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I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.

I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.

I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.

This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.

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> And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.

I would buy a used Macbook Pro for the same price, just because it is more powerful. I have bought used Macbook Pros for many years, and have never had any problem. Apple gear is durable, and I've never had any SSD issues or problems with dead pixels. The laptop I'm typing this on is a 2021 M1 Max, so 5 years old now, and I just did an SSD health check, it is 100% after 5 years of heavy use. It easily has 5 more years of life.


A Chromebook with stock ChromeOS runs the Linux Dev VM just fine and you can do real work with it

M4 air to Neo is a huge downgrade, what’s the motivation?

It's not a replacement, it's an addition. My Air is stationary and it doesn't leave my desk due to lots of cables plugged in and I want something that I can take with me around the house if I decide to chill elsewhere for a bit. I was looking at Windows laptops for a long time and it was either a Chromebook or £1k+ which I couldn't justify.

Anything for the price of the Neo that I could find was an ugly looking 15" piece of plastic from Asus or Lenovo (no offense, I love my Thinkpads).

However I do have to say again that I use an 8G M2 at work without any issues and I've had an M1 as a temp replacement for work recently again without any issues and they say A18 is equivalent to M1 in performance so I really don't see why this new Neo wouldn't be enough for a home/personal laptop. All my consumption is SaaS-based, I really don't need better spec. What I need is a lower price and familiarity that I appreciate and I think Apple nailed it here by offering both in a product.


i think a mac mini (m4, 16gb, $599) for the desk is what i’d buy in your situation but ofc i don’t know the specifics

Or wait for the M5 Mac Mini to come out instead.



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