Comments

• By theopsimist 2026-03-0419:2050 reply

  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...

  By MYEUHD 2026-03-0419:3512 reply

  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.

  By post-it 2026-03-0419:3913 reply

  > 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.

  By wrs 2026-03-0422:014 reply

  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?"

  By RunSet 2026-03-0622:34

  "Uneaten food" <CHOMP CHOMP> "is wasted food." <CHOMP CHOMP>

  By underlipton 2026-03-052:404 reply

  Because OoM errors are oh so fun.

  By connicpu 2026-03-056:331 reply

  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.

  By mort96 2026-03-069:051 reply

  I write algorithms that operate on less predictable amounts of data.

  By connicpu 2026-03-070:511 reply

  If you operate over all of your data every time it's a lot more predictable ;)

  By mort96 2026-03-0713:28

  The data I operate on come in from the outside world, I can't operate on all of it because most of it doesn't exist yet. I can't process an event that hasn't happened yet

  By stouset 2026-03-052:582 reply

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

  By bagels 2026-03-053:362 reply

  You eventually run out of caches to evict.

  By stouset 2026-03-054:49

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

  By winter_blue 2026-03-054:011 reply

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

  By kulahan 2026-03-054:421 reply

  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…

  By gck1 2026-03-056:311 reply

  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

  By ua709 2026-03-057:11

  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

  By raverbashing 2026-03-058:551 reply

  I don't think MacOS OoMs as Linux

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

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0515:59

  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.

  By ed_elliott_asc 2026-03-057:521 reply

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

  By cultofmetatron 2026-03-059:521 reply

  > 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

  By hnfong 2026-03-0511:371 reply

  we're still talking about the MacBook, right?

  By cultofmetatron 2026-03-0512:47

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

  na, this is just PTSD talking

  By jasonfarnon 2026-03-050:055 reply

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

  By groundzeros2015 2026-03-050:583 reply

  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.

  By heavyset_go 2026-03-051:541 reply

  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

  By groundzeros2015 2026-03-0512:39

  > 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.

  By KingMob 2026-03-056:22

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

  By LaGrange 2026-03-051:231 reply

  > 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_.

  By groundzeros2015 2026-03-0512:40

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

  By coldtea 2026-03-051:292 reply

  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?

  By nick238 2026-03-054:04

  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.

  By jasonfarnon 2026-03-057:172 reply

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

  By coldtea 2026-03-0523:06

  Isn't it obvious?

  Because wanting to utilize something as much as you can to get your money's worth, and wanting to fully exhaust it as a resource are two different things.

  By fifilura 2026-03-068:47

  HDD is for storage. RAM is for speed?

  Why do you even need RAM when you could run everything from your HDD with much cheaper cost/MB.

  By einr 2026-03-057:36

  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?)

  By astafrig 2026-03-050:43

  > about money in the bank?

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

  By KronisLV 2026-03-059:39

  > 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.

  By jcelerier 2026-03-0422:577 reply

  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.

  By rileymat2 2026-03-051:441 reply

  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.

  By adrianN 2026-03-053:17

  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.

  By lelandbatey 2026-03-052:32

  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.

  By SkiFire13 2026-03-051:40

  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.

  By johncolanduoni 2026-03-052:00

  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.

  By yunnpp 2026-03-051:47

  > 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.

  By anvuong 2026-03-052:08

  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.

  By stevefan1999 2026-03-051:40

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

  By MYEUHD 2026-03-0419:433 reply

  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.

  By intenex 2026-03-0420:251 reply

  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)

  By tomcam 2026-03-0421:152 reply

  > 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?

  By pitched 2026-03-051:312 reply

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

  By vablings 2026-03-052:17

  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

  By asimovDev 2026-03-058:39

  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

  By darkwater 2026-03-0422:05

  OpenClaw found some sweet deal? /s

  By parl_match 2026-03-0420:571 reply

  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.

  By Twirrim 2026-03-053:05

  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.

  By KerrAvon 2026-03-0419:591 reply

  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.

  By MYEUHD 2026-03-0420:06

  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

  By sufehmi 2026-03-0423:264 reply

  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.

  By amazingman 2026-03-0423:301 reply

  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.

  By alright2565 2026-03-0423:381 reply

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

  By mrtesthah 2026-03-050:19

  But I thought Electron was the future?

  By peapicker 2026-03-053:50

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

  By astrange 2026-03-058:07

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

  By gizajob 2026-03-0423:40

  Have you tried turning it off and on again?

  By cmontella 2026-03-0423:342 reply

  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.

  By torginus 2026-03-068:54

  Tbf when Big Sur was released, it was leaking like crazy. It was a daily ritual for me to kill Dock and Finder after they've eaten all my RAM.

  By uncSoft 2026-03-052:531 reply

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

  By ForOldHack 2026-03-057:33

  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.

  By nilsbunger 2026-03-055:071 reply

  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.

  By msh 2026-03-0513:061 reply

  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).

  By nilsbunger 2026-03-0514:52

  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.

  By jval43 2026-03-056:58

  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.

  By api 2026-03-0511:45

  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.

  By Foobar8568 2026-03-056:281 reply

  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.

  By wtallis 2026-03-056:431 reply

  > 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?

  By Foobar8568 2026-03-0512:451 reply

  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.

  By wtallis 2026-03-0520:41

  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?

  By nomel 2026-03-0423:161 reply

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

  By Yizahi 2026-03-0423:344 reply

  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?

  By StilesCrisis 2026-03-051:441 reply

  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.

  By Yizahi 2026-03-059:431 reply

  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.

  By nar001 2026-03-0513:09

  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

  By sgt 2026-03-057:10

  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.

  By nomel 2026-03-050:141 reply

  > 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.

  By macintux 2026-03-052:34

  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...

  By herdymerzbow 2026-03-051:22

  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.

  By tomcam 2026-03-0421:143 reply

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

  Most cool. Is it an M1?

  By alistairSH 2026-03-0421:351 reply

  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.

  By tomcam 2026-03-0422:12

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

  By sudo_cowsay 2026-03-053:45

  Early 2020 i3 macbook air

  By post-it 2026-03-0422:27

  M2

  By 5o1ecist 2026-03-057:58

  [flagged]

  By qmr 2026-03-0419:461 reply

  What are you slicing?

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

  By post-it 2026-03-0422:28

  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.

  By astrange 2026-03-0421:201 reply

  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.

  By znpy 2026-03-0421:38

  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.

  By tedmiston 2026-03-0419:492 reply

  > 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/ios-benchmarks

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

  By wffurr 2026-03-0421:071 reply

  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.

  By josephg 2026-03-050:432 reply

      | 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 |
  

  The single core performance difference is wild. Far more than I expected.

  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.

  By jamiek88 2026-03-052:301 reply

  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 !

  By josephg 2026-03-052:541 reply

  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.

  By wffurr 2026-03-0516:03

  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.

  By wffurr 2026-03-0516:00

  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

  By iso-logi 2026-03-0423:19

  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?

  By waterTanuki 2026-03-0423:111 reply

  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.

  By eviks 2026-03-051:46

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

  By Aurornis 2026-03-0423:062 reply

  > 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.

  By Lerc 2026-03-052:592 reply

  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?

  By pfg_ 2026-03-058:31

  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.

  By tokinonagare 2026-03-057:21

  > 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.

  By redeeman 2026-03-050:18

  > 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 :)

  By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-0420:471 reply

  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.

  By izacus 2026-03-0423:011 reply

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

  By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-0423:48

  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…

  By dotancohen 2026-03-051:39

    > macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup
  

  My Debian (KDE) uses just under 1GB on startup. If one is not using animations and things syncing in the background and daemons monitoring file system changes and whatnot, can the stock MacOS memory usage be reduced?

  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.

  By EagnaIonat 2026-03-055:10

  > 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.

  By tracerbulletx 2026-03-050:21

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

  By nytesky 2026-03-0423:32

  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.

  By zadikian 2026-03-0515:481 reply

  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.

  By wtallis 2026-03-068:061 reply

  > Why is there swap used when I have free memory?

  That data may have been evicted during a previous moment of higher memory pressure. If it hasn't been needed since, leaving it in swap probably makes more sense than preemptively paging in data that's known to be cold.

  By zadikian 2026-03-0617:00

  Yeah you're right. But now I'm wondering if it preferred writing to swap over evicting the cache at that time... can make sense if the cache is being hit more than the pages it's swapping out.

  13GB app usage is also odd. I feel like running the same thing with half the RAM wouldn't really result in like 5GB of swap.

  By gentleman11 2026-03-0716:47

  The limited ram is planned obselescence. It leads to massively increased swap usage and will wear out your non-replaceable ssd to make you get a new machine. In theory

  By browningstreet 2026-03-051:401 reply

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

  By hollandheese 2026-03-053:42

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

  By giobox 2026-03-0422:595 reply

  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.

  By realityfactchex 2026-03-0423:08

  > ...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!

  By prawn 2026-03-050:302 reply

  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.

  By knodi123 2026-03-054:09

  > 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.

  By testing22321 2026-03-053:03

  > 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

  By hedora 2026-03-052:041 reply

  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.

  By iFreilicht 2026-03-069:54

  100% agree. The mac mini was offered with 8GB for some time as well, and when my dad needed a new desktop, I thought that would be a good option. It was basically unusable. Even when you only have a few finder windows and a few (less than 5) tabs in safari open, you can feel the swap slowing down the system; just opening a folder or a new tab is noticeably slow, opening safari itself takes multiple seconds, and with just that basic usage you can run into the out-of-memory dialogue, something I had never seen before in macOS.

  I have no idea how apple can believe that the neo won't damage their brand reputation. They must have optimized something to make 8GB viable.

