[Reason077]

Apple isn’t this bad, of course, but they’re slowly heading in that direction.

The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.

Now there’s the MacBook Neo and a rumoured new MacBook Ultra in the pipeline. The easy days of “pick standard or pro, select a display size, select RAM & storage” are starting to fade.

[SllX]

The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder. Start from the bottom and climb up picking up features along the way until you reach the point where you’ve got what you want or you’re not willing to spend more money.

The Neo is either easy to recommend or rather easy to not recommend. It has a fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web. Others… disagree. Either way, it might entice some schools and school districts assuming they can volume discounts where 8GB is probably enough and it fills the spot in the Walmart part of the sales channel previously occupied by an 8GB RAM M1 MacBook Air Apple hadn’t sold itself in years.

[dhosek]

From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.

[SllX]

I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. It’s a great computer, but even on days where I’m doing fuck all but using the web I can pressure that memory easily. I also have a tendency to never reboot until that becomes the fastest way to fix whatever performance bottlenecks I’m running into.

I’m not saying you can’t get away with 8GB of RAM. You can, but I won’t recommend a Mac with only 8GB of RAM to anybody for a few reasons: 1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time. 2) they’ll spend $600 and even if RAM isn’t as much of a bottleneck for them today, with modern web developers and modern web browsers, it will be much sooner rather than later. And everything is a web app now.

For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way nor should it last less than 7 years and still be a kickass experience. Ideally it should last longer. The Neo is great for what it is, but the RAM is the deal killer for me.

[heironimus]

If you had 32G RAM it would use that too. It uses all it can. 8GB is fine. And will be for years.

[LoganDark]

macOS will pop up a window that says the system has run out of application memory, asking you to quit applications. I have a friend with, I believe a base M3 Air, who runs into this constantly with nothing but Firefox open.

(Been trying to get them to switch to Safari, but they prefer the Firefox name. I don't think there's anything wrong with Firefox other than it being less native.)

[qingcharles]

Does Safari use less RAM because it shares some parts with the rest of the OS? (e.g. in the same way Edge probably uses a bit less because half of its components are already idling on the OS)

[tpowell]

I have an M2 Air 24GB/1TB that has been such a beast that I haven't touched my 16" Pro in months. I have four browsers running, with a ton of tabs in Brave (daily driver) and I'm sitting at 21/24GB utilization with all sorts of apps running (granted, Docker is not at the moment, but it still doesn't make it sweat). I had ~8 pro laptops in a row going back to the late 2000s, but Apple Silicon has changed how I work. A future 14" OLED that was similarly light might turn my head, but if I had to replace it today I'd just buy another M5 Air with at least this much RAM. [FYI I never installed Chrome after M1 came out. Brave has been rock-solid for over a half-decade now.]

[SllX]

24GB is definitely solid. 16GB is like my minimum recommended for any kind of Mac, but if you can go for more you should go for more. I think 24GB should last a good long while though.

[rbanffy]

16GB, depending on your use, can be constraining and, sometimes, you need to get creative with complex processes. My colleagues complain about developing with several containers running peripheral services. In similar situations we asked the services teams to provide mocks that answered the same APIs without needing a large memory footprint.

[jodrellblank]

> “1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time”

> “For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way”

In the article, Gruber normally uses a 64GB Mac, expected the 8GB RAM to be a problem and was surprised to find that it wasn’t, and judged the Neo as not being a bad experience in any way.

[SllX]

Gruber has also had it for a week at most by the time he published his review. It’s enough time to run some tests, not enough time to properly review what it will be like to actually live with it. I like the guy, but I also understand the limitations of how he reviews products.

8GB can be limiting on an iPad Pro, which runs a generally more memory efficient branch of Apple’s XNU-based system software and it’s not difficult to get it into a state where it is constantly paging out an app you had in front of you two minute ago if anything you’re doing involves the web at all. A Mac will just swap at that point, but swapping is also slow.

[rbanffy]

You could get away with 8GB 5 years ago and you still can do it now, but Macs are expected to last longer than that, and starting now with 8GB might become limiting 5 years from now. Here we retire them at about 10 years, or when the last OS they can run is EOL’ed.

[rickdeckard]

Not to be devils's advocate here, but I'd suspect Apple is aiming for a smaller retirement window for this kind of product.

It's basically a Laptop engineered in the iPhone/iPad space of the company, it's only natural for Apple to target a shorter lifecycle.

8GB RAM is maybe the best way to achieve that, many of the MacBook Neo buyers of today will be very compelled to upgrade to a newer (or higher-tier) model in ~3 years from now...

