alt Hacker NewsMacBook Neo
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RIP, IBM compatiable PC.
Haters will say this is them competing with Chromebooks, real OGs know they just expanded TAM
Apple's Chromebook.
Does anyone know if Linux is viable on this? I want Apple hardware (or surface hardware) but despise osx. Saving a few hundred over a surface would be sweet.
Did anyone else notice how the wallpaper spells MAC?
Wow thats a really good deal
What on earth, at least they could have provided 16gb as base RAM. 8gb RAM in 2026 - what on earth were they thinking.
Ideal computer for our mom.
> Built for Apple Intelligence.
With 8GB RAM?
After Tahoe and Apple Intelligence what's going to be left for actual applications to use?
Honestly, if you have a tonne of staff that only use Excel and Chrome... this is the laptop to buy.
I'd hate to jinx it, but I reckon this thing will dominate the market.
Good job Apple.
This is basically the most efficient way to work with agentic tools in my opinion.
that's a wild price point for a mac, impressive
Would this be an upgrade from an X270?
Just from a pure investment standpoint, while people seem to think this will take on Microsoft PCs and Google's Chromebook, to me the bigger risk is that it is going to cannibalize Air sales. Just read the comments here and elsewhere online. Sure, some people say they need more RAM, etc...but the average consumer just uses their device as a browser.
Anyhow, I do hope this wakes Microsoft up. They seem to have abandoned their consumer base, which is quite annoying. I do enjoy Windows 11, despite the hate here, but Windows PCs have a lot of catching up to do.
Now give me a damn tellow MacBook Pro please
I guess PCs and chromebooks are over? Literally what normie would pay more for a worse experience now?
No Force Touch?! That's absolutely awful... That's probably the biggest UX difference in daily use...
They finally installed a real Operating System on iPad hardware and attached a keyboard. Innovative!
* US price: $599 * UK price: £599
I don't like swearing on here, but fuck that.
The "real" USD-GBP exchange rate price should be £448. Apple are basically taking £150 extra on top for UK consumers.
I wonder if the bootloader will be locked down, I hope not.
This is an ad.
just let me run macos on ipad?
I'm a little skeptical about the Apple Intelligence capabilities, as others have mentioned. I can assume that it doesn't run on-device and sends it to Apple's servers for processing.
I just noticed that according to https://support.apple.com/121115, devices purchased in China don't support Apple Intelligence but it's odd that they explicitly mention a workaround where devices purchased outside of China support Apple Intelligence if the region isn't set to China.
Personally, I might not get this device because of the hard limit of 8GB unified memory. This is unacceptable in 2026 because there were iPhones with 8GB of RAM in 2023. The current generation of iPhones have 12GB of RAM available.
In Canada this is the same price as something like this: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/acer-aspire-14-ai-copil...
So not bad, maybe a tad underwhelming but for those in the Apple ecosystem it's a decent student computer.
Curious how the cell phone chip holds up to desktop-esque workloads.
This is an amazing move by Apple. Most excited I've been about an Apple product launch in a long time. Low cost, high quality, colorful laptops are back.
With 256GB SSD storage & 8GB RAM, the Macbook Neo's Price @ $599.00 is still a bit high, for my needs. I would be sold if it came with 512GB SSD & 16GB. Still, the higher storage class version @ $699 with Touch ID should at least make people think a bit longer when deciding to jump in and purchase or not. It's a step in the right direction, slowly moving it away from "Eye Candy," status in my view.
And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much. Sure it's touchscreen but at end of the day If I am "keyboarding" it I am not "touching" it much.
Finally, some good hardware announcements. It nails almost every common use case, with few flaws or exceptions.
* If we're talking "child's first laptop", this gives them a full-fat desktop OS with ample power to get into various mischief (experimenting with audio in Garageband, making videos in iMovie, writing stories in whatever text editor they fancy, presentations and spreadsheets for school, and the ability to install whatever they like with a quick reformat/refresh if things get borked). $599 isn't quite "disposable", but it is "accessible".
* For "parental computer", this also fits the bill. The extra $100 doubles storage and adds TouchID, enabling Apple Pay on-device. It's affordable, resilient, and manageable by remote support (i.e., us kids). 8GB of RAM is more than enough for common tasks for most folks, provided they work intentionally and not just stack tabs infinitely.
* As a Chromebook alternative, the results are a bit more mixed. Sure, durability seems higher at first blush, and the user experience is better, but as @runjake points out Chromebooks play a "numbers game" Apple won't compete on: rock-bottom pricing, disposability, replaceability, and integration with Google's (mostly free or heavily discounted) educational tooling. For schools that have the CapEx to move back to Apple's ecosystem (or are in it, but want to expand it), the Neo is compelling; for public school systems lacking disposable funds, it's a harder sell - though maybe moot, given the studies linking negative outcomes to early and forced technology adoption in schools.