  By jorvi 2026-03-0423:503 reply

  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.

  By ajkjk 2026-03-052:17

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

  By arvinsim 2026-03-059:173 reply

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

  By xp84 2026-03-0517:37

  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

  By butlike 2026-03-0518:12

  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.

  By something765478 2026-03-0516:36

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

  By Foivos 2026-03-0423:141 reply

  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.

  By macintux 2026-03-052:36

  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...

  By p1necone 2026-03-0422:322 reply

  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.

  By kulahan 2026-03-054:442 reply

  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.

  By dsl 2026-03-055:022 reply

  > 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.

  By kulahan 2026-03-055:464 reply

  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.

  By NikolaNovak 2026-03-0512:46

  >> 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 :)

  By cardanome 2026-03-0514:182 reply

  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.

  By xp84 2026-03-0517:391 reply

  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.

  By cardanome 2026-03-0523:342 reply

  I don't have a habit of sitting in the dark.

  Also I don't understand what would be hard about your challenge. My hands automatically move to the home row, feel the key bumps and I instantly know where every key is. I never need to look at my keyboard. Not to mention having to move my eyes down from the displays would be annoying.

  I mean people like backlight keyboards. So if it fits your use case great. Still makes sense to not include in a base model. I actually actively avoid keyboards with any lightning.

  By xp84 2026-03-061:16

  Congratulations on your keyboard superiority. I was just explaining why mere mortals like myself like backlight.

  By kulahan 2026-03-061:46

  The fact that one in ten million people is annoyed by one of the softest lights ever invented by mankind is not a good reason to not include said feature in a product my guy.

  By kulahan 2026-03-070:41

  Most people don’t have the touch typing skill and do not care to learn it. It literally matters zero per cent if they would benefit from learning that.

  By estomagordo 2026-03-058:31

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

  By KingMob 2026-03-056:371 reply

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

  By bongripper 2026-03-0511:22

  [dead]

  By port11 2026-03-0719:31

  Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks.

  Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget.

  I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.

  By 00deadbeef 2026-03-058:31

  > 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.

  By simooooo 2026-03-055:14

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

  By gehsty 2026-03-0421:121 reply

  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.

  By cyode 2026-03-0422:101 reply

  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).

  By killingtime74 2026-03-0423:011 reply

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

  By KPGv2 2026-03-0517:56

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

  By spaceisballer 2026-03-0419:504 reply

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

  By freetime2 2026-03-0421:122 reply

  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.

  By SchemaLoad 2026-03-0421:412 reply

  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.

  By philistine 2026-03-053:181 reply

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

  By SchemaLoad 2026-03-0522:081 reply

  As far as I could tell, there is no passive adapter that converts Displayport to usb-c, you can only go the other way. The only way to use a non usb-c device is to use a capture card to capture the HDMI/Displayport signal and retransmit it over usb.

  By wtallis 2026-03-068:20

  There are two ways to carry video signals over type-c: DisplayPort alt mode, and Thunderbolt. DP Alt mode can work in either direction with a passive adapter or cable: a monitor with a Type-C DP input can be driven by a graphics card with a regular DP output connector, because it's all DisplayPort signalling either way.

  Thunderbolt encapsulates the DisplayPort data in Thunderbolt packets, so both endpoints of the link need to be full-featured Thunderbolt devices.

  By testing22321 2026-03-053:051 reply

  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?

  By SchemaLoad 2026-03-0522:112 reply

  It's easier to justify removing stuff when it's very bulky and expensive. But a single HDMI port on the back of a desktop monitor would take up relatively no expense and space. HDMI has a fairly long life left yet, so much that even Apple backtracked on removing it from the macbooks. Which is far less of a problem since you can get a usb c to hdmi adapter but the other way is significantly harder.

  By freetime2 2026-03-0523:501 reply

  Additional ports would complicate the user experience. The Studio Display has no buttons on it, but if you added additional inputs, you would also need to add a button for input switching at least. And potentially other buttons for brightness and volume settings.

  It may not sound like a big deal, but I have an LG monitor that uses a remote for input switching and volume controls, and a BenQ monitor that uses buttons, and both provide a noticeably jankier experience.

  The Studio Display provides a very clean user experience when paired with a Mac. You plug it in, it turns on, and all other functions (volume, brightness, colors, camera, etc) are controlled via MacOS. Personally I'm happy for Apple to optimize for that experience, at the cost of not working with non-Apple devices.

  By SchemaLoad 2026-03-065:451 reply

  Sure, having two inputs does require some ui to switch inputs. That said, you could get the same user experience by simply only plugging one device in to a monitor even if it has multiple inputs.

  If it was possible to use adapters, this problem would be much reduced, but as it is, it's pretty much impossible to plug in a desktop or game console in to the Apple monitors. And at least for me, having a joystick on the back of the screen for input switching is less problematic than a monitor which only works on some of my devices.

  By musicale 2026-03-0821:53

  DisplayPort supposedly can work via an 8K@60Hz DisplayPort 1.4 to USB C cable.

  By testing22321 2026-03-064:23

  HDMI is inferior. No power delivery, non reversible connector just to start.

  If you want old connectors , why not put a scusi port on that thing!

  By internet2000 2026-03-0422:41

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

  By tonyedgecombe 2026-03-057:04

  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.

  By winstonp 2026-03-0523:38

  The new Studio Displays have more powerful chips than the Neo.

  By parasubvert 2026-03-051:20

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

  By dhosek 2026-03-0423:284 reply

  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.

  By avianlyric 2026-03-0423:391 reply

  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.

  By dhosek 2026-03-053:411 reply

  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.

  By avianlyric 2026-03-0622:25

  The large iPad Pros have the advantage of using OLED displays rather than an LCD. Give the iPad screen an automatic power advantage because all of the light generated by the screen is emitted at the user, unlike an LCD where a substantial chunk of the LCD backlight is absorbed by the LCD layer.

  By KPGv2 2026-03-0517:53

  > 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.

  By morpheuskafka 2026-03-056:501 reply

  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?

  By qkc3p3Jbf4 2026-03-058:121 reply

  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.

  By retired 2026-03-0510:45

  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.

  By ygouzerh 2026-03-0511:27

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

  By theopsimist 2026-03-0419:371 reply

  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)

  By theopsimist 2026-03-0419:441 reply

  I'll keep adding to the list:

  * Only one external display

  * No haptic trackpad

  By turtlebits 2026-03-0423:532 reply

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

  By nguyenkien 2026-03-050:281 reply

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

  By macintux 2026-03-052:382 reply

  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.

  By drdo 2026-03-0812:45

  I really dislike "tap to click" for some reason. I like the feedback of actually pressing it.

  By bzzzt 2026-03-057:411 reply

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

  By macintux 2026-03-0513:42

  Really? Terrific.

  By gopalv 2026-03-0420:351 reply

  > * 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.

  By whiterook6 2026-03-0421:012 reply

  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.

  By genxy 2026-03-0421:312 reply

  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...

  By realityfactchex 2026-03-0423:27

  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.

  By whiterock 2026-03-0421:421 reply

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

  By genxy 2026-03-0422:32

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

  By toomuchtodo 2026-03-0423:27

  Any you could recommend that are safe?

  By reddalo 2026-03-0422:152 reply

  >No camera notch

  Well, I see this as a very positive thing.

  By ta8903 2026-03-055:53

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

  By OrangeMusic 2026-03-057:50

  Instead, the screen has big bezel.

  By giobox 2026-03-0423:431 reply

  > 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...

  By odysseus 2026-03-0516:171 reply

  What about the old Studio Display?

  By giobox 2026-03-0521:38

  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.

  By internet2000 2026-03-0419:495 reply

  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.

  By ezfe 2026-03-0419:54

  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.

  By pbreit 2026-03-0420:583 reply

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

  By Aurornis 2026-03-0423:081 reply

  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.

  By pbreit 2026-03-073:37

  I would say the vast, vast majority of people are completely unable to use a non-lit keyboard in the dark.

  By justinator 2026-03-0421:121 reply

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

  By pbreit 2026-03-0422:282 reply

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

  By andai 2026-03-050:12

  https://xkcd.com/333/

  By justinator 2026-03-056:44

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

  And the keys are still labeled...

  By Findecanor 2026-03-0513:04

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

  By theopsimist 2026-03-0419:56

  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.

  By bluedino 2026-03-0420:10

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

  Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well

  By itsrobreally 2026-03-050:061 reply

  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.

  By mlrtime 2026-03-050:111 reply

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

  By hedora 2026-03-052:071 reply

  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/

  By watersb 2026-03-054:15

  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.)

  By atlgator 2026-03-0422:422 reply

  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.

  By utopcell 2026-03-050:001 reply

  and there's nothing wrong with that.

  By murukesh_s 2026-03-055:37

  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..

  By astrange 2026-03-0623:35

  And a different SSD and different charging and different heatsinks…

  By franciscop 2026-03-051:46

  * 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.

  By KronisLV 2026-03-059:37

  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.

  By hartator 2026-03-053:111 reply

  > 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

  By vulcan01 2026-03-053:43

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

  By dbg31415 2026-03-0422:03

  > The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

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

  By coldtea 2026-03-051:27

  So no real issue at all for the target group

  By philip1209 2026-03-0421:06

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

  By michelb 2026-03-058:56

  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?

  By SomeHacker44 2026-03-050:42

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

  No camera notch

  Praise the...market?!

  By spinningarrow 2026-03-0419:561 reply

  > No keyboard backlighting

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

  By CharlesW 2026-03-0420:23

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

  By ryeguy_24 2026-03-050:443 reply

  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.

  By lifis 2026-03-050:49

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

  By cmovq 2026-03-050:47

  Just turn on a light?

