subjective discussion.

I was deeply into Microsoft products for a while. I got my start coding an indie game for the Xbox, I spent years using Windows Phone and developing an app for the platform, I interned at Microsoft twice and then later worked there as a software engineer for a period.

While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.

My opinion about Microsoft's product culture is not formed lightly.

I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand. It's not just marketing spin, it's real actionable decisions over decades that accrue to brand perception.

>While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.

You've described every company I've ever worked for. I guarantee that Apple does not work any differently.

>I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand.

You're wrong about this, as evidenced by their "glass" debacle. I mean you didn't respond to my comment about that at all, and it's so glaring obvious how bad and pointless "glass" was. Nobody wanted it, nobody needed it, and it made things objectively worse. That wasn't a display of product design acumen, it clearly exposed Apple's flaws in very public fashion.

> "You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.

Okay... how about, Apple put the charging port on a wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse.

I could go on, and on...

Which makes for a great internet complaint, but I’ve owned that mouse for years and it’s never once been a thing I thought about in practice.

As they say "past performance does not guarantee future results".

That version of the Magic Mouse is also over 10 years old…

Apple's "glass" UI update debacle should be evidence enough to quash any argument you could make. Their current performance leaves a lot to be desired, everyone hates "glass".

The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

The VP by most accounts is best in class. It’s just too damn expensive. There’s also still an open question if people really want to strap goggles to their face.

Fair enough, although I wouldn't call the vision pro a bad product necessarily, it's just too expensive for what it is.

Yes, you see them on the subway all the time

I bought mine for air travel, when I can strap it to my head for 12 hours and be in a completely different place. I can lie back in my lay-flat seat, so there’s no weight pulling my head down, and it’s an absolutely fantastic experience.

I fly sufficiently that this is well worth it. The fact that it doubles as a mobile computer in the hotel room is just icing on the cake.

So subway ? Maybe not, but don’t pretend they don’t have their own niche…

In laptop keyboards, UI refactorings, or Siri?

Where is exactly the premium quality?

Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.

Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.

Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.

Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.

Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.

There is no room for imperfections when paying premium.

Where is the Apple from "I am a PC, I am a Mac"?

MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.

I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.

Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.

I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine

Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

You can post images in Slack and use text formatting. Those are things that use memory.

Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

Slack is an Electron app.

Gifs. I'm only half joking.

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

Is Slack that much worse of a memory hog than Discord? Aren’t they both built on electron?

Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.

You can make a pretty good electron app or one that kinda sucks. Slack is in the latter category.

VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.

Say what you will about Microsoft but the performance of VS Code is really good.

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.

Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.

Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.

If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.

But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.

> 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026

I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.

Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?

And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.

Web pages are very complicated and there's no pressure on people to make less complicated ones, nor is there any way there could be pressure on them.

Images, complicated CSS, JavaScript ads, they can all use lots of memory!

It depends on how you define "serious work". Is it to get the best results possible, or is it to tax a computer as much as possible? Programmers would usually answer the latter, while users would answer the former.

That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.

Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.

As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.

I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.

I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.

Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.

Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?

If you're trying to link clang, this laptop is not for you. It's for people that would consider a chromebook for their use case.

Usually the problem then is more fundamental.

Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.

I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.

I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.

I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.

Rust has similar issues with memory usage during linking as C++.

I can use a build server when I want one, but that's not always appropriate. Local builds are useful.

>People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.

I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...

Or, she can keep the macbook air as it basically has the same specs as the neo. What is the point of buying the same laptop twice?

> Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM.

They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"

Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.

My spouse bought a mac and asks me (mostly a linux user, and I'm happy to help) for support somewhat regularly (mostly recently, for a tahoe upgrade). It's not the golden unicorn people paint it to be. 8gb is insane in 2026.

It may not be a golden unicorn, but I find it is quite a lot better than providing support for the Windows laptops they used to buy from random department stores on rock-bottom sales... Nothing quite like a $200 PC laptop stocked with OEM bloatware

Until 1/3 of your hard drive space is taken up by weird cache stuff that MacOS doesn’t explain nor offer a straightforward way to clean up.

If it's cache it gets automatically deleted. If it doesn't get automatically deleted it's not a cache and is a bug.

