The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.
Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.
Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
Just make some decent SD Elite laptops, preferably with Linux OOTB, I’ve been waiting…
They’ve had Mac minis for over a decade.
I find this hard to believe.
Dude, the difference between you and Apple is Windows 11. They don’t have a crappy copilot or Edge hoarding 4GB in the background just to show the weather.
Exactly. They should start installing Linux Mint and call it a day.
Fuck Microsoft.
Indeed. PC manufacturers should just invest in the Linux ecosystem.
yet
The industry problem is mainly that RAM makers do not want to piss off Apple, who has already had long term contracts set prior to rampocalypse. But 8gb linux native is a better product for systems that need to be offered at 8gb for affordability.
The perfect time for a relatively cheap Apple laptop when Microsoft is forcing people to buy new hardware just to use their latest version of their operating system. I wonder what the percentage of Microsoft folks who go to the MacBook will be. I wonder what the percentage of users who go the UNIX/Linux route would be. I’m not an apple fan myself so would go linux, but a good business move from Apple though.
Apple user share is beneficial for Linux user share.
That would be interesting to watch.
If I ever had to buy a personal laptop again, it’d definitely make the list.
Obnoxious hardware prices are what kept me off mac for so long. Now all prices are obnoxious maybe it would even out.
Great move if they can capitalize on it
They were making a lot on build quality, convenience, brand, ecosystem, cultism, software quality, but not so much on power.
Now power became more expensive for suppliers, and for things listed before it you have to restructure marketing and everything. Apple doesn’t have that problem. They also have rid themselves of the legacy problem by two softer changes (dropping 32 bit Intel, then moving to ARM) instead of one hard change.
Windows is DOGSHIT, I bet a lot of people will dump that pile of shit and move to Mac OS.
Why would you move to Mac os?
Windows still runs software from the 90s.
Mac’s… Lol… Good luck with that.
I can’t see teenagers and 20-somethings going, “What I really want is a laptop that runs software from the 90s.”
Just because you have no appreciation for history you think no one else does either?
Just be nice to be so detached from reality
Its still a Mac
Knowing apple, at that price point, performance is going to suuuuuck.
Exactly which means superior build quality and a great experience. Parents will be snapping these up in the fall for back to school.
Foxconn has never been known for quality.
Exploiting child labor? Sure.
Inhumane long hours? Absolutely!
Build quality? Hahahaha. Hahaha. What a tool you are.
It really is not appealing a mac air with 16gb RAM was $999 AUD and the NEO is $899 AUD. It’s a step backwards…
Which Air is that? I just looked at the current m5 Air, entry level everything is $1099 USD, i am guessing the one you saw was an older model.
I said was.
If you know what RAM is, this product isn’t for you. It’s for your kid or grandma
In Europe the price it’s not that appealing, it’s €699 and because they “care about environment 😉” the €99 charger (which is almost mandatory for a new user) is sold separately.
At €798 for 256g/8g it’s not as good as the $599 they’re selling in the US.
If someone is price sensitive, can get 3-4 refurbished ThinkPads with better specs for that price and run Linux much easier without hoping on some volunteer wizard to reverse engineer the proprietary components
because they “care about environment 😉” the €99 charger (which is almost mandatory for a new user) is sold separately.
It’s because they’re required by law to offer it without a power supply. See Article 3a, section 10.
Apple’s first-party power supply isn’t “almost mandatory”, and doesn’t cost 99€. The 20W model shipped with the Macbook Neo in other markets costs 25€ on Apple’s German store, and a generic 8€ power supply from Amazon will work. The power supply most people already have for their phone will usually also work.
