Segmentation is about product fit. I think it’s amazing and an amazing price and I expect and hope it will be very successful. Yet I feel like this is where the Air used to be, but the Air has crept more towards Pro.
I don’t dislike it! Just, confused how three models all fit together.
MacBook Neo: for students (some primary school, probably more geared to post-secondary) and people who want a lightweight (form factor, price, performance) laptop that still feels premium.
MacBook Air: people who frequently move around, have an actual need performance but in a highly portable form factor.
MacBook Pro: professionals who highly prefer performance over ergonomics, basically a portable PC, as they likely keep it plugged in more than not, and it spends more time on a desk than being used as a laptop.
Basically the Pro is like a PC that also happens to have a screen and a keyboard and foldable, the Air is their laptop that intends to be a laptop, and the Neo is their Air on a budget.
That's used RAM, it doesn't include things like caches.
Even with macOS deep into swap space during development (about 6-8GB of swap), macOS internals will happily keep 2GiB of memory reserved for window management and spotlight.
Apple's fast SSD is the only reason this laptop doesn't get bogged down under load, and with it being irreplaceable I wonder how long the disk last being used like this.
Obviously you're not going to use Apple's new netbook to do heavy development, but I don't expect the base model to remain usable for long with only 8GB. I don't exactly get the impression macOS has gotten lighter to run over the years.
I doubt anyone learning to program would need to subscribe to a remote dev machine just to run hello world type programs. From 2020-2023 I used an 8GB Macbook Air M1 to develop a lot of relatively heavy software, containers in the background too, and it wasn't a bad experience.
> It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.
May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.
Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?
> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
Yes it does. I was clarifying what the commenter was saying; not making his statement myself.
akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
correct, I thought he meant that the Neo does not support it, since his M1 Macbook does support Apple Intelligence but perhaps he's not aware of that or hasn't updated yet.
The only difference the laptop would make is slightly better cooling; although with the effort Apple puts into iPhone/iPad thermals, I doubt it'll be exceptionally better. At most, maybe a 2-4% increase in multicore, from being able to sustain burst frequencies longer before thermal throttling.
The laptop can also supply more power to the chip and might have better integrated data lanes. Throughput to cache might be faster too if the access to disk and RAM are faster, they could try a more aggressive CPU scaling governo, since the hardware can handle it. And the list goes on
Benchmarking is not only about raw processing power, we can easily prove this on chips that are not hardware bound, benchmarks can vary wildly between machines running Intels or AMDs. The hardware between a phone and a laptop are orders of magnitude different, even though the CPU is the same
Most of that doesn’t apply, the RAM is part of the SOC so the same as the phone, the SSD controller is part of the SOC so the same as the phone. This isn’t an old fashioned Intel system, this is a modern Apple Silicon system where everything is unified. The CPU, GPU, I/O and SSD controller are all in one SOC.
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