  By estomagordo 2026-03-058:32

  I have light fixtures at home.

  By killingtime74 2026-03-0421:48

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

  By locusofself 2026-03-0421:05

  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.

  By nsonha 2026-03-0423:443 reply

  "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?

  By esskay 2026-03-0423:52

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

  By rzhikharevich 2026-03-056:14

  More like stockpiled a phone SoC with limited I/O

  By raffraffraff 2026-03-056:581 reply

  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.

  By bzzzt 2026-03-057:39

  They were great long before Force touch.

  By nolist_policy 2026-03-0419:312 reply

  Do you know if the A series processor supports virtualization?

  By xmodem 2026-03-0419:371 reply

  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?

  By nolist_policy 2026-03-0419:38

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

  By dmitrygr 2026-03-0420:22

  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)

  By dana321 2026-03-0423:451 reply

  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.

  By numpad0 2026-03-0423:54

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

  By wackget 2026-03-0419:271 reply

  Price difference?

  By ezfe 2026-03-0419:551 reply

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

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

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

  By B1FF_PSUVM 2026-03-052:551 reply

  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.

  By ezfe 2026-03-0620:18

  * The smaller devices don't have enough demand to have multiple versions.

  * Just because it's smaller doesn't magically reduce the price by 30% (currently iPad is $350).

  By MoonWalk 2026-03-0421:56

  "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.

  By tomcam 2026-03-0421:12

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

  By waynesonfire 2026-03-050:25

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

  By davidkwast 2026-03-0512:45

  Still better than my Lenovo

  By genxy 2026-03-0421:281 reply

  The Red Delicious of Macs.

  By KingMob 2026-03-056:41

  Except nobody wants Red Delicious.

  By risfriend 2026-03-055:33

  No keyboard backlighting is itself a dealbreaker for me.

  By sgjohnson 2026-03-0419:272 reply

  > The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

  That’s been the case for 5+ years :)

  By joshuat 2026-03-0419:361 reply

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

  By crazygringo 2026-03-0420:42

  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.

  By evadne 2026-03-0419:31

  I thought they changed from glowing Apple to reflective Apple

  By ibic 2026-03-052:29

  The last point made me chuckle, good catch :D

  By ilovechaz 2026-03-0513:40

  Can’t expand it at all. Not for me.

  By kyleee 2026-03-0423:22

  Center stage is dumb anyway

  By ValentineC 2026-03-0423:321 reply

  > 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).

  By Panzer04 2026-03-051:34

  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.

  By Zenst 2026-03-0420:061 reply

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

  By simondotau 2026-03-0420:392 reply

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

  By gizajob 2026-03-0423:431 reply

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

  By simondotau 2026-03-0612:40

  I’d wager that the great majority of Neos won’t ever be connected to anything on the regular (aside from a charger).

  By muterad_murilax 2026-03-0422:00

  Man, that's just gross!

  By nine_k 2026-03-0421:47

  — ...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"?

  By KPGv2 2026-03-0517:51

  also, less space than a Nomad. Lame.

  By znpy 2026-03-0421:34

  > * “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

  By tokyobreakfast 2026-03-0421:061 reply

  > 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.

  By vvillena 2026-03-050:20

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

  By pbreit 2026-03-0420:562 reply

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

  By esskay 2026-03-0423:531 reply

  You're not the audience, obviously.

  By pbreit 2026-03-073:39

  It's a show-stopper for the main audience: students.

  By kccqzy 2026-03-0421:342 reply

  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.

  By pbreit 2026-03-073:40

  Very small percentage of students (the primary audience) are touch typists.

  By asadotzler 2026-03-0423:081 reply

  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.

  By ta8903 2026-03-055:581 reply

  Aren't classrooms usually well lit?

  By pbreit 2026-03-073:41

  No. And multi-resident dorm rooms much less so.

  By aimanbenbaha 2026-03-0422:114 reply

  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.

  By dbbk 2026-03-0422:511 reply

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

  By stavros 2026-03-0423:04

  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.

  By LordDragonfang 2026-03-0422:16

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

  By esskay 2026-03-0423:53

  You get what a budget product is right?

  By wildzzz 2026-03-051:38

  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.

  By sva_ 2026-03-0419:305 reply

  > 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.

  By coder543 2026-03-0419:333 reply

  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.

  By sva_ 2026-03-0419:493 reply

  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!

  By dijit 2026-03-0420:31

  > 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.

  By piperswe 2026-03-0419:57

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

  By throwaway2037 2026-03-054:26

      > 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.
  

  Why don't you buy a used M1 from eBay? You can probably get one for less than 500 USD.

  By j45 2026-03-0419:59

  That’s pretty impressive

  By jefftk 2026-03-0423:06

  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.

  By hennell 2026-03-0419:511 reply

  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.)

  By simondotau 2026-03-0420:33

  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.

  By sgjohnson 2026-03-0419:433 reply

  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.

  By sva_ 2026-03-0419:531 reply

  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.

  By sgjohnson 2026-03-0420:241 reply

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

  By nguyenkien 2026-03-0422:16

  It's M3.

  By midnitewarrior 2026-03-0420:491 reply

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

  By sgjohnson 2026-03-0421:50

  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.

  By asadotzler 2026-03-0423:10

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

  By scubadude 2026-03-050:39

  It just means the phone is massively overpowered :)

  By stuff4ben 2026-03-0419:351 reply

  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.

  By sroussey 2026-03-0420:041 reply

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

  By Tostino 2026-03-0421:181 reply

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

  By nguyenkien 2026-03-054:271 reply

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

  By sroussey 2026-03-056:23

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

• By lateforwork 2026-03-0415:2939 reply

  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...

  By xtracto 2026-03-0417:4515 reply

  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.

  By pie_flavor 2026-03-0418:117 reply

  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.

  By satvikpendem 2026-03-0420:055 reply

  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

  By fluoridation 2026-03-0420:46

  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).

  By natpalmer1776 2026-03-0616:001 reply

  This is why I stopped using Windows.

  You shouldn't have to go through all these extra steps just to squeeze out the same performance you would get by just installing [Other OS].

  At some point I realized I was spending hours at a time trying to 'fix' Windows and decided to give Mac a try right around the time that Apple Silicon came out. It was a night and day difference.

  By satvikpendem 2026-03-0616:231 reply

  Gaming, especially multiplayer

  By natpalmer1776 2026-03-0616:441 reply

  CrossOver lets me play most single player games just fine on my M4 Pro, and personally I found multiplayer gaming taking too much of my time and emotional energy anyway.

  By satvikpendem 2026-03-0616:53

  CrossOver is alright but not always enough in terms of performance for many games compared to a Windows machine, especially one with a dedicated GPU.

  By endymion-light 2026-03-0510:32

  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.

  By michaelcampbell 2026-03-0421:00

  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.

  By zer0zzz 2026-03-058:50

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

  By rstat1 2026-03-0418:371 reply

  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.

  By m_mueller 2026-03-0419:022 reply

  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.

  By p_ing 2026-03-0419:162 reply

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

  By mattbee 2026-03-0421:121 reply

  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.

  By p_ing 2026-03-0515:391 reply

  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.

  By rstat1 2026-03-0518:551 reply

  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.

  By p_ing 2026-03-0619:10

  No, they don't disable the Windows Defender filter, they put it in async mode.

  By zer0zzz 2026-03-058:51

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

  By PaulHoule 2026-03-0419:171 reply

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

  By fluoridation 2026-03-0420:471 reply

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

  By PaulHoule 2026-03-0420:531 reply

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

  By fluoridation 2026-03-0421:121 reply

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

  By PaulHoule 2026-03-0421:591 reply

  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.

  By fluoridation 2026-03-050:141 reply

  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.

  By wholinator2 2026-03-0516:01

  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

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0419:03

  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.

  By everfrustrated 2026-03-0420:091 reply

  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.

  By chocochunks 2026-03-0421:44

  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.

  By zer0zzz 2026-03-058:49

  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.

  By 0x457 2026-03-0419:001 reply

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

  By ErneX 2026-03-0419:421 reply

  Intel iMac?

  By 0x457 2026-03-0420:24

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

  By teaearlgraycold 2026-03-0422:37

  You’re running Windows unironically?

  By luke5441 2026-03-0418:267 reply

  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.

  By swiftcoder 2026-03-0418:281 reply

  > 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

  By luke5441 2026-03-0418:342 reply

  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...

  By p_ing 2026-03-0419:151 reply

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

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

  By nandomrumber 2026-03-0419:341 reply

  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.

  By necovek 2026-03-0421:11

  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...

  By caycep 2026-03-0420:59

  hence the Neo and the iPhone chip!

  By kokanee 2026-03-0418:343 reply

  YOU GUYS IT HAS A HEADPHONE JACK

  By joemi 2026-03-0419:06

  Don't all macbooks have one?

  By joecool1029 2026-03-0418:483 reply

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

  By jkestner 2026-03-0418:58

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

  By monocularvision 2026-03-0419:35

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

  By zer0zzz 2026-03-058:53

  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.

  By satvikpendem 2026-03-0420:05

  This isn't news, all MacBooks have one.

  By xnx 2026-03-0418:321 reply

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

  My body is the heatsink

  By arbirk 2026-03-0418:41

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

  By brailsafe 2026-03-066:58

  I think the 14" and Air might get a little warmer, but I can't recall a time I've felt heat from my 16" M4 Pro, fan sound is rare. On my 13" Intel, it was comically easy to cook my balls and the fans were at max constantly

  By binkHN 2026-03-0419:59

  > 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.

  By whateverboat 2026-03-0419:54

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

  By pbreit 2026-03-0421:03

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

  By nailer 2026-03-0417:535 reply

  > 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.

