alt Hacker NewsMacBook Neo
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Didn't we agree that calling your product "new" is poor planning? Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(3rd_generation)
Or will they keep doing this with "neu", "nouveau", "nuevo" etc?
Looks like the best display you can get in laptops at this price: 2408x1506 resolution, 500 nits, antireflective coating (!). And bonus points for no silly notch.
Basic question: will this be able to run any app built for M chip? I suppose so because both a18 and the M chips are ARM?
Possibly dumb question: why not just get a previous generation MacBook Air for a similar price? Even a refurb one. I really don't understand who this is for, apart from children perhaps (but still just get a bloody MacBook Air)
I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?
If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.
I wonder if this means a Mac Nano with an A-series chip is on the table now. Essentially a beefed up Apple TV that runs macOS.
This, coupled with the nightmare fuel that Windows has become as of 2026, means no one sane should buy a Windows computer. It's more expensive, more intrusive, and Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.
8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.
I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that.
The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going to confuse a lot of people. One of Apple's perks in terms of connectivity has been that you can basically assume all USB-C ports do everything. It also seems like they didn't include an SD card reader, like they used to. That's going to make the 256GiB rather cramped, I feel.
Instead of launching neo, Apple could have enabled something like Dex on their phones. This is still a welcome device if Apple has excess inventory of A18 lying around as this helps people get a laptop for cheaper.
An iPhone in a laptop body to be an Apple "Chromebook", I can only imagine this will be pretty popular.
I’m confused. The iOS device line gradually shifts towards the M chips. Why does Apple make a laptop with the A chips? Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?
8 GB of RAM and an ARM chip, it is almost as if they took the specs from the Raspberry PI and built a laptop around it.
Joking aside, this is too anemic for today for serious work, but I guess at today's RAM prices this is going to be setting a trend. My decade+ old Lenovo W540 has four times that and I sometimes wished it had more. But for a school laptop it is acceptable I guess.
Macs were already much better value than other laptops in my opinion. I just wish it were easier to run Linux on them.
Fantastic value proposition.
For most of the non-tech people in my life, I'd now recommend a base MacBook Neo + base iPhone 17 + AirPods Pro 3. Students may want to throw in a base iPad and an Apple Pencil. Splurge on the higher end versions if you like nice things, but that combo will pretty much cover the tech needs of most non-tech people.
Apple is crushing it with their entry products.
I'd be glad to try one (either blue or piss colored). If it really comes at 600€. Though it would already be 100€ too much unless it gets liberated to run linux at some point.
My fear is that it's going to be made useless in no time with software updates, or that it has some important limitation (like i can't use XCode command line tools)... But i wanted to replace my old mid 2012 for a couple of years and i decided the next laptop would be either ARM or RiscV (browsing, writing text, scripting, light programming)
This is exactly what's needed to get general users off of Windows.
Anecdotal, but whenever my friends/family are looking for a basic laptop I almost always suggest a Lenovo for the price/performance/quality they're looking for in the $400-600 range, even though I myself would never get anything besides a MBP.
I would recommend this to them instead every single time. The build quality of macs are unmatched and now in everyone's price range.
It's like the Netbook is back, but done well. This is really exciting, I have to admit. Superb execution of hardware of course, but the secret sauce is the OS. Can't wait to try one.
The A18 Pro single thread passmark score is 4k, that's up there with pretty premium desktop CPUs, very impressive if it can do it for any meaningful time.
Apple, please make a new 12" Macbook for those of us who travel and want the lightest weight possible. Less than 2 lbs, thinner than the Air, but without the compromises of the Neo. I'd pay more than the Air price for this. Or, make the Air lighter and thinner (to match the iPhone Air in approach?).
8GB of RAM? In 2026?!!!
Xcode and some browser tabs are going make this slow AF.
Looks like they're using some new variant of branding font for this. Inspect Element shows it as SF Pro Display, but it's actually just being masked over with an image
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-neo/a/images/overview/welcom...
Also, why not just MacBook? Wasn't that historically the base-level laptop name?
I'm sure these will sell very well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the M1. I'm sure Asahi linux folks are really excited about an extra chip set to support.
I find this a very exciting release. I was actually hoping we would somehow get macOS on mobile 'A' chips some day. And I think this is better than putting 'M' chips on an iPad.
My iPad with an 'M1' chip actually consumes more battery than much older iPads when both are locked and with the screen off. I ended up figuring it was probably because, in the 'M' chip, the lowest possible energy usage is way higher than the 'A' chip. So even small background wake-ups used more energy.
I'm still hoping one day we have an iPad with macOS.
