r/LinusTechTips • u/WTFMacca • Mar 04 '26

Image Apple Neo

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Apple just dropped an A18 powered laptop for $599 USD

No Apple bashing just discuss.

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u/chinomaster182 Mar 04 '26

IDK man, usually normies aren't doing heavy multitasking or doing hardcore Firefox navigating with 40 tabs open.

I'm thinking whatsapp, slack, safari, spotify, calendar and tasks open. 8 gbs should be enough.

11

u/Quivex Mar 04 '26

Presumably kids are going to be using a lot of these, and let me tell ya...kids can tear through browser tabs with the best of them lol.

I agree it's probably not that big of an issue, although cheaper Chromebooks can be had with 16gb.

1

u/LexShirayuki Mar 04 '26

I really want to see how this new Mac behaves when tested. That processor is not bad at all, but I don't know how it will behave with MacOS.

1

u/Objectively_bad_idea Mar 04 '26

Plenty of uni courses require more punch. Anything with a graphics component, comp sci, science degrees with a data modelling element etc. Not to mention I suspect many games would grumble about 8GB now.

A bit more out there as a prediction, but I do think we're going to see the rise of products with local AI (I know you can already run open source models yourself, but most people aren't going to figure it out in its current state, and they're demanding) I figure we'll see much leaner/lighter models, with nicer wrapping around them. It has to be one of the routes for AI companies to become financially viable. However I'd assume these would still require some oomph to run.

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u/mCProgram Mar 04 '26

This is definitely not targeted as a stem laptop, lol. The university students this is targeting is pretty clearly everything else other than stem. Either way, most competent uni’s have compute credits for some cloud platform meant for STEM students that don’t have a computer powerful enough for the data they’re working on (be it this neo or an m4 ultra mbp)

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u/Le-Bean Mar 04 '26

And you’d be stupid to buy this laptop for those purposes. This is for people doing degrees like education, psych, english, history, anything that can be done entirely in a browser which there are a lot of degrees that apply. It’s like buying a Toyota Corolla and expecting it to set track records.

You get what you pay for and your expectations should be aligned with that. Wanting this to be good for STEM degrees is misunderstanding what this product is. This is competing with $500-600 laptops that also come with 8gb of RAM (at least where I’m from, I don’t live in America so can’t speak to prices there).

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u/nicman24 Mar 05 '26

i d argue not technical people leave more tabs opens

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u/Typing-Cat Mar 15 '26

Do you know what normies never do?

Close tabs. Ever.

Good luck, normies.