It’s because they’re required by law to offer it without a power supply. See Article 3a, section 10.
the problem is not that, but that they are still including the price of the charger in the deal
How much cheaper do you think it should be for not including a 20W power supply? I’d be surprised if Apple’s cost for that part is more than 5€.
it should be cheaper with the full price of the charger
in my european country, apple’s website says the 1 meter 60 watt usb-c charger cable costs 25 EUR, and the 30 watt usb c charger adapter costs 45 EUR. these are the most budget options I could find on apple’s site
so, the devife should be 70 EUR cheaper, to be exact
one caveat: the us price is without vat
Got an L440, upgraded it to 16 GB and to i7, now it’s a beast. Had to “reset” its battery, otherwise it didn’t last for more than 20-30 minutes. Maybe will swap the screen to a 1080p IPS one and upgrade the WiFi/Bluetooth to modern standards.
I also hate that they no longer ship chargers, but it’s a USB-C charger. Don’t most people have at least one by now? The Neo in particular doesn’t require a very powerful one.
Now the fact that if you get an M5 Max 16" MBP which takes like a 100ish watt charger (can charge with slightly less, but with 20-30 it’ll be hopeless), you still get no charger, is utter bullshit because most people don’t have such a powerful USB-C charger around unless they’ve had a Macbook Pro made in the last decade already.
“care about environment 😉”
Most definitely something they’re doing for improved profit margins, but at the same time, slightly smaller boxes = more boxes per load of cargo = a bunch of CO2 saved on transport. Also they get to manufacture fewer chargers, as repeat customers won’t buy multiple chargers anymore. I do think the impact is significantly more pronounced with phones which get replaced more often and where the charger would take up a bigger percentage of the total box size.
Am I the only one even a little happy to see the head of a major company mentioning upgradability as an appeal for customers?
Please do stick with two unsoldered SODIMM slots for your laptops Asus.
I don’t know what Asus is doing as I haven’t owned one, but some manufacturers are finally starting to do LPCAMM2. Which near me is actually cheaper than SODIMMs. And is technically superior. One reason (besides being able to sell you a new device when memory goes bad) that manufacturers solder RAM it is that it allows for faster speeds than SODIMMs, at lower power requirements.
Really?!
The only laptop I was with LPCAMM was a specific Lenovo laptop that used LPCAMM to connect to a SODIMM daughter board.
Are there others you know of?
That may be the case, but the most irritating thing is that thy fill all available spots with the lowest-capacity chips that meet the requested provisioning spec, instead of taking the requested provisioning and using the fewest higher-capacity chips needed to meet the provisioning spec. The latter, at least, would leave spots open for an authorized repair location to manually solder on more approved chips of compatible spec.
I think the real shock is the quality of windows and Microsoft, and the pc laptop industry also… When everything about a pc laptop is worse than a mac laptop, why do we expect?
It really is like no pc laptop manifacturer has pride in what they create anymore. They dont care if its a bad screen, shitty keyboard, horrible battery time. Just get it on market so the people can buy, and pay reviewers for good reviews.
I got me a dell rugged laptop and the build quality is excellent. It’s effing heavy but solid as anything.
It’s always super frustrating that even on “high end“ pc laptops they’ll use some shitty combined Bluetooth and WiFi chip that will bottleneck everything.
I can’t speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it’s awful because of all that bloat. I’m guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.
The only time I ever use more than 8gb on my M4 Mac Mini is when I run a Win 11 VM through Parallels
in the Linux world, 8GB is fine
So I presume you’re saying that the entire system shouldn’t slow down when Firefox starts swapping?
Macs don’t have copilot so that’s like 4GB saved right there
Ha ha ha. True!
8GB of ram on Macs is fine for work and medium photo/video editing, as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
I’m running Mint on an 8BG laptop and I’m surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn’t even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.
Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.
I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.
Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs,
Oh…I guess I’m the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.
One day I closed one window and it said “Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?”
I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?
Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they’ve sat unused for awhile?
I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of…
When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you’re looking for when you have that many open?
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
Zen (firefox (gecko) derivative, No AI, focus on decluttered interface) has bloody excellent tab management these days, workspaces, folders, horizontal tab lists (like sideberry), essentials (tab icons pinned to the top), auto unload, all built in, and everything disappears when reading a page.