  By Eric_WVGG 2026-03-0418:234 reply

  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?

  By mkreis 2026-03-0418:33

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

  By soneil 2026-03-0418:501 reply

  > 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.

  By dragonwriter 2026-03-0418:54

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

  By jkestner 2026-03-0419:06

  > - 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!)

  By agildehaus 2026-03-0419:32

  We test these things in production.

  By vunderba 2026-03-0418:43

  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.

  By entropicdrifter 2026-03-0418:12

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

  By reactordev 2026-03-0418:05

  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.

  By rrnechmech 2026-03-0418:43

  [dead]

  By michaelt 2026-03-0419:282 reply

  > 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.

  By joshvm 2026-03-0423:13

  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.

  By necovek 2026-03-0421:21

  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.

  By Matl 2026-03-0417:552 reply

  What about something like [1].

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

  By jemmyw 2026-03-0422:42

  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.

  By SaltyBackendGuy 2026-03-0418:505 reply

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

  By carefree-bob 2026-03-0420:03

  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!

  By itsfine2 2026-03-0419:401 reply

  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.

  By evilduck 2026-03-053:051 reply

  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.

  By Matl 2026-03-0513:20

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

  By achenet 2026-03-0419:32

  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.

  By mrheosuper 2026-03-068:40

  Maybe don't touch the screen eh ?

  By Matl 2026-03-0513:18

  Touchscreens can be disabled in software.

  By delusional 2026-03-0417:525 reply

  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 :)

  By macNchz 2026-03-0418:321 reply

  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.

  By matwood 2026-03-057:04

  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.

  By grogenaut 2026-03-0419:011 reply

  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.

  By therouwboat 2026-03-0419:341 reply

  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.

  By grogenaut 2026-03-056:10

  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.

  By dzonga 2026-03-0419:26

  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

  By pxmpxm 2026-03-050:281 reply

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

  By fubdopsp 2026-03-051:571 reply

  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.

  By pxmpxm 2026-03-0712:51

  Yupp, even before the ram shortage we were paying $60-$80k for 1u racks with 768 to 1.5tb ram and 48-128cores

  By 0x457 2026-03-0419:01

  Running FatLTO on Chrome.

  By ekianjo 2026-03-0423:05

  Did you check what Framework offers?

  By mrheosuper 2026-03-068:38

  >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

  Maybe ROG Flow 13 ? It's more like hybrid laptop, and geared toward "gaming"(because it's usually the gamer market that demand high performance), but nothing prevents you to use it as business machine.

  It's also top of the line asus laptop, so i expect decent build quality.

  By w0m 2026-03-0419:24

  > (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.

  By dm319 2026-03-0514:02

  > 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.

  By hypercube33 2026-03-0418:311 reply

  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+

  By mrbuttons454 2026-03-0418:411 reply
  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.

  By vrganj 2026-03-0419:22

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

  By necovek 2026-03-0419:29

  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).

  By Liftyee 2026-03-0423:041 reply

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

  By nechuchelo 2026-03-0423:521 reply

  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.

  By leeman2016 2026-03-056:17

  P1 comes to mind

  By game_the0ry 2026-03-0417:504 reply

  > 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.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0418:103 reply

  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.

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0419:551 reply

  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.

  By hedora 2026-03-053:011 reply

  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.

  By pjmlp 2026-03-055:01

  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.

  By zer0zzz 2026-03-058:54

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

  By jimbokun 2026-03-0419:581 reply

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

  By pjmlp 2026-03-058:26

  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.

  By hedora 2026-03-052:20

  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.

  By leptons 2026-03-0419:092 reply

  >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.

  By game_the0ry 2026-03-0419:201 reply

  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

  By bloomca 2026-03-0419:412 reply

  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.

  By game_the0ry 2026-03-0420:093 reply

  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.

  By TacticalCoder 2026-03-0421:211 reply

  > 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.

  By game_the0ry 2026-03-0422:51

  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.

  By leptons 2026-03-0422:22

  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.

  By fragmede 2026-03-0423:51

  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.

  By GeekyBear 2026-03-050:511 reply

  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.

  By bigyabai 2026-03-0518:50

  What a conveniently annoying default!

  By sys_64738 2026-03-052:41

  It helps to switch on your computer.

  By asimovDev 2026-03-059:12

  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.

  By GeekyBear 2026-03-0417:133 reply

  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

  By hightrix 2026-03-0417:295 reply

  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.

  By dijit 2026-03-0417:351 reply

  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.

  By a1o 2026-03-0419:48

  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.

  By GeekyBear 2026-03-0418:05

  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.

  By numpad0 2026-03-050:071 reply

  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.

  By hightrix 2026-03-051:321 reply

  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.

  By hedora 2026-03-053:12

  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.

  By regularfry 2026-03-0418:32

  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.

  By 98codes 2026-03-0418:411 reply

  > 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...

  By hightrix 2026-03-0419:49

  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.

  By miohtama 2026-03-0417:33

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

  By MarcelOlsz 2026-03-0417:421 reply

  [flagged]

  By fortran77 2026-03-0418:131 reply

  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)

  By buzzerbetrayed 2026-03-0418:351 reply

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

  By leptons 2026-03-0419:15

  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.

  By NietTim 2026-03-0415:378 reply

  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.

  By runjake 2026-03-0415:5716 reply

  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.

  By lm28469 2026-03-0416:218 reply

  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

  By Sohcahtoa82 2026-03-0423:322 reply

  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.

  By fragmede 2026-03-050:02

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

  By matwood 2026-03-057:10

  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.

  By jonhohle 2026-03-0417:162 reply

  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).

  By the_sleaze_ 2026-03-0417:413 reply

  > 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.

  By dragonwriter 2026-03-0417:45

  > 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.)

  By runjake 2026-03-0422:58

  > 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?

  By dzhiurgis 2026-03-0423:12

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

  By Aeolun 2026-03-0417:401 reply

  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.

  By jonhohle 2026-03-0418:01

  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.

  By notatoad 2026-03-0417:291 reply

  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.

  By malloci 2026-03-0417:541 reply

  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.

  By 8ytecoder 2026-03-0419:31

  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)

  By 6SixTy 2026-03-0416:433 reply

  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.

  By el_benhameen 2026-03-0417:011 reply

  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.

  By doubled112 2026-03-0417:33

  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.

  By dragonwriter 2026-03-0418:15

  > 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.

  By cptskippy 2026-03-0417:422 reply

  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.

  By olyjohn 2026-03-0419:571 reply

  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.

  By matwood 2026-03-057:13

  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.

  By growt 2026-03-0418:021 reply

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

  By cptskippy 2026-03-072:29

  Does everyone pay for bully insurance or is it a tax on the bullied?

  By stickfigure 2026-03-0418:11

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

  By prcrstntr 2026-03-0416:301 reply

  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.

  By runjake 2026-03-0416:392 reply

  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.

  By mghackerlady 2026-03-0417:28

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

  By joezydeco 2026-03-0417:082 reply

  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.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0418:15

  > 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.

  By k3nx 2026-03-0417:47

  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...

  By iqandjoke 2026-03-0516:00

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

  By themingus 2026-03-0418:481 reply

  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.

  By runjake 2026-03-0419:12

  > 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.

  By tim333 2026-03-0416:201 reply

  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.

  By runjake 2026-03-0416:28

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0419:401 reply

  > 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".

  By asadotzler 2026-03-0423:151 reply

  >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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-055:37

  > 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.

  By newsclues 2026-03-0416:201 reply

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

  Some schools will gladly pay more.

  By runjake 2026-03-0416:331 reply

  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.

  By newsclues 2026-03-0416:44

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

  By NietTim 2026-03-0416:192 reply

  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.

  By runjake 2026-03-0416:32

  > 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.

  By zarzavat 2026-03-0417:00

  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.

  By rpcope1 2026-03-055:15

  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.

  By jen20 2026-03-0417:251 reply

  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.

  By runjake 2026-03-0419:15

  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.

  By blactuary 2026-03-0416:471 reply

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

  By briandear 2026-03-0422:53

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

  By jonplackett 2026-03-0416:473 reply

  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.

  By magnio 2026-03-0417:321 reply

  > 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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0420:062 reply

  > 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...

  By TheBicPen 2026-03-0423:36

  > 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.

  By asadotzler 2026-03-0423:221 reply

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-051:10

  > 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    |
  

  As of late 2024, the Pixel 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 5, and 5a series are all fully out of support. The Pixel 5 received Android 14 as its last OS update with a final security patch in October 2023, and the Pixel 5a concluded support in August 2024, also on Android 14.

      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        |
  

  The Galaxy S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra received their final update in the form of the January 2025 security patch. After originally launching in 2020, Samsung had promised four years of software support for the S20 trio — three major OS upgrades (Android 10 to 13) and four years of security updates.

  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-...

  By orthogonal_cube 2026-03-0417:021 reply

  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.

  By al_borland 2026-03-0421:55

  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

  By sayamqazi 2026-03-055:32

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

  By harshaw 2026-03-0417:15

  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).

  By bob1029 2026-03-0418:221 reply

  > 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.

  By LunaSea 2026-03-0418:28

  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.

  By ben7799 2026-03-0416:452 reply

  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.

  By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-0416:52

  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.

  By nolist_policy 2026-03-0417:26

  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.

  By GeekyBear 2026-03-0417:23

  The build quality of a $300 Chromebook is laughable.

  By intrasight 2026-03-0416:09

  [flagged]

  By threatofrain 2026-03-0417:23

  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.

  By free_bip 2026-03-0415:59

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

  By zitterbewegung 2026-03-0417:13

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

  By jimbokun 2026-03-0420:06

  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.