I like my MB Pro but it has serious audio and external display issues. I've had to remove spotlight indexing to prevent obscure OOM issues. One time I woke up to open my laptop and find it's screen cracked for no apparent reason. Since I couldn't prove it wasn't my fault I was charged for the repair anyway and I'm grateful to myself that I had AC+ because I might have as well just bought another laptop if not. At the end of the day, it's still just a computer.

Is it hard for you to imagine that people who'll buy the Neo don't care about specs at all?

I mean, look at the colors!

The surface laptop is a competitor to the MacBook Air, the cheaper Surface Laptop Go was the low cost attempt from MS.

Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.

"good laptops" yes. But I haven't seen a "great" one in a very long time. The Windows market is asleep at the wheel and a copilot button is not going to resuscitate it.

I think the Surface is as close to great as you can get. I'm not saying that I know the whole market of laptops, you probably know better. But the Surface is pretty good, which is weird because it seems like Microsoft isn't really focusing on it or even backing away from it.

I agree with the parent, that Macbooks are way ahead in terms of usability, polish and charm for a laptop. And the performance is outright stellar.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.

I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.

The Surface is garbage. My last work-issued one caught fire.

I've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.

I think the problem is that Microsoft's hardware quality is super inconsistent. We had a ton of employees using Surface laptops and tablets at my previous company, particularly sales and support. The company stopped buying them after a few years because the first year failure rate was almost 15%. However, the folks that had the good ones often kept them for 5 years or more.

woah, how did it catch on fire? I want to hear this.

Don't know. Plugged it in one morning, and it wasn't turning on. So I tried detaching it from its base because that had been a problem before, but it was dead, so you needed to find the little manual release thing that's inside one of the vents, which I didn't have a tool for, so I gave up on that. Then I turned to ask a coworker to try their charging cord (as mine had to be replaced once after it failed, and I assumed the same thing had happened again), and by the time I got back to my desk a small whisp of smoke was rising from the keyboard, which is strange, because to my understanding that's not where the computer bits are in that laptop.

So I unplugged it, at which point I noticed the smoke was increasing. So we doused it in CO2 (maybe N2, idk, some cheap gas we had lying around for the wetlab), pried the computer part off of the base, and then IT handled sending it back to M$.

> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.

Not if you move windows between screens with different scaling, or launch apps that don't support the scaling stuff out of the box, or launch apps via X11 forwarding in WSL.

All of this works much worse on macOS: Scaling sucks, as it's integer-upscaled rendering + fractional downscaling in a shader. Windows can't span screens either.

On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.

Works just fine. I do this every day in my setup. Yeah, it'll take a second to adjust but it works.

I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad

Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves

I have the Lenovo X1 and I'm very happy with it, though obviously that's in a pretty different price category than the Yoga, Surface, or Macbook Neo.

On the other hand, more money doesn't always mean better computer. I had a Dell XPS 9570 at a previous gig that had a lot of issues: coil whine, bad camera placement, terrible thermals, etc.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

Strong disagree on this one - there are some great laptops available, they just aren't "macbook clones". I have an Asus Rog Strix that I love. Lenovo have great ones, Dell, even HP is back in the game somewhat.

I use a macbook professionally, but still don't like the keyboard very much. The display is good, but my Asus display is better. Aluminum is pretty, but I don't like the feel of it on my wrists.

I think you're undervaluing touchscreen capability, which even the cheapest laptops offer now. Kids and non-tech folks have come to expect it by default.

Now that Apple is attempting to compete in this space, they'll have to pitch these folks on what macOS without touch capability offers over Windows with touch capability.

Maybe it will still sell well enough, maybe people aren't that stuck on touchscreens.

This is really well put.

It's interesting, for years I have been trying to make my iPad a nice, slim laptop I could bring with me everywhere for lighter/coding specific tasks. I've gone through several keyboards trying to make this work. It never has.

Now with this laptop, I can do exactly this, while being cheaper than what I've been attempting to do with an iPad.

> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only nerds use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.