Glance is the most used feature on Zen for me. Everything else I like Firefox for more, but that damn Glance feature really helps me when doing research or looking into things! I NEED it for Firefox! :'(
Get Sideberry for your sanity.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
I literally have over a thousand tabs open in one window.
8Gb ram. Mint. 10+ year old pc.
Yeah sidebery is the goat. I too have thousands of tabs open.
on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.
7.9gb of ram use.
it’s not that bad really, I mean it’s a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.
I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it’s been absolutely fine.
If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.
Many entry level MacBooks of the last decade have probably been 8 GB. I have a M1 MacBook Air and that is 8 GB. It is fine for me.
Not “probably”. They were. For the last decade, up until like last year. And they were awful, and a ripoff
Hard disagree. I have the same MacBook Air and it’s still crazy fast. What are y’all really doing that more RAM is so necessary?
A handful of apps and a few browser tabs will do it. I can go through twice that fairly frequently.
Probably having thousands of Chrome tabs open.
Ugh, I see this on people’s computers at work during screen sharing. First off, Chrome is the clunkiest browser you could possibly use on macOS and second, why so many tabs? How do y’all need 20 tabs open — like you can’t even see the titles because there are so many?
You don’t need to see the titles (and you can always see them with vertical tabs anyway). There are good cases for having many tabs open. It’s just that chrome is terrible at dealing with them.
And the RAM upgrade prices have been a consistent Apple profit center for over 20 years now.
in the Linux world, 8GB is fine
Yeahhhhh no
Been enough for me.
Different people use computers for different things you know.
I use my computer for simple tasks and can power through double that pretty easily. My family is full of Mac sheep who are constantly coming to me to make their computers faster and I have to tell them I can’t help because their machine was deliberately kneecapped by the OEM and there’s no way to fix it. Fortunately one of them just upgraded to the new Air w/ 16GB and they remark how much faster it is. Obviously it’s faster in lots of other ways, but none of those would do anything if they were still capped at 8GB.
But it is for most people.
Again, no.
Most people still browse bloated websites, doesn’t matter what OS you’re using 8GB is going to be tight.
As a web developer… what?? If your website needs 8GB on the client to run there are serious, deeply ingrained problems with your front end. I recently scoffed at coworkers who wanted 8GB of memory for just one instance of their web server — I can’t even fathom how cursed the codebase is if the browser plows through 8GB of RAM on a page load.
They said websites, not website
8GB wouldn’t be one site, but between the OS & a couple of bloated sites 8GB is easy to hit.
I have 13 tabs open over two browsers (Safari and Firefox) and a text editor open on my Mac and I’m using 1.82GB
M1 Max MacStudio
Exactly. I am not a heavy user but occasionally I need to multitask a bit. I upgraded from 16 gb to 32 gb a while back because with 4 open workspaces, a browser window in each one plus an email client, signal, a couple libreoffice apps open, and my notes app, it was having to use enough swap space that I noticed the performance hit. I’ve had to use some very poorly optimized sites for work that literally used a gig of ram for one tab. A small number of very light users might be ok with 8gb, but most will likely have issues.
And that’s why we have adblockers
My old laptop is running Pop!OS on 8gigs really well. I mostly do document editing, vector graphics, and a little light gaming. Have not updated to COSMIC yet so will see how that goes. I definitely dont load it up like my beefy desktop though.
I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.
How so? I have a work Mac and it uses more ram in general despite both the Mac and my personal laptop both employing memory compression and caching.
What?
I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn’t been my experience at all
To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier, if you have it to spare. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you’re out of RAM you’re out if RAM. It’s less likely to happen at all on Linux though.
What compression algorithm? The osx kernel is largely open source so they aren’t doing some secret compression, do they hardware offload it or something?
OSX enables zswap by default, but on a laptop that regular uses it, I’m not convinced it’s a trade-off that’s worth it, although swapping is different on OSX (IMO worse on modern desktops as it swaps whole apps) so I could be wrong.
