I Was Wrong About 8GB MacBooks

0:00 The MacBook Neo is, without a doubt, the most  hotly debated Apple product in years. On one side, you've got the defenders, suggesting that Apple  is finally pushing into completely uncharted territory, that for the first time ever, they  are courting the low-end consumer, a market currently dominated by Chromebooks and crappy  little Windows laptops filled with bloatware. And then on the other side, well, you've got  the detractors, suggesting that the specs of this thing are unjustifiable at any price, that  it's just a machine with a mobile processor and a paltry 8GB of memory, that anybody who buys it  is doing themselves a disservice while anybody who recommends it is dishonest and doesn't have their  audience's best interests in mind. Both sides do have some rationale, but I also think that both  are coming at it from completely the wrong way.

0:43 As with most things, I find myself somewhere in  the middle on this. I do believe that the Neo is the most important computer Apple has released  in years. In fact, I'd probably put it in the top three most important computers of the 21st  century, alongside the unibody iMac and the M1 MacBook Air. Part of this is because it dispels  the long-held, but now also incorrect presumption, that Apple products carry an unjustified premium  over the rest of the market. The Neo directly proves that belief wrong. It is in fact very  modern Apple to release a machine at their lowest entry price, while the rest of the PC market has  had pricing forced upwards by memory shortages.

1:19 To be clear, this video is not going to do the  "how does the MacBook Neo compare to Windows PCs at the same price" song and dance, because,  well, that's already been done elsewhere, and also because I'm not one to hide my biases.  The best part about any Mac is macOS, and despite my qualms with 26 Tahoe, it remains and will  continue to remain the selling point for any Apple computer regardless of price. So I will only  compare the Neo to the competition abstractly, because specs aren't the story that are worth  telling here. What Apple has actually built is.

1:50 And what Apple has actually built is a machine  that is interesting precisely because of what it isn't: flashy, premium-priced, or covered in  obvious tech signaling. Which is a philosophy today's sponsor shares in a completely  different form factor. Meet the INMO GO3. Now, I will be upfront with you. AI glasses as  a category has a bit of a credibility problem. Most of what I've tried has either been too chunky  to wear in public without feeling like a goober, too limited to justify charging them every  night, or some weird combination of both.

2:20 So when INMO reached out, I went in skeptical.  But what surprised me is how hard their new GO3 leans into the least flashy thing a smart glasses  company can possibly lean into — and that's just looking like regular glasses. At 58 grams, with  8mm temples and a 5-axis CNC machined matte frame, these don't scream "tech", they just read as a  perfectly normal-looking pair of specs. There are four interchangeable frame styles depending on  whether you're heading into a meeting or a coffee shop, and the display inside is a binocular  green micro-LED waveguide that hits 1,500 nits. So not incredibly flashy, but it matters,  especially the brightness, because that's the threshold where you can actually see the display  in daylight, not just in the dim booth at CES, something I have definitely had a problem with  on other glasses we've tried on this channel.

3:09 Now, as for what it does: the headlining feature  is translation, with 78 supported languages, photo translation for signs and menus, and  real-time dialogue translation when paired with their optional clip-on Speaker accessory. For  anyone who gives presentations, ho ho ho, there is a teleprompter mode with AI-driven pacing  that follows your speaking cadence. So if you improvise, or skip ahead, or you look  around the room, or you go super, super fast, the script will keep up with you. I'm doing  it right now. And for meetings — which is honestly where I've gotten the most mileage  out of these — a four-microphone array does voiceprint recognition to distinguish who's  talking, it auto-records the whole thing, and then it generates structured  minutes in the app afterwards.

3:48 Battery is handled by a magnetic swap system.  You pop one out, you click a fresh one in, it takes under five seconds, and the case  itself holds three to four full charges. That's the solution that you ship when you've  accepted that true all-day battery on a form factor this small isn't physically possible yet.  It's an admission that I wish more companies in this space were willing to make. Is this the  product that finally convinces me that AI glasses are here to stay? Well, they're certainly  more useful than my Meta Raybans. The INMO GO3 is launching mid-April via Kickstarter, and early  backers get the glasses bundled with the Ring4 and Speaker for $499. The link is in the  description if you want to take a look.