If the Neo would have 16GB of RAM today, it would be harder to justify an upgrade in 3 years from now, when the common entry-tier for laptops is likely still at 16GB...

[jrockway]

Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.

It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.

[jonhohle]

The M1 Air would have blown people’s minds in 2000. 128MB of RAM was luxurious at the time for a laptop. In 2003 I borrowed and bought several sticks for a presentation (senior thesis on 3D presentation software), and got to 1GB in my desktop and felt like I’d broken some law of physics.

Shortly after I had a TiBook (PowerBook G4) that was _only_ 1-inch thick! Compared to 1.75” Dells my coworkers had, it seemed like the future. DVD drive, modem, Ethernet, full sized DVI port, FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, optical audio in and out, gigantic display with a bezel that was unrivaled for years, even among Macs. What a beast!

(I know you meant 2020, but it’s fun to think about the air in 2000).

[duskwuff]

In the year 2000, a M1 MacBook Air would have been the world's fastest supercomputer (or second fastest if you had the base model with the 7-core GPU).

https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2000/06/

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Sp...

[tgma]

Impressive, of course; but not quite that impressive.

Only true if all you're running is matmul (supercomputer has general purpose CPUs so more flexible than M1 GPU) - also those flops are probably FP64 in supercomputer ratings and FP32 in M1.

As a smart man I knew used to say, supercomputers are about I/O not raw compute. Those have terabytes of RAM not 8GB.

[asimovDev]

as someone who wasn't around for PowerPC mac times (I was alive but I didn't have internet and only knew apple for iPod and Apple II), did non artist people use FireWire for anything other than synchronizing their first generation iPods? Was it common to have a firewire external drive and were there any other devices that aren't cameras, film scanners or audio interfaces that utilized firewire?

[chocochunks]

There were FireWire HDDs too. Non-artist people also used FireWire for their DV camcorders for home videos. It wasn't really common because most PCs didn't have Firewire.

It was also used by the PS2 for local multiplayer between multiple consoles. Although Sony eventually removed that port.

[SanjayMehta]

I have a 2008 iMac with (I think) 16Gb of RAM which is used for just Firefox. I've been meaning to upgrade it to Linux but that generation didn't boot from USB, need to burn a CD.

All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.

I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.

[SanjayMehta]

You mean 2020, not 2000

[nessus42]

I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.

OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)

[JohnBooty]

    OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. 
    (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)

32GB is starting to feel like a minimum for a common workflow: Dockerized development + git worktree + Claude Code or equivalent for working on multiple branches at once.

Definitely brings our engineers' 24GB MBPs to their knees primarily b/c of the RAM chewed up by those multiple Docker instances.

Will 32GB also start looking paltry soon? It's hard to say. I want to say the realistic upper limit is 3-4 simultaneous worktrees for a given developer (at this point the developer becomes the bottleneck again?) but it's a wild guess that may be hilariously low.

[st3fan]

Weird .. I easily run 40 docker containers on an 8GB MacBook just fine!

(Just posting this to show that you have to be very specific when talking about these kind of things. Yeah maybe you need 32GB because you run some large deployment 3 times. Others mayb be totally fine with less if they just develop a basic Python web app. Who knows. The devil is in the details. Omitting them makes the discussion ambiguous and just difficult.)

[zf00002]

I have M2 Air with 8 and don't have problem either. Even runs WoW ok.

[bandrami]

I've got an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and it runs Ableton and Serato so well I don't actually need a Pro anymore, so Mac may have shot themselves in the foot there.

[mschuster91]

> I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need

Mac devices have been able to get away with less RAM (and higher priced upgrades) for well over a decade. During the Intel era, they were the first ones to adopt SSDs as the default option while everyone else still installed spinning rust. That alone provides for way faster swap storage to conceal a relative "lack" of RAM.

And when they went for their own fully integrated stacks of soldered RAM and SSD? Then everything went off the rails - close proximity and no sockets means very low latency for both RAM and persistent storage on one side and on the other side it also allows for much higher bandwidth because of much cleaner signals - remember, even at "measly" hundreds of megahertz you're already in the territory requiring precise PCB design.

On top of that, macOS's scheduler seems to be much, much more efficient and outright better in constrained RAM (and CPU) settings to provide the feeling of "the system is still responding" than either Windows or Linux. The only setting where macOS goes into molasses is when you not just run out of RAM but of free disk space as well.

[seunosewa]

Large Java apps like Android Studio are not good at managing 8gb of RAM. Emulators are terrible as well. They don't play well with the swap feature.