I think macOS applications feel like they have mostly updated to use the native resolution, so arbitrary scaling works great now. My comparative experience with a new Windows laptop is how I remember macOS felt when they first made high density screens many years ago: lots of render bugs all over, and every program has to be re-opened when I plug in an external screen to be usable at the new resolution

Most macOS applications now support rendering at 1x and 2x. And arbitrary scaling is done by the OS not by apps.

That’s the ideal. Apps shouldn’t concern themselves with pixels. It’s the OSs job to know the hardware the machine uses.

This leads to visible moire patterns at non-integer scalings, though

We should probably have nicer scaling algorithms that account for Moirés. Also, when you see a Moiré, that’s because you are scaling a bitmap that has periodic dithering. These should be more rare now, and a good opportunity to replace them with vector images with periodic patterns that are tuned for physical dimensions rather than pixel count.

The ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.

I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…

the surface laptop has an excellent screen (2880x1920 i believe), and the macbook neo is lower resolution than apple's made in years, however.

Not true.

13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)

15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...

Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)

ahhh....good catch. i used the wrong name: i meant surface pro 13, which has the detachable keyboard. yeah, it's odd that the surface laptops are lower res.

The Neo’s display is 219 pixels per inch, which is virtually the same as the Air’s 224 ppi.

What about color quality? I've used high resolution laptops with shitty washed out colors, but one thing I've always appreciated about Apple's displays is their vibrance.

too late to edit: i was thinking surface pro (the detachable keyboard) not surface laptop with attached keyboard and weirdly low res screens, compared to the surface pro series.

Not just Microsoft. Dell and HP must be having emergency meetings right about now...

Their challenge is, how do we halve the price and yet deliver twice the quality? I think they are going to realize they can't. Some of them will leave the market.

Dell has 50% more market share than Apple and HP 2x Apple's market share in the PC space. I doubt they'll be exiting the market because Apple launched a cheap laptop with 8gb of ram and using USB 2.0 ports. Most corporations are still tied to Windows apps and the MS ecosystem in general.

> cheap laptop with 8gb of ram and using USB 2.0 ports.

A nitpick: there are two USB ports, one of them is a 10GB/s USB 3 port.

Both of which look identical with no obvious markings which is which. I'm sure this will generate no confusion amongst consumers who will have no issues whatsoever with this. /s

"you're plugging it wrong" will become the new version of the classic "You're holding it wrong"

Yes, the Mac Neo will tell you you’re plugging in to the wrong port!

And while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255353

What are the odds the notification functionality was only tested to work with Apple's overpriced first party accessories like 79$ USB cables, and will have countless issues and edge cases with third party accessories?

If school is using anti-cheat exam, serious MDM software that only support Windows, would student still buy a Mac?

I'll just chime in to say that not everyone cares about the features you mentioned that much. Keyboard, touchpad, looks are the last things I think about when comparing laptops. Not to lessen your preferences, just to point out that there's a variety of viewpoints.

What features do matter to you?

Last time I was shopping for a laptop, I needed battery life, low glare, high screen brightness, rugedness was a plus. Cheapness is a good proxy for rugedness. Being able to upgrade/repair components is generally something I value highly too. Something that's made to be maintained, meaning opened, disassembled (and reassembled!), feels good to me.

What options do you see available on the market today that meet those needs? I agree that all of those are super nice to have

Used thinkpads and dell latitudes, battery and brightness aren't always what I'd like though. Frameworks and similar sound nice, but can't bring myself to pay the premium.

What features matter to you?

I have a framework and love it - repair-ability is exceptionally important to me, and I support it as often as I can.

That being said, I have a really specific use-case I have to fill right now: I travel all the time for work, and my work laptop already takes up a good amount of space, so I need something small and easy to use when I travel

I guess a lot hinges on what kind of work you need to do while travelling. I've been on tmux and vim for the longest time which works great over mosh, so almost any device worked for me, as long as I had an ok internet connection. Spent a summer working in a park, on an epaper tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. Good times.

To make a different point, a regular consumer does not care about tech specs. They want a laptop that can browse the web, stream Netflix, and maybe open a Word doc. They will be more sensitive to hardware problems in my opinion. A janky touchpad is going to be annoying no matter what computer task you're doing. A wobbly keyboard will be the same. To me an average consumer is more interested in the "feel" of the computer rather than what it can do.