Eager to see the Xcode benchmark on this. Would expect it to be similar to the M1, but we shall see! I still use my M1 MBP for light mobile development work. Sure it's slow, but it certainly works. It's wild to think you can buy a new laptop that costs less than an iPhone and write apps for an iPhone.
What's fun about this machine is its constraints, and it sort of reminds me of one of my processors orchestrating our school's server cluster via nothing but an 11" MacBook Air back in the day.
Apple's share price is down about 0.45% today. The market knew this was coming, so that doesn't say much. It will be interesting to see if this product helps their market share and also has good enough profit margin to affect Apple's profitability much. I expect it will sell a lot more units more than the previous cheapest Walmart M1 Air
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/04/apple-macbook-neo-budget-lap...
So... have we now confirmed that the only thing preventing us from running macOS off our iPhones is a software limitation?
(I'm being facetious, if the hardware was open, someone would have already written a custom boot loader for this :P)
It's still almost three pounds....
Whatever they did with the 11" macbook air was magical. It doesn't seem like they can pull it off twice.
With every new device Apple releases the split between iPadOS and macOS gets more awkward.
Makes no sense for a $1500 "Pro" iPad to have desktop-class RAM, storage, an M5 chip, and be stuck with a Fisher Price OS, while this one has the equivalent specs of last year's iPhone and gets the full power of macOS. Just unify the two already.
Even if apple is losing money on these devices, they shouldn't care. Low cost laptops are the main reason why people buy Windows laptops instead of Macs. They need to get people into the Mac ecosystem.
$499 through Apple Edu: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-neo.
I wish more would be done on weight. The 12 inch Macbook was very lightweight, just 2 pounds. Today there's no Apple product that gets close to that: an iPad with the added accessories weighs more and it's still an iPad. The Macbook "Air" is not airy, this Macbook Neo weighs the same as an Air.
I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.
Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...
Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
On the one hand I feel like 8GB is low these days, but my iPhone 12 Pro only had 6GB of RAM, so maybe for light usage this is fine. I do feel like 16GB is the new "8GB" minimum of the 2010s. Especially on windows, 32GB feels like Windows just chews through it no problem.
Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.
I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.
I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.
This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
Really want Apple to launch the Mac Mini version of this (yes, I really want an updated Apple TV)
I am going to need a mac to perform some app build for ios sometimes. I was thinking to get a used mac mini for that. Would the neo be a cheaper, but still viable option?
cute netbook, I appreciate the no notch design
Too bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.
I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.
I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.
For someone who wants a secondary (travel) laptop I don't like how needlessly thick and heavy this is.
More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.
But the only issue in school is the rick kid's parent will get them Macbook Pro or even Macbook Air, and the poor kids will get Macbook Neo... I'm sure the kid will not feel great about having Neo while her friend have Pro version.
This is an absolutely solid buy I think. My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.
A return to 8GB laptops would be a good thing overall, so if this becomes a "target" for electron based apps, it would be a total game changer. The iPhone 17 has 8GB RAM, and honestly for the workloads we're doing it should be enough. I think there was a big jump when we jumped to 1080 screens on laptops about a decade ago (seriously...) but most of the resource usgae growth there has been needless since.
I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.
I have an Air (M2) and I use it where I once owned a Pro. No fans sold it to me -- that's a quality feature, tired of them getting dirty over time. But I have the 15" model and essentially use it as a pro laptop.
This? This is an Air.
But the Air has become the Pro, the Pro has become the one you get for ports and super power and I don't know if many people even need it, and now 'Air' has lost its meaning (light, entry-level, portable) so they need a new name. So they name it, literally, neo: New.
Steve Jobs would weep. What happens in five years when it's not new any more?
Still can't compete with a used ThinkPad from ebay.
Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dec everywhere.
This proves macOS should/could just be an iOS app that you can run when docked. It has great suspend and resume, the phones/tables would just need more ram and storage. Maybe we'll see it in the future
This machine has me asking why much older hardware can't run newer versions of macOS. The answer of course is Apple needs to sell new machines, but the Neo may be proof that decade old Macs could run Tahoe as well as or better than the Neo.
It's interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was
- No touchID on the base model
- 8GB of RAM
- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2
- No MagSafe.
But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.
This is perfect for folks looking to buy a brand new laptop.
For the rest of us, happy with gently used 2nd hand devices, the original M1 MacBook Air and the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro are a *much* better deal for the same price, pretty much across the board, especially the Pro: bigger, brighter, 120Hz screen, beefy specs, ports.
That citrus colour, tho...