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Initial NEO thoughts

jouster said:
I'm buying soon. I qualify for the edu discount, and also have a trade-in. The resulting deal is going to be very attractive. A few thoughts after checking them out in the Apple Store today:
  • While the dimensions don't differ much from the Air on paper, they definitely feel smaller.
  • To me, the tinting on the keyboards is very subtle on the silver (no tint; I get it), blush, and citrus. Conversely, it is very obvious on the indigo, whose keyboard is much darker than the others'.
  • The indigo was more purple than I had been expecting. From the pictures, I thought it would veer toward blue.
  • I don't have an opinion on the great yellow-green vs green-yellow debate of '26, but I will say that whichever way you see it, the citrus is eye-searingly bright.
  • The trackpad feels great. A very positive and uniform click. I think I actually prefer it to Taptic Engine-based trackpads.
  • The bezels are wide...if you concentrate on them. They faded away immediately for me, but then I have never cared about bezel size.
I'll be picking it up next week, in store. Have to decide on a color by then!
Click to expand...
Ok, follow up for what it’s worth to prospective buyers. I got the 512GB model, having walked in planning to get the 256. I went back and forth on the color for a long time, before going with…silver. Had been planning to get indigo, but the keyboard is quite dark; more so than I remembered from my visit on release day. My eyes are getting kinda creaky so the white keyboard makes sense.

I work in education, giving me $100 off. I traded my ancient core i3 in for another $145 off. And they offered twelve months of interest free credit, so why not? That comes to about $39—about ten trips to Starbucks—per month.

The store was jammed. I had to wait in line to purchase. I think they are going to sell a boatload of these.
 
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jouster said:
Ok, follow up for what it’s worth to prospective buyers. I got the 512GB model, having walked in planning to get the 256. I went back and forth on the color for a long time, before going with…silver. Had been planning to get indigo, but the keyboard is quite dark; more so than I remembered from my visit on release day. My eyes are getting kinda creaky so the white keyboard makes sense.

I work in education, giving me $100 off. I traded my ancient core i3 in for another $145 off. And they offered twelve months of interest free credit, so why not? That comes to about $39—about ten trips to Starbucks—per month.

The store was jammed. I had to wait in line to purchase. I think they are going to sell a boatload of these.
Click to expand...
One question: How do you get out of Starbucks ten times for less than $4 per visit?
 
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I went to the apple store and played around with the neo. I have to say, for the "compromises" this laptop had to make to come under a price point, it's hard to compare this to a windows laptop with the same price. The "touch points" are nice quality. The track pad (always terrible 500 laptops including my work laptop), is premium! I like clicking this. The size is good I thought it would be smaller. Multi touch work!

Screen brightness is the same as my MBA 15 in air! I like my screens bright and 500 is the minimum for me. Keyboard is like any apple keyboard. Again my work laptop which is windows, the keyboard is mushy, and the screen dim. I love the screen and the keyboard!!

I didn't test the speaker but I hear it's very surprisingly good per reviewers.

The bad, I think the colors are ok. The lime appears to green for me. I was expecting yellowish tint on some of the pictures. The pink looks nice though.
 

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Dirk Pieters said:
Visisted 2 electronics stores today, not Apple stores but they both have dedicated “islands” for Apple products. Both had a Neo and both were Citrus, which was to be expected.

Build quality … very nice but the Citrus is just not for me. I think that color is going to get really old really fast.

I closed all the apps that were open, relaunched Safari and loaded 4 tabs with decent sites like this one, arstechnica, etc. Had a look at Activity Monitor and it showed 6gb in use. That wasn’t after a clean reboot so unsure what to make of that.

I’m still in doubt about getting one. It would be nice to do some work in the evening. A minimal setup for Laravel development (php/mysql as services, PHPStorm, Safari and Sequel Ace)

If anyone here runs similar apps on an 8gb MacBook Air M1 ... any feedback would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
You are not an entry level user. For $400 more you clearly should get an MBA with its two Thunderbolt 4 ports, [at least] double the RAM, double the memory bandwidth, better display, better battery life, more external display support, MagSafe, etc. Your usage will be smoother on an MBA and it will have a substantially longer life cycle. The MBA is much more computer and it weighs the same.
 
