MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
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It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.
I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality.
Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.
Using a macbook air, even a recent one, before this Docker was definitely usable but noticably slower. Probably still worth it but a noticable tradeoff using it as a dev machine Vs a pro. Now that tradeoff has basically gone away.
My Thinkpads seem to only use the fan occasionally but then my work load is very light.
Happy to see Gerbil Scheme occupies 4GB RAM use on the Neo while building.
A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the workday).
All the i7/i9 Macbook pros that I used back in the day were obnoxiously load. Even when not under particularly heavy load.
But Apple's fanless machines do b) and then they just charge you the premium. There are a few fanless PC laptops that do the same thing, but most people don't want that, because they'd rather save a significant amount of money by getting the same performance out of a less expensive CPU with a fan.
I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Of course one could say that ~having~ using the fan is always optional anyway (like the older 13" macbook pro was mostly an air with a fan) and in these types of tasks you may barely hear it. But still I prefer the peace of not ever hearing a fan for my to-go laptop.
5W Phone CPUs of today are faster than 105W workstation CPUs of ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a matter of whether it can do real work, of course it can. The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise? That's the trade off, and most people pick saving time and money over silence, so that's what most vendors offer.
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it. They do make them. There are AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W and fanless laptops that have them. They're just not as popular when you give people the choice.
Yeah tbf I would probably consider just using my phone with my mobile usb-c monitor and bluetooth keyboard, if iOS was not so hostile to be used for actual work (and it does not seem simple in android either, though maybe I would be eventually able to make it work there). It would be very useful to have such a light setup on the go, as I do not necessarily need strong multicore performance all the time.
> AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W
I don't trust the TDP values companies publish because there is no standard way to define what TDP is or how it is measured. At best they are consistent in how they measure them within each brand, so you can at least compare different generations.
And in any case, the question is how competitive such a configuration is vs an ARM-based laptop, with much longer tradition in the low-power space. Could be my searching skills, but looking to get a laptop recently I did not find anything in a better spot in the efficiency/performance/price axes than an air. In particular I was unable to find AMD fanless laptops anyway.
Just as an example, during light work with my m5 mac (eg editting a text file, or writing this comment while a youtube video plays in the background and a bunch of light stuff run in the background too, screen low lit) I see 3-4W total system consumption reported by the OS, while a wattmeter shows 7-9W consumed. Part of it may be hardware, part of it software, but figuring out idle consumption is actually very important for making fanless work. A lot of work a cpu does in a normal day of mine is in bursts. Much of the time it is not necessarily doing much, and you need the thermal headroom for when it is actually needed. Last time I tried tinkering with a thinkpad and linux I did not get remotely as far. I would be happy if there get to be more options.
> The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise
If I encountered these instances often enough, then definitely a fanless laptop would not be appropriate for my use-cases. But I don't encounter them for what I want to use it for, and the next option with a fan is a larger, heavier and more expensive laptop, which I don't need. When I needed one for my work, I got one. I also have a 16" one that stays mostly at home because I cannot carry this weight around daily and I do stuff I cannot do with an air there.
Can confirm. I used an Air for a couple of years as a bit of an experiment at work. Ultimately we did go back to Pros, specifically discounted M3 Max ones, just because I did start hitting bottlenecks running Xcode + Android Studio + Firefox + Slack + Telegram + god knows what else, I did FINALLY find the thermal throttling at the end and we ended up going with more expensive machines. That was over a year ago and I purchased the Air I had been using for my wife, who is using it today. It meets and exceeds all her needs and she loves the thing.
Ultimately I did have to cave and get a bigger Mac for work, but that was more out of convenience than necessity. I could've made the Air work if I wanted to, but ultimately I wanted a larger screen and more displays.
They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.
But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.
Fanboys.
I can't stand Apple, but it's the truth. I used one sporadically to build my stuff for Mac. Going back to my Windows workstation after that always felt like travelling 15 years back in time. I recommended M1 Air to everyone whose workflow was compatible with a Mac. Most of the people who acted on that recommendation still use it and don't really think about upgrading.