Sometimes I wish I could just use any laptop and Remote Desktop into my gaming rig which is awesome. Then I can have whatever form factor laptop I want, but the problem is I think the latency still sucks (maybe not?) on stuff like Parsec even locally.

The latency is acceptable. I host a remote gaming rig accessed through Parsec, the extra encoding/decoding latency is minimal. Distance has the largest effect, I found that over roughly 1,000 km my total latency is about 30 ms, perfectly playable for all but the most competitive FPS.

Nah locally is fine, if you have a good 6ghz coverage, but that means a hotspot in every second room

I don’t have WiFi 6E, just 6 (5ghz). If the input latency is imperceptible for productivity work, and the resolution matches my laptop resolution without pixelation, then why the heck am I not streaming my powerhouse main pc?

Weekend project.

I agree. I read this and immediately thought to myself: The gloves are off.

The price point, the capability, the only thing stopping Apple at this point is the MDM stuff integrating it with other identity providers but its ahead of where it used to be.

The MDM stuff is there now, and platform SSO works pretty well, at least with Entra and Okta (the only two I have experience with). Both JamF and InTune support it, I'm sure all the other MDMs do as well.

The only time macs can be a bit of a headache is if you are still using all on-prem AD & group policy and trying to force them into that environment via joining the mac to AD.

Microsoft is forcing everyone onto Azure AD or whatever so that should fix that.

Last time I dealt with Apple MDM was integrating it with on-prem AD and it was a pain. I know it’s better now because last few “gigs” have used it and it’s been pretty seamless with Microsoft Authenticator for Teams. (Ugh!)

The Surface has 16GB of RAM vs 8GB on the Neo (Windows definitely eats RAM though so maybe that's par).

> I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible.

Can we talk about laptops that you can’t carry by the edge where your palm rests because it flexes the frame and registers it as a mouse down event …

> The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones.

Possibly, but I would wait for reviews to make that call. The hardware is slower than other MacBooks; memory may be slower, too, and other hardware may be slightly worse in quality.

“hardware is slower” single core is significantly faster than the M2 Ultra chip. And when you're browsing the web, single core is all that matters.

The LG Gram is incredible, 17 inch thin light and powerful. However it has one of the worst keyboards I've ever used.

Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.

What's wrong with the Thinkpad T series?

The Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise

It has an unusual keyboard. Function should come before form [1]. This unconventional design makes it harder for touch typists to locate keys by feel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

That Surface has 16GB RAM though.

> Your new MacBook Neo. Just the way you want it[sic]. 13-inch MacBook Neo in Indigo A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine Apple Intelligence Footnote ※

    8GB unified memory
    256GB SSD storage
    U.S. English Magic Keyboard with Lock Key
    20W USB‑C Power Adapter

    Two USB-C ports, 3.5 mm headphone jack
    Support for one external display

> 8 GB unified memory is brand-new e-waste today. macOS 26 makes it even worse.

One reason Apple can get away with 8 GB of RAM is their SoC does realtime compression of data in RAM and they use high bandwidth memory; the A19 Pro RAM bandwidth is 60 GB/s. This enables them to treat the SSD like an L3 cache.

It's nearly 5 years since the M1 was released; I suspect Apple has gotten really good with their RAM > compression > SSD system since then.

I will take MKBHD's take on this[0]. Great as a higher-end 'chromebook' etc. Could be an upgrade for my Surface Go 3 but not as portable. Definitely more useful than a tablet.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBX5WH9b4M4

I'm going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here until proven otherwise. I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience as it would cause a lot of reputational harm.

> I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience

I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!

I don't know what apps you run, but I'm typing this from an M2 Mac with 8 GB, running Tahoe. Performance is fine. It's always been fine.

Doesn't the surface have a touch screen?

I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.

In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.

100%

All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.

A touch screen by itself doesn't noticably increase the weight of the screen. It's only when you put everything else up there that it becomes heavier.

I have a Yoga, I use the stylus more than I type.

Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.

I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen. The only time I touch the screen is when I take a screenshot using the Snipping Tool and want to circle something.

