What we cover: Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo is here with absolutely wild TikTok marketing (and a weirdly adorable Finder mascot) iPhone Fold 3D designs leaked—Apple’s going full origami on us Apple Music transparency tags now ID AI-generated tracks (so you know what’s real) A serious toolkit for hacking iPhones surfaced—and yeah, it might be government-connected Apple’s blocking ByteDance apps left and right
Christina Warren cuts right to the chase on some of my issues with the MacBook Neo. The limitations to me are pretty telling when you consider viability for multiple years.
I feel like you can find equivalent or better Windows laptops at a similar price point (educational discount aside), and when you factor in 2 UCB-C ports (one running slower than the other), a hard limit on RAM, substandard storage speeds, and processor that will technically let you run power apps but make you regret ever trying - then this because a less obvious choice.
For me personally, if the base price was the educational price ($499 + tax instead of $599 + tax) then it would be a no-brainer. It just seems like the compromises Apple made to reach this price point make this a harder sell, and makes retention (whether they return it or resell it) unclear. But that’s me.
EDIT: Andy makes some really good points too on the ease of buying a Neo vs. having to bargain-shop and hunt for Windows laptops at the price point. I don’t know that this counters my points, but it absolutely is a valid consideration.
Gruber’s review is interesting he’s been running for about a week exclusively on his 512GB + Touch ID MacBook Neo, and he’s quite surprised with the performance. MKBHD did some 4K editing just fine (video review here). His grades for various uses:
K-12: A+, College: A, Writers: A+, Photographers: B- (need a P3-capable display), Coders: B,
Editors: C+ (memory and I/O too slow for workflows), Podcast: B+, Gamers: D+, Grandma: A.
That is a whole bunch of passing grades – probably more than you’d expect.
MKBHD thinks the next version will have an A19 Pro chip, 12GB memory, and an ambient light sensor. Grades should improve with a refreshed version. We always forget that the first version of a new Apple product is still a moving target. The use of the A19 Pro chip in the Studio Display XDR was interesting: those chips are simultaneously best-in-class and a commodity! I bet they thought about using the A19 Pro in the 2G Mac Neo before it was ever announced.
The problem with reviewing the higher-end model is that it now skews the curve. You can’t judge the low-end Neo based on the high-end Neo.
Gruber’s Neo is $699 + tax, which makes it easier to find equivalent Windows devices. For example, I found a Snapdragon-based HP Omnibook 5 16” display 2K laptop with 1 TB storage and 16 RAM for $729. And all I did was a search for Windows laptops for under $700.
If you have to be in the Apple ecosystem, then this is a low-end device that will work. And I get that the Apple reviewers have been forgiving of it. But I, for example, was looking at possibly getting one of these as a way to affordably get in the Mac ecosystem. Except I can’t justify $599 for the compromises this makes when I can get a Windows laptop that does more for approximately the same price point. And If I have to the next-higher Neo to get a good experience, then the cost becomes even harder to justify.
Then you should get a PC.
One thing people gloss over when comparing is what you get beyond the actual hardware. You can attend multiple trainings at your local Apple store. You get very nice telephone and online support. You get an Apple ID with a variety of services in its free tier. The included Mac office apps are quite functional and cross-compatible with MS Office. There’s more cohesiveness in the entire Apple product. Metal runs everywhere from the iPhone to the biggest Mac Studio.
Maybe those Snapdragon PCs have better packaging than the hardware manufacturers delivered years ago. I recall the days when PCs were loaded to the gills with absolute junk. From the YT channels I frequent, people are really unhappy with MS Windows as a platform. There are massive shifts to Linux derivatives. MacOS Tahoe was an ugly release for Apple, but I have faith that the next year or two will be much better in Apple-land.
You are not the target demographic for the Neo. Neither am I. You’ll do just fine without the Neo, and the Neo will do just fine without you.
Well yeah - I mean, you could say that about anything. That doesn’t mean my observations are invalid. I even said I was interested in getting a Neo until I saw the specs and the price.
Look - if all we want here is praise, then fine. I don’t think my points are unreasonable, but if they don’t resonate with you - that’s okay.
Back in 2021 when I picked up a base M1, with the Mail app open, Safari playing something in YouTube with another tab for maybe Reddit, Discord, and when working with VMWare in a VDI session, the memory pressure was very low and in the green. Now, doing the same thing on the Neo without the VMWare session, memory pressure is firmly in the middle, mostly green but sometimes orange. Not the greatest sign, but maybe that’s indicative of the slower storage adding to the pressure? Not sure exactly how that graph works.
Still, if I never opened Activity Monitor, I wouldn’t know it. The thing is pretty speedy and the build quality is great. Feels just like a more expensive MacBook. I do prefer the haptic touchpad on the Air and Pro, but this physical one still feels nice. It’s a shame that the storage speed is so much slower than M1, although I haven’t really noticed it but that will make swapping memory that will happen that much more problematic.
Two things can be true: 8 GB of RAM is not enough, and the great memory management on the Mac makes it difficult to know that 8 GB of RAM is not enough. For us, the Neo isn’t the best, but the Neo is great for people who have no business buying something used. Every financial guru will tell you to buy a cheap car on Craigslist to save money, but not everyone knows what to look for. At a smaller level, to tell someone to just go out and find a used M1 or M2 is a daunting task if they aren’t well versed at what to avoid.
I couldn’t imagine purchasing the low-end model. OTOH, the 512GB+Touch ID version is only $100 more. I hope smart students figure out that that’s a nice jump in value for their $100. Why would you categorically avoid that option?