(Honest question: I'm a longtime Mac user, I use Macs at work and I can tell you the correct DFU port for each model. But my home computer for the last 6 years has been an HP EliteBook with Ubuntu.)
My M1 air (I think 8GB?) had similar issues My M2 24gb was amazing - especially since it allowed dual monitors. I recently upgraded to the M4 32GB and it is my "do everything" computer and is absolutely awesome.
My personal experience with the m-series is that get as memory as possible. I do feel the M1 had issues based on the couple I owned.
EDIT: Even on 32GB my memory pressure is constantly in the yellow, but have not seen it go to red
More importantly you shouldn't be experiencing audio stalls, so complain in the feedback app if you do.
Low memory handling is better that what Linux does, we can all at least agree on that :)
Remote makes it way more useful, but bashing out well-formatted code on the road is trivial in Textastic, for instance.
Ones low down in the curve can be less steep of course.
OpenBSD 7.1, 2022-04-21 -- https://www.openbsd.org/71.html
R/AsahiLinux posting from around that time, only one comment -- https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/u8rb2o/openbsd_...
No temptation to open Youtube or other distractions.
Just an emacs session with code and notes. Forcing myself to read the man-pages first before googling anything.
Absolutely untrue. Your 2020 CV makes you completely unemployable in 2026.
I bought a 2019 Intel MBP and that was by far the worst laptop I've ever had. After just a year of use it was constantly overheating and running out of memory and disk space, barely able to open a terminal. It was so bad that I hesitated to buy the Apple silicon versions, but the good reviews convinced me and it has been going strong ever since.
Unfortunately the display in my M1 has failed and a replacement is £500-700. Very frustrating.
The memory limit is probably in my head now, it does pretty well as long as I'm not obsessing over activity monitor.
Yet considering the price I've paid for it like $0.5 per day and used it daily for 10-16 hours a day. Pretty much like phones I use except I use them much less and drop them often unlike a macbook.
So for me it did make sense to repair - it costs less than a new laptop, at least
If so this is like an option for like super skilled 1% of 1% of us who repair their devices.
I obviously checked repair videos and just disassembling top part almost impossible without destroying everything except for aluminum cover. Doing it properly on first try is well beyond my skills.
On top of it there is always risk of getting damaged part considering how super fragile it is.
People who say it’s impossible to use a 8gb MacBook are being obtuse
I don't get the hate on the base model / 8GB. If it's not enough for you, don't buy it.
You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around
It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
It’s not functionally useless, it supports a mouse, keyboard, printer or even an iPhone (non pro) perfectly fine at full speed. It also probably has enough speed for the average cheap terrible quality USB drive that the buyer of a $600 PC might have.
This is a Silicon Valley tech geek take not a real world one.
Yes, but it is uncommon for a $600 PC to have a beautiful screen, great trackpad, metal case, and top notch build quality. Also, the neo performs really really well.
I doubt there's many Neo buyers that really needed multiple Thunderbolt ports but decided to pick up the $600 entry level machine instead.
I used a macbook air all throughout school, I never once owned a dongle or even plugged the thing in to an external monitor. My requirements were something that could run photoshop/illustrator and chrome. If I ever transfered something over USB it was a 300kb docx file or something else that would have copied instantly at 2.0 speeds.
I think there's a huge problem of tech enthusiasts projecting their own requirements on to a device that is designed for a very different person, and then declaring it unfit for use. Apple prioritized things that actually matter to students like battery life, lightness, price, and hinges that don't snap after the first year. Rather than tons of super fast IO and 32gb ram.
It's not tons of super fast IO. It's pretty basic IO.
HDMI has been less common than usb c on laptops for quite a long time now.
If you want a separate display or super fast data transfers, more usb ports or more than 8MB of RAM buy one of the more expensive laptops.