4:26 Now, back to the Neo. The hardware here is a  surprising departure from Apple's usual MO. In the past, the company has been willing to  sacrifice repairability in the name of mass cost savings, cutting-edge performance,  and remarkably thin design. And the Neo, it's not that. It is truly a computer built  out of compromise, and no part of it matches the methodology that Apple takes on  almost any of their other products. Its form factor is atypical. Despite being  quite a bit smaller than the M5 MacBook Air, in about the same thickness, it is equally as  heavy. Now, you might suspect that's due to the battery. But no — the battery in the Neo is tiny,  because it's running an efficient iPhone chip. The weight largely comes down to the manufacturing  process, which forfeits high-precision machining in favor of extruded aluminum that spends only  a fraction of the time under machine tools.

5:15 That cost-saving philosophy shows up  elsewhere too, most notably in the trackpad, which is no longer Force Touch, no longer haptic.  It's been a hallmark of every MacBook since the 2018 MacBook Air, which was finally the last  model to ditch that mechanical click. That's absent on this machine. We're back to an analog  click. But this is not created equal to most other clicking trackpads. The mechanism does  feel slightly worse than the MacBook Air's, but I'd hardly call it bad. The tracking surface  itself — the glass, the capacitive multi-touch layer — is better than basically any other  Windows laptop on the market, including the very excellent Microsoft Surface line. And it  feels frankly identical to any recent MacBook.

5:54 It's only distinguishable when you actually click.  That's when you notice that it's lesser. And it isn't some like diving-board design that you'll  find on most other cheaper computers. Apple has done something very clever with a rigid backplate  and a trackpad-mounted button right in the middle, with little leaf springs helping to ensure a  fairly consistent, even actuation force and spring-back no matter where you press. It works  well. Is it as good as the haptic trackpad? No. You know, the best equivalent I can think of is  the iPhone 7, which moved to a haptic home button.

6:23 At the time, everybody suspected that the change  would be a downgrade, and in some ways it was, because the iPhone 7 didn't really feel like  a clicking button. It just felt like a really, really good vibration. Because that's what it  was. It took a couple of weeks to get used to, because you were in fact pressing something that  didn't physically move. But once you got used to that motion, going back to an older iPhone felt  legitimately horrible. Physical home buttons, with their sloppy side-to-side actuation that  would get grime and junk down inside and stick if you spilled anything on it, developing a  scratchy feel over time — they felt archaic, they felt old, and the iPhone 7 fixed  that. That's the way the MacBook Neo's trackpad feels. It doesn't feel bad, it  just feels kind of old. But so too does every other trackpad in the segment  that the Neo operates in. In fact, those don't just feel old, they feel bad. This is  a much better trackpad. It's just not flagship.

7:13 The same cannot be said of the keyboard, which  as best I can tell, is effectively identical to the MacBook Air keyboard, sans backlight. Now on  one hand, removing the backlight is a reasonable omission in the spirit of cost savings. But  on the other hand, the target customer for the Neo is likely the demographic to most need a  backlight to see the keys while touch typing. Erm. The display, with its chunkier bezels and missing  notch, feels a little dated as well. And though many will say, "I hate the notch, so this is an  upgrade," I would like to interject the following: aesthetics aside, you have to remember that  the notch on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, it's not really cutting into your 16:10 screen.  Everything below the menu bar is 16:10. You're just getting a little extra screen real estate  on top of that for the menu bar itself. The Neo does not have that, which means that the  menu bar does cut into the aspect ratio of the display and subsequently makes said  display a little wider. It's not preferred, in my opinion, to something like the near-perfect  3:4 iPad, another device in this same price class, or even, as I mentioned, other MacBooks that the  Neo finds itself priced underneath. But it is much better than the 16:9 displays found in most of the  competition. So you gotta keep things in context.

