Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale. It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine without killing the browser, for example.
A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen.
I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.
I think for this plan to work you’d have to force the developers of Xcode to work on the 4 Gb machines first. If they could do that, the rest would follow naturally.
Hah. When I worked for a very big Just Print Money bank circa 2008, they gave me, a SDE with the Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows with 4GB of RAM and a bonus of Lotus Notes for email. This thing was slower than molasses. Not to mention because we had an offshore team in India. every morning every engineer would begin the day with syncing the Subversion repo. My team was in central US but we had to connect to a proxy in NYC for network traffic inspection. This makes the sync over 45 minutes long. Repeat the same for every SDE, from both sides of the world, and you can guess the amount of time wasted.
I don’t think I would want to work in that environment anymore.
Similar story, I had a customer who wanted me to change the entire UI of a legacy application, because some information would not fit on the ancient 1024*786 15" desktop monitor of one employee, meaning he would have to use horizontal scroll constantly.
I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks.
Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!".
In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper.
A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.
Sometimes I have the feeling AAAs can be better optimized than Unity based indies.
It's probably a bit better than when Unity was new. I do remember the first x-com remake in 2012 was lasting longer on battery than $random_unity_indie.
Sure and all game devs should be forced to do their work on 80s NES dev kits or whatever. /eyeroll
This line of thought is ridiculous Ludditism. Artists and craftsmen deserve to work with SOTA tools, you can only benefit from having better more accessible more performant tools.
That's dumb. You can hardly even buy a machine with 4GB of memory on sale, at any price.
If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.
I must say, the irony of this comment in a thread about Apple moving down-market without losing quality is … well, it burns. Along with the arrogance: “Anyone who can’t afford 8GB isn’t worthy of being my customer,” is literally the opposite of what Steve Jobs always said.
I was stuck once in a cabin in the woods with an old Android phone. I’m glad it still worked, and that people curating software experiences for it had more empathy — and more business sense — than this comment displays.
Didn’t Steve Jobs basically say Apple didn’t know how to make a good computer for $500 and used that as a justification to not sell any products to the lowest priced area of the market?
There’s no irony here. The plain fact exists that 8GB of RAM has been considered not an especially exotic amount lot even on cheap on laptops and desktops for about a decade if not longer.
$450 in 2015 would have bought you a Dell laptop with 6GB of upgradable memory:
The point was that Apple has completely been uninterested in the bottom of the laptop market from 1976 to 2026, and there is therefore no irony in my statement that many businesses including Apple will purposefully ignore customers who do not have enough money to buy their stuff.
From the first comment I responded to:
> “Anyone who can’t afford 8GB isn’t worthy of being my customer,” is literally the opposite of what Steve Jobs always said.
This commenter is wrong. This idea that the bottom of the market is below Apple is almost exactly what the quote from the earnings call said. Jobs effectively said “we only make mid to high end computers, someone else can take the serve the budget customers.”
This is why I pointed out that most people employed making commercial software don’t have to concern themselves with the needs and desires of users on desperately outdated hardware, since those users can’t afford your product anyway.
Of course, at the time Jobs was alive that number for RAM was below 8GB, but that specific number is not specifically relevant other than the fact that I brought it up as a general example of the standard of the day from around 10 years ago.
I brought up a bunch of computing examples from the mid-2010s after Jobs’ death because they are about the oldest reasonable hardware you’d find around today, proof that even buyers of low-end hardware 10+ years ago were regularly getting more than 4GB of RAM.
Apple’s base model MacBook Air in 2017 had 8GB of RAM. The 2015 model started with 4GB configurable to 8GB. The 12” MacBook from 2016 had 8GB RAM.
So you literally have to go back a decade to find anything sold by Apple where getting less than 8GB was an option on the lowest possible configuration, never mind PC manufacturers who generally gave better specs per dollar and included socketed memory.
But hey, Apple shills will shout from the rooftops that a 2026 laptop with 8GB of RAM is a good deal just because it’s $500 if you lie about your status as a student and pinky promise with Apple that you’ll never use the computer for commercial usage.
No Steve Jobs said exactly what he said. The technology wasn’t to the point where they could offer products that aren’t junk. An unsubsidized $120 Android phone is “junk”. A $99 iPod Shuffle or a $300 low end iPad isn’t.
The Netbooks available in 2010 were junk even by that days standards.
The MacBook Neo which is fast enough, a better display than low end PCs and a good trackpad is not junk. It can do what most low end consumers care about well.
At least in the US, even during the SJ era you could get a “free” iPhone with a contract that anyone could afford - it was the last years phone
Well, here’s the thing…and, I apologize, this is a bit of a shift from what we were talking about.
The MacBook Neo is getting so much hype for being better than a low end PC, before it’s been put through its paces over the long term.
I had the same initial reaction. Wow, a Mac for $500, how incredible, how disruptive.
But then this morning I decided to look at the actual street pricing of laptops at my local Best Buy.
And here’s the thing: now that Apple has this machine with no haptic trackpad, no backlit keyboard, the worst screen available on any Apple product, very small keyboard, and very basic non-upgradable specs including a generations-old efficiency processor, I think the actual story here is that Apple has changed their mind and is willing to make a product that they would have previously called “junk.”