I suspect the majority of $600 laptops live their entire functional life without anyone plugging anything other than a charger into them.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
For many cards their drive controller might advertise and support higher UHS speeds the Flash memory is likely the cheapest silicon that can just barely pass acceptance tests. When I encounter cards that fail sustained writes I've had good luck using pv's (pipe viewer) rate limit. I stick it between dd invocations. This has worked well when writing OS images for Raspberry Pis onto cheap microSD cards. They're fine in the Pis but would fail trying to write OS images.
The Apple Take a tour of [the] MacBook Neo page describes the ports by location only:
"The left port can support one external display and transfers data at USB 3 speeds (up to 10 GB/s). The right port transfers data at USB 2 speeds (up to 480 MB/s). You can charge your MacBook Neo and connect accessories using either port."
...and...
"Tip: As a best practice, charge your MacBook Neo using the right port (USB 2), which leaves the left port (USB 3) available for a display or for connecting accessories that can take advantage of the higher speeds."
Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications.
This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
Like using Chrome…
FWIW I've never really considered Chrome: First it looked ugly (weird UI and bad font rendering on Linux), then Google gave itself permission to be evil and then they limited ad blockers. They fixed the font rendering at some point.
Either way, I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
So probably very old accounts
I’ll add on that the change to Apple silicon was an amazing improvement, even in the same OS version. Maybe these anecdotes mean your experience in this regard is dated. (I say this as someone who came reluctantly to Mac, and looks forward to returning to Linux)
That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity?
Either way, I agree with them, FWIW.
> I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.
In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory thanks to a misbehaving app that was taking 70 GB out of 64 GB physical RAM. Overall, almost 120 GB were used, most of it was compressed and a lot of it was swapped. It had absolutely zero effect on how useable the computer was, there was no unusual lag. Either Windows or Linux would have shat the bed long before that point.
That's why you usually want a userspace early oom service. Most preconfigured distros ship one by default. Linux is mostly focused on embedded targets, not servers or workstations. There is not a notion of mobile-style app lifecycle either, not in freedesktop environments that is, but XDG portals are working on addressing that sometime in the near future.
> In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory
Windows does that at since like XP and likely earlier. BeOS did that before Darwin based macOS was a thing. On Linux, I don't know which distros do that, but you're definitely much more likely to see an app die rather than be asked whether to kill it. Freezing, once again, is a result of not having a [working] early oom service.
Linux is not that bad, but traditional freedesktop model kind of is.
It's still much better than mac OS.
Also those replies just look like bots, they were really fast and not providing any value, that's what I meant.
Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.
Real life?
My macbook neo with 8gb memory is faster and snappier than my shit-tier thinkpad X13G1 even when the X13 is not swapping at all.
I have 8c/16t Ryzen 7 along with 32GB ram over there, running GNU/Linux.
And somehow my macbook neo running a phone chip is much more usable (and battery lasts longer, and suspend actually works).
My first was underspec'ed and I used Resolve, Lightroom and Photoshop on top of the usual other stuff and it was quite impressive. The relationship of performance to RAM for earlier machines felt incomparable.
MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.
A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.
then i welcome it
Reality is, the iphone 16 sharing the same chipset is perfectly functional for many more years to come, running similar workloads (for the same target audience): mainly web browsing.
If the iphone 16 can have the usual 3-6 years of useful life, then the macbook neo has the same -- FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE.
And I wrote this because I did actually get the macbook neo and I'm using it daily for the intended purpose (mostly web browsing) and it's just fine.
(if anybody is wondering: i have a large machine with 16c/32t and 128gb memory that i use remotely via ssh to do the "heavy stuff")
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
That legislation is at least ten years late but apple is absolutely not the worst offender. There is the entire market of cheap android phones (and tablets) that barely last a year or two, and have essentially no guaranteed software upgrade. That should have triggered the legislation in the first place.
Overall this limitation has the potential to be much more visible on the Neo and Apple must make real sure that the OS stays lean because we all know average app devs don’t care about this.
My Mac is currently using 9GB of RAM including 6.5GB of cached files with Safari and a few other apps opened. They likely forgot to subtract the cache from the used memory.
As opposed to years of garbage Windows laptops at the $600 price point, which you seem to expect will remain viable longer than the Neo ... ?
