"Education customers can purchase it for $499."
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
"Education customers can purchase it for $499."
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.
This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.
Yeah, but K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.
> K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.
Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.
true, which is why chromebooks are almost ubiquitous in k-12, at least in the US. a mac, even for only $500, is still ~2x the price and lacks the management tools that Google Classroom provides
I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.
There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.
Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).
After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
> and to never do anything that other people than the owner want
Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.
There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.
The purpose of an OS is to run applications. Windows and MacOS have the applications people want or need to run.
Other OSes can run the browser, which runs many of the applications you want.
So? Acer also makes Chromebooks.
In my area, an Acer Chromebook Spin 514 has a faster processor, more RAM, and a touchscreen and costs only $100 more. With those specs, it's much better for productivity, development, and games, so it's well worth the price. It has better Android integration than the MacBook has iOS integration and even runs Android apps natively itself. The same people who didn't know that Acer sold this before will still not know they sell it now. The people who knew Acer sold that device before will continue buying it.
Looks like it's aimed squarely at students.
Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.
They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.
My son went to college with his Mac. But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software. So we had to get him a PC as well.
Everything, as I understand it, is moving to the Web. Google Docs, Canvas…
Yeah.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
That's crazy, must be a specific field? The overwhelming majority of college degrees don't require Windows.
You can nowadays do fine with macOS or Linux in most college degrees I've seen, since nowadays there are decent open source alternatives for the most prolific software that's on the level of popularity that it will be used in teaching.
However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.
What software being taught in colleges today (outside of highly specialised niches) requires Windows?
Stats software is cross-platform or open-source.
Art programs are cross-platform or open-source.
Office suites are cross-platform or browser-based.
Unless you're specifically trying to learn Windows development, dev tools are cross-platform and open source.
15 years ago, what you describe was probably quite common. Today, it's almost completely disappeared.
When I was in college the exam nanny software required Windows, and not in a VM. (I had a Windows desktop at home, so I just remoted into that to take exams.) This was a few years ago but much less than 15.
Also most "professional" CAD software is Windows-only, which is going to affect a big chunk of engineering majors.
Student at a US Uni here. They still do very much own the space for both tablets and laptops, especially in CS
CompSci grad in the US as well, it is genuinely a sea of either Macs or ThinkPads with $INSERT_FAV_LINUX_DISTRO here, and even then 66% of that are Macs.
Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
My local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through high school.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
My kids' district gives them iPads in middle school (5th through 8th) and MacBook Airs in high school.
My old Highschool, as well as many other schools I've seen since, mandate Chromebooks.
I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.
> the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...
That's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.
The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Why not? They’re the same core OS.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
They added iOS-esque stuff a long time ago in Lion/Mavericks like “App Nap” and “automatic termination” so it kinda has this, but it’s inconsistent.
Isn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway?
Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.
People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.
Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.
This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.
No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
They were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence.
8 GB M1 MacBook Air does support Apple Intelligence.
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.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
I'll get one for my mom who uses facebook and pinterest and the occasional recipe website. I'm sure it'll be enough power for the average user.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
I used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers.
Maybe you should try a MacOS device.
Bruh if 32GB of RAM feels insufficient your computer is broken.
8GB will run chat, web browsing and word processors just fine.
Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
ChromeOS and macos aren't close to the same.
> The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable
C'mon, man.
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.
> 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.
Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop.
Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
Honestly 128MB might be too much...
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
There are schools where close to 100% of the kids are qualified low income.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.
Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.
I've bought several touchscreen Chromebooks for that price.
Growing up in the 90s all my elementary school computers were Macs. They seemed to get more Windows as I got older. Not sure the current state.
Would be great deal in 5 years to buy those post-lease if Asahi/others Linux catch up.
I'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...
A refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in 'fair' condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck. How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?
call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?
Yea if you can find one for $500 new on sale.
Maybe a slightly used one as well.
But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
Walmart sells a brand new M1 Air for ~$650 and refurbished for ~$500
doesn't need to be new, but maybe the m1s wont last another 4 years for college so maybe it makes sense...
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
Apparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...
A very old article, and if you follow any of their links, they are sold out. So it's not so apparent after all
I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
Walmart shows new as currently out of stock, they only have restored.
Is it a better deal? A18 Pro seems to be somewhat more capable than an M1.
Maybe but It has worse screen, worse battery and worse connectivity.
Noted, but I’d still pick the better CPU.
On the refurb market, you can get a Macbook Air at the 16-512 configuration for only a few hundred more, which is a better value.
But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.
I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.
This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used/older models.
For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.
For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.
What part(s) of the "full experience" are missing in this machine?
Smaller screen with less colors(sRGB instead of P3), shorter battery life(16 instead of 18), USB-3 and USB-2 Type-C ports instead of thunderbolt.
A used m1 air isn't going to have that battery life anyway...