[thinkindie]

I believe the Neo doesn't necessarily target Android Studio users as their primary segment.

[hayleox]

If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.

[kristianp]

Don't students learn java any more?

[pasc1878]

Yes but only comp sci ones do - and if you are doing that then you need more than a base computer.

Students in non STEM areas will not usually need more than writing and reading tools.

[bzzzt]

Depends on the course I think. But 8Gb is more than enough to run a Java 'Hello World' GUI app or even something heavier. Students don't - as a rule - get to deal with millions of lines codebases.

[usefulcat]

I don't doubt that 8GB is enough for most uses today. But is it closer to "more than enough" or "just barely enough"? Seems unlikely to be the former at a price point this low.

Five years from now, I have no doubt that the processor will still be fine for most uses, but I doubt that 8GB will be. Especially given that some of the most common memory hogs aren't under Apple's control (cough Chrome cough).

[heironimus]

You don’t buy a $600 laptop to be useful in 5 years. And I’ll bet it will be more useful in 5 years than any 2031 $600 PC laptop.

[SllX]

A $600 laptop bought new should absolutely still be useful in 5 years. It should be useful longer than 5 years. That people’s standards are so low is a condemnation of the modern computer market.

[usefulcat]

I would, and have. I disagree that I shouldn't expect a new laptop to still be useful (not perfect, not great, just useful) after only five years.

If it's not even useful after such a short time, then I question whether it was really fit for the intended purpose even when it was new.

[Reason077]

> "From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong"

Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow.

One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer)

Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!

[soulofmischief]

My M2 has an IDE and a couple active Firefox tabs open and I'm sitting at 30GB RAM usage, with about 5GB more on swap. It's a 32GB machine and I'm constantly opening Activity Monitor to kill Firefox tabs whose memory usage just seems to grow unbounded over time.

Software shouldn't be written this way. I shouldn't have to disable mds-store because it likes to take up 2-3 cores at full throttle when I'm on 10% remaining battery. But it is, and 32GB isn't enough for me to even have a basic computing experience anymore, it seems.

[runako]

> fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web.

The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.

Many of the apps non-devs use will likely be universal binaries, or adapted from iOS versions. Chrome, Safari, Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Zoom, Claude, Contacts, Notes, Maps, Music, Pages, Numbers, etc. These are apps that run concurrently with no issues on the iPhone Pro 16. I'm not sure why people expect those same apps would cause issues on materially the same hardware because its package includes a hardware keyboard.

(The most RAM you could purchase in an iPhone until late 2024 was 6GB. iPhone 11 had 4 GB of RAM. I have not at any point since approximately iPhone 6 heard anyone complain about the speed of an iPhone Pro for "normal" consumer/not professional media stuff. iPhone 6s was released in late 2015 and had 2GB of RAM.)

Yes, MacOS is a different OS than iOS. But the very same company who built the Neo also make MacOS. They are known to adapt the OS to the hardware they are shipping. I'm willing to bet the experience for the non-dev is similar to the experience of using an iPhone 16 Pro in 2026.

[MYEUHD]

On iOS if an app remains in the background for over ~30 seconds, it gets killed.

So, you can't really compare. On iOS you can have 3GB of RAM and it wouldn't be a bottleneck.

[runako]

> On iOS if an app remains in the background for over ~30 seconds, it gets killed.

Except 1) that's not entirely true (famously: music, Zoom) and 2) yes, cooperative state management. Users do not know or care that an app is not actually running if it appears that it is still running when they switch back to it. #2 obviously does not work for many dev use cases, but it would not impact my workflow if e.g. ChatGPT or Chrome were suspended when not in the foreground.

[SllX]

> The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.

I have 8GB of RAM in my M2 iPad Pro running iOS (yes, it’s “iOS” despite what Apple’s crack marketing team might call it), and I’ve certainly started to complain. Doing anything with the web, and like one or two other apps is enough to have apps I’m switching between page out like every two or three minutes.

[seec]

Yes, I think they changed something in the new iOS; they are trying to get people to swap old devices.

I had issues with swapping before, but with the latest iOS, it has become very annoying on an old iPhone with a small amount of RAM (3GB, I think).

Apple fanboys laugh at Android users for many things, but they can use their devices longer even though they might not have the fastest CPU around (8GB+ has been normalized forever in Android world).

[crooked-v]

At this point the RAM only matters if you've got something that actually needs all that RAM continuously, likes games, virtual machines, or heavyweight user workflows like 4K video editing. For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.

[SllX]

> For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.