If any legislation comes out of this, it will simply be because of Apple's high profile. They were content to let e-rot fill the shelves for years before the Neo.
See Asahi to verify[0]. I've been a donor since the week they opened a Patreon account.
Reminder that the possibility of installing a third-party operating system on Apple hardware is not a given. The same silicon is used in iPhones and iPads where you absolutely cannot install another operating system.
That's because a Linux kernel maintainer was a jerk to the project's lead, causing him to quit. It was a Rust argument, as I recall. Also, their genius graphics dev got hired into a large company, though I don't recall who.
I don't have a lot of insight into who is working on what. I only know of these two people because they were noteworthy enough for articles or HN links to make me aware. That said, a lack of developers isn't the same thing as constraints from Apple. If you get people who are motivated to continue building Asahi, it absolutely could continue to expand to newer chips.
You just run a CLI command and follow simple prompts.
On Windows PCs, you have to go buy a flash stick, download a tool for flashing it for your BIOS/UEFI (and maybe learn MBR vs GPT), wait while that happens, maybe learn about partitions and repartition your disk ahead of time, mess with your BIOS to change boot order, hope you don't wipe your data by selecting the wrong partition etc
(the fact that this is still the status quo is crazy. The nerds need to pay more attention to the funnel)
Also 8gb is good enough for the target market.
80 bucks!
Back to m1, just 8gb*. It sometimes hang for a second or two, but you know what. I'm happy with it.
That's when I have 38 tabs, two IDEs and try to grep some text on VS code.
Sublime is sublime.
Macos really excels at managing memory very well.
Qualcomm offers the Snapdragon X series, which in theory could be competitive on price and performance. But Qualcomm is in the business of selling chipsets, not building ecosystems, so once a Qualcomm chip is out the door, they tend to forget about it. This makes it harder for manufacturers to continue providing software updates that require an up-to-date BSP (board support package). This has historically reduced the long-term value of a Qualcomm-based phone (unsure about other products). It's why, for example, Google developed their Tensor chipset, which is Qualcomm-free, and which allows Google to offer a 7-year update guarantee on the latest Pixel phones.
Disclaimer: I've been out of this part of the industry for years, and I hope the dynamics have improved since then.
Google could (I think) do a lot of it in house like Apple does and make a killer product. They've done it before with the original Pixelbook. This time I was hoping they were going to essentially clone the Neo, put their software on it, and ship an inexpensive, high quality computer.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
Hopefully used Airs will come up for sale more frequently, as they remain a step up from the Neo.
Used M1 Airs are selling for roughly half the price of a new Neo.
Adjusted for inflation it pretty much the same.
My M1 Air display just failed on me after 5 and half years of daily 10-16 hours of use. Considered how non repairable some parts in MacBooks are I'd rather recommend people buy more expensive new one. E.g you can find very good offers on new M2 M3 etc.
I did well in business, but the family joke is that I’d be a billionaire if I could have monetized her.
I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying.
But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace.
The cats out the bag though. What can we do?
Shame because they clearly put a fair bit of work into it.
I'm pretty sure it's a "when", not "if".
Also, the Neo is just cheap enough that it's a product I'd consider buying that I don't need. I'm not in the market for a new laptop and certainly not an Air. So I'm a demographic considering this product that is not going to cannibalize their existing sales. There's gotta be at least a dozen people like me!
And just give even a metal plate on top of Neo SoC would have increased its thermal capacity.
That said, my sister this morning asked if she should buy a Macbook Neo. I pointed her to a refurb M2 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM for the same price. I feel like that's the right call? Slower single-core performance but better multi-core and I think for 90% of normal people use cases the RAM is the limit before the CPU.
Are others making the same calculation?
The reality is nobody is noticing differences between the M1 and anything afterwards, really - those that do will know enough to pick their laptop.
My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.
I wish once you bought an Apple computer it was truly yours for as long as you wanted it instead of it being dictated by Apple.
Still Great computers though.