  By adrr 2026-03-0415:582 reply

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

  By post-it 2026-03-0416:181 reply

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

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:271 reply

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

  By mbreese 2026-03-0416:321 reply

  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.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:24

  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.

  By sreekanth67 2026-03-0418:022 reply

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

  By chrisgeleven 2026-03-0420:47

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

  By adrr 2026-03-0421:33

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

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:25

  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.

  By nobody_r_knows 2026-03-0415:57

  [dead]

  By NearAP 2026-03-0416:294 reply

  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

  By kettlecorn 2026-03-0418:122 reply

  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.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0418:212 reply

  > 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.

  By leptons 2026-03-0419:163 reply

  >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.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0419:331 reply

  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

  By leptons 2026-03-0422:352 reply

  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/...

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0423:282 reply

  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.

  By leptons 2026-03-051:49

  >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.

  By 71bw 2026-03-059:31

  >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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-058:091 reply

  > 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    |
  

  [1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

  [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...

  By leptons 2026-03-0517:561 reply

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-062:191 reply

  > 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.

  Let me get this straight: you believe the iPhone "is very low ranking in the larger world of Smartphones" even though it's the most popular and best selling smartphone in the five largest economies on the planet.

  I posted the 5 top selling smartphones in the European 5, United States, Australia, Japan, and China—out of 25 models listed, 80% (20 out of 25) were iPhones.

  Don't hate the player, hate the game. No matter what you believe, the number are the numbers:

  - Apple’s iPhone marketshare in the US is 60% vs Samsung’s at 22%

  - the iPhone alone brought in $209,586 billion in FY 2025 [1]

  - if the iPhone were its own company, it would be #9 on the Fortune 500

  - Apple's iPhone revenue is greater than the revenue of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and AMD combined.

  [1]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/...

  By leptons 2026-03-062:261 reply

  The mental gymnastics you're doing is impressive!

  >"Apple’s iPhone marketshare in the US is 60% vs Samsung’s at 22%"

  Which iPhone, which Samsung?

  And you're cherry-picking the US market only.

  Worldwide, Apple's market share sucks. Oh, but I guess the rest of the world doesn't matter to you as long as the numbers make sense in your own head that Apple is somehow "winning".

  Apple has never had and never will have the market share that others have - Windows and Android eclipse Apple's 15%-30%. Those are the numbers you're so desperate to avoid acknowledging.

  It's a pretty pathetic display of fanboyism, and it's rather boring - this "conversation" is over.

  By alwillis 2026-03-069:561 reply

  > And you're cherry-picking the US market only.

  They say reading is fundamental; you might want to practice to get your comprehension up.

  I literally provided the top selling smartphones in China, Japan, Australia and a group of 5 countries in the European Union. The iPhone topped the sales charts in all of them.

  > Which iPhone, which Samsung?

  All of them? The total of all the iPhone models sold in the US was about 3x the total of all the Samsung models sold here. That’s the 60% vs 22% difference I mentioned earlier.

  > Those are the numbers you're so desperate to avoid acknowledging.

  Nobody disputes Android’s 72% global market share vs Apple’s 27%. You can calm down now. ;-)

  To simplify things for you, Android dominates in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. For example, Android has 95%(!) of the market in India, which is ironic since iPhones for the US are made there now.

  It goes without saying iPhone does much better in more affluent countries. So does Samsung.

  > It's a pretty pathetic display of fanboyism, and it's rather boring - this "conversation" is over.

  When someone isn’t doing so well in a debate, they resort to insults and name calling. Sad.

  It’s not that your “opinions” are worth responding to on their merits—they’re not.

  I’m writing for readers that might come across this thread and learn something they didn’t already know.

  By leptons 2026-03-0617:391 reply

  Sorry you wasted your time writing something that I won't read, but I told you, this conversation is over. You didn't "win" here, you only made yourself look like a pathetic, desperate fanboi.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0620:221 reply

  Like I said, this ain’t about you.

  Whether you read it or not is irrelevant.

  By leptons 2026-03-0623:46

  That's pretty deluded, I can't frame it any other way.

  By kettlecorn 2026-03-0421:091 reply

  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.

  By leptons 2026-03-051:491 reply

  >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.

  By kettlecorn 2026-03-054:401 reply

  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.

  By leptons 2026-03-056:51

  >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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0420:121 reply

  > "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.

  By leptons 2026-03-0422:222 reply

  Okay... how about, Apple put the charging port on a wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse.

  I could go on, and on...

  By matwood 2026-03-057:17

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0423:031 reply

  As they say "past performance does not guarantee future results".

  That version of the Magic Mouse is also over 10 years old…

  By leptons 2026-03-051:491 reply

  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".

  By sbuk 2026-03-0815:07

  I like it. Debacle isn't the word you're looking for. "Some loud people on the internet don't like it and the user base has largely been ambivalent towards it. In reality, it's rough around the edges and needs some work."

  By 1attice 2026-03-0418:442 reply

  The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

  By matwood 2026-03-057:18

  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.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0418:541 reply

  Fair enough, although I wouldn't call the vision pro a bad product necessarily, it's just too expensive for what it is.

  By 1attice 2026-03-0419:541 reply

  Yes, you see them on the subway all the time

  By spacedcowboy 2026-03-058:59

  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…

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0420:001 reply

  In laptop keyboards, UI refactorings, or Siri?

  Where is exactly the premium quality?

  By kettlecorn 2026-03-0421:031 reply

  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.

  By pjmlp 2026-03-054:581 reply

  There is no room for imperfections when paying premium.

  Where is the Apple from "I am a PC, I am a Mac"?

  By sbuk 2026-03-0815:11

  Evidently, and especially in comparison to Windows 11, alive and well. In rude health in fact.

  By akdev1l 2026-03-0417:061 reply

  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

  By MrDrMcCoy 2026-03-0417:236 reply

  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.

  By deepthaw 2026-03-0418:222 reply

  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?

  By astrange 2026-03-0419:071 reply

  You can post images in Slack and use text formatting. Those are things that use memory.

  By abujazar 2026-03-050:051 reply

  Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

  By astrange 2026-03-055:17

  Slack is an Electron app.

  By jshen 2026-03-0418:53

  Gifs. I'm only half joking.

  By akdev1l 2026-03-0419:06

  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.

  By Kirby64 2026-03-0417:311 reply

  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.

  By vunderba 2026-03-0418:472 reply

  Is Slack that much worse of a memory hog than Discord? Aren’t they both built on electron?

  By Kirby64 2026-03-0418:53

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0420:141 reply

  You can make a pretty good electron app or one that kinda sucks. Slack is in the latter category.

  By vunderba 2026-03-0421:481 reply

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0422:55

  Say what you will about Microsoft but the performance of VS Code is really good.

  By Schiendelman 2026-03-0417:301 reply

  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?

  By MrDrMcCoy 2026-03-0417:36

  I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.

  By briandear 2026-03-0422:58

  Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

  By Izikiel43 2026-03-0418:43

  > 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.

  By carlosjobim 2026-03-0416:403 reply

  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.

  By prmph 2026-03-0417:014 reply

  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.

  By garbageman 2026-03-0418:002 reply

  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.

  By prmph 2026-03-0418:131 reply

  > '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.

  By astrange 2026-03-0421:00

  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!

  By carlosjobim 2026-03-0421:39

  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.

  By vunderba 2026-03-0418:57

  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.

  By AlotOfReading 2026-03-0418:082 reply

  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?

  By jshen 2026-03-0418:55

  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.

  By prmph 2026-03-0418:231 reply

  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.

  By AlotOfReading 2026-03-0419:37

  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.

  By restes 2026-03-0418:34

  >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.

  By Bluecobra 2026-03-0416:591 reply

  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...

  By the_overseer 2026-03-0511:50

  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?

  By benterix 2026-03-0416:461 reply

  > 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?"

  By carlosjobim 2026-03-0416:573 reply

  Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.

  By abrouwers 2026-03-0417:481 reply

  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.

  By swiftcoder 2026-03-0418:36

  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

  By deepthaw 2026-03-0418:241 reply

  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.

  By astrange 2026-03-0421:01

  If it's cache it gets automatically deleted. If it doesn't get automatically deleted it's not a cache and is a bug.

  By olnluis 2026-03-0419:00

  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.

  By spiderfarmer 2026-03-0416:33

  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!

  By wilsonnb3 2026-03-0415:581 reply

  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.

  By taftster 2026-03-0416:43

  "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.

  By taftster 2026-03-0416:271 reply

  > 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.

  By OkayPhysicist 2026-03-0417:382 reply

  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.

  By jtbigwoo 2026-03-0419:02

  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.

  By carefree-bob 2026-03-0420:051 reply

  woah, how did it catch on fire? I want to hear this.

  By OkayPhysicist 2026-03-0422:34

  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$.

  By cmovq 2026-03-0416:121 reply

  > 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.

  By lionkor 2026-03-0416:202 reply

  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.

  By v1ne 2026-03-0417:08

  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.

  By hollandheese 2026-03-054:02

  Works just fine. I do this every day in my setup. Yeah, it'll take a second to adjust but it works.

  By manwe150 2026-03-0416:19

  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

  By mikepurvis 2026-03-0416:49

  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.

  By raydev 2026-03-0419:30

  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.

  By kccqzy 2026-03-0415:431 reply

  > 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.

  By manwe150 2026-03-0416:081 reply

  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

  By kccqzy 2026-03-0416:191 reply

  Most macOS applications now support rendering at 1x and 2x. And arbitrary scaling is done by the OS not by apps.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:291 reply

  That’s the ideal. Apps shouldn’t concern themselves with pixels. It’s the OSs job to know the hardware the machine uses.