You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.

[JohnBooty]

Right, I mean even a fast SSD has an order of magnitude less throughput, and 2-3 orders of magnitude higher latency from RAM. No dispute there. If you are doing random access across 16GB of data and your machine only has 8GB of physical RAM, you're in the pain zone.

OTOH, if you are using multiple RAM-heavy apps that aren't actively hammering that RAM (e.g. an instance of Photoshop that is using 10GB but is just idling or whatever) then MacOS and their stupid fast SSDs handle that pretty seamlessly.

Most use cases are probably somewhere in the middle.

[SllX]

Browser use on the modern web is enough to put you in swap territory early and often on 8GB of RAM. My much more RAM efficient M2 iPad Pro with the non-desktop OS and 8GB of RAM frequently has to page out apps I had open two minutes ago if I’m doing anything with the web and like one or two other applications. This things eventual replacement in like 4 or 5 years is going to need twice or thrice the RAM for me to consider it an upgrade.

[alwillis]

> Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD

People always forget that Apple does realtime compression on data that's in RAM allowing more things to fit in RAM; it also effectively increases the bandwidth of the SSD.

[JohnBooty]

Windows 10+ and Linux also have memory compression, though I don't know how the implementations compare.

Although, I guess Windows 3.1 and 95 users enjoyed it first thanks to this extremely high quality third-party implementation!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM

[alwillis]

> Windows 10+ and Linux also have memory compression, though I don't know how the implementations compare.

A combination of Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) and hardware-accelerated instructions (SIMD/NEON) makes RAM compression on Macs very efficient. Because the storage controller is integrated into the SoC, the bandwidth is high enough that the transition between "Compressed RAM" and "Swap" is very smooth.

And because the CPU and GPU share the same memory, there are no wasted cycles moving data between VRAM and System RAM.

Apple uses WKDM (Wilson-Kaplan Direct Mapping), a specialized, high-speed compression algorithm designed specifically for in-memory data. WKDM is "architecturally aware"—it was built to compress the specific types of data structures found in a computer's RAM, such as pointers, integers, and memory addresses. WKDM treats RAM like a collection of 64-bit integers and pointers; and it's designed to fit entirely in L1/L2 cache [1]. This shipped in MacOS 10.9 Mavericks in 2013.

Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient. The vast majority of Windows and Linux machines don't have unified memory or storage controllers connected to their processors.

Because of this, Apple can often compress a page of memory using fewer CPU cycles than Windows or Linux, which is why M-series Macs can be so aggressive with compression without you ever noticing a "hitch" in the UI.

The fallback algorithm is their LZFSE algorithm, which is like "Zlib-level compression with 2x-3x the speed and efficiency". LZFSE achieves a nearly identical compression ratio but uses Finite State Entropy (FSE) coding, which allows it to decompress data significantly faster while using much less battery power.

LZFSE is optimized for the ARM NEON instruction set to minimize "wake time" for the CPU, making it arguably the more "green" choice for mobile devices [2].

It's safe to say that neither Windows nor Linux has the combination of hardware and software optimizations that Apple has when it comes to RAM compression.

[1]: Compressed Memory compresses the least recently used data residing in memory using the WKDM algorithm, which not only frees up memory but also reduces the amount of swapping going in the background. Not only is this faster than swapping to disk (even to SSDs), but Apple also claims it saves power -- essentially, that compressing data in memory uses less power than writing data to disk without compressing it. -- https://www.osnews.com/story/27121/os-x-109-mavericks/#:~:te...

[2]: https://lyncd.com/2015/09/lossless-compression-innovation/

[SllX]

Nobody forgot anything, and I certainly didn’t. You can tell when you hit swap, and it doesn’t matter what Mac OS X is designed to do, when you hit swap, you hit swap. When you’re hitting swap a lot, you’re hitting swap a lot.

[alwillis]

> You can tell when you hit swap, and it doesn’t matter what Mac OS X is designed to do, when you hit swap, you hit swap. When you’re hitting swap a lot, you’re hitting swap a lot.

I have a 16GB M1 Pro machine from 2021 with 200 GB/s memory bandwidth; I can't tell when it's hitting swap, even with tons of browser tabs open, 3 or 4 terminal sessions, and several apps running. I often run two browsers with dozens of tabs open and there's no noticeable lag.

YMMV.

On an my old Intel Mac, it was pretty obvious.

[st3fan]

It is an old trick https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/RAM_Doubler

[alwillis]

RAM Doubler was a third-party application in the days when a top-of-the-line Mac had 128MB of RAM, with a 40Mhz processor. The level 2 cache was 256 bytes.