* For businesses, meet your new "loaner laptop". Keeping a few of these on-hand with corporate profiles preloaded and MDM/DEP managing provisioning makes these the ideal daily replacement while a laptop is being serviced or forgotten at home. Keeping a half-dozen of these ready to go is half the cost of Macbook Airs or Pros waiting in the wings, and perfect for 90% of SaaS-reliant business use cases.
* Speaking of business, say hello to your new "contractor special". Cheap enough to not fret if they're lost or destroyed, but still managed by the same impeccable MDM/DEP tooling, and with enough headroom for most contractor work.
For every niche where you don't mind paying the premium for a better UX in hardware (software is a bit...questionable, at the moment) and don't need a monster of power, this thing fits the bill almost perfectly. That said, I do have some annoyances with the Gen1 that I'd like to see addressed in the next revision:
* Don't make MagSafe a premium feature. It saves cables, it saves ports, and it saves computers. It should be standard.
* I get that the USB ports are limited by the A18 Pro's onboard controllers, but stop silently making different USB ports. Either label them, make them identical, or drop the lower-spec ones entirely. USB-C at USB2 speeds and missing DP video is dumb, and it makes the user experience worse since the ports aren't labelled somehow.
* I know I'll never get it, but either hardware mute toggles to keep speakers from going off during class/meetings, or profiles that let IT mute/disable speakers entirely to force headphones.
Now that MacOS has been demonstrated to run on an A-Series chip, can we please finally get unlocked bootloaders to run MacOS on other iDevices?
Woah. A burner laptop for travel? I might need to rethink what personal computing is for me soon. Mac Studio + Studio Display, plus a Neo/iPad might be the right combination instead of having to buy an expensive laptop which has hinges and can get stolen.
The hoops Apple will jump through to not let me install/dual-boot macOS on my iPad Pro.
It’s all the same damn hardware. Just let me install an OS that isn’t purposefully gimped!!
Excellent! Was going to get a MacMini for my kids but I might just get this instead.
I just looked over the specs [1] and it's pretty good for the price. My only quibble is that there's only one USB3 port and that's also the charging port. So if you want to use an external display, you need some form of dock to also charge it. The other USB port is only USB2 so you can't use that as an external display connector.
I'll be interested to see a true comparison with the M5 Macbook Air. I don't think we have any direct comparisons between an M chip and the A18 Pro. The A18 Pro is used in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, not even the 17. I found this spec comparison [2]. Not sure if it's accurate.
It seems like this is an iPHone 16 Pro in laptop form because the iPhone also has 8GB of RAM.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/specs/
[2]: https://erickimphotography.com/apple-m5-vs-a18-pro-comprehen...
You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They've really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.
very good product app man
It's an incredible value but a world of resource-hungry vibe-coded webapps and 8GB of RAM just does not feel compatible.
If you primarily use native Apple apps though this thing is awesome. $499 with student discount? This thing is going to do NUMBERS.
I think Apple has a winner on it's hand. This is perfect, for large number of people who don't do much on their laptop anyway. Even for me as a developer, I want something small and light that I can carry around and I can connect to my bigger machine from.
I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.
Well, Apple decimating competitors with this offering.
So the new iBook. Great.
I think most are going to pass on this. I'm not sure Apple has ever figured out how to sell anything to the price conscious consumer since the iPod Shuffle.
As always, you can get a more performant laptop for the price. Price sensitive consumers have shown time and time again they will put up with all the little annoyances of a cheap laptop if it means more performance. I'm not saying those details Apple puts into their products aren't nice, but yeah this is barking up the wrong tree. For those people, any laptop purchase is going to be their one and only device that isn't their phone.
Those who absolutely need MacOS and have this budget will just get a Mac Mini.
Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.
I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)
Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.
I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.
> MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.
> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.
So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.
Another nail in the coffin of iPad as a portable workstation. A18-powered $600 MacBook, but no MacOS-powered tablet.
If only there was an ~11inch one to replace the old 2012 model, possibly the most perfectly portable laptop created.
Others covered specs etc, but just came here to say the intro video is so much fun! I really enjoyed that.
would be a very compelling little device for cash strapped schools but ... 16GB of ram heck even 12 would have been better.
Otherwise the limitations are fine. In fact this really has the chance to canabilize the iPad a bit though the iPad has a better screen and a faster chip...
256gb and 8gb of ram, here we go again. Old gen macbook air seems a better deal, isn't it?
Interesting that the headphone jack is on the left! Have there ever been any other MacBooks where this was the case (no pun intended)?