Did some more testing today:
Installed LRC (Lightroom Classic) and PS (Photoshop)
copied 250 RAW photos that I took last year, average ~ 30MB
Imported into LRC which took about 2 min
Made some simple adjustments (color, exposure etc) which was a breeze
Then I loaded some scanned photos (75 years or so old, so visible scratches and such) into PS and ran the neural filter "photo restoration" and it ran quite smooth and quick too.

Last year I used my M2 iPad Air while traveling and while I could load my photos I ended up using the Photos app and that one just doesn't cut it for me. Now having LRC available while traveling is a major upside for me. The main purpose is to look at the photos taken during the day and share via Airplay with others, no perfection needed for that. And I will probably never use PS while traveling, screen far too small for my old eyes.

So for me, another win
 
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I've done a boatload of research work today on the Neo using AI tooling (involving a ground truth scaffolding I'm developing), it's holding up well and the framework I use is much easier to implement on a Mac than an iPad Pro. I'm probably going to keep this damn thing.

I think I like the trackpad MORE than the haptic ones. It's so satisfying even with tap to click because having your finger already down and then pressing provides a very satisfying mechanical thunk.

There's a lot to like about this little machine. I really wish Apple would make a pro machine this size, it's exactly perfect. And the color, oh my goodness.
 
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theluggage said:
Well, if anybody has a Neo they can run System Report and find out how the USB ports are plumbed & when someone does a teardown we'll see what controller chips it has.

First, I don't think I've ever seen a full pinout of any Apple Silicon chip but it's likely that they all feature some USB 2 and/or 3 interfaces and/or spare PCIe lanes (that could run USB controllers) for internal peripherals (keyboards, trackpads, WiFi etc). The "extra" USB2 most likely comes from an internal hub.

Second, USB2 and USB3 are actually quite independent, with their own electrical standards. A USB3 or USBC connector has two quite separate sets of wires for USB3 and USB2. They don't share bandwidth. A "USB3" hub effectively contains a separate, parallel USB2 hub - you can connect a USB3 device and a USB2 device and they'd both get their full bandwidth (minus the overhead of a hub).
Click to expand...
iPhones could either have USB2 lightning or usbc or USB3 usbc (the Pro Chip). Because they have 1 port, nobody bothered to wonder if they could have both ports. They just complained that some phones were still USB2.

My guess is the Pro Chips have the standard USB2 of all A chips and an additional USB3 controller.
 
I'm also a few days in. some early thoughts.
Pros:
- It's quite snappy for pretty much everything I've tried. Office work (MS Office), emails, safari, etc. You can def feel the difference between a Pro machine. I have a 14" MBP M5 for work, but this A18 chip is keeping up.
- Screen is great. It's like the Air's screen. I always have my displays on More Space and everything is crisp and sharp.
- Don't miss the notch at all.
- Speakers are pretty good though it's weird hearing the sound coming from the sides.
Cons:
- Keyboard definitely feels a little softer than the Pro.
- I didn't realize how much I missed the backlight on the keyboard. I'm making do - but I'm used to glancing down and seeing all the keys in semi-dark settings. I have the Indigo one and def the lettering is quite faint against the blue tint.
- I don't like the physical trackpad click. It's like twice the pressure of the haptic trackpad. It's not terrible since I use tap to click, but when I do click it, it feels clunky.
- They could have shaved off a little more in the size. It's close to an Air, but I'm glad it is smaller.

Overall, I'm really impressed. You see the benchmarks on the phones - but this is a real world example that what you carry in your pocket can power a full multi-tasking multi-app machine. That's pretty cool.
 
