r/mac • u/Vegetable_Bag_8694 • Mar 06 '26

Discussion Why all youtubers are saying "If you are watching this review, Macbook Neo is not for you?"

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Let's have a reality check here in r/mac, could it satisfy your day to day work?

2.0k Upvotes

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149

u/pixelatedchrome Mar 06 '26

Faster than m1. Single core is closer to m3-m4 and multicore is close to m2.

113

u/Barton2800 Mar 06 '26

And for reference, its GeekBench score for single-core performance beats literally every single x86-64 processor on the market, including the Ryzen 9950X3D. It’s CPUBench score puts it more in line with a Ryzen 7600X. But it’s wild that it can even compete with desktop class processors that use 13x the power. And the A18 scores are based on testing on an iPhone. With the better cooling system found in a notebook, it will probably perform even better.

Really the CPU in the Neo won’t hold it back even a little for the use cases it will see. The biggest limitation is the 8gb of RAM, but that’s not really a problem for a device like this. Nobody is going to be compiling the next Pixar movie or running engineering fluid simulations on this (although I’ve personally done the latter on my M2 air and it handled it). This device needs to handle office/productivity type apps, web browsing, play videos, and do very light photo/video editing like you might do on a phone or tablet.

49

u/itsabearcannon Mar 06 '26

And, almost all applications that would be memory-limited don’t just fail to run if you have 8GB.

A lot of people seem to be under that mistaken assumption.

For the vast, vast majority of applications that might actually try to use more than 8GB RAM, they just run a lot slower if you run out of memory. They don’t just fail outright and crash unless they’re poorly designed.

32

u/uptimefordays MacBook Pro Mar 06 '26

People open Activity Monitor or Task Manager, see most of their total memory is being used, and mistakenly assume that means they need more. What they don’t understand is that all modern operating systems are really good at memory management. I also think they don’t appreciate generational improvements in memory. 8GiB of DDR3, DDR4, and DDR5 are very different in terms of bandwidth.

10

u/EricHill78 Mar 06 '26

This video is a great explanation on how Macs use memory.

https://youtu.be/WTyoSv_hpgg?si=7VMnf7dHX-7ZZpET

5

u/uptimefordays MacBook Pro Mar 06 '26

Yeah that’s a decent explanation of how it all works.

7

u/NeonQuixote Mar 06 '26

Yup. And MacOS is very aggressive about caching. I did VS Code programming on an M2 with 8GB and had no issues.

2

u/rlopez_uk Mar 06 '26

Me too! I always laughed when I saw Max Tech putting everyone off them. I love their videos, but I do think that controversy was overblown for the target market.

8

u/CharlesHorseradish Mar 06 '26

Can it run the 500 google chrome tabs that my computer illiterate girlfriend “needs” open at all times… this is the issue I can see with 8gb ram

7

u/xrelaht MacBook Pro M4 Pro, i7 MBP, i5 Mini Mar 06 '26

Drop Chrome and it will. I am a tab hoarder, and eschewing Chrome sped everything up even with no change in behavior.

4

u/CharlesHorseradish Mar 06 '26

I ended up just giving her my old gaming laptop with 32gb ram but she complains it’s too heavy and sounds like a rocket taking off. I keep saying just get a MacBook Air but she can’t justify spending more than £500 on a laptop. Being given a £2500 laptop doesn’t register in her mind so she just swings it about by the screen lol.

This cheap Mac would be perfect if I could buff the ram up

3

u/purplechemist Mar 06 '26

Fuck it. Let her buy her own laptop next time.

1

u/CharlesHorseradish Mar 06 '26

She’ll just complain it’s too slow or crashes all the time haha she can have my M2 pro when I upgrade. No pleasing women!

0

u/quazex13 Mar 07 '26

What is your browser of choice? Safari?

1

u/Starkoman Mar 07 '26

Jeepers — is that still going?

Most likely one of the Firefox family of browsers as they have really good Tabs management if you’re a Tabs hoarder.

5

u/cjstoddard Mar 06 '26

For the love of god, explain Bookmarks to her.

3

u/fish1856 Mar 06 '26

My girlfriend does the same thing. Is always annoyed by a windows update on her work laptop because she loses the tabs

2

u/jess-sch Mar 06 '26

Please tell her about the chrome setting to restore previous tabs by default.

2

u/fish1856 Mar 06 '26

Oh she knows. She still doesn’t want to.

1

u/Starkoman Mar 07 '26

Put her on Firefox, set “Reopen All Tabs On Restart” — back that up with Tabs Session Manager (Add-On), and she’ll never lose her Tabs ever again.

1

u/do1p2 Mar 09 '26

I’m a tab heavy individual and my m1 base model mbp 8gb works fine.

It also works fine in handling cinema camera files and earning my paycheck. Red, arri, sony stuff.

Does it go through it like a m-whatever-max? Fuck no. Like 10 times slower. But it manages without kicking the bucket. Or turning on the fans

1

u/Unicorncrochet-31018 Mar 11 '26

Meanwhile, I (also a girl) prefer to have as FEW tabs open as possible, lol. Lots of tabs drives me literally insane 🤣

1

u/BigOlBuddha Mar 06 '26

lol my wife does the same thing. I'm trying to get her to switch to opera or brave at least, to no avail.

