alt Hacker NewsYou forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)
Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.
Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
Replies
> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip
i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):
| device | cpu | single core score | multi core score |
|:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3708 | 14698 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.
Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
Thats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications.
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup
What, in fact, is it doing? I'm of the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.
This is a Mac Chromebook. You use it for cloud stuff and every now and then you can run a real application in a pinch.
You can also develop locally which is significant.
Modern pcs use the ram given to them. Its not like a fixed quantity it requires.
For $300 more the base MacBook Air is a significantly better machine than the Neo.
If you're concerned about the amount of RAM, this isn't the laptop for you. Grandma doesn't need 16GB to browse Facebook and look at family photos.
I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open
Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."
I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.