  By odo1242 2026-03-0416:481 reply

  This leads to visible moire patterns at non-integer scalings, though

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:18

  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.

  By SunshineTheCat 2026-03-0417:36

  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.

  By timpera 2026-03-0415:391 reply

  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…

  By jjtheblunt 2026-03-0415:564 reply

  the surface laptop has an excellent screen (2880x1920 i believe), and the macbook neo is lower resolution than apple's made in years, however.

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0417:461 reply

  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)

  By jjtheblunt 2026-03-0420:16

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0416:42

  The Neo’s display is 219 pixels per inch, which is virtually the same as the Air’s 224 ppi.

  By dmonitor 2026-03-0416:10

  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.

  By jjtheblunt 2026-03-0420:23

  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.

  By heraldgeezer 2026-03-0416:154 reply

  >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!

  By post-it 2026-03-0416:201 reply

  > 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).

  By thefounder 2026-03-0416:512 reply

  8gb of ram is not performance.

  By ducktastic 2026-03-0419:20

  Maybe I am in the minority but MacOS always feels so bloated and heavy to me.

  By NetMageSCW 2026-03-0418:23

  Never used an 8GB Mac I see.

  By dartharva 2026-03-0417:43

  The experience I have had with Thinkpads, both current-gen and old during my childhood, did not warm me up to the line. They are not particularly better in feel, thermals and screen quality against its cheaper alternatives including those from Lenovo themselves. The only good thing was its keyboard, but then most Lenovo laptops in general have good keyboards. Its popular acclaim is weird to me.

  By akdev1l 2026-03-0417:14

  A decked out Mac mini is actually a beast for its size

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:461 reply

  Thinkpads are tanks, but most of the time you’d be perfectly well served by a BMW series 3.

  By heraldgeezer 2026-03-0419:031 reply

  Ts-series are nice and slim. X1 too.

  Only P-series are workstations.

  I meant for build quality.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0716:33

  I have a T series and it's neither slim nor light.

  By internet2000 2026-03-0417:231 reply

  Not just Microsoft. Dell and HP must be having emergency meetings right about now...

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0417:361 reply

  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.

  By joe_mamba 2026-03-0419:001 reply

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0420:201 reply

  > 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.

  By joe_mamba 2026-03-0420:371 reply

  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"

  By alwillis 2026-03-0423:331 reply

  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

  By joe_mamba 2026-03-059:111 reply

  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?

  By alwillis 2026-03-0620:38

  The odds are probably pretty low.

  The notification is hardware based; the manufacturer of a USB keyboard or mouse won’t matter.

  If you plug a hard drive into the slow USB port, macOS will let you know.

  There have been thousands of different USB devices plugged into Macs since they adopted it in 1998; I doubt there’s going to be problems now.

  By dmos62 2026-03-0418:372 reply

  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.

  By 65 2026-03-050:22

  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.

  By widowlark 2026-03-0418:391 reply

  What features do matter to you?

  By dmos62 2026-03-0418:521 reply

  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.

  By widowlark 2026-03-0419:121 reply

  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

  By dmos62 2026-03-0419:241 reply

  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?

  By widowlark 2026-03-0516:131 reply

  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

  By dmos62 2026-03-0519:52

  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.

  By general_reveal 2026-03-0418:312 reply

  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.

  By 6jQhWNYh 2026-03-0419:33

  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.

  By pinkgolem 2026-03-0418:361 reply

  Nah locally is fine, if you have a good 6ghz coverage, but that means a hotspot in every second room

  By general_reveal 2026-03-0418:43

  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.

  By reactordev 2026-03-0418:031 reply

  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.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0419:151 reply

  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.

  By reactordev 2026-03-0421:02

  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!)

  By gilbetron 2026-03-0514:54

  > 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.

  By karmakaze 2026-03-0417:464 reply

  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.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0420:45

  > 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.

  By karmakaze 2026-03-051:49

  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

  By stanmancan 2026-03-0417:491 reply

  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.

  By 12_throw_away 2026-03-0418:41

  > I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience

  I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!

  By skybrian 2026-03-0417:50

  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.

  By fluidcruft 2026-03-0418:52

  The Surface has 16GB of RAM vs 8GB on the Neo (Windows definitely eats RAM though so maybe that's par).

  By xattt 2026-03-0418:58

  > 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 …

  By Someone 2026-03-0416:501 reply

  > 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.

  By Eric_WVGG 2026-03-0417:17

  “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.

  By ViktorRay 2026-03-0415:59

  Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.

  By ge96 2026-03-0416:051 reply

  The Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0421:12

  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

  By iqandjoke 2026-03-0516:02

  If school is using anti-cheat exam, serious MDM software that only support Windows, would student still buy a Mac?

  By rr808 2026-03-052:28

  The LG Gram is incredible, 17 inch thin light and powerful. However it has one of the worst keyboards I've ever used.

  By ElijahLynn 2026-03-0417:002 reply

  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.

  By GenerWork 2026-03-0417:082 reply

  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.

  By garbageman 2026-03-0418:021 reply

  100%

  All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.

  By f33d5173 2026-03-0418:18

  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.

  By wasabi991011 2026-03-0423:15

  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.

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0417:381 reply

  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.

  By internet2000 2026-03-0417:501 reply

  So you do use it.

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0418:06

  Yes... barely. I wouldn't miss it if I didn't have it.

  By sigzero 2026-03-0419:22

  For a casual computer at home, I'd get one. Everything I do is practically web based anyway.

  By jstimpfle 2026-03-0418:472 reply

  > which means you have subtle display artifacts.

  No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0420:051 reply

  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.

  By jstimpfle 2026-03-0514:261 reply

  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.

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0519:521 reply

  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.

  By jstimpfle 2026-03-0613:57

  I've started out with a longer reply, but let's try and condense it a little: I concede you can still find this issue, especially on less than 4k displays, but it's becoming less and less of an issue, because of improving software. Where you see the issue, it's simply a software problem -- CSS or Chrome or the website/app should be fixed.

  I don't see much of this issue anymore, on my 27" 4K screen, set to 175% scaling. It's logical that if you want to do arbitrary scaling or zooming, and want to keep all distance ratios perfectly intact, you will experience some ugliness from antialiasing (less and less noticeable as you go to ~4K and beyond). That will be so regardless of scaling, even when it's set to 100%.

  So if it ought to look good, software simply needs to be written more flexibly! 1px in CSS doesn't mean 1 physical pixel but it is a (quite arbitrary) physical distance, defined as 1/96th of an inch. It's all up to the app and the software stack deciding line widths and how they will actually come out on a screen in terms of pixels lit. They should _respect_ the scaling setting (like 150%) but they also are in full control, in principle, to make it look good.

  <hr> lines come out are perfectly fine on my screen (175% 4K) with Firefox and Chrome.

  1.5px width lines will come out quite bad with 100% scaling, but will look perfect with 150% scaling obviously.

  Notice that vector fonts generally look better if you have a reasonably high-dpi display. But on average, it doesn't matter if you test font sizes of 20pt or 21pt or 17pt or whatever. Why is that? Because font rasterizers already snap to pixels. They properly quantice geometric objects. They don't make arbitrary stubborn choices like "it must be exactly 1/96th of a virtual inch wide" but they are a little flexible to fight antialiasing.

  And the more higher DPI monitors there are, the less software will be making stubborn choices.

  By lateforwork 2026-03-0420:27

  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/

  By caycep 2026-03-0420:57

  PC to me is always best as a itx minitower form factor.

  By Gasp0de 2026-03-0510:16

  What's wrong with the Thinkpad T series?

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0415:451 reply

  Not really, because Surface isn't what most folks buying PCs get.

  And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.

  By blazarquasar 2026-03-0416:041 reply

  Surface Laptop is 1099€ vs 699€ for the Macbook Neo in Germany.

  Macbook Neo is also 219ppi vs Surface Laptop at 178ppi. We’ll see about performance, but i’d expect the macbook to be on par or better.

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0416:304 reply

  Except most Germans don't buy Surface Laptops, and there are much cheaper options with 8 GB, naturally they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.

  It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.

  And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:482 reply

  > they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.

  If your MacBook has a glowing apple, you might be running Snow Leopard. You need to upgrade like now.

  By rescbr 2026-03-0418:561 reply

  I miss the glowing apple on my white polycarbonate MacBook. What I don't miss is the shitty Intel GMA X3100 iGPU and Apple not releasing a 64 bit driver for it.

  Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:26

  I miss the glowing logos too, but I guess this would force the screen to be ticker, which is a big no-no for Apple.

  I think this April they should announce one with a beige shell, a rainbow logo, and a brown keyboard (with BELL on top of tge G) ;-).

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0417:211 reply

  Thankfully I don't own any, I rather have computers with replaceable parts, more environment friendly, thus not something I need to worry about.

  By NetMageSCW 2026-03-0417:583 reply

  what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly? The MacBook Neo is 60% from recycled materials and Apple offers free recycling for all their products.

  How do you recycle your old parts?

  By rescbr 2026-03-0419:141 reply

  > what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly?

  Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.

  The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.

  Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.

  20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.

  15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.

  10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.

  By recordlabel 2026-03-0420:03

  nowadays macbook batteries aren't something i'd call "easy to replace" but it's not something a typical repair shop or meticulous individual wouldn't be able to do – most beater windows laptops don't have user-replacable batteries either fwiw

  if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:31

  Being able to add RAM and replace storage with faster flash typically extend the useful life of a computer, even if the CPU is not replaceable as in desktops.

  On my machines the limiting factor is not CPU, but memory and GPU speed. Low RAM and slow GPUs prevent me from running local AI models. These things will only get bigger over time. I wouldn’t expect a developer machine to still be useful 5 years from now with less than 16 or 32GB.

