Why would anyone buy a new laptop when the second hand market is so available? It's all just novelty. I wouldn't touch this, all I can think about is what it'll look like in the second hand market in about 3 years.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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8 gb of RAM shared between the gpu and the rest of the system... My 2 year old phone has 50% more.
This is a POS to distract from the fact that their existing cheapest laptop just jumped form $899 to $1099
Same price as the cheapest iPhone I think. It tells you something.
$600 MacBook in 2026 is absolutely insane to me. Around 2007/08 when I started using MacBooks as a student the entry level ones used to be 1200€.
Consider that this is an iPhone 16 in a MacBook shell, though. This gives you performance comparable a 5 years old used MacBook M1. It's usable, but it's designed to act as a gateway drug, you'll immediately hit storage and memory limits and want to buy a more expensive one.
8gb of RAM in 2026 where most modern apps are made in electron and a basic text editor takes half gig to show a blank page is less than ideal
To be honest it is not as big of deal. I have a MacBook M1 with 8 GB of memory and my swap is regularly 20 GB but I don’t have any problems when actually working with the system. It’s handling the low memory situation very gracefully.
For browsing, office and some media it’s totally fine.
This thing can run iPad apps right? So at least that is an option when the desktop version is shite. This laptop is aimed at college and high school kids who just need a browser and take notes. It’s probably fine for that. I mean I’m using an iPhone 14 for the last 4 years and it works just fine. It’s a Chromebook alternative it’s not for power users.
Just look at how many crappy Chromebooks get sold to schools. The Neo is the perfect replacement for that market.
I just wished Apple would revert that shitty Liquid Ass UI. It made the operating system unusable.
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Completing the MacBook Neo experience is macOS Tahoe
Woah, this is new! A version of Mac OSX running on a iPhone/iPad CPU.
Not new, the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit had an A12. And of course the M-series is based on the A-series, so in a way they've always been iPhone/iPad chips.
They're clearly going for the same thing on all devices at some point. There's a lot of money to be made locking shit down and keeping your users hostage.
So a glorified tablet?
It’s a Chromebook alternative.
If its the full macOS, I don't think we can say that. That's what makes this so interesting as it is a first of its kind.
Now, if it performs like a dog compared to an equivalent spec M3 or M4 Macbook Air, then we probably could call it a glorified tablet.
I'm not mad about this, especially with Google pushing Gemini so hard on all their devices. I pulled up the Chromebook site to see their current offerings, and the prominent advertisement for Gemini is pretty disgusting after fresh news of another death.
Apple has been violating people's wallets for how long and they finally decide now is the time to make affordable macs?
Complaining aside, this is a darn good move. The timing is great, so they are likely to be very popular too, which is good for the future of the market. I hope.
They have had an ‘affordable’ Mac for a lot of their history. The Mac mini was a downright value for a while. They have had near $1000 laptops for most of my memory.
Sorry but near $1000 and near $600 are not even remotely comparable.
I got an HP EliteBook 840 G3 in 2017 for $565 with 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB storage. That was NEVER possible with any Apple laptop. Until now.
Or actually, it still isn't now! The RAM and storage on this are absolutely abysmal for a 2026 laptop. PCs have already vastly eclipsed this bullshit.
As an Apple devotee that pays your annual tithe to your exclusive, elitist blue bubble cult, you're welcome to crow about their smooth interface and nicer terminal and better privacy, but you will never, ever, ever beat PCs on price. Ever.
Apple is a monopoly. Monopolistic exploitation that maximizes profit by keeping prices high and sales low is literally introductory level macroeconomics. They have never made their products good value for money, and they never will.
just typical /r/technology apple hating.
It’s a big circle jerk. One day we suddenly hate Netflix. The next day Apple has always been terrible. Nobody cares about the complaints that are doing actual harm.
It's pretty. But I recently bought a Lenovo IdeaPad at Costco for less, with 16GB ram and 1TB SDD and am running Linux Mint on it, which I'm getting way more out of than any other Mac I've owned.
Without a doubt the Mac's screen is better than mine. But I feel like, all things considered, what I have can do more (and probably for longer). I'm happy to see something like this come along and take the wind out of Microslop's sails (and sales). At the same time, I feel like one is able to get far more value out of a less-costly machine. If one were going to switch OSes anyway, why not Linux? I guess they're banking on people already owning iPhones and therefore making this a more seamless transition or whatever...
Not usually an Apple guy, but it's hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)
This is the opposite of "own nothing and be happy" and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.
Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡
Asahi Linux on MacBook Neo? A man can dream...
I know you didn't mean it like that, but at $599 it is not a "$500 device". It is a $600 device. Which maybe isn't much worse but still quite a price difference.
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Honestly this seems absolutely incredible for the vast majority of people, a good MacBook at a decent price point. Benchmarks haven't come out yet but I heard its as good if not better than the M1. For the vast majority of people that's good enough, and even with the worse battery the real world battery life is gonna be amazing.
Also for those complaining about Linux support the main competition is Windows laptops running Snapdragon X Elite which should have somewhat similar performance and also doesn't support Linux. Hell the snapdragon x2 probably won't support Linux either. These laptops cost two times as much as this and usually with significantly worse build quality.
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