It's nice to be able to authenticate sudo via biometric id with the help of Pam, or unlock your password manager like bitwarden.

I don't think an apple watch would help there?

> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID

Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.

Apple Watch costs half this thing, but then again maybe there's a large percentage of phone/watch only users.

I have one of those, it's perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn't a lot, but I've never run into issues with it not being enough.

The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.

$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.

I think it might be 2020 when the M1 was released since I remember i had bought a mac book in 2019 and it was still intel

M1 came out Nov 2020.

They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.

Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm

  - Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
  - Width: 30 vs 29.75
  - Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
  - Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23

But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).

Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.

The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.

They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.

Yup. The MBA11 is probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's my daily driver. I have 4 of those now, running MacOS and Linux Mint.

I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.

That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!

It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!

That would cannibalize their ipad lineup

That's basically what this is, no?

Depends what you're developing. You could build a pretty powerful webapp as long as you don't fall into 'i need my blog running in kubernetes' trap.

For a couple months I was on an 8gb m1 air, it was perfectly fine, even with docker containers. As long as i didn't launch teams....

I've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.

I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.

> Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.

> Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.

> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.

That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.

you must be joking sir. those gonna be paperweight in 2 years. 16 is usable minimum for music making, grpahics and web browsing

My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.

But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.

RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.

RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...

Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.

The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.

Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.

Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.

It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.

That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.

I do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that.

Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.

1: Education market 2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products

This is a 600 buck machine. "Just $300-350 more" is a 50% price hike!

300*500 kids is 150k and the difference between a school choosing chromebooks again. This is priced against the $450 Chromebook.

CPU performance is about equal to the M1 multicore and a bit better single core.

I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.

Not true, but good riddance if it was.

It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.

No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB