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.
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This is as believable as “air pods are for rich people”
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.
Macs don’t have copilot so that’s like 4GB saved right there
Ha ha ha. True!
Can it be debloated? I might do that for my parents home PC.
Idk about copilot, this is my recommended debloat tool
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 8GB 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.
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.
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?
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
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! :'(
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…
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?
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.
This is the computing equivalent to hoarding.
When I have too many tabs, I press that blue button of the “one tab” extension.
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.
I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.
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. At least they’re not trying to charge $1k+ for this one.
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?
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.
I typically have two tabs of the same website open and need to know which tab belongs to which page. Just having the icon looks so sloppy to me and I always see coworkers cycle through their 4,000 tabs to get to anything.
A handful of apps and a few browser tabs will do it. I can go through twice that fairly frequently.
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
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.
8GB wouldn’t be one site, but between the OS & a couple of bloated sites 8GB is easy to hit.
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.
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
the OS
Windows maybe? I’ve been using macOS (UNIX), FreeBSD (UNIX) and Linux for the past 20+ years.
I’m sat in front of my work computer(OSX) and may personal laptop(Linux).
Both are using well over 8GB just for the browsers.
On OSX vscode is using an additional 4GB and the windowserver east up 1GB too
On Linux/KDE my window manager is much lighter but for some reason my akonadi is using 2GB on my contacts resource
Sure you can technically run Linux on much less memory but a modern browser, hitting modern websites will use up 8GB pretty quickly.
They said websites, not website
And that’s why we have adblockers
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.
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.
Been enough for me.
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?
I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.
What?
I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn’t been my experience at all
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but that’s a bad excuse. 16 GB is a standard even in low end nowadays.
I do agree that 8GB is low. But it does fair better on Macs than Windows. This reviewer is editing his 4k videos on one. https://youtu.be/pCRtNeAP1dQ
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.
No I keep seeing this “caches a lot” thing keeps getting repeated. Memory break downs already accounts for that. They shows the different break downs of ram usage. In use vs cached.
This is 6gb of inuse memory while the laptop is chilling. Cached memory is typically like 80% of whatever the ram is on your device. If you hit that 8gb your app is getting killed before the kernel kills a system process.
Okay I don’t think you’ve actually used MacOS lol
Ive got a stack of them right next to me. I work on them regularly. I know older versions of macOS are lean but Tahoe and Seqouia are noticeably heavier. Its not a problem because the devices running them have 16gb+ of ram. But I’m worried 8gb will impose contains on usage. I know it’ll do basic stuff like run a browser but i think people are overestimating how capable this device will be.
Okay, fair, I haven’t used Tahoe or Sequoia myself. But I think we’ll see how these fare when people actually start using them. I’m very much not the target audience, I’m looking at the M5 or M5 Pro models myself.
That’s not true at all.
I constantly have Illustrator, Photoshop, Sibelius, Scrivener, and about 100 browser tabs open on my 10 year old MacBook with 8gb of RAM without issue.
What version or macOS?
Sequoia.
That is pretty surprising to me. I noticed a significant bump in resource requirements for Sequoia. I’ve got a stack of macs next to me I’ll see if I can find one still running sequoia and reassess my opinion.
Oh, if it matters, I also run Memory Clean 2 to monitor RAM usage and do Extreme Clean from time to time.
I forgot about this because it’s basically muscle memory at this point, but maybe this is making a difference?
As of right now with just Sibelius, Scrivener, and about 40 browser tabs (no Adobe), I have 2.01 GB free.
e: I downvoted my original comment since it’s now occurred to me that this app may be why my machine isn’t struggling.
Yeah, I’m not sure about Tahoe since my machine is too old so it won’t let me upgrade, but at least Sequoia has been fine with 8GB.
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.
That’s a big difference but not all. The sub-$1000 ultrabook sector has SO MUCH garbage, like Intel Celerons that stutter when you scroll down a web page designed in 2022+. Manufacturers are happy because they can sell rubbish and uncle John with no idea about computers will say “I want a laptop with 1 TB so it’s faster, and it must have free office 365 and an antivirus”…
So when someone puts a phone processor in a laptop and builds a chassis that isn’t a $5 extruded plastic shell, they panic because it still manages to be better in both benchmarks and real world use despite the paltry amount of RAM.
Exactly. They should start installing Linux Mint and call it a day.
Fuck Microsoft.
Indeed. PC manufacturers should just invest in the Linux ecosystem.
What, like Asus did back in 2007?
