I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
The article says the CPU costs Apple less than $50. Why aren't these types of chips for laptops more popular in the Windows and Linux world? Where are the Dell and Framework laptops that can compete with this thing on price, quality, and performance?
We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.
The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.
My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.
I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
it also looks really nice. at the Apple Store, the chassis seems well machined. the "cheaper" apple logo insert also clearly also incurred some expense as it fit into the lid perfectly. Hinge, keyboard and trackpad felt good. Design team clearly took time to telegraph craft and quality in their product.
> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port.
You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around
It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
This feels like a dumb question, but is there nothing to distinguish the USB 2 port from the USB 3 port? I think there is an alert to tell people if they are using a fast device in the slow port, but I wonder whether their target market will read the manual and know which is which. I feel they will be surprised when that pop-up appears.
The Apple Take a tour of [the] MacBook Neo page describes the ports by location only:
"The left port can support one external display and transfers data at USB 3 speeds (up to 10 GB/s). The right port transfers data at USB 2 speeds (up to 480 MB/s). You can charge your MacBook Neo and connect accessories using either port."
...and...
"Tip: As a best practice, charge your MacBook Neo using the right port (USB 2), which leaves the left port (USB 3) available for a display or for connecting accessories that can take advantage of the higher speeds."
I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school.
It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.
I think 8GB is harder to defend in 2026 than it was in 2020, but maybe Apple's low-end machines may be staying useful long after the spec sheet says they shouldn't...
I bought a 2019 Intel MBP and that was by far the worst laptop I've ever had. After just a year of use it was constantly overheating and running out of memory and disk space, barely able to open a terminal. It was so bad that I hesitated to buy the Apple silicon versions, but the good reviews convinced me and it has been going strong ever since.
Since the M1, macbooks pretty much hit "good enough". I've got a 2021 macbook and a top of the line 2025 model from work as well. But the experience using them is pretty much exactly the same, the newer one is many multiples the performance, but my old one does everything instantly. So I can't tell the difference just using it normally.
I bought a 8gb m1 air just a few days ago to use as a travel laptop. The 8gb gives me memory anxiety coming from my 48gb m4, but it did force me to turn off some settings I never liked (siri, spotlight indexing) and I also discovered zed, ghostty, and orbstack to replace vscode, iterm, and docker desktop.
The memory limit is probably in my head now, it does pretty well as long as I'm not obsessing over activity monitor.
I also got a M1 Air 8gb, bought 2021 and it's good but there's been various hardware go wrong - screen packed up, usb ports packed up, speakers knackered, battery says service. I think 10 years use would require quite a lot of fixing on mine.
Mine M1 Air display just failed after 5+ years out of the blue like worked at night and stopped in morning and even pre-used LCD assembly cost $200-300. So repairing makes no financial sense.
Yet considering the price I've paid for it like $0.5 per day and used it daily for 10-16 hours a day. Pretty much like phones I use except I use them much less and drop them often unlike a macbook.
Similar story here, I used the original M1 Air 8GB for for years, still in same great condition without any flaws. I did get a M4 Air last year because I just needed more than one display and wanted to work in a docked mode, and I have similar feelings with this machine too.
I have the same model and have been using it as my personal laptop all along just fine. Doing my day job on it is a bit of a headache but I can do it in a pinch.
People who say it’s impossible to use a 8gb MacBook are being obtuse
I used mine for 5 years as my personal laptop and it was fine, even for development work. I even ran docker on it. I'm sure it had to swap at times, but SSDs are so fast now that I didn't even notice.
I don't get the hate on the base model / 8GB. If it's not enough for you, don't buy it.
I agree from a hardware perspective. Once Apple drops software support for the device it makes it less useful online. With Intel based Mac I can install Linux and a 13 year old machine is still fine for a lot of tasks. With Apple silicon, I wonder about what options will exist when you reach this point of no longer having software support from Apple. Asahi project is a nice effort to support this journey, though I do not know if I can expect that to exist long term or with support for future m cpu variants.
I think the only gap I’ve come across is that trying to drive two monitors through a display link dock it doesn’t really have the GPU to not have that be laggy.
> Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.
Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.
Recently dived into mac world (air) too after decades of win/linux.
Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed.
Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?
One thing that helped me make the transition to nearly full time with the Mac was remapping Command. I remapped Command to Control, and put Control on the Meta / Windows key (I mostly use an external kb).
This kept my decades of muscle memory almost intact since I'm so used to Control being the primary modifier in Linux and Windows. And, weirdly enough, it helped me learn the new MacOS shortcuts since the patterns were now centered on Control instead of the Command key.
You can make the switch without having to use 3rd party software. The Keyboard section of Settings will let you adjust the modifier keys on a per keyboard basis. With different settings for internal, external, etc. if you wish. And it will let you remap Caps Lock if you prefer that to be something else.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 83.4 ms ] threadAnd just give even a metal plate on top of Neo SoC would have increased its thermal capacity.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.
We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?
You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around
It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
The Apple Take a tour of [the] MacBook Neo page describes the ports by location only:
"The left port can support one external display and transfers data at USB 3 speeds (up to 10 GB/s). The right port transfers data at USB 2 speeds (up to 480 MB/s). You can charge your MacBook Neo and connect accessories using either port."
...and...
"Tip: As a best practice, charge your MacBook Neo using the right port (USB 2), which leaves the left port (USB 3) available for a display or for connecting accessories that can take advantage of the higher speeds."
It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.
I bought a 2019 Intel MBP and that was by far the worst laptop I've ever had. After just a year of use it was constantly overheating and running out of memory and disk space, barely able to open a terminal. It was so bad that I hesitated to buy the Apple silicon versions, but the good reviews convinced me and it has been going strong ever since.
Unfortunately the display in my M1 has failed and a replacement is £500-700. Very frustrating.
The memory limit is probably in my head now, it does pretty well as long as I'm not obsessing over activity monitor.
Yet considering the price I've paid for it like $0.5 per day and used it daily for 10-16 hours a day. Pretty much like phones I use except I use them much less and drop them often unlike a macbook.
People who say it’s impossible to use a 8gb MacBook are being obtuse
I don't get the hate on the base model / 8GB. If it's not enough for you, don't buy it.
Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.
Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed.
Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?
This kept my decades of muscle memory almost intact since I'm so used to Control being the primary modifier in Linux and Windows. And, weirdly enough, it helped me learn the new MacOS shortcuts since the patterns were now centered on Control instead of the Command key.
You can make the switch without having to use 3rd party software. The Keyboard section of Settings will let you adjust the modifier keys on a per keyboard basis. With different settings for internal, external, etc. if you wish. And it will let you remap Caps Lock if you prefer that to be something else.
Apple fumbled the ball here. They should have called it the "M4 Mini", and this device the "MacBook mini".
Also, OP: Have you considered doing this professionally? I'd read this as the next AnandTech.