MacOS doesn’t shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.
There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:
- You don’t have to configure swap on macOS, while on Linux you can get into a situation where e.g. at install time you set up some default 2 GB swap but then it’s not enough and you don’t know that’s a thing that can be changed.
- You don’t have to configure compression for RAM or swap on macOS; on Linux you often have to know you can set up zram/zswap if you want it. Compression can make a huge difference for users that switch between memory heavy applications as long as they don’t literally switch every 5 seconds.
- On macOS, applications generally use the same frameworks e.g. for UI (because there is not much choice), and they can be loaded once and shared between all of them. Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time, and then you have stuff like snap on top that comes with its own copies of even basic system libraries. Containers also do this. As a Linux user you can avoid library bloat to some extent but “normal” users are not aware of it in the first place.
Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out. But when your using actual swap it’s in my experience more noticable on OSX than Linux, which at least for me remains responsive until you’re using a lot of swap.
Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time
Maybe Arch & Flatpak users hit this, but avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for and avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for. Although the ability to restore apps after closing them is pretty sweet and built in to OSX in a way that lets me safely kill apps to reduce the memory I’m using.
I think the main reason my Linux setup consumes less memory is probably because I used Kate for most file editing instead of vscode, which is probably an unfair advantage to Linux.
Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out.
I disagree. If the OS automatically identifies unneeded pages and compresses them or swaps them out, it’s certainly using the physical memory more efficiently than if it wasn’t doing these things.
avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for
But they can’t if the applications they want to ship don’t all use the same version. E.g. Ubuntu ships GTK 2, 3, and 4. Arch even still ships GTK 1 in addition to these three.
avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for
What happens is you run KDE but then you still want to run Firefox so you still need GTK.
It’s basically iOS at that point.
MacOS is like 6 gb of ram doing nothing
It can also do things and still use the same 6 gigs.
MacOS caches a lot. That memory is freed when it’s needed for other things.
As I always say:
…Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.
That’s all they use their computers for. They don’t want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid’s picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.
And that’s basically what the Neo is.
Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.
If I were a laptop maker I would have seen the writing on the wall ten years ago and invested in Linux support, but hey
Well, technically, System76 and a few other white box laptop makers did. But they don’t actually make laptops.
And to be fair to big OEMs, “it uses Linux!” was a much harder thing to market before. I can see (outside of the Framework, which caters to enthusiasts) they only dabbled with it but didn’t invest.
Also, an HP or Dell Linux distro would be an unholy abomination. I can only imagine what they’d ship.
To be quite honest if IPads could just run Mac OS apps on it, it would be a dynamite device and I wouldn’t have even bought my MacBook. I bought an IPad for note taking, and basic work tasks I can do via SSH. The lack of desktop app support was the only thing that thing couldn’t do handily.
Iirc the general assumption in tech spaces was that ios and macos are going to merge in two or three major versions, so I would imagine that apple is aware of this want in their consumer base as well.
The tech spaces have been saying that since 10.7 was released in 2011.
Eh, but will they? There’s a whole lot of OSX legacy Apple would have to throw away.
I mean, I guess they could; they’ve done it before with architecture transitions. But this is different in that stuff on existing devices would stop working, whereas Intel or PPC Macs keep chugging along as-is.
I always thought of it going the other way, leave osx relatively untouched and make phones run on it, rather than taking ios as the standard.
I don’t buy that. No way they “open up” iOS to be more OSX-like, as that would spoil their cash cow (the App Store).
I hate to sound so cynical, but I just don’t see any incentive for Apple to do that.
Can I put Linux on it? Because otherwise refurb Thinkpad Carbons are cheaper and better.
Refurb
You can’t really compare refurb to new. If you do, you might as well consider refurb Macbook Pros instead of the Macbook Neo too.
