>If you have 32GB Macs, and you had them 7 years ago already, you're not even remotely close to the target market for it.
that market is already saturated with a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines. The only reason the Neo market is even slightly different is to cater to crowds that want the apple offerings for OS and fashion/reputation.
The market we're talking about has no real reason to care what kind of chip is in the thing. They just want YouTube/Discord/Zoom/EduWebsites to work right.
>that market is already saturated with a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines.
Yeah, come back in a year when we have sales numbers for the Neo and tell me how saturated it is.
>The only reason the Neo market is even slightly different is to cater to crowds that want the apple offerings for OS and fashion/reputation.
No, the real main reason is that the "zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines" are half-arsed and/or less powered and with worse build quality depending on the model. The "OS and fashion/reputation" are a bonus.
The interesting/unique thing about Apple's offering at this price point is the build quality, not the spec.
If you're a school IT department buying these in volume, you want something that actually lasts more than a year before pieces of plastic begin chipping off, hinges start wearing out, etc. And you want something that's easy to clean / sanitize sticky little kid fingerprints off of, and also to undo e.g. residue (from kids who thought it'd be a good idea to stick stickers on their take-home laptop) without worrying about either the adhesive or the thinner permanently damaging the chassis.
In both cases, Apple can actually promise this with the Neo, while none of the Chromebook OEMs can for their equivalent offerings at this price point. (The other OEMs can promise it, but only for offerings at higher price-points schools aren't willing to pay.)
Also, Apple can now promise that you can keep a pile of spares and spare parts, and swap parts between them easily, replace consumables like batteries, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y). Which is essentially table stakes for the education market, but it's good that they've caught up.
While the Neo is a nice notebook, I think you are overestimating it's durability advantages.
> If you're a school IT department buying these in volume, you want something that actually lasts more than a year before pieces of plastic begin chipping off, hinges start wearing out, etc. And you want something that's easy to clean / sanitize sticky little kid fingerprints off of, and also to undo e.g. residue (from kids who thought it'd be a good idea to stick stickers on their take-home laptop) without worrying about either the adhesive or the thinner permanently damaging the chassis.
If you manage to break a plastic cover, that amount of force will certainly also dent, bent and/or dislodge the aluminum cover of the Neo.
I've never seen or heard about plastic chipping off due to normal use (i.e. just wear). In the EU chipping-off plastic due to wear (with normal use) would fall under warranty. I have seen aluminum covers on high-end HP notebooks being bent, dent, etc. For example when transported in a bag, with other things in it, aluminum is more likely to get damaged.
All major brands (Lenovo, HP, Apple, etc.) have at some point had issues with hinges. I think it's even fair to say that Apple isn't known for being particularly forth coming about acknowledging problems with hinges and issuing service advisories to repair those under warranty even when it's a known issue.
> good idea to stick stickers on their take-home laptop) without worrying about either the adhesive or the thinner permanently damaging the chassis.
Getting stickers off plastic covers vs getting stickers of macbook covers doesn't really matter in difficulty. If it is problematic for plastic, it's probably going to problematic for aluminum as well. There are a lot of cleaning agents aluminum doesn't like, which cause white-ish stains in it. You can test that yourself by putting an aluminum breadbox in a dishwasher.
> Also, Apple can now promise that you can keep a pile of spares and spare parts, and swap parts between them easily, replace consumables like batteries, etc.
Right now the Apple self-repair program is, from a financial standpoint, pretty much a gimmick. The costs are so high, you are better of going to the Apple store. Also the swap-able battery is going to be mandatory in the EU so that's something all notebooks will have. Schools usually aren't that interested in starting a repair shop.
This guy [1] that posted about his series of plastic laptops over the years is a telling indictment of what the PC/chromebook value range is about. Hinges easily damage, bits and pieces falling off, can't go from closed to open with one finger, etc. In my region in Australia schools require parents to buy a laptop and the choice is between PC and Mac (Chromebook not allowed); before the Neo getting a Mac would be a budget constraint, especially for their children, but now it is such an easy sensible choice.
Yep. Anyone saying a MacBook of any kind is comparable to the average school Chromebook has clearly never touched a school Chromebook anywhere other than in a Best Buy.
$200 — or even $500 — plastic computers are different in kind (of parts and materials used) to $800+ computers. It's not anything you'd notice when the hardware is new — not the extreme "deck flex" or anything like that — but it becomes clear after 3–6 months of even light use.
Planned obsolescence is real. But, rather than being a result of malicious adulteration, it is the predictable result of aiming for an MSRP (and therefore COGS) where the only viable parts and materials the OEM can get their hands on to meet that price point, have engineering tolerances far below the use-case they’re applying them to. The makers of $500 Chromebooks know they'll break well before buyers expect them to. But with their middling purchasing power and economies of scale, this is the best they can do.
Apple, meanwhile, can hit the same MSRP not by cheaping out on parts, but rather through economies of scale and manufacturing consolidation. Obviously the A18. But also: buy enough high-quality aluminum in bulk, and stamp the same modular chassis parts out for every laptop you make — and those parts start to get cheap enough to use even in a $500 product.
I daily-drive a base level MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM for writing docs and some light coding in VIM/VSCode. Never had any issues.
When I need more I offload tasks to a remote VM (usually AWS/GCP).
I can easily afford a top spec Mac but chose this because I want to have a “entry level” device that I don’t mind my kids breaking or getting stolen at public co-working space.
Plenty of people will get MacBook Neo and never hit its limitations.
