* 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...
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).
Actually figuring out free RAM is kind of confusing.
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.
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?
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?
Most cool. Is it an M1?
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
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.
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.
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 |
| device | cpu | single core | multi core |
|:----------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) | Apple M1 Pro @ 3.2 GHz (10 cores) | 2385 | 12345 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |
My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.
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?
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.
I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.
Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
I 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?
Problem exists between user and hardware. Applied the Firefox salt over the wound doesn't help either. It's a discussion about Macs btw.
if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup
What, in fact, is it doing? I'm of the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.
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.
You can also develop locally which is significant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I wonder if they plan far enough out that this was part of the A18 Pro
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.
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.
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.
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
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...
I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.
When there is a better way, why would you spend money and effort supporting the old outdated way?
I wonder if Apple should introduce a cheaper 24" 4K monitor to pair it with.
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.
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)
* Only one external display
* No haptic trackpad
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.
*edit
https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...
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.
Well, I see this as a very positive thing.
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...
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.
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.
Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well
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.
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.
This is a positive though.
> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
The light has stopped shining at Apple for a bit now
This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=
No camera notch
Praise the...market?!
When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?
Great for a student or casual user though for sure.
Why? Did they stock-piled USB 2.0 controllers and now need to get it off their inventory or something?
On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?
That’s been the case for 5+ years :)
* $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education)
* $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education)
I can't quite figure out why the Mini became a luxury item ten years ago, leaving the kid's cheap tablet to Android.
* Just because it's smaller doesn't magically reduce the price by 30% (currently iPad is $350).
That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.
A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.
This is one of the things I never really expected Apple to do, since they've somehow managed to avoid the confusing black/blue colouring of USB-A ports, giving every laptop they've ever produced since 2012 USB 3.0 ports.
Seems like they're buying into hardware enshittification too (macOS and iOS 26 being software monstrosities with liquid glAss).
— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.
— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?
for pretty much half the price, though.
i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ 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
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18
So this is basically running on a phone CPU
I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.
But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.
The 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.
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!
The reputation problem was kind of baked in. Vista launched the same year netbooks did, and even though Vista was a disaster, "runs the latest Windows" is the smell test normal people use for whether something is a real computer.
Netbooks didn't pass.
The storage situation made Windows users miserable anyway. The SSD models had 4-8GiB of flash, and XP alone ate well over half before you'd done anything. So people bought the HDD variant instead, more space, sure, but spinning at 4,200rpm, which wasn't even the slow-but-acceptable 5,400 of a normal laptop drive. Then pile the standard bloatware on top of that.
Bear in mind, people chose the HDD version because it ran Vista: the thing that made it a "real" computer. The SSD variant, the one that actually worked, got ignored for exactly that reason.
Run Linux on the SSD variants though, and the thing was actually great.
> I 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.
(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.)
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.