[billyhoffman]

For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors.

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!

[philistine]

You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.

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!

[intrasight]

Except sadly it is not using M.

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.

[philistine]

The M-series is just marketing. They're just the A-series with more cores and IO. Apple has one family of CPUs, but they give them different names.

[esskay]

They dont need to use an M series. The chip they are using isn't far off (spec wise) a base M4. It's single threaded performance is damn good.

[intrasight]

I didn't realize that. I thought it was a different architecture - or different enough that the two couldn't run the same binaries. Are they indeed binary compatible?

[sjs382]

You can run iOS apps on an Apple Silicon Mac if the developer doesn't explicitly prevent you.

[menno-sh]

Additionally Apple have been sticking M-series chips in iPads for a while now. They appear to be pretty much interchangeable.

[esskay]

Yeah theres very little difference at this point between the A and M lines, think of the M as just being the more powerful line, but that doesnt make the A line weak, not by any stretch. Both are completely binary compatible at this point.

The A18 Pro single core performance is on-par with the M4 (a smidge lower but barely anything in it), and outperforms the M3.

[jamiek88]

Yes! It’s simply a naming convention.

[trillic]

A18 Pro Geekbench on an iPhone: Single: 3539 Multi-core: 8772 Macbook Air M1 Geekbench: Single: 2347 Multi-core: 8342

[bell-cot]

's/in 1994/in 1984/', perhaps?

[intrasight]

Yes. Thanks.

[ciupicri]

So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

[runako]

> Can it run multiple programs at the same time?

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.

[alpaca128]

I have an M1 with 8GB and M2 with 16GB, and they are not comparable. I once ran the M2 smoothly for over 250 days without reboot with a bunch of applications open the whole time (at some point it just force-rebooted, fair enough). On the other hand I regretted the 8GB on my M1 Mini every time I used it.

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.

[ewoodrich]

I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said:

  Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising?

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.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB

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.

[ewoodrich]

Thanks, I can see the point being that a smaller subset of that would work on 8 GB, but I don't think you can really just divide by half? (Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS/unified GPU needs compared to the 16 GB model).

e.g. using hypothetical numbers: if base MacOS/typical GPU usage requires 4 GB, then the 8GB model would have 4GB available for running apps (but multiplied by memory compression/swap to fast SSD). Whereas the 16GB would have a much more comfortable 12 GB for multi-tasking in that scenario especially with the multiplier effect of compression/fast swap on top.

So it still feels like a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as far as what an 8 GB model could handle in real usage. I have a friend who does light dev work on an M1 Macbook Air so I don't think an average user would have issues on the Neo day to day, but using the 16 GB as a yardstick doesn't seem that useful.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS

Sure, but, by the numbers I'm seeing, their much heavier load than mine would be waaaay into swap territory for them and is still doing just fine. That's really my point. That's why I think it's actually pretty reasonable to look at half their load and say "man, even half their load is a pretty heavy load for most people, so half their RAM will almost certainly be more than plenty for the target market".

Also, just for the info, my Activity Monitor says that the non-purgeable OS RAM (wired) usage is around 3GB on Tahoe 26.3.

[ciupicri]

Guess what? Both Windows 10+ and Linux have memory compression, too, yet 8 GB are good only for light usage unless you're willing to "destroy" the flash with intensive swapping.

[BugsJustFindMe]

I think it should be obvious that...

1) Different operating systems have different virtual memory usage patterns.

2) Different computer hardware has different performance profiles.

3) Apple is in the unique position of being able to control both.

4) People keep predicting that SSDs will die en masse from swap, and it keeps not happening.

5) Shrug emoji.

[runako]

Sorry, I should have said that running that same stack on Windows/macOS Intel with 16GB resulted in tons of sluggishness in my experience. I would consider that a 32GB workload on Intel, so I was surprised that 16GB was enough for it.

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.)

[ezfe]

They're giving an example of a very heavy workload on 16GB. It stands to easy reasoning that a casual consumer could be fine on 8GB.

[ciupicri]

> Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs

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.

[potwinkle]

macOS actually does the opposite; to avoid wearing down the drive it will hold 7-10gb of your most commonly used files in memory and release them when the memory gets allocated for something else. In theory you could get away with editing gigabytes of files and using dozens of apps without ever wearing down your drive at all.

[ciupicri]

> it will hold 7-10gb of your most commonly used files in memory

I would love to see how it does this on a system with only 8 GBs of RAM like this Neo :-)

Anyway Linux can also cache files in memory for some time if you tune it a bit.

[perardi]

Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while.

It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.

[happyopossum]

Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets.

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...

[alpaca128]

As someone who used an M1 with 8GB and has hundreds of browser tabs I can assure you it is not enough and you'll have to restart the browser at least a few times per week to not make the whole system lag.

16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.

[falkensmaize]

Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.

[kube-system]

This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.

[dchest]

Yes, it can -- to all questions.

[philistine]

Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.

[quesera]

This is wrong.

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.

[darkstar999]

How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.

[kdheiwns]

There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy.

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.

[ewoodrich]

It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.

[quesera]

No need to be obnoxious.

I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand.

I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive.

FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.

[jombib]

How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand

[quesera]

I use tabs as temporary bookmarks. It's still a lot, sure, but it comes at no cost.

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.

[alpaca128]

I am "only" ranging around 800-2000 tabs and 95% of them are practically bookmarks that aren't hidden in some menu but visible in the same visual context as everything else, which feels more natural to me. They're not loaded in RAM anyway.

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.