As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely, although with a different set of software to what you got the laptop with. 2026 is the year of the Linux Desktop!1! (in all seriousness though, it is actually quite good by now).
They didn't say that. In fact they said the total opposite
> As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely
Somewhat true for Intel
Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
> After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser.
But I don't think the lines were particularly far apart.
> Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
M1 was six years ago, M2 was four, both within the seven years OP was talking about.
You can run Linux inside a VM on any Apple Silicon Mac already, even if there is no progress on native Linux on Apple Silicon.
Thinking I’ll try and install Linux on it at some point.
software? macos is a disaster after disaster, worse each year. currently deferring upgrade to tahoe for as long as corporate IT lets me.
People complain about the strangest things too, like the corners of windows. I am resizing a hundred times a day and it works fine.
The OS however I have used for 23 years. I know it quite well and it's robust.
While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client, I've ended up using the Neo more than any of my other machines.
My Windows and Fedora machines have 2-4x the RAM but the Neo is just as responsive when juggling 20 Firefox tabs and a few other apps (mostly electron eg. Slack).
I plan on getting one for this use case. I do most dev work on servers via either something like VSCode remote or just through Vim. Tailscale and <pick your own VNC type tool> make it easy to use my Mac Mini from anywhere. I can get the Neo on an educational discount, making it $500 and a pretty easy choice.
A while back I went into an Apple Store and opened up as many huge applications (Logic Pro, etc.) and like 50 browser tabs and the Neo still worked fine. I think it will be a good thin client.
Popping open Activity Monitor, when I have a lot open my swapfile regularly hits 6GB and memory pressure is yellow, but I'd have no idea otherwise.
Not to say the rumoured 12GB in the next Neo wouldn't be better, but for the price you can't go wrong.
The uni-body pre force-touch trackpads clicked on a hinge from the top and you would need to press much harder in that area.
Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed.
Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?
You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app). You don't even need to memorize them.
When I first switched to Mac after using Ubuntu for 4 years before that, I didn't expect this level of customization. It's misunderstood because Apple doesn't advertise this.
That's actually my other complaint. "Fixing" problems with the OS with mystery apps.
Connected an external mouse. Mouse wheel is inverted...weird? Google it. Yeah you can toggle it. Thank goodness. Apple knew people use mice. Oh but that inverts the trackpad too. WHAT? You're joking. I need to pick between a sane trackpad and sane mouse? I own both and need both to work to work in a not upside down manner.
Climb onto an AI and ask it what to do because this is insanity like surely not this can't be how it is. LLM goes yeah no that's just macos you need to install a mystery app to unfuck it.
Don't get me wrong my overall experience is positive and there has been the expected learning curve which is fine ofc, but also a fair bit of "what the actual F how are people OK with this".
As an outsider it boggles my mind that apple crowd doesn't notice how all over the place macos shortcuts are.
Command Q quits the currently active application.
Command W closes the current window without quitting the active application.
Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
>Command W closes the current window
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
That's 3 different apps made by apple and preinstalled by apple...three different behaviours
>standard behavior
It isn't and its a tribute to human adaptability to chaos that mac crowd thinks this is standardization
You can’t quit finder - it’s a fundamental part of the hi that always has to run.
> Safari
Multiple tabs in a window are intended to be treated the same as multiple windows. This has been the case since macOS made tabbed interface components a standard part of the OS.
> Open Apps
What do you mean? Which apps?
That's what google told me after I set out to discover what rules are behind the inconsistency. The solution to inconsistent shortcuts is apparently memorizing which parts of the software that is PREINSTALLED is considered part of the OS and which parts are not.
>Which apps?
Not apps small a...Apps big A...the thing apple macs ship with on the dock and literally entitled "Apps". That baked into the default install window just behaves differently from both finder style built in OS things and Safari also built in but different built in not part of OS. Why? I don't fuckin know. Neither Q nor W make it go away. OK so hit esc. Does that make the window go away? It turns it into a smaller window that now performs a different function?!?!? Spotlight. OK so now i need to memorize what is an preinstalled OS window, preinstalled not os window, preinstalled not os window not app window but some sort of launcher I guess?