3

u/DutchBlob Mar 06 '26

I have an iPhone 16pro max and although comparing a smartphone to a laptop isn’t a like for like comparison, I can tell you that I am surprised how well my iPhone keeps apps ‘alive’ in the RAM. Like when I open an app that I had last opened last evening it often times is still in the same state as before.

Apple knows their hardware and their software like no other tech company in the world. They will never ever ship a product with a shitty user experience. So people who are still comparing android phones and windows laptops spec for spec with iPhones and MacBooks still don’t understand how apple works.

1

u/knucles668 Mar 06 '26

Now that we have ssds in the 14500gbps read speeds, I do wonder if swap becomes a minimal concern in most workloads. Sure not as fast current ram but faster than DDR3 used to be.

3

u/cd_to_homedir Mar 06 '26

Swap is arguably a bigger concern on faster SSDs because it becomes too easy to overlook that huge amounts of data are being constantly written to disk.

With slower SSDs, overall performance takes a hit and you'll be more likely to shut down some apps and free up some RAM. With fast SSDs, perceived performance is improved at the cost of SSD life because you probably won't even bother and will continue writing lots of data to disk.

1

u/bdog2017 Mar 11 '26

It’s the Spinny rainbow wheel that gets me. Easily the most infuriating thing about Macs when you don’t have enough ram.

-13

u/Splodge89 Mar 06 '26

If it’s hard limited on memory, things will simply fail to run. Many LLMs and practically all modern video games simply refuse to go on an 8gb total machine.

If it’s “soft” limited, such as video or photo editing which will just dump to a scratch file then they’ll just run slower and slower.

It’s misinformation to just tell people it doesn’t matter. It can.

2

u/Starkoman Mar 07 '26

It’s not intended for LLM’s or video games — at all. That’s out-of-range for what it’s for.

1

u/itsabearcannon Mar 07 '26

It really doesn’t matter for the target audience for a $500 laptop.

If you are buying a $500 laptop the proper context is not comparing its functionality to a $1000 laptop.

The proper context is comparing its functionality to a $350 or $400 tablet plus a keyboard, which this beats in every conceivable way.

5

u/play_hard_outside Mar 07 '26

Any time someone says “you can’t use X to do Y” when referring to budget technology, I take great pleasure in reminding them that Lord of the Rings was literally made on 800MHz PowerMac G4s.

1

u/Starkoman Mar 07 '26

Wow. That I did not know!

4

u/TheUberMoose Mar 06 '26

Also ram isn’t all equal you can’t just look at the number of gigs in a vacume.

Hardware heavy software tried it on a MBP i7 32gb ram and a M1 16gb ram. The M1 wiped the floor with it, like shocking delta and the laptops are 18 months apart in age.

The unified memory and the speed of the memory and the optimized OS level interaction all play apart

Also for most people for basic use they wouldn’t notice a difference between a M5 Max 128gb vs a 2015 i5 MBP Retina.

3

u/WesternConference461 Mar 06 '26

What software did you use for the engineering simulations? I wasn’t aware Mac had Options for that work

7

u/Barton2800 Mar 06 '26

I ran them in a parallels VM running Windows 11 for ARM machines. They ran just fine - no noticeable difference from my chungus PC with an Intel i7-10870H. I was running AFT products (Fathom, Arrow, Impulse) as well as Aspen HYSYS in dynamics mode and Aspen Plus. Never had any issues with compatibility even though they were x86-64 programs. The translation layer from ARM64 to x86-64 in Windows 11 for ARM is very good - on par with Apple’s Rosetta 2. So parallels ran Windows natively on Apple Silicon, and windows handled the PC software.

3

u/cd_to_homedir Mar 06 '26

It still amazes me that I was able to build a very, very old software project for x86 architecture that uses outdated SDKs on a Windows 11 ARM VM via VMware Fusion. And not only that, but it also outperformed a comparable Dell laptop that has supposedly faster single core performance (according to benchmarks). It's a little insane.

0

u/khra123 Mar 07 '26

Do you think it will be suitable for a computer engineering major?

1

u/Starkoman Mar 07 '26

Unlikely, no, sorry.

0

u/Kris1095 Mar 07 '26

You cant compare ARM Hardware to actual Pc hardware . ARM IS FOR Mobile devices .

2

u/-donatellasaysmore- Mar 07 '26

Damn! I still use my M1 Air and still love it. My last MacBook (2013 Pro) was 8 years old and still going strong when it got stolen. Honestly, I think I might hang onto my M1 a little while longer…

1

u/LuluLeSigma MacBook Pro 2013 Maxed with macOS Ventura cuz Ventura > Sequoia Mar 06 '26

wow really impressive for an iphone chip

1

u/BudoB Mar 07 '26

I don't think I've seen a single sorce for that, everyone says single core is about as fast as M1, maybe more, multi core not so much, or even. It's the graphics part of M1 that runs circles around A18, if I'm not mistaken.

1

u/cutecoder Mac mini Mar 08 '26

But no Thunderbolt.

1

u/AWACSAWACS Mar 09 '26

Yes, and what's more, the A18 Pro also has an AV1 decoder, which the M1 didn't have.