u/Accomplished_Wafer38

I have finally got my macbook neo, and I have used it for couple days, so here is my opinion that nobody have asked for.

Screen
Fantastic. It has 2K-ish resolution (slightly less), plenty bright, good color accuracy (according to eyeballs) and contrast.
I have doubts you'd find anything similar for this amount of money from other manufactures.
After FHD on 15 inches, this is very nice. Text is nice and sharp. KiCAD schematics look pretty sharp.
Maybe now I would consider scaling when developing random websites, so images don't look pixelated on high-dpi screens.

Performance
It is plenty fast and efficient.
For example, when watching youtube on Firefox, SoC consumes about 300 mW.
Peak power I measured was around 9W, which tapers off to steady state 5W. (that is without thermal pad mod, data from sudo powermetrics )
I didn't run a lot of benchmarks, except wasm/JS one (Jetstream 3.0 on Firefox), and it has performance in same ballpark as desktop Ryzen 5600G and 5800X (one less 160-ish points, other more 230-ish points, while macbook gets 195 points). I think that benchmark is mainly single-threaded, so keep that in mind.
Limited RAM doesn't seem to be a huge deal, Mac OS features memory compression that works, and it has other dirty tricks to keep it usable.
Still, probably with some weird tasks limited RAM might become an issue. And you should probably keep that in mind, and close apps that you're not actively using (Win Command+Q), if you don't want to experience random slowdowns.

Battery
Good, despite having tiny 36 Wh battery. 10 hours maybe, watching youtubes and scrolling reddits. Maybe more with reduced brightness, or less with more brightness.
It also can charge from 5V USB phone charger, which is... interesting. Most other laptops won't charge from 5V USB-C, they would want 45-65W charger as a minimum.
Nice feature, when you forger the charger at home, and your macbook neo runs out of the juice, as now you can ask regular 10W USB-C charger.

Build quality
It uses real aluminium. Not foil wrapped plastic, like other manufacturers tend to do in this price range.
That said, I think manufacturing precision is indeed slightly worse than other Apple laptops. Screen lid is slightly bent, and bottom cover has slight indents near screw holes (even when compared to abused MBP 2012)... But, it doesn't matter stop using micrometers to measure laptops XD

OS
I didn't use Mac OS for a long time, since 10.9 or there abouts. But muscle memory kicked in fast.
There are some quirks, like red button doesn't close app (hence you need to memorize cmd+q shortcut, or go to menu bar->appname->quit), but hey, at least green one maximizes the app now.
But overall, it is nice. No copilot, no ads, no Windows moments... No Linux moments either.
Touchpad gestures feel nice (unlike Windows where they were half-assed).
All your Linux software is available via homebrew, if you're into that.

Oh yeah! No account needed. You don't need to log in with iCloud (if you want to use Appstore, you'd have to log in, sooner or later). But it needs to call Apple home on setup, so you'd need internet.

So overall, its a nice laptop. I have no idea how did Apple manage pull it off, or why iPhone needs CPU this powerful, but here we are. Decent competition to mid-high range laptops from usual suspects like HP, Lenovo etc.

A lot of people are worried about 8GB of the RAM on the Neo, so was I.

I still didn't get my MacBook Neo, but I have a guinea pig, ASUS laptop netbook with Celeron N4500 and 4GB of soldered DDR4. I.e. piece of u know what :D

I did couple things, with Linux and Windows, and I came up to the conclusion that 8GB on Neo would be fine.

Screenshots:

1. Average Win10 RAM consumption, take notice that Compressed memory is really small, and commited memory (RAM+pagefile) is large.
2. Alpine Linux, fresh install, probably idle, no zram
3. Alpine Linux, zram enabled, 1.4GB compressed into roughly into 460Megs
4. Alpine Linux, zram enabled, idk what i was running but yes, thats hardware abuse at this point.
5. Zramctl status (idk what i was doing again)

With Windows 10 it was unbearable. I just though OK, it is what it is... But then I was looking at Neo screenshots, from "taskmanager" or whatever it is called and it hit me. OS X Mac OS has memory compression that actually works, and I noticed that compressed memory can be couple gigabytes.
Windows doesn't do that. I tried disabling pagefile (swap) - compressed memory was 0 and taskmanager told me that compression is disabled. I tried making smallest pagefile possible, and compressed memory was around 50 megabytes. When I launch KiCAD... Windows would just close it because of OOM (out-of-memory) exception.
So in other words, Windows 10 doesn't support memory compression. All it supports is swap compression. Or it is broken in some weird way. I don't know about Windows 11, but given its Win10 with copilot and new UI, it probably doesn't support it either.

I talked to couple of my online friends about this, and I realized that Linux has memory compression too, zram. From what I understood it works like this. zram allocates chunk in the RAM, and then uses it to create virtual "hard drive". That virtual hard drive uses compression algorithms to store more info. After which you adjust swappiness to make it swap more aggressively to said virtual hard drive, and you get memory compression. And when you run out of RAM, it starts slow swapping to the regular SSD.

So I decided to give it a try.
Since I played in the past with Linux on this Celeron piece of ..... I knew that on Alpine Linux with Gnome installed, opening KiCAD would freeze the OS, until KiCAD finishes loading things.
I have installed Alpine with Gnome, configured zram, swappiness... And my God! It didn't freeze.
I decided to load it more, I was installing flatpaks, while talking to parents via Microsoft Teams while sharing screen (software encoding), and sharing Google street view. It did eventually freeze a bit, but overall it was incredibly responsive, compared to Win10 that was running 2 tabs in chrome/firefox in slideshow mode.
Analyzing zramctl, I learnt that compression ratio is about 3:1, and it took 1 GB of RAM, so overall I got 6GB of ""RAM"", instead of 4 GB without compression.

Sooo... More RAM? Literally "download more RAM" sort of meme. What's the catch?
It is slower than regular RAM, but orders of magnitude faster than normal swapping. Plus it uses CPU for compression/decompression. But N4500 Celeron is pretty weak, and I didn't notice any significant issues, so I am pretty sure MacBook Neo, which has a beast of a CPU (compared to my Celeron), would be able to handle it just fine without any stutters.
Other thing is that data has to be compressible, so it is a bit of a gamble.

I guess a simple way to explain it would be something like this (in context of MacBook Neo):

• Use 8GB of RAM - CPU performance 100%
• Use 8-12GB of RAM - CPU performance 98%
• Use >12GB of RAM - CPU performance 98% + slowdowns due to swapping to SSD

In other words, you trade CPU cycles for more RAM.

Now, Mac OS does exactly the same thing as Linux does, or something similar (if somebody is curious enough, Mac OS kernel is open-source, you can analyze code and compare to Linux). They are doing it since OS X 10.9 apparently. It uses different compression algorithm, and it is probably tuned much better than my Linux install.. So it is not a problem.

Conclusion: RAM compression is free RAM dude. Windows can't do it for some reason, even though it should. Linux is... well, Linux, if you tinker around you might get it to behave well enough.
If Mac OS behaves similarly to Linux, then limited RAM of MacBook Neo is not an issue for most people. And if you're software developer that wondered about all this, if it is enough or not... You should refresh OS structure course knowledge, maybe experiment with Linux VM + zram and draw conclusions from that, before blindly comparing to Windows or Linux with disabled zram.

Couple interesting articles:

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/07/03/macos-memory-management.html

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory_compression

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/wilson/wilson.pdf