I can't speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it's awful because of all that bloat. I'm guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.

Dude, the difference between you and Apple is Windows 11. They don't have a crappy copilot or Edge hoarding 4GB in the background just to show the weather.

As I always say:

...Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.

That's all they use their computers for. They don't want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid's picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.

And that's basically what the Neo is.

Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.

In Europe the price it's not that appealing, it's €699 and because they "care about environment 😉" the €99 charger (which is almost mandatory for a new user) is sold separately.

At €798 for 256g/8g it's not as good as the $599 they're selling in the US.

If someone is price sensitive, can get 3-4 refurbished ThinkPads with better specs for that price and run Linux much easier without hoping on some volunteer wizard to reverse engineer the proprietary components

He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.

Given the price of RAM, you'd need to sell a kidney to upgrade it in a Windows laptop these days, so that's not much of a difference, although 8MB is a little skimpy, I'll give him that one.

Am I the only one even a little happy to see the head of a major company mentioning upgradability as an appeal for customers?

Please do stick with two unsoldered SODIMM slots for your laptops Asus.

The perfect time for a relatively cheap Apple laptop when Microsoft is forcing people to buy new hardware just to use their latest version of their operating system. I wonder what the percentage of Microsoft folks who go to the MacBook will be. I wonder what the percentage of users who go the UNIX/Linux route would be. I'm not an apple fan myself so would go linux, but a good business move from Apple though.

Lemmings that focus on the RAM spec are telling on themselves. 256gb storage is the real travesty here.

I honestly dont care about the 8gb of ram, that is plenty for the target audience given MacOS's pretty good memory management, and optimisation of the first party apps the majority of users will use. I would have liked to see the base price be $499, but that would probably have needed something to be cut down to outside of apples standards, like the display or chassis quality.

I'm a little disappointed by the limited USB, its just one usb 3.0 (not 3.1 as far as I know) and one 2.0, I know that's a limitation of the platform, there arent really any spare PCIE lanes on a phone SOC. They could have put in a USB Hub chip to get two USB 3.0 ports with shared bandwidth, but I suspect that was difficult to do with reliable video and power throughput and someone decided saving a dollar was more important. That's plenty for your average user, but a pair of usb 3.1 would have been preferred of course.

However.. how many average PC users even use USB now? maybe just a thumb drive very rarely or to use an external display. I'm surprised it even has a headphone jack and an SD reader honestly.

I'd suspect the next gen model to use the newer iPhone chip that should bump the memory up to 12gb and I think has a usb 3.1 controller, so they could break that out better.

I dont hate it. it's filling in what used to be the mid range of laptops that has kinda died in the last 10 years and is full of spec bumped versions of bottom tier plastic garbage with awful screens and short battery life, and a couple of underspecced cut down versions of nicer metal case laptops that are just not very good either.

I'm suspicious.

I'm seeing social media FLOODED with Neo content. Definitely not organic.

"We can't believe Apple aren't fucking consumers harder! Apple?! have been fucking everyone so hard, for so long and people have just been bending over and taking it, and so we're very shocked to see them decide not to go maximum fuck-you with this product"

Maybe Asus should invest more into linux and start shipping it on their laptops by default? Maybe add an improved software compatibility layer for windows apps to get more people in?

Its still a Mac

Well good, maybe it'll incentivise y'all fuckers to sell actually usable machine instead of Bordeline e-waste Celerons with a 4GB of RAM in the ultra-budget segment

Can I put Linux on it? Because otherwise refurb Thinkpad Carbons are cheaper and better.

I think the real shock is the quality of windows and Microsoft, and the pc laptop industry also... When everything about a pc laptop is worse than a mac laptop, why do we expect?

It really is like no pc laptop manifacturer has pride in what they create anymore. They dont care if its a bad screen, shitty keyboard, horrible battery time. Just get it on market so the people can buy, and pay reviewers for good reviews.

For Windows if 8 gb of RAM is not enough that’s an own-goal. Because it is. Or it should be. Windows 11 is not so dramatically better than Windows Vista SP3 to require a 10x better computer to use comfortably. Actually, in many ways Windows 11 is a massive downgrade from what came before it.

I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target. That means we aren’t jumping the gun on saying “actually you need 12 gigs of RAM” as if that should be normal for a usable computer.

He pointed to the laptop's 8GB of "unified memory," or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can't upgrade it.

Yes, because Asus laptops all have non-soldered RAM...

A few do have non-soldered RAM, the most expensive workstation laptop and a couple of gaming laptops; all of which are >$2000.

They've had Mac minis for over a decade.

I find this hard to believe.

This is attractive to me simply because finding a quality 13" laptop is very difficult. 15.6" is huge.

It really is not appealing a mac air with 16gb RAM was $999 AUD and the NEO is $899 AUD. It's a step backwards..

Just make some decent SD Elite laptops, preferably with Linux OOTB, I've been waiting...

He also described the MacBook Neo as a “content consumption” device, similar to an iPad. “This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook," which can handle more compute-intensive tasks, Hsu said.

I don't know what Windows have out of the box but is MacBook really content consuming device ?

Free build in OS offline office apps Word = Pages, Excel=Numbers, Power Point = Keynote, Notes, Calendar, Email, Reminders, PDF viewer = Preview, movie editor = iMovie, Journal, Password Manager = Keychain, Maps app ( yes you can download parts of map to use offline), Garage band where you can connect your midi devices and record them.