So you do use it.

Yes... barely. I wouldn't miss it if I didn't have it.

For a casual computer at home, I'd get one. Everything I do is practically web based anyway.

> which means you have subtle display artifacts.

No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5

At 150% scaling, one logical pixel maps to 1.5 physical pixels. When a 1px grid line is drawn, the renderer cannot light exactly 1.5 pixels, so it distributes the color across adjacent pixels using anti-aliasing. Depending on where the line falls relative to device-pixel boundaries, one pixel may be fully colored and the next partially colored, or vice versa. This shifts the perceived center of the line slightly. In a repeating grid, these fractional shifts accumulate, making the gaps between lines appear uneven or "vibrating."

Chromium often avoids this by rendering 1px borders as hairlines that snap to a single device pixel, even when a CSS pixel corresponds to 1.5 device pixels at 150% scaling. This keeps lines crisp, but it also means the border remains about one device pixel thick, making it appear slightly thinner relative to the surrounding content.

For some people such artifacts are not noticeable for others they are.

I'm one of those people who are super sensitive to the issues you describe, and let me tell you this: Scaling value (like 150%) is just an integer number.

For the most part, non-ancient renderers (3D but also to a large degree 2D renderers), do not care about physical pixels, and when they do, they care the same amount no matter what the DPI is.

Raster data has a fixed number of pixels, but is generally not meant to be displayed at a specific DPI. There are some rare applications where that might be true, and those are designed to work with a specific display of a given size and number of pixels.

It's especially older applications (like from the 90s and 00s) that work in units of physical pixels, where lines are drawn at "1 pixel width" or something like that. That was ok in an age where targetted displays were all in the range of 70-100 DPI. But that's not true anymore, today the range is more like 100 to 250 or 300 DPI.

One way to "fix" these older applications to work with higher DPIs, is to just scale them up by 2 -- each pixel written by the app results in 2x2 pixels set on the HiDpi screen. Of course, a "200%" display i.e. a display with 192 DPI should be a good display to do exactly that, but you can just as well use a 160 DPI or a 220 DPI screen and do the same thing.

It's true that a modern OS run with a "scaling" setting of 150% generally scales up older applications using some heuristics. Important thing to notice here is that the old application never considered the DPI value itself. It's up to the OS (or a renderer) how it's doing scaling. It could do the 2x2 thing, or it could do the 1.5x thing but increase font sizes internally, to get sharp pixel-blitted fonts when it has control over typesetting. And yeah, some things can come out blurry if the app sends final raster data to the OS, and the OS just does the 1.5x blur thing. But remember, this is an unhappy situation just for old applications, and only where the OS receives raster data from the App, instead of drawing commands. Everything else is up to the OS (old apps) or the app itself (newer, DPI-aware apps).

For newer applications, e.g. on Windows, the scaling value influences nothing but the DPI value (e.g. 150% or 144 DPI) reported to the application, everything else is up to the app.

Sorry none of that makes any sense to me. Go to BestBuy where they have Surface laptops on display. Open the browser and go to a website where a grid with 1px horizontal lines are displayed. I immediately notice that the lines are disproportionately thin. You may not notice it and that's fine.

Here are some links that explain the issue:

https://patrickbrosset.com/articles/2024-06-21-invasion-of-t...

https://flutterawesome.com/sharp-looking-flutter-application...

https://tanalin.com/en/articles/integer-scaling/

>Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world

Thinkpads.

Or in general any business laptop, like HP Elitebook or Dell Presicion.

But they are not cheap at all haha

If you want performace get a desktop!

> If you want performace get a desktop!

Or a MacBook, which is part OP's point. Apple is delivering quality at price points that Windows OEMs aren't (which is sort of the opposite of the phone world).

8gb of ram is not performance.

Maybe I am in the minority but MacOS always feels so bloated and heavy to me.

Never used an 8GB Mac I see.

A decked out Mac mini is actually a beast for its size

Thinkpads are tanks, but most of the time you’d be perfectly well served by a BMW series 3.

Ts-series are nice and slim. X1 too.

Only P-series are workstations.

I meant for build quality.