8:25 My single biggest complaint, and I know this  is going to sound funny, is a simple hardware omission: the lack of an ambient light sensor.  It is quite frustrating to open the laptop at night and be blinded, or to open it up in  the afternoon and have it be so dim as to be illegible. I have hit the brightness keys  on this keyboard more than I have ever touched the brightness keys on any recent MacBook Air  or Pro. And yet, just like with the lack of a backlit keyboard, you do kind of get used to  it. It doesn't feel crappy, it just feels old.

8:53 And I guess here's the strange irony underneath  all of this: Apple had to actively engineer most of these compromises into existence. This trackpad  mechanism is not some carryover part from an old 2015 MacBook Pro — it is a new design built  specifically for this machine. The Neo doesn't feel old because it's old. It feels old because  Apple's own standards have raised the bar so high that even cutting back requires innovation.  Which, when you sit and kind of think about it, is a little bit of a flex. But importantly,  the things that Apple chose not to compromise on — the build quality, the display quality, the  battery life — are exactly the things that they should not have compromised on, and they are  the compromises made in other cheap laptops.

9:35 They made all the right choices here, but there  is no denying that they have had to make cuts. Now, while we're talking about departures from  Apple's usual playbook, repairability here is genuinely worth celebrating. Many other laptops  in this price range are glued together with very poor parts availability, essentially e-waste  if something breaks. But the Neo is not just the most repairable Mac in years, it is  likely one of the most repairable laptops at this price point period, maybe at any price  point. Every single aspect of this device can be removed and disassembled other than the  aluminum top lid from the display itself, but given that you only have an inexpensive  USB webcam and a microphone inside there, I don't think it's that terrible. You can  buy just about any part for this machine as a consumer through the self-service repair  store, and the pricing is pretty reasonable, at least relative to what Apple charges for  their other machines' parts. The battery, at $134 for a 35 watt-hour pack, is, in my  opinion, a bit egregious, but the bottom case lid is only $35. Not bad. The keyboard assembly  is only $140, and it no longer requires replacing the entire bottom half of the computer like every  other MacBook in Apple's lineup. And even better, for the first time in many, many years from  Apple — I can't even remember since before the butterfly keyboard, so like 2015 — we are seeing  per-component repair down to individual keys, not just the keycaps themselves, but  the switch assemblies as well. Awesome.

10:58 The most expensive part outside of the logic  board itself is the display at $308, because again it includes the aluminum and the camera  and everything else, and that's pretty steep, especially considering that most educational  institutions will be buying this device at around $500 to begin with. However, if you send  the old display back to Apple for recycling, the price drops down to $220. Still not ideal  if broken, about half the cost of the machine, but hardly the extortionary multi-hundred,  near-thousand-dollar repair where you'd be better off replacing the entire machine with  a newer model, as is true with other Macs.

11:33 And it is worth noting, by the way, that pricing  for educational institutions and enterprise replacement programs that buy in massive volume  is almost certainly lower per unit of cost and per repair part than the consumer self-service tier  that we would be paying. For the target buyer, repair is more accessible than the sticker  prices would suggest, and I think that's great. Of course, being a Mac, this thing runs macOS  — full and unadulterated, something that even Apple's much more powerful and more expensive  iPad Pro cannot do. And the Neo? It honestly runs macOS pretty well. I will say, however, that  I did experience more device slowdowns than I can remember in recent years, especially during  the machine's initial configuration. You know, while FileVault is encrypting the drive,  while apps are installing from the App Store, while photos is syncing from the cloud — this  multi-day setup process did feel slow at times, and in a few instances, the machine beachballed  kind of just doing nothing. And it wasn't just on this unit. I got my wife a pink Neo  to replace her aging M1 MacBook Air, and hers was similarly slow. Were these  slowdowns game-breaking? No. Were they permanent? No. After a few days, you know,  performance settled to about where I'd expect, but they happened. And this is the first time in  the Apple Silicon era where I've used a Mac and thought, "yeah, this is kind of slow, isn't it."  It doesn't feel bad, it just feels a little old.