Unfortunately, these particular devices were kinda shit lol
Eh, I gather the Linux based ones were actually pretty cool. But 99% of netbooks ended up being underpowered mini laptops running XP, so were doomed to failure.
EEEs were amazing! Not because of their performance or specs, but because they were a fully working compute for dirt cheap at only $199! Remember, these were released 5 years before the first Raspberry Pi. The original model of EEE with its 7" screen 512MB RAM and 4GB of slow SSD storage were plenty of compute for small tasks or portable applications. The cheapest fully functional laptop you could buy at retail those days would still cost you $800-$900 for a pretty horrible machine.
Linux was part of the secret sauce that made them successful because it meant they didn’t have to pay for an OEM Windows XP license.
yet
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.
yea, it would certainly have been a long-term investment.
Also, an HP or Dell Linux distro would be an unholy abomination. I can only imagine what they’d ship.
I figured they would just rebrand some big stable distro
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.
Of all the PC manufacturers, Apple are the ones who are most likely to sweep away legacy standards.
Remember when they ditched DVD drives altogether, and the tech world threw a shit fit. When was the last time you saw a new laptop with a disc drive?
They did the same with the 30 pin connector. USB-A as well.
Of course, they can get away with it because they can also dictate which machines get which OS updates, so can entirely block devices that don’t have hardware they no longer want to support.
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
Like any other manufacturer, Apple marks up the devices in their store. Don’t believe me? Go price out chargers on Dell or HP’s website and see how overpriced those are.
When’s the last time you bought a laptop from any other manufacturer and had to specifically opt in to buying the charger
A year from now when Dell starts doing it on their home line of laptops.
The law is there solely to ensure the customer always has the option to buy the product without a charger, in order to fight waste. It doesn’t restrict manufacturers from offering the product including charger as well.
For consumers it doesn’t matter. Capitalism is capitalism. If the price of the laptop + charger is not attractive, consumers can buy a competing product. Arguably buying an Apple on a budget is a controversial choice anyway, as the ecosystem costs (software, cloud services, accessories) are generally higher compared to other OS, which have an open hardware architecture, less licensing costs and more competititon.
one caveat: the us price is without vat
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.
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.
He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
Given the price of RAM, you’d need to sell a kidney to upgrade it in a Windows laptop these days, so that’s not much of a difference, although 8MB is a little skimpy, I’ll give him that one.
[…] although 8MB is a little skimpy
Have we already downgraded to this???
/s, and sorry for being pedantic
No one needs more than 640k
My phone has more RAM than that. I can’t imagine running a computer with that little memory considering how poorly optimized software tends to be at this point.
I’m not sure what the overhead for Mac OS is, but that has to be basically rock bottom to be even considered functional unless you’re running one of the lighter Linux builds.
I mean, at its heart, Mac OS is a heavily re-tooled fork of the BSD platform, so it’s not inconceivable that it’s light enough to run on 8G. I doubt it would run well on 8G, but it could do it.
My M1 MacBook Air idles at 1.03GB, my XPS 13 running Gnome on Vanilla OS idles at 2.4GB
GNOME on immutable distros = very bloated. Try antiX instead, as it uses a lighter DE.
I’m not looking for anything lighter
Even a bloated GNOME runs with much less ram than Windows
I’d be curious to see what Gnome looks like on Debian stable or the like
It runs fine, unless you load up on chrome tabs, or try to run pro apps. Itdoes basic photo editing and admin apps and phone holiday video editing just fine for average users. I have a lot of clients with 8GB M1 machines.
I know it was lighter than windows the last time I used Mac, but that has been quite a few years now. Hopefully it is a decent machine. Computing just keeps getting more expensive, so having more budget options is definitely good as long as they are reasonably functional.
MacOS’ kernel is derived from Mach, though with with some BSD code, and is Apple’s own work since then. Its API is compatible with FreeBSD, but it’s not FreeBSD. And the FreeBSD userland tools don’t have effect on systemwide memory management.
I got a free, going to be recycled, dell with 8gb of ram from work. I threw in an nvme and installed Linux. It’s not the lightest Linux install, but it is Arch, so definitely on the lighter side. I idle at under 1gb and under normal use don’t break 2. I do some coding which uses more but nothing super crazy. MacOS probably uses a little more ram, but it’s not Windows. I’d wager than the vast majority of people don’t come close to using all of that RAM, and power users are going to get hardware for the task, and this isn’t it.