So a new user is basically guessing which of THREE keys combos may or may not make the window go away or possible do nothing or do something else entirely (close tab).
I feel like I'm being gaslight by all the hn users telling me yeah that makes sense
That's a fancy spotlight search modal, not an application or window...
> Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window.
No it doesn't, it closes the window. Look at your dock - minimized windows show up on the other side of the | divider with a mini representation of their contents.
> I feel like I'm being gaslight by all the hn users telling me yeah that makes sense
It feels more like you're willfully railing against the way macOS is because you're not used to it. If you remove your preconceptions about how things should be (and keep in mind that macOS defined most of the things we're talking about 30+ years ago, so it's not like there was a standard to follow), it really does make sense. CMD-W closes the current doc/tab/window, CMD-Q quits the application.
The only time that doesn't work is when the application writer intentionally breaks it (and the macOS community typically rages about that - looking at you chrome!), or you're not dealing with a normal application/app/program (ie you can't close a system prompt with a command targeted at applications).
@screenshot
Mac has always been kind of amazing for the granular options you get to take screenshots out of the box.
• Command - Shift - 3 | Takes a fullscreen pic of the entire display. Loads a preview in the bottom right corner. Click to expand, and from there edit, share, save, delete, etc.
• Command - Shift - 4 | Turns your mouse cursor into a crosshair. Drag to create a rectangular window. Takes a capture of the contents when done. Escape or right-click to cancel. Preview loads the same as above.
• Command - Shift - 5 | Brings up a rectangular section that can be moved around and resized.
But any shortcut can be remapped:
Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Screenshots
Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
That's 3 different apps made by apple and preinstalled by apple...three different behaviours
It is true that Finder is always running, you can’t quit it or kill it.
For "document-based" apps (think almost anything where you open multiple files), the application can stay running even if there are no open windows. So you have both cmd+q and cmd+w available to you.
You can probably come up with some apps that don't cleanly fit these two, but that is what Apple has.
As to screen shot commands, it is a three-key chord because it is system-wide, and they did not want to step on any toes that the apps might have. And there are a few versions: shift-command-3 takes the entire screen shift-command-4 takes either a window or a section (press space bar to switch between them) shift-command-5 opens a more menu-based system that includes a timer
Why 3, 4, and 5 (and not 1 or 2)... I don't know. Maybe there was something in those spots at some point.
This kept my decades of muscle memory almost intact since I'm so used to Control being the primary modifier in Linux and Windows. And, weirdly enough, it helped me learn the new MacOS shortcuts since the patterns were now centered on Control instead of the Command key.
You can make the switch without having to use 3rd party software. The Keyboard section of Settings will let you adjust the modifier keys on a per keyboard basis. With different settings for internal, external, etc. if you wish. And it will let you remap Caps Lock if you prefer that to be something else.
IMO developers should be forced to run on such computers, such that they would care a little bit about optimisation.
Love this
Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
It is noticeably faster, but Chrome is the new Internet Explorer in more ways than one, and many web pages don't work in WebKit browsers.
I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.
That's exactly the opposite of my perception—for instance, it's been used to render help/support databases on my Mac for at least twenty years.
But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.
On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.
The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...
I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.
I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day.
For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.
That way the marketing can be: double the memory for the same price. Apple has done this again and again, the more time people are spending talking about one single deficiency in your product, the less time they are spending on any other product. Then you solve that single issue in the next cycle.
When it's over, Neo will be long obsolete.
All the current fabs are trying to balance current production with building next gen scaled up facilities. Can’t have both.
Why is Rust Analyzer running and taking 2GB? I don't even write in Rust. Each Electron app takes 300-400MB and for some reason Ghostty takes 400 MB... ok I take it back, I couldn't use 8GB.
I feel like I end up stumbling on the charging cable at least one or two times. Plus, I wouldn't be able to re-use the old Macbook charger I have :(
The M-series all have chargers with a USB-C socket on them that the cable is plugged in to, so you would have been able to use the PSU from any M-series MacBook - even if they were the models prior to magsafe being re-introduced.