Most students/educators and many professionals just use the web all day and never need much RAM.
Having said all that, Apple could easily have made it 16GB cleaned up the market place and nobody would be talking about Neo being under spec’d. But Tim Cook has to be a Tim Cook and squeeze every last penny of profit. ;-)
Having said all that, Apple could easily have made it 16GB cleaned up the market place and nobody would be talking about Neo being under spec’d. But Tim Cook has to be a Tim Cook and squeeze every last penny of profit. ;-)
I think this has more to do with binned A18 Pro SoCs which enables Apple to do this with economies of scale. A later version may get the 12GB variant of the A19 Pro SoCs.
I haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB device in 2026, but this device isn't targeted at either of us.
For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy.
I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.
Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.
Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors.
A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following:
smartctl --all /dev/disk0
...
Data Units Read: 1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB]
Data Units Written: 154,244,108 [78.7 TB]
...
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
...
I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.
> I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more
It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB.
Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse.
On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.
Most people using these things aren't going to be using more than 8GB on an ongoing basis, and if they do, they'll not be swapping it like mad as you suggest, because it's only on application-switch that it will matter.
As for 600TB in just over 3 days, I want some of what you're smoking.
I’ve never had an SSD crap out because of read/write cycle exhaustion, and I’ve been using SSD almost exclusively, for over a dozen years. I’ve had plenty of spinning rust ones croak, though. You don’t solder those in, so it’s not really a fair comparison.
I did have one of those dodgy Sandisks, but that was a manufacturing defect.
If you have 24GB of RAM and a 12GB working set then it's fine. Likewise if you have 8GB of RAM and a 4GB working set. But 8GB of RAM and a 12GB working set, not the same thing.
Most flash memory will happily accept writes long after passing the TBW 'limit'. If write endurance would be that much of a problem I'd expect the second hand market to be saturated with 8Gb M1 MacBooks with dead SSDs by now. Since that's obviously not the case I think it's not that bad.
> Most flash memory will happily accept writes long after passing the TBW 'limit'.
That's the problem, isn't it? It does the write, it will read back fine right now, but the flash is worn out and then when you try to read back the data in six months, it's corrupt.
> If write endurance would be that much of a problem I'd expect the second hand market to be saturated with 8Gb M1 MacBooks with dead SSDs by now.
That's assuming it's sufficiently obvious to the typical buyer. You buy the machine with a fresh OS install and only newly written data, everything seems fine. Your 30 day warranty/return period expires, still fine. Then it starts acting weird.
> That's the problem, isn't it? It does the write, it will read back fine right now, but the flash is worn out and then when you try to read back the data in six months, it's corrupt.
SSD firmware does patrol reads and periodically rewrites data blocks. It also does error correction. Cold storage is a known issue with any SSD, but I don't have any insight in how bad this problem is in reality.
Of course it will wear out eventually, but so will the rest of the system components. There's nothing to be gained by making SSDs that last 30 years when the other components fail in 15.
> Then it starts acting weird.
Is that speculation or do you have any facts to back that up?
Well, I am just saying it is not for me, and neither for anyone else who is not a newbie. It for sure is a great first laptop for kids or students (in the humanities).
I don't think I am the one trying to put anyone down here. Just telling you how it is. I stand by every word. I mean, I wouldn't exchange my 7 year (!) old laptop for this. It seems also to be Apple's opinion (Macbook Newbie, I mean Macbook Neo).
That was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago.
Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.
Because look around - same code compiled for x86_64 and aarch64 is not that drastically different in size, save for some special cases (like NumPy). Data structures are going to have even less differences. Then, assets are the same.
I’ve cursorily checked few programs and difference seemed to about 10-20% (with some exceptions), so 8GiB RAM on an aarch64 is like 10GB on x86_64. Significantly nicer, not a life-changing nicer - you’re still very limited.
Edit: Next comment has a very good point about memory and SSD bandwidth increases, allowing faster swap and compressed RAM performance. That’s something I haven’t considered. So maybe it’ll feel closer to a 16GiB old machine or something like that…
Yeah. Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. The performance impact of moving applications in and out of swap should be much lower than it was a few years ago.
> And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1].
UMAs aren't made for speed, but for power savings. You are ignoring the fact that a discrete GPU accesses VRAM and caches at much higher bandwidths (and power) than an iGPU does RAM. Shared mem also comes at the cost of keeping it coherent between CPU/GPU. So you can't just look at one part of the system and then claim that UMAs must be faster because there are no data transfers.
And by the way, even on UMAs, the iGPU can still have a dedicated segment of memory not readable by the CPU. Therefore UMA does not imply there won't be data transfers.
That's not really a thing with Apple Silicon. The A series chips and the M series have the same CPU and GPU core designs.
Because you don't need to support Thunderbolt 4/5 controllers, PCIe lanes for NVMe storage, ProRes encode/decode engines (on Pro/Max/Ultra tiers) and multiple external displays in a device like a phone, Apple TV, or a HomePod these features are absent from A series chips.
The A17 Pro corresponds to the M3, the A18/A18 Pro corresponds to the M4 and the A19/A19 Pro corresponds to the M5. Same core design, different implementations.
It's not like Intel where there are many server processors, desktop processors and mobile processors. Apple uses the same core design they scale up or down as needed, for example the S series chips in the Apple Watch. The S9 is a scaled down A13 or A15.
Parent said "In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point".
That has zero overlap with the "felt the need for 32GB 7 years ago" not-exactly-crowd.