[bottlepalm]

Yea it does look like 5 year old M1's are going for $300 on eBay, but man that's painful a 5 year old machine for that much when you could get a new Neo or Mini for $600, if only you could buy them. I probably should just get the M1, test and sell it back on eBay. Thanks.

[deaux]

If you're going to do any kind of work on it I'd choose a 5-year old 16 GB memory M1 over a Neo every single time. 8 GB is what's painful. The CPU difference is very small anyway.

[harambae]

Yeah but the base Mac Mini comes with 16GB. So getting that for $600 instead of a very clapped out M1 for $300 seems worth it. That's what I thought when I was browsing on ebay, anyway.

[solarkraft]

They are similarly good. In fact I prefer my M1 MBA to the newer models because of its shape.

[MikeNotThePope]

If a $300 Mac can do the job, a $600 Mac is overkill.

[awakeasleep]

You’re thinking about these M series macs like they’re computers from the 2010s.

A M1 MacBook Air will perform virtually identically for most if not all laptop computing class tasks.

[yreg]

Neo isn't much better than M1.

[wang_li]

In my personal experience, 13” M1 MacBook Air, 15” M4 Macbook Air, M4 Pro Mac Mini, and MacBook Neo, the Neo is the fastest for single threaded and strictly CPU bound tasks. E.g. calculating 200x200, 1000 max iterations Mandelbrot fractals it does ~785 in ten seconds compared to ~760 on the M4s and somewhere in the 600s for the M1.

Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.

[windowsrookie]

I'm not really sure why your neo is performing better than the M4.

The M4 and the neo share the same CPU architecture but the M4 has 4 performance cores at 4.4ghz, while the neo has 2 performance cores at 4ghz.

The neo also does not have any CPU heatsink so it thermal throttles after only a few seconds:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MacBo...

[wang_li]

Yes, all the M-series have more cores, they often have better thermal management, and they have more memory bandwidth. (The the Neo still has crazy high bandwidth.) But, for a single threaded, strictly compute task that runs in 10 seconds, it outperforms the M4 cores. I don't know why, I'm just sharing my experience.

The actual code I am using for this is:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tp, void *tzp);

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      double xmin, xmax;
      double ymin, ymax;
      double x, y, xs, ys;
      int max_iter;
      int i, px, py;
      int width, height;
      volatile double wx, wy, t;
      double start, now;
      struct timeval tv;
      int count;

      xmin = -2.0;
      ymin = -1.5;
      xmax = 1.0;
      ymax = 1.5;

      max_iter = 1000;
      width = 200;
      height = 200;

      xs = (xmax - xmin) / (double) width;
      ys = (ymax - ymin) / (double) height;

      gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
      start = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
      count = 0;
      now = start;
      while (now - start < 10.0 /* && count == 0 */) {
        for (y=ymin, py = 0; py < height; py++, y += ys) {
          for (x=xmin, px = 0; px < width; px++, x += xs) {
            wx = 0.0;
            wy = 0.0;
            for (i=0; i < max_iter && (wx * wx + wy * wy) < 4; i++) {
              t = wx * wx - wy * wy + x;
              wy = 2 * wx * wy + y;
              wx = t;
            }
          }
        }
        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
        now = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
        count ++;
      }
      printf("%d iterations in %.2f seconds.\n", count, now - start);
    }

[kalleboo]

M1 is even better in some ways, like it has Thunderbolt ports (plural even!).

[Marsymars]

The only place where it seems unequivocally better for mainstream use is hardware AV1 decode.

(If I were building a Jellyfin server today, I'd probably use a MacBook Neo.)

[brailsafe]

If you literally just need to borrow one, I'd just buy an Air from Apple directly and then return it within the 14 day window. I'll sometimes do this if I need an extended repair on my personal one, or there's a new mac I want to try.

[valleyer]

This is unethical.

[brailsafe]

That's not what the employees say! Though it's a rare thing for me to do, it's not like I'm doing something shady, and they're quite happy to say things like "Well, give it a try, if it's not for you, return it", which I'm sure leads to customer comfort and increased sales. Usually I'm also genuinely trying a different product than the one I have, and get to evaluate whether it's any good.

As far as I'm concerned, if I can't work because they have my laptop for a week, especially because I pay for AppleCare and have to leave it with them, it's not much different than an insurance policy that lends me a rental car while mine's in the shop.

[nirava]

If the return policy explicitly allows "change of mind", I'd say it's in the gray area. Though ofc it isn't sustainable if everyone starts doing this. I assume there's a ((returns:buys)/payment identity) metric to ban the largest offenders.

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

[chongli]

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

Yes, exactly. When getting your car repaired there’s loaners or rentals to allow you to keep driving. Why isn’t a loaner computer a standard thing?

[Marsymars]

My local library will loan you a Chromebook for up to three weeks (three weeks reserved, can extend if there's availability) at no charge.

[chongli]

That’s fantastic for people in the Chromebook ecosystem. They can log in and away they go! Not so great for us in the Apple ecosystem though.

[wildrhythms]

Glad to see the hackers have arrived to defend a billion dollar corporation

[lotsofpulp]

Glad to see the people who do not understand tragedy of the commons have arrived.

[brailsafe]

I don't think this situation qualifies, or maybe it's on the border. This seems more akin to using all of the bandwidth provided to me by one of a few companies coordinating together to extract as much as possible from their customers. Apple's had a policy like this for ages, if it wasn't more profitable than not for them, then they'd have done something about it under the miserly rule of the outgoing CEO.

Some people occasionally returning products—that they intended to keep or not—is not like all of the energy grid being consumed by data centers, nor is it like all of the wetlands being paved over for suburbs.

[awakeasleep]

Im also against this practice but both of you can be understanding the facts the same and still coming to opposite conclusions. Thats the whole point of the tragedy of the commons!

[brailsafe]

> billion dollar corporation

Multi-trillion dollar corporation*