12:56 What the Neo absolutely does feel competent  at is real work. Because unlike a Chromebook, which mostly requires everything run in the web  — and I know that's not strictly true anymore, but effectively it is — the Neo runs any macOS app  natively. Because it's a Mac. I've run Photoshop on this. I've edited video on this. I have done  Xcode compiles and builds on this. It's actually pretty fast. Installing Xcode takes forever, but  that's true on every Mac. Is it indistinguishable from my MacBook Air in the same way that an A16  iPad is indistinguishable from an M3 iPad Air?

13:26 No. You can absolutely tell the difference. But  the Neo isn't bad, it's just a little bit worse. And a little bit worse at half the price is to  be expected. It feels just a little bit old. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: 8GB  of memory. I was criticized by another YouTuber for dismissing the reality that 8GB was okay in  a MacBook, because just two years ago I praised Apple for finally dropping the 8GB spec, claiming  it was no longer enough in the year 2024. Well, that was two years ago. I think that YouTuber was  being a bit disingenuous to suggest my statement was a universal blanket, because two years ago  Apple was not selling a MacBook Neo for $600.

14:06 And while yes, you could argue that the  Mac mini is also $600 — the Neo includes a bunch of things that the Mac mini doesn't:  a display, a keyboard, a trackpad, a battery. The silicon cost difference between an A18 Pro  and an M4 is smaller than you would imagine, making the Mac mini a much higher-margin product  than this one. And it also makes it such that they can justify a higher starting memory count.  Especially in the world of current RAM pricing.

14:31 But again, I'm not saying that 8GB isn't  ideal. It's not great. But 8GB is not Apple being a dick on purpose, it is just the reality  of using this chip. Because it comes with 8GB of memory on package during fabrication, and we'll  come back to why that matters shortly. But on performance — for most normal workflows today,  8GB is still fine. The question is whether it continues to be fine three or four years from  now. That's where things will get interesting.

14:58 I had one Xcode build, from scratch, that put  enough memory pressure on the Neo that it hung hard. It didn't just beach ball, the cursor like  stopped responding entirely. It didn't crash, it rebounded eventually because swap on macOS is  very, very good, but it did stall. And it got me thinking, swap is only effective when there  is disk space available. A lot of disk space, ideally. And 256 gigs on this base configuration?  Well, that doesn't leave very much available to the system after the user throws all their  crap on it, especially iCloud photos.

15:27 And where MacBook Pro or Air owners are either  not sophisticated enough as users to ever use more than is available in their DRAM and  swap cache, or are sophisticated enough to identify why their computer has slowed down  and take proper action — the same is not true of the Neo's target buyer. There will be Neo  owners a year from now who are confused why their machines have become so slow. It's  not the silicon, it's not really the RAM, it's not even really the disk performance, it's  that there is nowhere to shove all of that swap when no free space exists on the drive, which  is going to happen because heaven knows they can't even keep everything in DRAM when half the  DRAM allocation is being used just to run macOS.

16:04 And so this naturally brings us into our other  longevity question: long-term software support. This year marks the end of Intel support. macOS 27  will not support Intel Macs, which puts the newest unsupported Intel Mac at six years old. Six years  from today puts us in 2032. Do we presume that the Neo will be supported in 2032? Spec-for-spec,  it has worse system performance than a nearly six-year-old M1 MacBook Air. Now having said  that, and I think a lot of reviewers forget this — even though the A18 Pro is less performant  than an M1 in a lot of ways, maybe even most ways, it is a much more modern chip that shares far  more architecture with modern M-Series silicon.

16:44 Therefore, it will be way easier for Apple to  continue to support this machine into the future. But while I have no doubt that the Neo  will be supported longer than the M1 Air and Pro — not because Apple can't keep  supporting those older 8GB machines, but because supporting a rapidly diminishing  number of M1 owners is not cost-effective — it does bring up the question, well, how long will  Apple support this? And how long will they support Apple Silicon devices in general? Will they  support these machines longer than they did with Intel computers? Perhaps. iOS 26 still  supports the iPhone 11, a device from 2019.

