> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port.

You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around

It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.

I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school.

It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.

> Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.

Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.

I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.

The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.

My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.

It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.

We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.

it also looks really nice. at the Apple Store, the chassis seems well machined. the "cheaper" apple logo insert also clearly also incurred some expense as it fit into the lid perfectly. Hinge, keyboard and trackpad felt good. Design team clearly took time to telegraph craft and quality in their product.

I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.

I think the only gap I’ve come across is that trying to drive two monitors through a display link dock it doesn’t really have the GPU to not have that be laggy.

The “8gb gamble” could be seen as a misleading headline.

The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.

for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.

Id pay an extra $150 for the haptic trackpad tbh

What if you cool the chassis really really well??? Does throttling go away?

This might win big in emerging markets where there is a desire for a high-quality laptop for non-programmers.

Why is the author considering Claude Code a "real developer workflow"? Unless you're doing complex tool calling, is CC really resource-heavy?

I already have half dozen over decade old laptops with 4-8GB of RAM in the drawer, don't need any more.

The question thus, is how does the Neo perform if I put it on top of an ice pack?

> Yes, 8GB of RAM is a real limitation. But give it a year and the next version will almost certainly ship with 12GB and a modest CPU bump.

We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?