That's not in the same universe as hardware compression on a 6-core, 64-bit ARM processor with cores that can run at 4GHz.

[philistine]

> The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder.

That is ultimately what keeps saving Apple from turning into Dell. They want to offer you one model per price point. You'd be hard-pressed to find two iPads, Macs, iPhones with the exact same price. There's always a price difference with Apple, which helps immensely.

[jll29]

The original article doesn't dwell too much on the RAM limitation, but I agee with you that 8 GB is too little for the near future or even today.

I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026.

Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning some features. Currently, the OS uses much of the available RAM for caching (I've seen "40%" of total OS RAM usage) to make the system faster, whereas 8 GB RAM permits only essential caching.

(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)

[carlosjobim]

That's nothing compared to my car! It fires on all cylinders, instead of saving 3 out of 4 cylinders for a day when I will really need the power.

The reality is that nobody outside of HN cares about 8GB vs 16GB of RAM. You can do anything you want or need to do with an 8GB Macbook, including running a million dollar business, or working with anything creative on the highest level. If you are actually doing something which requires 16GB of RAM on a Mac, then you are doing state of the art tech stuff and should be rolling in money already and have no problem spending thousands and thousands on your computer.

[labcomputer]

You can't load a 8.001GB dataset in R on an 8GB macBook!

[dwighttk]

Or using chrome to browse the internet

[jurgenburgen]

Laptops are a bit of a niche client for browsing the internet.

[dwighttk]

Have to intentionally install chrome to use it on this computer

[Longlius]

>(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)

Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.

[SllX]

> Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.

I think it’s as simple as: 8GB is what the iPhones using the A18 Pro had. It’s this thing Apple likes to do where to keep costs down, they use some iPhone part or other SoC/SiP they have laying around as close to its standard configuration as possible with minimal changes.

Their new Studio Displays for example have an A19 Pro and 128GB of NAND. For basically just the firmware. Why? Because that’s the least amount of storage Apple ships with an A19 Pro iPhone, because like the previous Studio Display from 2022 which had an A13 Bionic in there, they probably just shoved an iPhone board in there to handle the logic and I/O.

So in theory, if they update the MacBook Neo next year to an A19 Pro, it should have 12GB of RAM.

[throwaway85825]

8GB would be fine if not for a decade of terrible development practices creating bloated software.

[kevhito]

Like freeways, it's not clear that increasing the baseline ram for basic laptops is an effective way to mitigate software bloat. Rather it likely creates bloat.

[throwaway85825]

Induced demand.

[LoganDark]

I wish they would release a Pro version of the iPad Mini. Maybe the iPhone foldable will somewhat be this?

[fl0ki]

I think the big difference is that if you just want to optimize for some objective, it's usually very clear how to do that from Apple's options, so there's not much research to be done. It can still be challenging to choose what's the best value when it's your own money, but at least you know what you're getting, and the quality hasn't been a concern for years.

[enraged_camel]

>> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.

One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence.

Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.

[labcomputer]

With respect, I think you're misremembering the product lineup in the 1994/5/6 era.

Back then, Apple had 16 to 32 distinct models[1] of just desktop computer (just the desktops!) with little to distinguish them. In many cases, the exact same internal hardware was shipped in two different boxes as two models aimed at two different customers (LC/Performa/Centris/Quadra/Workgroup Server). For example, the "LC 550" and "Performa 550" were the exact same computer[2] with two different names on the front, meant to be sold to the educational and home markets.

That's extremely confusing for the consumer. You had the same internal hardware being sold for two different price points, and computers with significantly different performance sold at the same price point. You don't want your customer to get analysis paralysis and give up before they purchase.

The point of Jobs's simplification is that there is one option for you to pick at a given price point in a given category of tablet/laptop/desktop, and that pricing and capability are clearly aligned. I don't see where Apple has gotten away from that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mac_models

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series

[0x457]

I think It makes sense for iPad line up to be this way. Very clear feature segmentation that make sense. Most is directly result of underlying hardware. For consumer it's also very easy:

- decide on size

- go from your budget

- if still too many SKUs go by features

What features? Thunderbolt, Screen, Apple Pencil, Face ID

Alternatively if you know what features you want, start with that.

If you're struggling to choose which iPad you need then you might want an iPad for the sake of having an iPad (in which case get Air).

[wlesieutre]

Yeah, I don't think this lineup is particular crazy:

- 8.3", one tier (mini)

- 11", three tiers (iPad, Air, Pro)

- 13", two tiers (Air, Pro)

Could you spend the same amount of money on a regular 11" iPad with a lot of storage, or an iPad Air with less storage? Sure.