I’ll list off a couple of systems that I would absolutely buy as better machines over the MacBook Neo:
HP OmniBook X Flip, 16” 2K touch screen, Intel Core Ultra 5 226V, 16GB memory, 512GB storage, $699.
For the same price as the top model Neo you get double the RAM, a bigger and probably better screen, which is convertible and touch enabled. It is not some kind of bargain basement SKU, either, a legitimately well-reviewed laptop.
Right there in the pricing sweet spot you get more memory and basically all the benefits of an ARM architecture in another laptop that is well-regarded. You also get a number pad on the keyboard.
All these laptops have been getting well over 4.5 star reviews, like this one:
> This little guy has been amazing this semester plenty of power while being light and getting good battery life the quick charging feature is particularly impressive from almost dead to full in around half an hour all and all this laptop has met or exceeded all of my school life needs
Finally, this is probably my choice if I was in this segment:
Another great example of a laptop that is costing you less than the Neo’s top model before education discount, has better specs, and is again a legitimately good model of laptop solidly in the mid-range of the lineup, not a bargain basement SKU. I would actually be surprised if the Neo kept up with this particular model in terms of build quality, keyboard, etc.
The Neo’s main advantage is that it’s got a chassis made of aluminum, and that’s really its only differentiator. And I’d say that’s an overrated differentiator (e.g., plastic is lighter and isn’t automatically weaker/worse for long-term ownership).
Just looking at the first one - the screen is worse, it’s heavier and the processor is slower. Of course PC mags always grade crappy intel based PCs on a curve. Actually all of the screens are worse.
The Ryzen AI 340 isn't a bad match against the A18 Pro. It's actually ahead of the A18 Pro on multicore performance, and only 20% behind on single core benchmarks, not enough for anyone to notice. Yeah, it's true you're losing a lot of integrated GPU performance. Integrated GPUs do need more RAM, though, and I doubt the Neo is going to be handle a lot in the realm of "high school kids who want to game on the side" between that and the software compatibility situation.
My main point isn’t about caring or not, the point is that 4GB RAM in a laptop/desktop is incredibly rare for how outdated it is.
The PS4 came out in 2013 and has 8GB of RAM. In case you need help counting, that’s 13 years ago.
And that’s an optimized game console with no general purpose operating system and limited multitasking capability.
10 years ago, Samsung phones were shipping with 6GB of RAM. Not many phones even physically last that long.
My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
The price of memory is insane, so if anyone wants to increase performance/dollar, they're likely going to have to do it in software. I would suspect 4Gb computers are going to come back if the hungry AI beast doesn't cool it soon.
How much memory does your parents and grandparents computers have? There are a lot of people out there with older computers, probably even some that you know :)
My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
> It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine
If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
The CPU is capable. The 8GB of RAM not so much. If this had even just the 12GB of the A19 Pro that'd be a huge upgrade. Unless the RAM shortage gets developers to actually start giving a shit about RAM efficiency, but that seems unlikely to happen honestly.
Especially not when a certified macbook air refurb straight from Apple isn't that much more if you're not able to get the $500 EDU pricing on the Neo. $850 gets you a 16GB RAM / 512GB M4 Air, which is significantly better than the $700 Neo in every way.
Honestly the 8GB is not really an issue. As opposed to basically every other computer on this price range, Apple puts real storage in their machines, making a well-tuned swap simply transparent. I'd also bet they have very performant hardware engines for memory (de)compression.
A few years ago, my parents asked me for a laptop for my sisters, for university use. We targeted this price range. It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage. And I'm not speaking about the other specs like display or build quality. We ended up buying second-hand M1 and M2 macbook airs, and both I and my sisters are very happy about it.
(also, as the "tech support guy" of the family, I'm oh my so happy about them not running windows)
The SSD in the Neo only manages around 1,500 MB/s in sequential benchmarks, it's not an impressive drive.
> It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage.
I just went to Dell's website and picked a random $400 laptop and it had an NVME SSD. The $650 Dell 14 Essential also is NVME. Both of which are M.2 so easily upgraded, replaced, or have data recovery done on them. The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
> The SSD in the Neo only manages around 1,500 MB/s in sequential benchmarks, it's not an impressive drive.
That's sequential, not what you want for swap, but already a good start. I agree that it's not impressive, but already leagues ahead of a SATA SSD. And for swapping a 8GB machine it's more than enough (when the swap pattern is sequential though): you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive.
> The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
Then it's good the situation improved, genuinely! Less e-waste being on the store shelves. Pretty sure windows is nigh unusable on eMMC. And yes, those were sold alongside chromebooks, but at a markup of a "real computer" despite having roughly the same internals.
Another thing that could impact, though, is availability in different markets. I am in France, and the offerings are perhaps worse than in the US? (quite likely, in fact). Add to that the usual price markup where US companies tend to do, at best, 1 USD = 1 EUR, and we get worse machines for the equivalent price range.
> you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive.
As a user a 3 second hang is unusable. Also, critically, swap consumes the life of the drive. Since the Neo's isn't user-replaceable, a 3-5 year lifespan before death is actually a non-trivial compromise, although time will tell on that one I suppose.
Should be fast enough to swap in a browser page I guess. Overall you're right that it's the wrong device for memory hungry applications, but it's not the target audience.
As Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) mentioned in his review, the Neo has the same keyboard as Apple's MacBook Pro line, just without backlighting. That makes them really good for writing and potentially coding on the go.