Under 1GB on a modern build is pretty light. I run CachyOS and I’m pretty sure I idle at significantly more than that. Though I honestly haven’t checked, and don’t really want to close everything out to find out haha. I do know I’m currently using more than 8GB and not doing anything super heavy, but I do have multiple programs running. And multitasking is always going to be a killer for a system with low RAM limits. There is a reason my laptop has 32 and my desktop has 64.
I did just check and I was wrong. I idle at 1.6GB. I may have been thinking of a single app I had open when I looked the other day. I did just open Firefox and it took about a gig. Opening about 20 tabs and navigating to different sites did Bum it up to about 5gb. So yea, 8 is on the lower end, but it’s usable and I’d bet most people would be fine. Throw in things like swap and high speed storage, I feel most people wouldn’t notice. Definitely not enough for high usage though.
I miss when 4gb was good enough.
I run CachyOS with Gnome and it idles at just under 2GB
I have a 2013 MBP that shipped with 8GB, the minimum amount they came with.
Of course it also is upgradable. Which I did, to 16GB. A decade ago.
My 2013 MBP is still at 8GB. With memory compression, I rarely run into issues unless I’m doing VMs/Docker or something really heavy.
Just to play devil’s advocate: a smartphone is definitely a computer and has no trouble competing with older laptop CPUs in benchmarks. I see this as a difference without a distinction beyond form factor.
8GB is 💯 barely serviceable. I see this is a product for a casual user only, with excellent build quality. I don’t think it ages well when pushed.
I mean… of course it’s for the causal users what kind of observation is that?
What appears to be common sense to you is hardly common sense to the consumer. I choose to be more inclusive thinking of a person who might not necessarily know what 8 GB means. That’s a ton of Apple’s customers.
What the fuck are you doing on a phone that you need 8 GIGABYTES of RAM? Damn son!
It’s great for multitasking. I’ve seen phones boot and already consume 3-4GB of RAM. Alas, that’s how much some of this software uses now, depending on your needs.
or what amounts to its RAM
You can criticize the amount of RAM, but it’s still RAM. Clown.
They’re hinting at the fact that those 8GB are shared between the CPU and GPU. So it’s not dedicated, which you’d expect if someone said “RAM.”
Don’t most integrated graphics setups use system RAM for graphics?
RAM is RAM. If you take issue with it being unified say so, but it’s still RAM.
He sounds like he’s grasping.
The neo is going to eat his lunch, and he knows it.
If you take issue with it being unified say so, but it’s still RAM.
He did say so. 8GB unified when a Linux laptop has 8GB of ram and an Nvidia 5050 with 8 GB of VRAM is 16GB of Ram despite not being marketed as a 16 GB laptop.
Sounds more like you’re looking for reasons to hate on the article.
I take issue Hsus statement, but not the article.
This model has absolutely short-circuited the brains of the ardent Apple haters, perhaps including yourself, and I’m here for it.
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?
Thinkpad P1 Gen 7 and the upcoming T14 Gen 7. The latter got 10/10 in repairability from iFixit, and the T lineup has always been great at longevity, repairability, and drive-over-it-with-a-tractor-or-pour-water-on-the-keyboard-survivability. I’m suspecting most upcoming Thinkpads will have it. Some Thinkbooks do as well, but I don’t trust any Lenovo without a Thinkpad name on it, and not even all of those.
Dell Pro Max lineup as well.
They’re only just starting to come out. Within the next few years I imagine most manufacturers will have offerings with LPCAMM.
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.
He knows his market. As others have mentioned, most casual users don’t need or care about that. Personal computing has become much more niche.
Lemmings that focus on the RAM spec are telling on themselves. 256gb storage is the real travesty here.
Is it, though?
If you like to actually do your computing locally, it sucks. If you’re using it for web browsing, the specs are great.
I do all my computing locally.
I doubt I have a system using more than 256GB on a system disk. There’s 14 running in the house.
You are a unicorn man doing everything locally is so uncommon these days it’s a small percentage.
OK not EVERYTHING.
It is not a lot, but it is not that hard to extend storage. For example with an external SSD/HDD or a NAS.
Even if tethering any portable device to an external drive wasn’t wildly inconvenient, you would be giving up your only usb port on this thing
NAS over Tailscale is remarkably workable for non performance oriented workloads.
Still doable, but you can’t have external RAM. Hence, lack of RAM is a bigger issue.
More than 8GB of RAM is unnecessary, and getting around that limitation does not require any action by the user.
Setting up a NAS + tailscale solution is doable but not worth the hassle for whatever niche use-case that would resolve.
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.
I’m suspicious.
I’m seeing social media FLOODED with Neo content. Definitely not organic.
Tinfoil hat aside, that could also be due to how disruptive it is in the tech world.