Gruber wrote something 20 years ago. He’s right: people are proud of MacOS. OTOH, sometimes they want to strangle the company with goofy features. His quote:
I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else.
The Mac app Preview is one of the shining things in MacOS. I love to teach newbies about Preview and all the cool things that it does.
One more thing: I have heard the rumblings that Windows is evolving into an agentic OS. That sounds scary. While you’re able to do all sorts of agentic things in MacOS, it can definitely run for protracted time periods as an offline OS. All things equal, I definitely prefer Apple’s approach.
The Mac Neo will give an option for Microsoft alumni who have no interest in being part of their Agentic experience.
So many doomers around on it being too slow and not enough RAM. Having used an 8GB M1 for 3 years and never having had any problems with a “normal” workload, I think it should be OK for the next couple of years, at least.
I only switched to 16GB at work, because I need to use Parallels regularly, and with all my normal apps open, that did blow the 8GB limit.
I have an M1 IPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard. I primarily use it for media consumption (TWiT Podcasts and some streaming shows. My other primary use is to update my churches website. All our posters are made with an app on an iPhone, I simply upload media and write the blog entry or calendar entry on the site.
I’ve thought about updating my iPad Pro even though it meets every need with out issue because the battery isn’t lasting as long as it once did. But when considering the cost of updating this iPad and keyboard vs the NEO. I’m strongly considering the NEO as a viable option.
Spot on, Phil! John Gruber noted your exact observation in his review:
I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house. The MacBook Neo is going to be a great first Macintosh for a lot of people switching from PCs. But it’s also going to be a great secondary Mac for a lot of longtime Mac users with expensive desktop setups for their main workstations — like me.
The only obvious negative I see for this approach is that the A18 Pro chip lacks cutting-edge computational resources. If you were going to go with a current iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’d get a bunch more AI computons. And, BTW, Apple has apparently pre-anticipated this “deficiency”: Gruber speculates that the 2G MacBook Neo will have the AI-enhanced A19 Pro chip with 12GB of memory under the hood. He didn’t attribute that comment, but it sounded as if he heard that comment off the record from someone at Apple.
Apple is indeed in danger of cannibalizing some iPad sales with this new fruity-colored laptop. Some companies would avoid the risk of selling something that could hurt another product line. Apple embraces it. As noted by Walter Isaacson:
One of Job’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
Isaacson’s quote now needs a new clause: or a MacBook might cannibalize sales of an iPad. Words to live by – or words to wither by for Apple’s competitors. This is quite a pivot for Apple.
Apple’s new TikTok videos for the MacBook Neo are hilarious! I particularly like Jake Schroeder’s ballad about passwords ( TikTok - Make Your Day )
The last thing I want to do is reset my password cause I don’t care, I just use the same one.
I just want to put my little finger on the thing that recognizes my finger and move on.
If you watch and listen closely, you’ll see it’s actually a video for passkeys! Jake doesn’t mention that you must get the +$100 version of the Neo to get Touch ID in order to move on from typing in those pesky passwords. Details! TWiT viewers are clearly not the target demographic for this video.
Scroll through the videos for many absurdities. I know that Ren is not on that team, but this campaign is clearly in her wheelhouse.
Just found time to watch this episode. It seems everyone is hung up on 8GB of RAM. What they’re tending to forget is the target market for the Neo (or my interpretation of the target market). It’s not high end, professional, users like most people who watch tech podcasts and post in tech forums. There are multiple threads over on Macrumors and their forum with a LOT of posters very angry, even hateful, at the specs of the Neo. Not sure why. They’re clearly not the intended audience. It’s students, senior citizens, people who’d use it for email, web browsing, maybe some streaming, Microsoft Office, etc. if I was in the market for a laptop, I’d seriously consider the Neo.
Well, if RAM wasn’t in short supply because of all the AI BS related to hardware, it would be too little RAM to put into a machine you expected to have a future. These days, 16GB is the minimum you should want in any PC of any kind if you could get hardware at a normal price.
Sam Henri Gold published an alternative point of view – This Is Not The Computer For You – a few days ago. Referring to the 8GB Macbook Neo, he notes:
Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.
He has decided he’ll be fine.
[…]
That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.
I was that kid.
He knows it’s probably not the right tool. It doesn’t matter. It never did.
The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.
None of that invalidates your point. OTOH, the essay reveals a delicious alternate perspective.
It reminds us when we were young. I recall getting breaking in after hours to access a 110 baud timesharing service at my local education institution. I remember seeing a DEC LA36 dot-matrix terminal whizzing by at 30cps a year later. I remember using TECO – text editor AND corrector. I remember the Incompatible Timesharing Service – the Four Mighty MIT PDP10s – and having all of the single-stroke keyboard commands committed to muscle memory. I remember the brilliant tiny PDP-11 version of that OS at my first job, and having muscle memory to use the OS – and its version of TECO – when I walked in the door. I finally realized that customers were scared of that OS. Why? It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Who would anyone want to waste the time entering full words for commands?
Here’s to the crazy ones – especially the little crazy ones.
Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo is here with absolutely wild TikTok marketing (and a weirdly adorable Finder mascot)
iPhone Fold 3D designs leaked—Apple’s going full origami on us
Apple Music transparency tags now ID AI-generated tracks (so you know what’s real)
A serious toolkit for hacking iPhones surfaced—and yeah, it might be government-connected
Apple’s blocking ByteDance apps left and right
This is quite a pivot for Apple.