8 gb of RAM shared between the gpu and the rest of the system… My 2 year old phone has 50% more.
This is a POS to distract from the fact that their existing cheapest laptop just jumped form $899 to $1099
$600 MacBook in 2026 is absolutely insane to me. Around 2007/08 when I started using MacBooks as a student the entry level ones used to be 1200€.
Powered by A18 Pro
Completing the MacBook Neo experience is macOS Tahoe
Woah, this is new! A version of Mac OSX running on a iPhone/iPad CPU.
So a glorified tablet?
If its the full macOS, I don’t think we can say that. That’s what makes this so interesting as it is a first of its kind.
Now, if it performs like a dog compared to an equivalent spec M3 or M4 Macbook Air, then we probably could call it a glorified tablet.
I’m not mad about this, especially with Google pushing Gemini so hard on all their devices. I pulled up the Chromebook site to see their current offerings, and the prominent advertisement for Gemini is pretty disgusting after fresh news of another death.
Apple has been violating people’s wallets for how long and they finally decide now is the time to make affordable macs?
Complaining aside, this is a darn good move. The timing is great, so they are likely to be very popular too, which is good for the future of the market. I hope.
They have had an ‘affordable’ Mac for a lot of their history. The Mac mini was a downright value for a while. They have had near $1000 laptops for most of my memory.
just typical /r/technology apple hating.
It’s a big circle jerk. One day we suddenly hate Netflix. The next day Apple has always been terrible. Nobody cares about the complaints that are doing actual harm.
Honestly this seems absolutely incredible for the vast majority of people, a good MacBook at a decent price point. Benchmarks haven’t come out yet but I heard its as good if not better than the M1. For the vast majority of people that’s good enough, and even with the worse battery the real world battery life is gonna be amazing.
Also for those complaining about Linux support the main competition is Windows laptops running Snapdragon X Elite which should have somewhat similar performance and also doesn’t support Linux. Hell the snapdragon x2 probably won’t support Linux either. These laptops cost two times as much as this and usually with significantly worse build quality.
It’s pretty. But I recently bought a Lenovo IdeaPad at Costco for less, with 16GB ram and 1TB SDD and am running Linux Mint on it, which I’m getting way more out of than any other Mac I’ve owned.
Without a doubt the Mac’s screen is better than mine. But I feel like, all things considered, what I have can do more (and probably for longer). I’m happy to see something like this come along and take the wind out of Microslop’s sails (and sales). At the same time, I feel like one is able to get far more value out of a less-costly machine. If one were going to switch OSes anyway, why not Linux? I guess they’re banking on people already owning iPhones and therefore making this a more seamless transition or whatever…
I would be kinda impressed that Apple is finally offering something that’s good value, but 8GB of RAM? ehhhhhh. It’s probably still a decent-ish deal, I don’t really know how good a phone SoC would handle anything more than light tasks, though.
Not usually an Apple guy, but it’s hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)
This is the opposite of “own nothing and be happy” and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.
Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡
I know you didn’t mean it like that, but at $599 it is not a “$500 device”. It is a $600 device. Which maybe isn’t much worse but still quite a price difference.
It’s $499 for students.
Also microcenter usually sells apple products at the student price to non students too
Hell, Apple themselves usually sell Apple products at the student price to non-students, as long as you nod and wink when you click the Checkout button.
Macs do not respect your privacy. In comparison to windows it’s better but they still log and send every application you open to Apple.
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)
If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.
That claim seems like it’d be trivial to fact check, and indeed does seem to be false.
indeed does seem to be false.
That’s from 5 years ago. Let’s look what Apple themselves say about that topic:
Personal Data Apple Collects from You
Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data
this is HIGHLY misleading. The page you linked is for Apple’s global/web properties (hence “within our services”); device-level settings govern app and OS telemetry separately. You can opt out of telemetry on apple devices you own.
I am not ever trusting a proprietary OS, specially when it has been actively advertised as “caring about your privacy”
You known what, good job Apple. You’ve been winning me over lately. I’m not sure I’d exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we’ll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.
How soon until Asahi will run on it
This was my first question. This laptop looks like a really strange bird from the hardware point of view. It runs OSX (Tahoe), but uses an iPhone/iPad CPU (not an M1 or M2 CPUs that Asahi runs on today).
How soon until Asahi will run on it
Years. Asahi fully relies on reverse engineering by the community and those community members tend to get hired by the competition. Get a device where the platform designer supports Linux development upstream if your priority is Linux.
If it wouldn’t carry just 8 GB of RAM, it would be a great deal. Sadly, it’s not even upgradable, so its usefulness is rather limited.
It would be. Even my pixel have 16gigs of ram, lol.
