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.

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.

How soon until Asahi will run on it

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.

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.

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).

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)?

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.

Performance wise it's an interesting one. I think from a price and energy standpoint it sits squarely against windows ultrabooks with a Snapdragon X, for example, a Galaxy Book 4 Edge.

Based purely on benchmarks, the A18 Pro is weaker than that, plus you have only 8GB of RAM.

However - I have a Surface Pro X with the original SQ1, with roughly 40% of the performance of these... And even at that level, the problem is Windows on ARM, not the performance. It only lets you down for things it's clearly not meant to do, like video editing.

Another alternative I see for that price is a windows laptop with an i5-1334U, which theoretically gives you a raw performance within 2% of the A18 Pro.

Given that at this price Linux compatibility is an absolute lottery, would I sacrifice half the RAM for having an OS that isn't Windows? Yeah there's not much to think. W11 will probably eat half the RAM on telemetry alone, and Apple's BS is easier to put up with than MicroSlop's...

I'm not sure we can use the "Windows x86 vs Windows ARM" analog for this new unit from Apple. MacOS Tahoe is a native ARM OS on both the high end and now this low end unit. With Windows its a completely different CPU architecture.

Apple has to know this is going to cannibalize its low end (8GB/256GB SSD) Macbook Air line. So will Apple discontinue the low config Air or is there some other differentiator that still makes the low config Air compelling?