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0419:46

  Thinkpads with replaceable components and PC desktops.

  By antfarm 2026-03-0417:295 reply

  The Apple logo is on the wrong side of the screen to be concerned about. Apple's OS and user experience is miles ahead of the competition and so are the displays they use.

  By achenet 2026-03-0419:56

  I disagree about Apple's OS and UI, I prefer the user experience of Linux :)

  With a distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything basically "just works", and you have much more freedom with how you setup your computer. Plus, while Apple is generally better about not bloaring their OS with bothersome corporate BS ("log into your Windows account! Sign up for OneDrive! AI in your email!") then Microsoft, they're not exactly perfect.

  By margorczynski 2026-03-0420:052 reply

  The Mac OS is the thing that keeps me away from those computers. I really don't like when a piece of software tries to treat me like I have some kind of brain injury and needs to "help" me at every point.

  By KerrAvon 2026-03-0521:341 reply

  Have you ever actually used macOS? It doesn't sound like it.

  By margorczynski 2026-03-0615:33

  I have a MBP and used it for years

  By antfarm 2026-03-0511:081 reply

  Are you saying this coming from Linux or Windows?

  By margorczynski 2026-03-0615:33

  Linux

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0419:44

  Indeed nothing beats the Tahoe experience.

  By wolvesechoes 2026-03-0417:341 reply

  Yes, this should convince people who cannot afford to pay for Apple brand to buy it.

  By antfarm 2026-03-0417:44

  The post that I commented on was arguing that what sets the Mac apart from other options with 8 GB RAM, and what makes them more expensive, is that they are seen as a status symbol. I made a point against that mentioning two areas in which Macs are truly superior.

  What exactly is your point?

  By klardotsh 2026-03-0421:16

  To each their own. The OS is easily one of the most frustrating I’ve ever been required to use. It does some things very well, but many things absolutely infuriatingly.

  Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.

  By internet2000 2026-03-0417:521 reply

  Glowing logo for Starbucks dig? What year is it?

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0419:45

  2026

  By Schiendelman 2026-03-0417:331 reply

  "With 8GB". 8GB on Apple Silicon acts more like 16GB on a PC.

  By pjmlp 2026-03-0419:44

  Depends on how many ChromeOS Platform apps you have running.

  By locusofself 2026-03-0418:21

  MSFT up 1.84% today..

  By wyclif 2026-03-063:29

  Apple says the magic keyboard is "much loved." Eh, I can't think of anyone I know who uses a MacBook who agrees with that, even the biggest Cupertino fanbois. It's a terrible typing experience for touch typers, as others have commented here.

  Making MacBooks thinner and thinner creates diminishing returns when it comes to the keyboard. The "butterfly" design isn't very sturdy and on both my previous MacBook Pros several of the keys stopped working after a few years and had to be repaired.

  By rk06 2026-03-0415:396 reply

  all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.

  I don't know why the downvotes, maybe someone can chime in if there is more to surface laptop? because i am using one laptop, and much prefer to use windows on M4 macbook pro instead.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:162 reply

  I’m not sure that many people want Windows badly enough they would get an Apple device and remove the original OS so they could run Windows.

  From my personal experience, Widows users in general don’t mind Windows, but, definitely, nobody I have ever met finds it more desirable than macOS.

  By fidotron 2026-03-0416:442 reply

  The games industry remains a hotbed of people that vehemently hate Apple, even those that have never touched a Mac.

  Part of it historically was a sort of Visual Studio induced Stockholm Syndrome, where for a long time if you were doing C++ work that was the only sane way to go.

  There are some companies that even filter potential employees on this basis.

  By dartharva 2026-03-0417:392 reply

  Apple leaves gamers alone, it does not even attempt to be a nontrivial gaming platform and makes no promises. Why would gamers and gamedevs hate it? It just doesn't exist in their market.

  By xyzsparetimexyz 2026-03-0418:121 reply

  Its a computer. People are gonna try and play computer games on it.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:401 reply

  Was Sony making their MIPS workstations when they introduced their MIPS-based PlayStation? Sounds like a nice distinction between work and play. ;-)

  By fidotron 2026-03-0512:19

  Curiously the Sega game Columns was licensed from the HP UX original.

  By fidotron 2026-03-0418:30

  From the noises that occur whenever you force a Windows loving gamedev to use a Mac the first major "problem" is mouse acceleration.

  By iknowstuff 2026-03-0417:571 reply

  Which companies?

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:39

  Sounds like a nice blacklist to have.

  By carlosjobim 2026-03-0416:441 reply

  Don't have to remove anything. This used to be possible on Macs with bootcamp as they called it.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0417:081 reply

  Bootcamp was a hedge when Apple was a lot less dominant than it is now.

  When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, it wasn’t clear that was going to work. Being able to boot into Windows was sort of an insurance policy that’s no longer necessary.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0716:37

  It made migration from Windows to Mac easier. Now that Office can run in a browser and the Mac has first tier support for the desktop version, and a lot more of the usual software is delivered either as web applications or portable apps on top of a browser runtime, being able to boot Windows is a lot less relevant.

  By akdev1l 2026-03-0417:12

  wine already runs on Mac so really they would just need something like dxvk to have a package similar to proton

  To be honest if Apple wanted to they could work with valve to make gaming on Mac a reality

  To some degree it should already be possible with wine + dxvk + moltenvk

  By wao0uuno 2026-03-0417:342 reply

  Oh man I'd pay premium for a sleek device like this that CAN'T run Windows or Mac OS. Just a mere thought of being able to run pure Linux on that sweet sweet apple silicon with full driver support makes my juices flowing.

  By alwillis 2026-03-0420:55

  FYI: Apple added support for Linux containers to macOS Tahoe [1].

  [1]: https://github.com/apple/container

  By NetMageSCW 2026-03-0418:211 reply

  There will never be an Apple Silicon device without the ability to run an Apple OS.

  Just run MacOS.

  By wao0uuno 2026-03-0510:25

  I know and I'd rather just stop using modern tech than willingly go back to Apple or Microsoft software.

  By raverbashing 2026-03-0416:052 reply

  Who cares about Windows anymore?

  Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices

  Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases

  By NetMageSCW 2026-03-0418:23

  Google Docs might handle 50% of people who use Office, but I doubt if it handles 25% of Office use cases. Few use every feature of Office but someone uses every feature of Office and all those power user cases that are different can’t be handled by Google Docs. Or even Web Office.

  By rk06 2026-03-0416:251 reply

  many people do. i work for Microsoft and don't have option to use mac os

  By raverbashing 2026-03-0416:45

  Well, last I checked most people don't work for MS so I reckon their experience might be a bit different

  By alwillis 2026-03-0417:00

  I believe you’re being downvoted because your logic is from 20+ years ago when Windows compatibility was important.

  Also the era when companies were trying to “kill” each other’s devices is no longer a thing.

  They all get the reality it’s a multi device world and they need to work within it.

  By TingPing 2026-03-0415:47

  I assume you’re downvoted because Microsoft has to want that.

• By reacharavindh 2026-03-0415:0616 reply

  If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)

  By compounding_it 2026-03-0415:168 reply

  Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

  By elzbardico 2026-03-0416:099 reply

  8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.

  By compounding_it 2026-03-055:50

  I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.

  When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

  If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

  I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

  note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:202 reply

  I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.

  By pants2 2026-03-0417:136 reply

  Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.

  By cocoto 2026-03-0418:032 reply

  Tons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.

  By semiquaver 2026-03-0423:52

  Meh. I do plenty of development on my 32GB work macbook pro and 8GB M2 air and never notice a difference.

  By some-guy 2026-03-0418:122 reply

  My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)

  By elzbardico 2026-03-0514:37

  I have a 128GB M3 Max from my employer. Due to some IT oversight, I was able to use it for a few months without the corporate "security" crapware. Didn't even ever noticed this machine had a fan before the "security theatre" corporate rootkits were installed.

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:37

  > My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory

  What are you doing that needs that much memory?

  By humanperhaps 2026-03-0417:35

  While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.

  By amluto 2026-03-0420:23

  Pretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.

  (I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)

  By beejiu 2026-03-0423:17

  For mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.

  By zadikian 2026-03-0419:42

  VMs or huge builds can burn through that fast. Say 3 simultaneous Android emulators, or building Android itself

  By leephillips 2026-03-0419:13

  Some people use computers to compute things. More memory is always useful.

  By cbm-vic-20 2026-03-0417:26

  egacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping

  By bloomca 2026-03-0419:45

  I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.

  By sdsd 2026-03-051:532 reply

  I've been using 8 GB on my M3 for years as a security engineer, doing pretty heavy development. I usually have like 15 Brave tabs open, several terminals, a game (PokeMMO) and a small DeepSeek model, lots of Claude Code instances running, Obsidian, and LadyBird, among other small things. I honestly have no idea what people do with all that RAM.

  By eertami 2026-03-058:21

  To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.

  Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

  By kwanbix 2026-03-052:331 reply

  15 tabs? I manage multiple projects, one per window, and have about 15 to 30 tabs per window. So maybe 300 tabs.

  By sdsd 2026-03-0514:06

  Oh yeah well I run 500 VMs of Windows Vista each with an instance of DeepSeek botting Neopets stocks for me. I make more neopoints in a day than you'll make in USD in a year.

  /s but I suppose I've developed a work flow that adapts to the RAM I've always had. I've seen people with zillions of tabs and I do wonder if it's really that much more productive than the occasional HTTP request to reopen one. I find leaving things open as a form of bookmarking clouds my mental space too much.

  I do intend to have beastly RAM on my new desktop so who knows, maybe I'll be like you in a year.