17:16 But if Apple phases out Apple Silicon devices with  the same cadence as they have on Intel machines, that means that next year, well, the first M1s  are getting the boot. And that also means that in just three years, they won't have to support  any machine that shipped with 8GB of memory, other than this. And are we to suspect that Apple  will hold macOS back to support this one weird, low-end device? I think probably not.  And I wouldn't be surprised if that's yet another thing that makes this the cheaper  machine: lesser long-term support and feature updates down the road. Maybe only three  years, or four years, instead of six.

17:53 Hey, future Quinn here. Look, these videos  take a few weeks to make, and I had surgery, but it all kind of panned out, because I had  this whole section in my video about how the Neo's A18 Pro is leftover silicon from the iPhone  16 Pro. Binned chips with a dead core here or a flaw there that made them ineligible to be used in  the iPhone, but that they could use in something lower-end like this instead of just throwing  away. I also talked about how Apple was going to run out of these leftover chips way faster  than they or anybody else expected because of the success of the Neo — I mean, Cook himself said  as much on the recent earnings call. My prediction was that Apple would just refresh the MacBook Neo  early with the A19 Pro and its subsequent 12GB of packaged memory, thereby solving the MacBook  Neo's biggest problem: the memory. Because, I mean, reopening a fabrication line to make  the A18 Pro would be financially insane. But it turns out that I'm dumb, because that is  exactly what is reported to be happening.

18:46 TSMC is said to be spinning A18 Pro production  back up, which makes the per-chip cost of the silicon in these new MacBook Neos, if they do  that, meaningfully higher. Because they're not leftovers, they're not available for free,  they're not the consequence of fabricating higher-end chips. No, no, they're spooling them  back up to make this machine on purpose. Yet, it is still reportedly offsetting the cost  increases of using the A19 Pro because of the stupid freaking DRAM pricing that is going on  right now. Reviving an old chip line is cheaper than four gigabytes of memory per unit, which  is just wild — the times that we are living in.

19:22 Now, many assume that if and when this happens  — not if, when this happens — that Apple will pass their increased costs onto customers by  either discontinuing the low-end model or by hiking prices. But I really don't think Apple  will do this, because I don't think they can. The Neo is dominating in its segment because of  price, and surrendering that advantage to protect margin would forfeit this entire strategy.  Cracking the low end of the market is just the cost of doing business. If they want this  beachhead — and I wager that they do — they're willing to pay for it. Which also means that  the recommendation I now give is a little bit different than what I had planned. Past Quinn  would have said, well, just hold off on the Neo because a refreshed 12-gig model is right  around the corner, probably before year's end.

20:06 It's all but inevitable. Well, but now I don't  think that's happening. And the gap in between an 8GB and a 12GB machine that you intend to  keep for many years is significant. Now that that bet's off the table, it seems that the Neo  that you can buy today is the Neo that you'll be able to buy for the foreseeable future. So  either pull the trigger and suck it up — or, as my recommendation has always gone, find  a used MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with more memory, a better chip, faster disk, and frankly,  longer-term support for similar amounts of money.

20:38 Having said all that, this is a very important  computer, and people who buy one will like it. I mean, buyers cross-shopping between this  and an entry-level piece of Garbo Windows laptop — they are far better served here. Buyers  cross-shopping between this and an iPad will likely find themselves more satisfied with this  machine. And casual Mac owners, like my wife, will find this a completely suitable modern  replacement to the M1. I know that's unsurprising to hear, but it's reality, and if you're not  a nerd, you don't get it, so let me explain.

21:06 I gave this machine — well, the pink one — to  Meghan, my wife, and her reaction was, "wow, this is a lot nicer than my old computer,"  despite the fact that it's basically the same machine in performance while having lesser build  quality and fewer features. It didn't matter, she didn't care, and most people won't.  Get this through your head, you nerds. The Mac has slowly been gaining market share  since the transition to Apple Silicon, and I think the Neo is about ready to rapidly accelerate  that. It is crazy to see this machine — one that, despite being compromised basically in every  way, really did have a lot of care and thought put into it — and that's coming from a company  that just six or seven years ago had us Mac fans wondering if the Mac would even survive, if it was  dead. We were in hell. The MacBook Pros with the stupid touch bars being thermally throttled, the  absence of a real Pro Mac, and the iPad stealing the limelight from the Mac at every opportunity.  The turnaround from there to here is remarkable.