A new X1 Carbon is 1749 EUR starting price near me. The Neo is 719. A 5 year old X1 Carbon, refurbed, is 725. It’s not a bad laptop by any means, but it also has soldered RAM much like the Mac, so at 5 years of age it may not exactly be super reliable past the warranty which isn’t all that long for either case.
I’m sure Asahi support will be available soon. If these had 16gb of memory, I’d seriously consider it as a new Linux laptop. Even with the global AI-fabricated RAM shortage, 8GB hasn’t been a reasonable amount of RAM for over a decade.
Has Asahi matured? Last I heard there were still quite a few unsupported features like touch ID and displayport over usb c
I honestly dont care about the 8gb of ram, that is plenty for the target audience given MacOS’s pretty good memory management, and optimisation of the first party apps the majority of users will use. I would have liked to see the base price be $499, but that would probably have needed something to be cut down to outside of apples standards, like the display or chassis quality.
I’m a little disappointed by the limited USB, its just one usb 3.0 (not 3.1 as far as I know) and one 2.0, I know that’s a limitation of the platform, there arent really any spare PCIE lanes on a phone SOC. They could have put in a USB Hub chip to get two USB 3.0 ports with shared bandwidth, but I suspect that was difficult to do with reliable video and power throughput and someone decided saving a dollar was more important. That’s plenty for your average user, but a pair of usb 3.1 would have been preferred of course.
However… how many average PC users even use USB now? maybe just a thumb drive very rarely or to use an external display. I’m surprised it even has a headphone jack and an SD reader honestly.
I’d suspect the next gen model to use the newer iPhone chip that should bump the memory up to 12gb and I think has a usb 3.1 controller, so they could break that out better.
I dont hate it. it’s filling in what used to be the mid range of laptops that has kinda died in the last 10 years and is full of spec bumped versions of bottom tier plastic garbage with awful screens and short battery life, and a couple of underspecced cut down versions of nicer metal case laptops that are just not very good either.
Yeah, I think the RAM argument is besides the point. Apps can be optimised for macs in a way that they can’t for PC, and the target audience for this is people at school/college who need to do their homework, and people sitting in offices
Is it going to run super-powerful software? No. Is it going to replace a leet coder’s desktop PC? No
But it’s not supposed to
And if you’ve got the CEO of one of the largest computer firms on the planet saying “this is a serious threat to our business” then that’s worth taking seriously
Especially if you look beyond this. Apple won’t be looking at this in isolation. They’ll be looking at getting in to schools. Chances are that the OS you use in school will be the one you’ll stick with as you get older - especially if it’s also the one that workplaces are starting to use. And if you’re using Apple computers, well, then it makes more sense to have an iPhone than an Android, doesn’t it? Fitness tracker? Well, the Apple Watch is right there
And so on
This is a smart move by Apple. Probably the smartest they’ve made in years
I have to use MacBook for work, I guess it depends on the load but I doubt 8GB is enough unless you are just browsing, in which case far cheaper devices can fill that nieche.
Cheaper, but breaking in your hands. In case of laptops mechanical wear is important. This thing might be weak, but last a decade (well, I don’t know).
On my desktop I have more USB shit plugged into my system than I can count. Literally. Like if I were to guess, maybe 20 different things, roughly?
But yeah, maybe I’m not really an “average” PC user lol
The person this is targeted at is my 18 year old niece who just left for college. 2 USB ports is PLENTY for her.
My sister got her an iPad when she left but had this been out I guarantee she’d have gotten her this instead.
One thing I don’t appreciate about Apple is that you have to use a dong(le) concentrator always.
But yes, iPad laptop version is what this is and a thing in demand.
They were preparing for an offensive and it’s starting! The order is given, we are starting to bomb Wintel.
It’ll be a better world. MacOS devices are pretty normal in the sense of being locked down, as compared to iOS. And there will be some competition. Apple winning is good, they’ll raise quality standards. And they won’t kill MS completely, just eat out a piece of the market, perhaps more than half.