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clarencek said:
I'm also a few days in. some early thoughts.
Pros:
- It's quite snappy for pretty much everything I've tried. Office work (MS Office), emails, safari, etc. You can def feel the difference between a Pro machine. I have a 14" MBP M5 for work, but this A18 chip is keeping up.
- Screen is great. It's like the Air's screen. I always have my displays on More Space and everything is crisp and sharp.
- Don't miss the notch at all.
- Speakers are pretty good though it's weird hearing the sound coming from the sides.
Cons:
- Keyboard definitely feels a little softer than the Pro.
- I didn't realize how much I missed the backlight on the keyboard. I'm making do - but I'm used to glancing down and seeing all the keys in semi-dark settings. I have the Indigo one and def the lettering is quite faint against the blue tint.
- I don't like the physical trackpad click. It's like twice the pressure of the haptic trackpad. It's not terrible since I use tap to click, but when I do click it, it feels clunky.
- They could have shaved off a little more in the size. It's close to an Air, but I'm glad it is smaller.

Overall, I'm really impressed. You see the benchmarks on the phones - but this is a real world example that what you carry in your pocket can power a full multi-tasking multi-app machine. That's pretty cool.
Click to expand...
Agree about the backlight. It's not enough to make me move on from the NEO, but that is the one thing I would change if I could.
 
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clarencek said:
I'm also a few days in. some early thoughts.
Pros:
- It's quite snappy for pretty much everything I've tried. Office work (MS Office), emails, safari, etc. You can def feel the difference between a Pro machine. I have a 14" MBP M5 for work, but this A18 chip is keeping up.
- Screen is great. It's like the Air's screen. I always have my displays on More Space and everything is crisp and sharp.
- Don't miss the notch at all.
- Speakers are pretty good though it's weird hearing the sound coming from the sides.
Cons:
- Keyboard definitely feels a little softer than the Pro.
- I didn't realize how much I missed the backlight on the keyboard. I'm making do - but I'm used to glancing down and seeing all the keys in semi-dark settings. I have the Indigo one and def the lettering is quite faint against the blue tint.
- I don't like the physical trackpad click. It's like twice the pressure of the haptic trackpad. It's not terrible since I use tap to click, but when I do click it, it feels clunky.
- They could have shaved off a little more in the size. It's close to an Air, but I'm glad it is smaller.

Overall, I'm really impressed. You see the benchmarks on the phones - but this is a real world example that what you carry in your pocket can power a full multi-tasking multi-app machine. That's pretty cool.
Click to expand...
I think Apple messed up with the Indigo keyboard in that either the letters need to be bright white and the keyboard darker, or the keys much lighter blue and the lettering black or navy.
 
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ikramerica said:
I think Apple messed up with the Indigo keyboard in that either the letters need to be bright white and the keyboard darker, or the keys much lighter blue and the lettering black or navy.
Click to expand...

I agree. But I am getting use to the Indigo keyboard.


ikramerica said:
My guess is the Pro Chips have the standard USB2 of all A chips and an additional USB3 controller.
Click to expand...

The Pro chip supports a single USB 3 port. Apple had to use a third party USB control to be able to have the second USB 2 port on the Neo.
 
ZipZilla said:
One guy was really complaining about the screen. I am going to the Apple Store this week to see in person, but pretty sure I am getting the base model as a cheap travel laptop (in case it gets lost/stolen/confiscated)
Click to expand...
I have used both MBA and MBP and I didn’t see any inherent probs with the Neo screen nor have I seen any widespread reports of such. It’s good you will be seeing for yourself, instead of taking negative feedback at face value.
 
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I haven't noticed any issues with my Neo. And I can't tell much difference between it and the screens on my 2018 iPad Pro or m3 iPad Air.

As I said before, everyone's eyes are different. What one person notices won't be noticed by others.
 
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ZipZilla said:
One guy was really complaining about the screen. I am going to the Apple Store this week to see in person, but pretty sure I am getting the base model as a cheap travel laptop (in case it gets lost/stolen/confiscated)
Click to expand...
Apple doesn't use inferior displays, so enjoy your Neo. You'd need a side by side comparison with applicable color images to see the difference between sRGB on the Neo (and base iPad) and P3 wide color on the non-entry models. And some of us might need someone who knows what they're looking at to point it out to us, LOL.
 
Alohabai said:
Do you even know what a phone is? Sensationalist post lol. A laptop is not a phone lol
Click to expand...
Who wants to pay for an additional cell bill for their laptop. I wouldn't. If my MacBook had cell ability i'd not use it; just tether it to my cell phone instead for internet.
 
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