Maybe it’s just a literal bomb to everyone involved in decision making and now making the waves in the news.It could be.
But I don’t see any other PC/laptop reviews by this author. He writes mostly about cybersecurity. And his Neo articles seem a bit…biased. Compare to his other articles, which are well-researched. Example:
https://www.csoonline.com/article/563017/wannacry-explained-a-perfect-ransomware-storm.html
My guess is either someone is posting articles in his name, or he’s taking a free Neo in return for a positive review.
Maybe just a bit of both.
My guess is either someone is posting articles in his name, or he’s taking a free Neo in return for a positive review.
And a bit of both for that as well.
It’s also quite unexpected, given that it’s Apple, and they’ve traditionally made more expensive machines, with worse hardware. In my country, for example, it is nearly unheard of for a new Apple computer to cost less than four digits/US$800+.
Particularly at a time when it’s more typical to hear of new computer prices going up instead, due to shortages.
I was very surprised to hear how reasonable (to some degree lol) the iPhone and macbook was priced.
Very hard to deny that they are very interestingly priced.
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.
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).
Macbook build construction (ever since they’ve moved off the plastic entry level Macbook to all aluminum for all their models) is really solid but not necessarily rugged. The hinges and ports seem to hold up better than a lot of other devices from HP and Dell or whoever, but some models are more susceptible to drops, dust/sand, moisture, etc., than the solid construction would lead you to believe.
So it depends on use case. I think they hold up very well to normal indoor use, for many years, but might not be the ideal device for clumsier people or those who might be routinely using it outdoors or in more rugged environments.
I know. The hinges are what naturally wears in all kinds of hands with active use. So that’s what matters IMHO. You open and close them, regularly. You don’t regularly strain that plastic while cleaning it, and you don’t regularly drop the thing or press against it. But opening and closing the lid is normal.
Also, yes, ports, which is why MagSafe is actually a cool technology, both less wear and more certain electrical contact. Anyway, I don’t own anything with MagSafe.
Really rugged is about ThinkPads and really-really rugged special laptops the size of a few bricks.
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
the recent gen mac mini and the iphone “e” range was probably a bit of a warning that they were going to push their entry level equipment a bit harder… I think it’s good for the industry to have some actual competition and disruption in what used to be the mid-range price brackets.
bring back the decently made, adequately specced mid range, we’ve lost it somewhere along the line.
I know their plan is just to get more people into their ecosystem, people will buy this laptop, or have it given to them buy a school or even a business, then they’re stuck in the apple ecosystem and will be more likely to upgrade to their higher end models, buy their phones, cloud services etc.
wicked smart.
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.
Thing is, from Apple’s perspective they don’t really need users to plug anything in to a MacBook - particularly where this one is concerned.
MacBook Neo exists as an entry-level device to hook new computer users into their services. You don’t need an external hard drive, because for just £5 a month you can access iCloud Storage. You don’t need to connect a music player, because for just £15 a month you can have Apple Music. You don’t need to sync a Kobo, because you can read Apple Books on your iPad or iPhone. And so on.
They made the same argument with the 2015 MacBook. It only had one USB-C as a nod to the fact that it needed to be charged somehow.
Personally I don’t like that view, but I’m not the target for this laptop.
For a teenager whose primary use case is to complete their school work on this, that’s entirely valid. And for the employee who’s issued a low-cost computer so they can work from home.
If the user needs more/better IO, then they can spend more to get more. But why equip an entry-level computer with four Thunderbolt 5 ports that will never be used? And why go to the trouble and expense of retrofitting an A18 SOC to provide those TB ports?
“We can’t believe Apple aren’t fucking consumers harder! Apple?! have been fucking everyone so hard, for so long and people have just been bending over and taking it, and so we’re very shocked to see them decide not to go maximum fuck-you with this product”
Maybe Asus should invest more into linux and start shipping it on their laptops by default? Maybe add an improved software compatibility layer for windows apps to get more people in?
Its still a Mac
Exactly which means superior build quality and a great experience. Parents will be snapping these up in the fall for back to school.
Lol
I hope the kool aid tastes good at least
Foxconn has never been known for quality.
Exploiting child labor? Sure.
Inhumane long hours? Absolutely!
Build quality? Hahahaha. Hahaha. What a tool you are.
Knowing apple, at that price point, performance is going to suuuuuck.
See for yourself:
Lawl you don’t know anything about Apple and the performance kicks the ass of similarly priced Windows machines. Keep spreading BS tho, I’m sure it makes you feel smug
