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Apple Introduces MacBook Neo

Apple Introduces MacBook Neo

dm

Comments (201)

  • reacharavindh
    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 :-)
  • opjjf
    $599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch IDHonestly pretty fantastic product and price.This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)
  • gyomu
    8GB RAM was actually pretty workable for lightweight work… until they shipped Tahoe. Now macOS is just a slog doing even the most basic things unless you’re at 16GB. Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.But hey the colors are cute.
  • digikazi
    I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.
  • areoform
    One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
  • scrivna
    How is it Apple can make a whole laptop cheaper than the phones they sell? Phones are costing more while laptops are going down in price.
  • afavour
    $599 and available in a range of colors. My bet is this is going to be a hit with high schoolers and college students everywhere.Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby
  • tylerrooney
    It's ironic that one of the product shots includes a child using a $599 laptop while wearing $549 headphones.
  • accrual
    Looks pretty cool. I feel they got some features right for their target demographics:- 2 fun colors + 2 regular- The Magic Keyboard looks like it has a decent amount of travel and should hold up well- Headphone port, recognizing that wired headphones are way more durable in a classroom setting- Decent price and display, though I wonder about performance w/ TahoeI don't currently have a modern macOS machine, so a basic machine like this could be useful to have around even though I daily drive Linux now. Maybe it'll get Asahi support!
  • eptcyka
    Yeah, just rub in the fact that an A series chip is capable of running a real OS.
  • tomduncalf
    This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty
  • giancarlostoro
    On the one hand I feel like 8GB is low these days, but my iPhone 12 Pro only had 6GB of RAM, so maybe for light usage this is fine. I do feel like 16GB is the new "8GB" minimum of the 2010s. Especially on windows, 32GB feels like Windows just chews through it no problem.Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
  • trillic
    Mom is getting a new laptop
  • Mizza
    Reminds me of when every college kid had those plastic Macbooks. Quite a smart product.
  • kraig911
    I want one for all my kids. I love it. I just wish it had more ram. Personally though this direction is good. I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'
  • anon
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  • mvkel
    It's strange that the low-end machines get positioned as "every day task" devices when the biggest ram hogs by far are browsers and websites.
  • WarmWash
    An iPhone in a laptop body to be an Apple "Chromebook", I can only imagine this will be pretty popular.
  • geon
    Didn't we agree that calling your product "new" is poor planning? Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(3rd_generation)Or will they keep doing this with "neu", "nouveau", "nuevo" etc?
  • avarun
    No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.
  • anon
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  • dangoodmanUT
    Woah... a mobile processor and enormous bezels... definitely feels like Jobs would have never let this ship
  • NietTim
    There it is! Very interesting offering. It's nice that it's running full mac os with "root access" (whatever that means on macs in current year) I was afraid they'd introduce some bastardised version of iPadOS for this device. This seems like the type of device I'd want my kids to use instead of an iPad or other touch & app based device and just let them figure things out like I did.> Apple also pointed out that the MacBook Neo is Apple's lowest-carbon Mac. It features 60% recycled materials, more than any other Apple product. This includes 90% recycled aluminum and 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.This is _incredibly_ cool.
  • oidar
    I'm sure these will sell very well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the M1. I'm sure Asahi linux folks are really excited about an extra chip set to support.
  • podgietaru
    I just want a colourful fun pro laptop :(
  • literoldolphin
    Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
  • madsohm
    Ugh. Why is is so much more expensive in Denmark? Here it's DKK5499 for the 256 GB version. That's USD857.
  • functionmouse
    cute netbook, I appreciate the no notch designToo bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.
  • spockz
    So the biggest difference I see with the new Air is that you get sRGB only in the display, with less brightness. Also it is has 8GiB of RAM, which shouldn’t be an issue for the intended use.Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
  • syntaxing
    Interesting how it runs on the A18. I wonder if this means they will try to unify macOS and iOS within this decade.
  • jitl
    I guess it’s to be expected, but i’m sad there’s no 16gb RAM upgrade option. $699 for a brand new Mac is nice and 8gb will work for the netbook/student audience but i’d personally want a teensy bit more.
  • mmastrac
    This could be useful as a remote-access device for something that has a decent amount of RAM, I suppose, but how can anyone do anything outside of light-duty work with 8GB? At some point a Pi + battery/screen case is legitimately better.
  • janitor77swe
    I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
  • Raed667
    8GB of ram places it in competition with cheap chromebooks but nothing more
  • TruffleLabs
  • andy_ppp
    I imagine this will be popular in other countries too. Such an incredible product for the price. Does anyone have benchmarks comparing the A18 to an M1 say?
  • pjmlp
    For 800 euros, with 8 GB RAM, and a mobile GPU?!? No thanks.
  • vegabook
    There’s now a gaping 500 dollar hole in the lineup between this and the macbook air.
  • pu_pe
    The specs are similar to what Google Pixelbooks had in 2017, except for the CPU.
  • hilti
    This is a very smart move and I love it! Absolutely the best device I can get for my parents.
  • aosaigh
    Anyone else find the naming odd? What’s the relevance of “Neo”?It feels like one of the only Apple products where the name is completely divorced from its intended usage (or defining feature)- Phone- Watch- Pro- Studio- Mini- Vision- Air- Neo???
  • readitalready
    What's that slot on the side? Antenna?
  • retired
    I was hoping for a sub 1kg laptop for travel. Might go for an iPad Air plus keyboard now.
  • faust201
    Nail in the coffin for ChromeOS (or aluminiumOS) if they 8GB RAM variants are sold > $500.
  • ValentineC
    Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
  • wongogue
    Neo will at least help in ensuring that macOS doesn’t become too heavy for a few years.
  • maxpert
    Can't seem to find what is the processor on this thing?
  • dfalbel
    Is A18 fully compatible with M series chips apps?
  • anon
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  • jgbuddy
    Interested to see how 8gb of ram holds up here.
  • esher
    I see a lot of young people on that page.
  • badgersnake
    So the new iBook. Great.
  • cj
    Is this the end of chromebooks?
  • sublinear
    I think most are going to pass on this. I'm not sure Apple has ever figured out how to sell anything to the price conscious consumer since the iPod Shuffle.As always, you can get a more performant laptop for the price. Price sensitive consumers have shown time and time again they will put up with all the little annoyances of a cheap laptop if it means more performance. I'm not saying those details Apple puts into their products aren't nice, but yeah this is barking up the wrong tree. For those people, any laptop purchase is going to be their one and only device that isn't their phone.Those who absolutely need MacOS and have this budget will just get a Mac Mini.
  • rambambram
    Does it run Linux?
  • Imustaskforhelp
    Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.
  • eastbound
    > MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.
  • moolcool
    You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They've really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.
  • lvl155
    Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.
  • gaigalas
    This thing is going to sell a lot.8GB memory is pathetic. But that doesn't matter for most users yet.In fact, it may not matter at all. If the hardware limitations push us to have several machines, a well-built entry laptop becomes a terminal (you won't run things in it, you'll connect to things). For that, 8GB might be enough.
  • throwaway613746
    [dead]
  • alexwrboulter
    Because of course there's no magsafe.