Some people want lots of storage. Other people don't care but want a wide gamut screen, faster processor, and better pen capabilities.

It's nothing like trying to pick a laptop from Dell where you have to spend hours digging around to even figure out what your options are. If someone asked me which iPad to buy we could figure it out in under 5 minutes.

[jonplackett]

Also it’s just one adjective per device. Compare that to the dell pro max premium

[wlesieutre]

Hilariously when I looked that one up the Dell store page says

  Dell Pro Max 16 Premium Laptop
  Model: MA14250

I think they have the model number wrong and corresponds to a 14” version, because further down the “order code” is bts101_ma16250_usx

Even Dell can’t keep their computers straight.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/dell-pro-max-16...

Edit: confirmed, here is a different laptop listed with the same model number https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/dell-pro-max-14...

[aylmao]

IMO it's telling that the lineup here is bucketized by screen size and not model. Screen size, processor performance, storage, sensors, etc are ambiguous concepts that don't mean much in their own merit. People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"; people think in terms of use cases and cost.

For laptops the buckets are portability and performance. These two will always be at odds, and people will gladly prioritize one over the other; these are the ingredients you need for creating a model lineup. Each model prioritizes something different:

- Affordability, MacBook Neo

- Portability, MacBook Air

- Performance, MacBook Pro

There's people who will be carry this machine everywhere and will gladly sacrifice performance for portability. There's people who will gladly use a laptop as essentially a desktop they can occasionally move if it means maximum power. You even see this in the wider market; there's a clear category of laptops praised by their portability (ultrabooks), and another group praised by their power (gaming laptops).

I don't think there's an equivalent for tablets, since people don't really seem to need them for that much (lol). Apple has been focusing a lot on portability, but the market of people who carry their tablet everywhere isn't really that big, most people use them at home [1]. Digital nomads, students, PMs hopping around meetings: they're on laptops. Same with performance; people who need performance are on laptops.

The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen. A single dimension for improvement doesn't give you the ingredients for creating a model lineup, it gives you the ingredients for a price ladder where more money just gets you a bigger, better screen.

I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone. In that case, I think like the iPhone, the iPad could do with less overlap:

- 8.3", $ (iPad mini, affordable)

- 11", $$ (iPad, standard)

- 13", $$$ (iPad Pro, better in pretty much every way)

And keep the iPad Air in the same space as the iPhone Air, a novelty luxurious product that isn't the fastest nor the most affordable, but showcases premium hardware and what the future could look like.

I think Apple doesn't do this because it hopes to discover what people want through the grid of different screen size, thinness, performance, etc permutations that currently exist, but oh well.

[1]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[wlesieutre]

> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"

Disagree, at least coming from a current iPad owner. I’m on an 8 year old 12.9” iPad Pro and if I bought a new iPad today it would be 11” because that’s the size I’d rather have at this point.

So hypothetically it’s between the Regular, Air, and Pro, and I would get the Air because I want the better screen and stylus compatibility but wouldn’t spend $1000 for it.

[0x457]

> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"

I have 12.9" iPad Pro, my priority was thunderbolt and screen size, but mainly screen size (battery life is given on Apple devices).

I also have iPad Mini where my priority was...bigger than the biggest iPhone, smaller than regular iPad.

> The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen.

It's like all-season tires, does not exceed in any particular field. I use my iPad for casual CAD with 3d printing in mind, it works great. I also use it as a bedroom screen on stand by the bed. Can two separate devices do a better job? Yes, but I don't need

> For laptops the buckets are portability and performance.

iPads not bucketed like this because you're not buying iPad for performance.

> I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone

Sure they can. This would lead to less overall sales. Right now 11" buyer have whole 3 feature set selections to choose from. I'd get rid of Pro, but not everyone needs 11" and Air features.

[asymco]

> 8.3", $ (iPad mini, affordable) > 11", $$ (iPad, standard)

iPad mini ($499) is more expensive than base iPad ($349) [1][2]

[1] iPad mini → https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-ipad/ipad-mini [2] iPad → https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-ipad/ipad

[wlesieutre]

They're suggesting a hypothetical lineup would be cleaner if that weren't the case.

I don't disagree, but Apple seems to treat the Mini as an afterthought side project that gets updated every 3 years or so, compared to the mainline iPad being updated yearly from 2017 to 2022. Then it had a gap until 2025, apparently taking a while to get the slim bezel redesign down to the affordable model.

