And thanks to the 8GB soldered RAM you've got, you will enjoy this ludicrous speed for about 5 minutes of mild usage, thanks to liquid glass, electron apps and modern web. Brilliant.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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8GB is not enough RAM. however, Apple memory management feels kinda magic? my base m2 air is fast enough even when swapping. i like to have a lot of apps open at once and i don't close them until I've finished a project so it's not enough memory for me. for the average person id argue it's fine... and i bet apple is going to do a base spec upgrade anyways in a year or two and make a ton of money because of it :p
Pretty sure it uses memory compression, Linux equivalent would be zram. Due to the speed and compression ratio of modern compression algorithms like zstd you can usually get double your RAM capacity in fast low latency on-memory swap. Not sure what macOS uses specifically but the compute is easily there.
8gb I more than enough ram for most things that are not called gaming or video editing, the cast vast majority of people will be fine with 8gb and hopefully with the RAMpolcalypse in full effect we can start seeing some better software optimizations.
I run a dinky little self hosted server in my basement, and when I spin up a VM to test something or just play around with a new distro I never give the VM more than 4-8gb of ram
This isn't a power user device, this is an iPad with a keyboard and trackpad instead of touch. This is your boomer parents next computer not your next computer
Thinking 8gb of ram is not enough is your windows-brain talking bro, break the m$ conditioning!
It might be enough today, but a MacBook is expected to last a decade. These might have a few good years at best
Swapping is a nice way to burn that soldered on SSD fast!
Ehhh, yes but also no.
8gb will struggle if you really push it, but MacOS handles RAM management well enough that most everyday tasks will work fine. But if you're really pushing the Neo often enough then it's probably not for you anyway. The 16gb Air would be a better pick in that case.
Unlike the equivalent Windows 11 laptop with 32 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron, where you'd get to experience that speed... Never. But sure, you can have all your apps frozen at once.
to be fair, that wouldn't be my pick at that pricepoint. That single-core performance would still be unmatched, but I would have something with better IO, more RAM, and more life in it.
the issue with this product is that it is not the right product for most persons that discusses technology online, but it is still a great product for tons of people
Hard disagree, the more you look at it, the more this can be described as "a product to convince people that discuss technology online that this is a product for tons of people". Most people need HDMI more than they need record-matching single-thread performance. Most people need more RAM because almost all they do is web-based and not MacOS native. Most people need I/O because they have mice, weird peripherals, and tons of usb drives, mostly USB-A.
That said, it's a magnificent second or third device for the tech elite that's already committed to the Apple ecosystem (having nothing on-device, whose peripherals and I/O needs are covered by more general-purpose computers) and who will absolutely brag that the performance of this lets them do lots of coding (using it as a metric for what a good computer is, in their eyes). Strangely both things can be true at the same time!
I have so many questions about how they're selling a laptop with that much RAM, especially right now, and that little CPU.
what do you mean by little cpu? that SoC beats so many budget chromebooks an cheap laptops.
Something a whole class below an i3, from 2019, just does not scream "winner" to me in any way. The same CPU has been deployed in cheap laptops... I see sub-$200 ones with this in it.
this chip has better single thread performance than the mac pro m2 ultra that apple still sells.
there are in fact very little chips faster in single core than this chip
edit- I went and look for some geekbench and the neo cpu is way better than I expected compared with intel cheap cpus.
the best intel result in single core is the i9-14900ks which is lower than the a18 pro (~3200 vs~3400). If you go to multithread and look for the closes match you need to check i7s or i9s from 11-13 gen (e.g. i7-11700f, that have 50% less score in single thread).
so I have no idea where you get the idea this chip is underpowered