21:59 And the Neo also has me wondering what's in store  for Apple's other devices. I mean, the MacBook Pro is slated to get a touchscreen later this year,  along with an OLED display. And unlike many other people, I don't actually believe there will be  a fundamental redesign of macOS to accommodate touch, because I think Apple still believes what  Steve Jobs said all those years ago: that having to reach your arm up to touch your Mac screen  is less than ideal. They'll accommodate touch, but I don't think they're going to encourage  it. And in a world where non-touch Macs and touch Macs have to coexist in the same lineup,  no changes to the OS can be so fundamental as to change what the Mac even is before every  device supports the new input paradigm. So I suspect a slightly dynamic UX change — tap  targets that grow when you touch the screen, gestures like swiping down to access Control  Center will be supported — but I'm skeptical that we'll see any massive change that forces,  or frankly even compels, you to use touch at all.

22:51 So then why add it? Well, as a full-time iPad  user, I often accidentally reach up to touch my MacBook Pro's display, only afterwards realizing  — dumb dumb — this is not an allowable input method. It's never my primary interaction, it's  not even really an ideal one. But the thing is, I can touch it. If you want to touch the screen or  touch the trackpad, both should be accepted. The irony is that while Apple has to start somewhere,  it does seem a bit funny that they're offering touchscreens to the demographic least likely to  want them. The MacBook Pro user base, plugged into external monitors and Studio Displays,  running pro apps and development workflows — they don't give a crap. Whereas the MacBook Neo  user, coming from an iPad or a cheap Windows laptop that almost certainly has a touch screen —  they're the ones likely to reach up and touch the display. And yet that user, this user, will not  be getting a touch screen for many years to come.

23:39 Running macOS on a phone chip also begs the  question: well then, if this can run macOS, why can't an iPad? And my answer is that, well,  Apple just doesn't care about you. They don't care about me. They don't want it to. Apple doesn't  view silicon anymore the way that us consumers for some reason still do. It's not about whether  something has an A-Series chip or an M-Series chip. It doesn't matter to Apple, it's just Apple  Silicon. How many can we manufacture? How good are the yields? What does the binning look like? Using  a phone chip — one made in the millions every year — makes a lot of sense for your budget laptop,  which you're also trying to sell in the millions.

24:13 If anything is to happen to the iPad over  the next few years, I — shut up, Alexa. If anything is to happen to the iPad at all over  the next few years, the only thing I can foresee happening is allowing you to run macOS binaries,  or selected binaries, within iPadOS — almost like Parallels lets you run Windows apps inside  the macOS desktop without the Windows desktop environment. But the notion that iPadOS is going  to become macOS, or they're going to merge, or the iPad will run macOS — it seems futile as  either an app or a dual-boot device or otherwise, because ultimately that would make the iPad  a worse iPad, which Apple is not going to do.

24:49 If you yearn for something like that, your heart  will only be broken, man. So just, I don't know, get a MacBook Pro with the touch screen.  That's probably as good as it's going to get. What is this video about again? Oh yeah. The  Neo really does stand as the best example of a completely refined, well-thought-out product. This  is the perfect gateway into the Apple ecosystem. So much of America owns and loves the iPhone,  but a surprisingly small percentage of those people also own and love the Mac. This could be  the device that changes that. This could be the thing that pushes the Mac to heights never  before achieved. And while it wouldn't be my first recommendation, it's certainly not a bad  device. If this is the budget you're shopping in and you can't afford more — well, buddy, get  this thing and start smiling. Because it's a Mac, and Macs are great. Thanks so much for  watching, and as always, stay snazzy.