If the mini were the default affordable entry point they'd need to keep it up to date but they've decided not enough people want a mini for it to be worth that effort.

[etchalon]

I'd reference all the iPod models Steve oversaw the introduction of (iPod, iPod Nano, iPod shuffle, iPod Mini, iPod Classic, iPod Touch)

[asymco]

With iPod line Apple was experimenting with completely new form factor, not so much with iPad or MacBook.

[etchalon]

The Neo is a different form factor than the Air is a different form factor from the 14 inch is a different form factor than the 16.

"No, it's not! It's a laptop!"

And most iPods were iPods.

The iPod touch was just an iPhone, and the shuffle lacked a screen.

[thewebguyd]

The goal is different. Jobs wanted to make the product spread simple to understand.

Apple's current method is a pricing ladder, make it simple to spend $200+ more than you planned.

MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better. Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."

Every product lineup is designed that way. It gets you thinking "eh, what's an extra $200" and slowly moves you up until you land at the highest tier.

Now that everything is using the same silicon, it costs Apple very little to maintain all these variants (that are mostly binning), so there's little reason not to.

[tpmoney]

I think you are completely misremembering what the Apple product lineup looked like even with the Steve Jobs cleanup. At its absolute simplest, it contained the iMac, iBook, PowerMac and PowerBook lines. Within each line was a "Good", "Better" and "Best" pre-configured model each being a few hundred different from the other and each of those models was further configurable to add additional storage / memory etc.

That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002 when the 14 inch iBooks, the 17 inch iMacs and the eMacs were introduced, followed by the 12 and 17 inch powerbooks in 2003. By 2005 they had also introduced the Mac Mini. And again most of these had a "good", "better", "best" variant, though in some cases (like the first 17 inch iMacs, the "best" tier was also the next model variant).

Apple's lineup is undeniably more complicated now than it has been in the past, but the simplification was never really about cutting model types down, so much as it was about making distinct model categories that people could easily understand why they would pick one or the other.

I think they still do a relatively good job at retaining that distinction, and I agree that the iPad lineup is probably the most muddled. Though special mention goes to the "Macbook Pro with M4 Pro" branding, which anyone should have caught and thought that maybe they needed a better moniker than "Pro" for the processor variant (and of course also, is the "Pro", the "Max" or the "Ultra" the best?)

[einr]

That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002

Don’t forget the G4 Cube (most people do ;) which was also around at this time for reasons that are mostly unclear (looks cool though)

[snuxoll]

> Now that everything is using the same silicon, it costs Apple very little to maintain all these variants (that are mostly binning), so there's little reason not to.

Don't underestimate how much of a bitch it is to maintain all the separate SKUs. This isn't the old CTO days where you had: 1 chassis, N mainboards for different CPU/GPU combinations, a bunch of SODIMM's of varying capacities, and a couple of different fixed storage drives to toss in.

When any given MBP has 2 CPU/GPU options, multiple memory options, and multiple storage options, with everything being soldered to the board? Honestly, the Neo is the one product in their portable lineup that doesn't cause a massive headache for logistics.

But...even then, Tim Cook is CEO still, and he is a supply chain guy, so you better believe this is top of his list when it comes to their product lineup. You don't increase operational complexity for no reason, because that is where the cost for every product lies for them, it's not just dealing with silicon binning.

[mschuster91]

> But...even then, Tim Cook is CEO still, and he is a supply chain guy, so you better believe this is top of his list when it comes to their product lineup. You don't increase operational complexity for no reason, because that is where the cost for every product lies for them, it's not just dealing with silicon binning.

Sure... but when looking at sales numbers, HP and Apple are tied by monthly sales volume on Amazon [1], with everyone else being widely behind them. But HP has almost 300 models, Apple much, much less - and Apple can react much, much faster because they almost directly run the production sites and mostly sell themselves, so they can produce an initial run of products and whenever a store or a region runs out of one specific variant, they just tell Foxconn to, say, instead of making a run with black casings they now make a day worth of gray casings, ship that onto a plane and that's it. HP, Dell et al? Their inventory gets distributed by an intricate web of middlemen who all need buffer.

[1] https://laptopmedia.com/highlights/august-2025-best-selling-...

[bombcar]

Those kind of pricing ladders are "fine" because at no point do you have to really make a decision. The problem is when it splits and you have a tree where what branch you go down precludes you from options on the other branch you might want.

[lotsofpulp]

> MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better.

Yes

>Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."

Disagree. The Air offers additional utility and longevity for the price, the Pro offers nothing that 90% of people will ever perceive.