The magsafe in the M-series is not the same as magsafe 1 or 2, so they are not compatible and you would have needed to buy an adapter (and I have no idea if Apple has even made a first party version of this.) So you'd need a new adapter.
On the other hand, any USB-C charger that delivers the right voltage will charge the Neo.
The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.
Apple fumbled the ball here. They should have called it the "M4 Mini", and this device the "MacBook mini".
Also, OP: Have you considered doing this professionally? I'd read this as the next AnandTech.
> Could one actually work like this, typing and everything? After my “heart-rate discovery” I decided I had to try it. I thought I’d have to build something myself, but actually one can just buy “walking desks”, and so I did. And after minor modifications, I discovered that I could walk and type perfectly well with it, even for a couple of hours. I was embarrassed I hadn’t figured out such a simple solution 20 years ago. But starting last fall—whenever the weather’s been good—I’ve tried to spend a couple of hours of each day walking outside like this
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-workin...
Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.
It take longer than 60 seconds, but the same happens with the MacBook Air. Once heat soaked, performance drops off a cliff.
[Laughs]
“Oh my Claude, who touched settings.json? Alright…Who touched my LLM!?”
Does this mean the Neo/Air aren't useful for lightweight gaming at all? Lightweight as in indie-ish games, not as in session length.
Anecdata: the first x-com reboot was nicer on my laptop battery at the time than random indies at the same time. Also it definitely had way more poligons.
> tl;dw Copper shim mod (using laptop bottom as heatsink) leads to 2x performance over stock.
I love the Neo as much as any other enthusiast, so yes, the subject matter is subjectively “cool”.
But this “article” is indigestible. Not only it regurgitates the same thing over and over (and it has links to other articles on the same page where they already did the same), on top of that the writing style, content, intentionality does not exist in the slightest. I feel like having been offered chocolate, but having received artificial cocoa flavored petrochemicals.
We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?
I haven't done a brand new install in a few years, but it's possible to run macos (not ios) without an account. You can't use the store, but it doesn't try to sell you things all the time either. Siri can be disabled. I don't think you can know how much it leaks and where.
You can install real software pretty much freely, but some of it may pop up with a dialog saying it was downloaded from the internet (OMG!) or that it doesn't pass a signature check. First one is a warning, the second disables the program. There's a workaround. That'll work as long as it works.
Brew still exists and is still terrible, but seems to still be the most common way and has a ton of things and updates pretty frequently. I think there's also Nix and some other things but I don't know how common "mac" software is on those.
And you can run VM's with pretty full real environments if you like. Also the OS itself has come a long way since the first os X releases. Nearly usable apart from the GUI stuff. Installing a real OS instead only works on M1/M2 and there's no sign of things getting better.
M chips and Retina screens (apart from the old 5k weirdo) are pretty damn nice.
Hate to defend Apple here, but there are so many more garbage laptops out there for the same price tag that can as well just go directly into landfill. Apple at least have the volume to make sure Mac software actually works on said 8GB.
If Apple manage to decrease market share of other e-waste manufacturers it's good on me. At least these laptops will live 5-7 years as we browser machines.
Problem with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is not performance, but horrific build quality, displays, webcams, audio and keyboards. This is something Apple have solved. Also there is no Windows which solves a lot of problems.
I was doing gamedev for years on M1 Air with 16GB / 256GB and some other software engineering too FFS. Surely non-power-users can live with less.
I have a more powerful Mac for "serious" development work, so I figured the Neo would practical to buy for travel purposes. Honestly, there is something really reassuring about traveling/running around town with a $499.99 + tax laptop. I do not treat it poorly, but if something spills on it, I drop it, etc. stomaching the damage is much easier than a $2.5k MBP.
Source: apple store staff
I literally went to an Apple Store the other day after every influencer released their video on yt claiming that it's a great computer, you just have to install the pad in less than 3 minutes and it will work like a charm...
So I asked the salesperson about that and they told I'm not allowed to tamper with the device and it will void the warranty.