  By mvkel 2026-03-0423:381 reply

  Development isn't hard on ram. Doing what Apple claims this device is designed for, spending lots of time in multiple browser tabs, is.

  By jachee 2026-03-050:55

  Less-so if you do it in Safari than using a non-Apple browser.

  By zadikian 2026-03-0419:26

  Yes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.

  Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.

  By lowbloodsugar 2026-03-0416:38

  Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…

  By evantbyrne 2026-03-0418:471 reply

  I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally

  By nateb2022 2026-03-0419:091 reply

  Then you're not the intended market for the MacBook Neo.

  By evantbyrne 2026-03-0419:18

  Totally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all

  By a456463 2026-03-0417:553 reply

  lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.

  I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly

  By marricks 2026-03-0418:001 reply

  Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.

  Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.

  By slowjin 2026-03-0419:222 reply

  Docker overhead is practically nothing, so running 3 docker containers should be well within the "light development" bracket.

  By marricks 2026-03-0422:301 reply

  What the heck is going on here, something cannot be light and use 20gb of memory.

  Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb of free memory.

  I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.

  By slowjin 2026-03-057:43

  What takes 20GB memory? I dev on a 2015 i5 and run multiple docker containers all day without issue.

  By KeplerBoy 2026-03-058:29

  Isn't docker overhead a full VM unless you're running Linux natively?

  By urxvtcd 2026-03-0513:31

  But is the system choking? Or, are you certain it would choke with half the RAM you have? It's a well know thing that OS will book majority of the RAM you have and that's actually not a problem at all.

  By elzbardico 2026-03-0514:41

  if you had 64GB you'd be using some 59GB. I have a 128GB machine and it happily hits around 40GB of used memory in no time at all.

  By crazygringo 2026-03-0415:491 reply

  > id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram.

  How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.

  By bzzzt 2026-03-0416:003 reply

  That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).

  It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.

  By lostlogin 2026-03-0416:491 reply

  > Teams

  You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.

  Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.

  By moduspol 2026-03-0418:301 reply

  It's probably not that bad if you ONLY use it for video calls and you've never used Slack before.

  By bzzzt 2026-03-069:45

  Still needs 2Gb of memory for a video call though.

  By crazygringo 2026-03-0416:04

  Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.

  I don't see too many students running Teams.

  By pooortal 2026-03-0416:112 reply

  Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0416:243 reply

  Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.

  Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.

  By epistasis 2026-03-0417:341 reply

  > Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors.

  I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)

  By rbanffy 2026-03-0717:32

  For governments and services governments delegate to third parties, being usable by low-end machines is extremely important.

  I always have to point out government services should not be designed to be efficient, but fair and universal. After they are fair and universal, THEN you can make them efficient, just as long as you don’t break fairness and universality.

  By hypercube33 2026-03-0418:271 reply

  Make that 1 or 2gb of ram, a 32gb emmc drive and a single core 2 thread original Atom

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:35

  Or a single-core Raspberry Pi with 512MB and an SDCard ;-)

  By Geof25 2026-03-057:131 reply

  Testing should be on such laptops. Development, especially in things like xcode or visual studio would be insane

  By rbanffy 2026-03-058:34

  That would force vendors to make Visual Studio and Xcode same ;-)

  By bzzzt 2026-03-0416:20

  Clearly not Apple's.

  By Razengan 2026-03-0415:345 reply

  I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.

  and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.

  By compounding_it 2026-03-0415:36

  I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.

  By etempleton 2026-03-0416:59

  I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.

  By post-it 2026-03-0416:23

  Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.

  Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.

  By sgt 2026-03-0416:092 reply

  I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).

  By whizzter 2026-03-0416:341 reply

  16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.

  By mrheosuper 2026-03-068:551 reply

  Could it be all the corporate-tracking software ? I used to have a M1 Pro macbook with 16gb ram when it's first released, and somehow it still feel slow when compiling.

  Then try again on my friend personal M1 MB, it was night and day.

  By whizzter 2026-03-0614:22

  We're a small shop so nothing of that sort, it's more of larger Figma projects and modern web-apps being hogs.

  Honestly, these days compiling feels like really lightweight work in terms of memory compared to so much else.

  By neoyagami 2026-03-0418:171 reply

  This is my use case, 4 ides. Chrome and docker, its a 14’ M1 Pro, it works nice, but im not installing tahoe any time soon xd

  By sgt 2026-03-058:59

  On Tahoe, I upgraded only recently (maybe they made fixes after the initial complaints). Haven't noticed any regressions except for the weird corners but those I'm already used to. Super fast.

  By AlanYx 2026-03-0415:421 reply

  It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.

  By Razengan 2026-03-0415:48

  Adobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff.

  Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.

  By KevinMS 2026-03-0423:45

  > But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

  I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.

  By mrheosuper 2026-03-068:51

  Apple has history of giving inferior device newer update because it's released later.

  Like the ipad pro 10.5 does not support later ios version, while the less powerful but newer base ipad does.

  So, there is chance the M1 MBA stop receiving update before the MB Neo

  By create-username 2026-03-057:011 reply

  I dream of a macOS installer in which you can decide the level of bloat, instead of then fighting against apple’s super user in your device (SIP) using scripts from generous Internet friends.

  “Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”

  By menno-dot-ai 2026-03-0523:04

  Something like TinyOSX (or TinymacOS, which doesn't have the same ring to it) would be pretty awesome.

  By thatwasunusual 2026-03-0417:231 reply

  > Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

  I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?

  By downrightmike 2026-03-0421:31

  Court cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases

  By BurningFrog 2026-03-0417:44

  Apple is people, my friend!

  By jaydenmilne 2026-03-0415:423 reply

  People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.

  This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).

  Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.

  By odo1242 2026-03-0417:021 reply

  I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)

  By Retr0id 2026-03-0417:31

  It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.

  By kyriakos 2026-03-0418:09

  Win 11 is actually way better at memory management than Windows 10. It's just more bloated.

  By f311a 2026-03-0416:001 reply

  That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.

  By NetMageSCW 2026-03-0418:33

  My Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.

  By stetrain 2026-03-0415:281 reply

  They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.

  By aziaziazi 2026-03-0418:362 reply

  As a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM.

  2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.

  2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.

  We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.

  By poly2it 2026-03-0419:141 reply

  In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.

  By aziaziazi 2026-03-0420:50

  That's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives.

  I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".

  By 00deadbeef 2026-03-058:34

  WhatsApp has a native Mac app

  By mpweiher 2026-03-0416:10

  NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.

  With builds running on big build servers.

  By citrin_ru 2026-03-0415:502 reply

  I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.

  Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.

  By 00deadbeef 2026-03-058:361 reply

  But the Mac has a huge trick up its sleeve: it can run iOS and iPadOS apps. Meaning developers only have to make relatively minor adjustments to make it nice in the desktop and bin off the electron app on Mac.

  By citrin_ru 2026-03-0513:52

  Among the biggest offenders when it comes by my daily usage are Youtube and Facebook web sites. Both have iOS apps but did choose not to provide native Mac OS apps. I don't think MacBook Neo will make them to reconsider this policy.

  By k4rnaj1k 2026-03-0415:56

  [dead]

  By zozbot234 2026-03-0415:151 reply

  There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.

  By philistine 2026-03-0416:132 reply

  Joke's on you; Swift has no garbage collector.

  By hu3 2026-03-0419:161 reply

  It obvious does, with reference counting. Otherwise programs would just balloon in memory.

  By rafram 2026-03-054:581 reply

  ARC isn’t a garbage collector.

  By saagarjha 2026-03-0514:55

  It is if you're being pedantic.

  By coolius 2026-03-0419:10

  if more apps were written in native swift we wouldn't be having any memory issues

  By tonymet 2026-03-0418:56

  I love the new reduced resources Era. MS was clever in launching Xbox series S + X and demanding all published games run on the lower spec machine (similar to Xbox One-S specs).

  Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.

  It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.

  By larodi 2026-03-056:28

  There was this argument by someone the other day that Electron is so attractive, because native APIs are shit and too complex. On the other hand, all software, even simple stuff like messengers or app managers, seems so bloated thanks to Electron and similar frameworks. I like to think of these packaged webapps really as prototypes, and now start to imagine that agentic swarms can effectively translate them to native code, which would save resource both on the hardware and human-ware side.

  By wslh 2026-03-0417:06

  This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.

  By transcriptase 2026-03-0415:521 reply

  “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0416:17

  That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.

  The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.

  That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.

  macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.

  By einpoklum 2026-03-0423:041 reply

  I'm afraid it doesn't. People most everywhere in the world don't buy these overpriced machines. And you can get a new budget laptop with 16 GB of RAM for well under 200 USD.

  However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...

  By import 2026-03-050:391 reply

  Curious where can I find new budget laptop with 16g under 200? N100 mini pc’s sold for 350 at Amazon.

  By einpoklum 2026-03-0610:46

  I don't use Amazon (and am not in the US). But look for manufacturers like Xiaomi, Chuwi, Mechrevo, Teclast, or even less-prominent ones; here's one example:

  https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010041415903.html

  By dgxyz 2026-03-0415:151 reply

  While I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right.

  We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.

  By ClarityJones 2026-03-0415:341 reply

  Particularly when paying for more RAM means buying a completely new computer.

  By thewebguyd 2026-03-0419:22

  Even on an upgradable machine. We're looking at ~$400 for 32GB of DDR5, and the price is only going to keep going up. We're at a point now where Apple actually charges less for RAM upgrades than it costs to upgrade your own machine. Insane.

  By antfarm 2026-03-0417:32

  The worst memory hogs today are websites.

  By DrBazza 2026-03-0416:01

  I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

  By inetknght 2026-03-0416:37

  Where are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.

  By merrvk 2026-03-0421:23

  Bye bye electron