Testing was conducted by Apple in January and February 2026 using preproduction MacBook Neo systems with Apple A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 8GB of unified memory, and 256GB SSD.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Most notably web browsing which one would think this thing is mostly for.
What is wrong with your computers that 8GB is unusable for a browser?
Honestly I’m expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).
Unless you’re buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.
I don’t like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.
makes it really good value
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor.
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
You can’t really use an iPad as a laptop. The hardware exists and should work, but the software is awful.
It’s often several seconds to switch to Safari on my iPad Pro with M series chip. We’ve had app switching in computers for 40 years. Why can’t iPad do it?
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
So form factor, not hardware internals should be the deciding factor in cost?
To a degree, yeah.
The laptop form factor is engineered with lid and palmrest assemblies, if you’re going to compare the two then you’ll want to add a nice keyboard to that iPad. Apple’s is $270.
Apple’s is $270.
Typical Apple tax, completely unrelated to the few dollars a keyboard costs to make for real.
You’re not entirely wrong, in that the Apple Tax is real.
Nonetheless, the quality of the Magic Keyboard is substantially higher than that of a keyboard you can get for “few dollars”
Ultimately, your assertion was:
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air with a keyboard that matches the form factor and build quality of a MacBook Neo does not actually cost the same, it costs an additional $270.
The MacBook doesn’t have a touchscreen. It cancels the keyboard cost out.
They don’t even put touch ID on the entry model.
Better specs sure, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
In addition to being more locked down, you’d also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?
It’s an iPhone 16 with a MacBook shell
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook
One has a keyboard (cheap components), the other has a touchscreen. The cost cancel each other out.
That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.
Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It’s GRIM out there.
It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi’s memory management wasn’t as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).
For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn’t surprise me given Apple’s laptop history
They were talking about memory not storage
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we’re pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.
Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.
It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.
This is a step backwards from M1 in terms of cores, core speed and bus speed. This is not going to feel like an m1 base even.
We’ll see when the reviews hit. It’d be pretty dumb for it to be worse than an M1 when older airs get discounted down to similar prices.
I seriously doubt many people using this will be doing much video editing with 40 tabs open. Your expectations are unrealistic for the type of user who will be buying these.
Agree. Probably best notebook for students and also for smaller companies, if you’re not relying on high end hardware.
8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn’t great, but it’s not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn’t so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
Honestly, it might be a wakeup call for laptop vendors, or it might just put a lot of them out of business. This is not a good economy for them to suddenly have to compete with Apple on value…
They should have done so from the beginning. If they vanish because they waited too long to compete, so be it.
I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?
You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!
No, 8gb of RAM (obviously older DDR but still) and 256gb or storage.
Of course the CPU and other older components will be less powerful, but like… What do we use computers for now that we didn’t in 2017? AI? Oh nooooo, what will I ever do without local AI… It all works the same, at a pretty decent speed running Bazzite (cause I wanted to see how it ran games. It topped out at Skyrim Special Edition running at 15fps, did good at fallout New Vegas though).
I got a bargain, but say you can only get it now for double what I paid. That’s 1/6 the price. Why pay 600% more for a computer that’s not even that much better?
Considering Windows has become a complete dumpster fire recently, this $600 laptop could be a really appealing option for some if they’re mostly browsing the web.
It’d make for a great student laptop, reminds me of the old polycarbonate MacBooks actually. They did cut corners a lot, but retained all the niceties you’d expect from a MacBook.
And they finally added some colour; could’ve have gone with more vibrant colours IMO but it’s better than nothing.
I gotta say, I do like fuzzy wombats as well^^
So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.
Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!
There’s no reason for the average person to ever buy another windows device
Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn’t.
That doesnt mean the average person can just use Linux, you cant even buy a laptop with Linux from a standard store that people typically look for laptops in (like Amazon or best buy). If you have to convince people to go to a separate website, manually enter their card details, and pay a shipping fee of $116 along with import fees (yes this is a bit more specific to Tuxedo but my point stands). Regardless of which Linux brand you buy it typically takes 3-5 weeks for shipping. Meanwhile across the board the base price of Linux laptops are always higher than Windows devices (some OEMs like Lenovo hide this by giving a $100 discount but when you consider that Linux is generally only an option for custom orders the total cost is still higher than a non custom standard windows laptop).
Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there’s no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there’s still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.
Kind of a weird example to say that people won’t online shop too. That’s far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.
Thanks to the amazing people over at Asahi Linux, you can on MacBooks too!
On some Mac books. With limitations.
It’s an amazing project, but outsiders might overestimate it’s status if you say it that way.
This one will not even boot in a long time.
