The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026.
The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have.
It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps")
People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!
This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.
I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.
Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:
- PostgreSQL (server)
- TablePlus (db client)
- Docker
- Slack
- Chrome
- Safari
- Zed
- Claude native
- ChatGPT native
- Zoom
- Codex
- Numbers
- Calendar
- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)
With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).
I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
8GB is perfectly fine for light use, but I'd argue if that's enough then you don't need the power of an M1+ processor either. So 8GB in the Neo and 16GB by default in everything else sounds more sensible than what M1 started with.
Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
To the major point of can it (Neo 8GB) run multiple programs at the same time, my experience would say it would have no issues doing so given what one can do in 16GB on lesser Mac hardware. (Maybe I am wrong and MacOS takes all 8GB for itself, but that seems far-fetched.)
So either it has magic fairy dust, or more likely it swaps a lot, but thankfully today's flash is faster than yesterday's hard disk; though this intense usage will shorten its life. By the way I wonder if Apple will use cheap QLC for this.
It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.
My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.
Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.
Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up.
It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count.
Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost.
Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.
The brain is amazing at remembering the rough location where I have tabs of a specific site/topic, so I just switch to the right window and scroll for a few seconds. Only works with a vertical tab bar though. It's not the most optimal solution but the best that actually exists and works smoothly.