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For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall

For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors. The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026. The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have. It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps") People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!

ciupicri 7mo ago
So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
- philistine 7mo ago
  Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.
- dchest 7mo ago
  Yes, it can -- to all questions.
- quesera 7mo ago
  This is wrong. My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app. Current RAM usage is 6.14GB. Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
  - darkstar999 7mo ago
    How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.
    - kdheiwns 7mo ago
      There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy. 30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
      - ewoodrich 7mo ago
        It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.
      - quesera 7mo ago
        No need to be obnoxious. I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand. I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive. FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.
        jombib 7mo ago
        How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand
        quesera 7mo ago
- happyopossum 7mo ago
  Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets. As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
  - alpaca128 7mo ago
    As someone who used an M1 with 8GB and has hundreds of browser tabs I can assure you it is not enough and you'll have to restart the browser at least a few times per week to not make the whole system lag. 16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.
- runako 7mo ago
  > Can it run multiple programs at the same time? I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application. Typical sample of apps concurrently in use: - PostgreSQL (server) - TablePlus (db client) - Docker - Slack - Chrome - Safari - Zed - Claude native - ChatGPT native - Zoom - Codex - Numbers - Calendar - the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.) With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86). I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
  - perardi 7mo ago
    Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while. It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
  - ewoodrich 7mo ago
    I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player. I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising? I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
    - BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
      > I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
- kube-system 7mo ago
  This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.
- falkensmaize 7mo ago
  Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.
philistine 7mo ago
You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal. This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
- intrasight 7mo ago
  Except sadly it is not using M. My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.
  - bell-cot 7mo ago
    's/in 1994/in 1984/', perhaps?
    - intrasight 7mo ago
      Yes. Thanks.
  - philistine 7mo ago
    The M-series is just marketing. They're just the A-series with more cores and IO. Apple has one family of CPUs, but they give them different names.
  - esskay 7mo ago
    They dont need to use an M series. The chip they are using isn't far off (spec wise) a base M4. It's single threaded performance is damn good.
    - intrasight 7mo ago
      I didn't realize that. I thought it was a different architecture - or different enough that the two couldn't run the same binaries. Are they indeed binary compatible?

ciupicri 7mo ago

So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

philistine 7mo ago
Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.
dchest 7mo ago
Yes, it can -- to all questions.
quesera 7mo ago
This is wrong. My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app. Current RAM usage is 6.14GB. Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
- darkstar999 7mo ago
  How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.
  - kdheiwns 7mo ago
    There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy. 30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
    - ewoodrich 7mo ago
      It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.
    - quesera 7mo ago
      No need to be obnoxious. I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand. I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive. FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.
      - jombib 7mo ago
        How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand
        quesera 7mo ago
happyopossum 7mo ago
Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets. As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
- alpaca128 7mo ago
  As someone who used an M1 with 8GB and has hundreds of browser tabs I can assure you it is not enough and you'll have to restart the browser at least a few times per week to not make the whole system lag. 16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.
runako 7mo ago
> Can it run multiple programs at the same time? I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application. Typical sample of apps concurrently in use: - PostgreSQL (server) - TablePlus (db client) - Docker - Slack - Chrome - Safari - Zed - Claude native - ChatGPT native - Zoom - Codex - Numbers - Calendar - the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.) With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86). I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
- perardi 7mo ago
  Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while. It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
- ewoodrich 7mo ago
  I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player. I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising? I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
  - BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
    > I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
kube-system 7mo ago
This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.
falkensmaize 7mo ago
Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.

philistine 7mo ago

You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal. This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!

intrasight 7mo ago
Except sadly it is not using M. My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.
- bell-cot 7mo ago
  's/in 1994/in 1984/', perhaps?
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    Yes. Thanks.
- philistine 7mo ago
  The M-series is just marketing. They're just the A-series with more cores and IO. Apple has one family of CPUs, but they give them different names.
- esskay 7mo ago
  They dont need to use an M series. The chip they are using isn't far off (spec wise) a base M4. It's single threaded performance is damn good.
  - intrasight 7mo ago
    I didn't realize that. I thought it was a different architecture - or different enough that the two couldn't run the same binaries. Are they indeed binary compatible?