MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

Posted by tosh 20 hours ago

MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble(www.jdhodges.com)

268 points | 322 commentspage 5

fragmede 18 hours ago|

The question thus, is how does the Neo perform if I put it on top of an ice pack?

orliesaurus 18 hours ago||

Yup, was wondering the same, that would be a great follow up article by author

Applejinx 18 hours ago||

Or mod it so it burns your junk but makes you the heatsink :D

tracker1 17 hours ago||

A lot of people have used a thermal pad to bridge the CPU to the case.. it doesn't really get that hot, and you get a >5% performance bump.

karel-3d 5 hours ago||

I wanted to ask "hm is 8GB that bad for coding? I don't use that much anyway" and now I look at my Activity Monitor and I somehow use 22GB, I don't know why.

Why is Rust Analyzer running and taking 2GB? I don't even write in Rust. Each Electron app takes 300-400MB and for some reason Ghostty takes 400 MB... ok I take it back, I couldn't use 8GB.

dickywad 15 hours ago||

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p0w3n3d 10 hours ago||

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charpit 9 hours ago||

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rebekkamikkoa 18 hours ago||

[flagged]

lifestyleguru 18 hours ago||

I already have half dozen over decade old laptops with 4-8GB of RAM in the drawer, don't need any more.

interludead 10 hours ago||

The most interesting part of this is the 8GB RAM decision. Soldered 8GB in 2026 is the sort of compromise that looks fine on day one and painful in year three

SXX 5 hours ago|

It's not "soldered". It's literally part of SOC package as it's comes out of TSMC lines. Using exactly the same iPhone chip is kind a the only reason they can target this price target.

Hate to defend Apple here, but there are so many more garbage laptops out there for the same price tag that can as well just go directly into landfill. Apple at least have the volume to make sure Mac software actually works on said 8GB.

If Apple manage to decrease market share of other e-waste manufacturers it's good on me. At least these laptops will live 5-7 years as we browser machines.

lifestyleguru 2 hours ago||

Yes they will reduce but for a start you have to buy yet another low end laptop. This time will be different.

SXX 1 hour ago||

There is massive percent of population whose needs will be 200% covered with Neo performance. Most people just need a laptop for web browser, watching videos, occasional app use.

Problem with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is not performance, but horrific build quality, displays, webcams, audio and keyboards. This is something Apple have solved. Also there is no Windows which solves a lot of problems.

I was doing gamedev for years on M1 Air with 16GB / 256GB and some other software engineering too FFS. Surely non-power-users can live with less.

justin66 18 hours ago|

> Yes, 8GB of RAM is a real limitation. But give it a year and the next version will almost certainly ship with 12GB and a modest CPU bump.

We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?

simonh 8 hours ago||

According to some reviews I’ve seen, it tops out at around 60.

mmaniac 5 hours ago||

You can have as many as you like, but Safari will kill them when you're not looking.