I know a ton of people for whom the $500 would be nothing, but still get an Air rather than a Pro. Obviously, that’s not great data, but I feel like the jump from Air to Pro just doesn’t happen or won’t happen compared to jumps from Neo to Air.

[NetMageSCW]

You keep saying $200 extra - I don’t think you know what that means.

[kvgr]

But for any real work, like coding/photo/video you just pick Pro with parameters you want and you are good. For office work you can choose air and for low level students or whatever you can have neo. You still basically know what you need, without needing to try really hard to understand it.

[throw0101d]

> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.

Sort of, maybe (not)?

First off there is the "mini", which is basically if you want a small screen / most portability.

After that, the two questions you need to ask are "How much horsepower and storage do you need/want?" (plain vs Air/Pro), and then "How fancy of a screen do you want/need?" (Air vs Pro):

* https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/

* https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-11-m5...

The "mini" is a bit of a 'wild card', but otherwise it's very close to the usual good/better/best trope (plain-iPad/Air/Pro).

Laptops also now fall into the trope of good/better/best with Neo/Air/Pro.

[butlike]

Do I want an iPad Air or Pro? Both seem pretty thin. Why is it called 'Air'. What am I not getting with the Air? When was the last time each product was updated, since I remember a time when different models were updated at different times (and I never updated my internal barometer if this changed)?

Further, I see older versions of the iPhone on display at the apple store. Does this mean I'm potentially browsing an older version of the iPad?

To be fair, there was some overlap in the Jobs apple store days (when the Santa Rosa processor dropped on the MBP and you didn't know if you were getting the older model unless you asked), but it was never this bad. You had the iPad, then the iPad 2. iPhone 4->4S->5. I don't know how the 'Air' slots in between the regular and the Pro, and I don't know if I'm seeing an older model on display. The whole thing is very confusing.

[throw0101d]

> Do I want an iPad Air or Pro? Both seem pretty thin. What am I not getting with the Air?

Horsepower (M5 vs M4), display ("XDR brightness: 1000 nits max full screen, 1600 nits peak (HDR content only"; "ProMotion technology"), option for more storage (2TB).

Hence the two questions I put forward:

* horsepower and storage (A16/M4/M5; ≥1T)

* display

[OJFord]

> Laptops also now fall into the trope of good/better/best with Neo/Air/Pro.

...until the bestest Ultra launches, as GP pointed out?

(Also Air used to be 'the light one', not the standard/middling one on same spectrum.)

We could say a similar thing with the Dell names above, the point is that it's confusing to work out which you need/want when there's so many, not that they don't fall in some sort of order across a line from mediocre to best.

[rafaelmn]

This is basically the performance of M1 with 8GB ram (with shittier USB/connectivity). I've seen developers who used the 8GB air a few years ago on a project. It would't work for me (even the 24GB air I have is swapping), but I can see this working for students without any problems.

Buying this for a kid would be a no-brainer for me - especially if it was on a discount (and it's not uncommon for Apple stuff to get 10-20% discount drops at retailers). Even the USB 3.0 is enough to power an audio interface - should be good enough to run some basic DAW, a MIDI keyboard, electronic drums etc. Will probably pick it up for my son at some point to motivate him to learn to type.

[GuidoL]

Apple stopped numbering iPads with their generation so it's pretty messy compared to iPhones. I recently spent some time to decode their entire line-up (all models ever released) and made this comparison table which might clear things up a bit: https://comparisontabl.es/ipads/

[calf]

It is giving me choice paralysis, last week I made a mental graph of the ones I wanted and went over all node pairs choose 2, now it's down to waiting for a fall M5 Mac mini paired with either: a MacBook Neo, or an iPad Air 13"; both options are very attractive for my intended usage though the latter seems higher risk since I've never used a 13 inch tablet before.

[simondotau]

The iPad gives you touch interaction, hand-held operation, a higher quality (albeit smaller) display, and a more resilient operating system (albeit managed).

The Neo gives you a real keyboard, a bigger screen, and unified UX/software support with your desktop computer.

But are you sure you need two devices? Why not just get a MacBook Air (with the same spec as your proposed Mac mini) along with a USB-C dock accessory to connect charging/keyboard/mouse/video with a single cable? Also don't underestimate the value of having a battery in your "desktop" computer. It's a free UPS.

[simonh]

Isn’t the Neo 13” as well? Also the iPad is usually closer to your eyes in use, so is effectively larger in terms of visual field.

[DaanDL]

Especially with things like: will my pencil work with this iPad.