JD Hodges did a proper teardown of the MacBook Neo — benchmarks, wafer economics, the whole thing — and the headline for me is the 8GB base RAM decision. In 2025, with local LLMs and Electron everything, shipping 8GB on a flagship-adjacent machine is either a brilliant margin play or a slow-motion mistake. Probably both.
The wafer economics part is where it gets interesting. Apple's silicon yields and binning strategy mean the marginal cost of bumping base RAM is real but not catastrophic. So 8GB isn't a constraint, it's a choice — a choice that quietly nudges a chunk of buyers up to the 16GB tier where the actual margin lives. Classic Apple pricing ladder.
The benchmarks themselves look fine. Single-core is strong, multi-core scales as expected, and the GPU holds up for the form factor. Nothing shocking, which is kind of the story now — Apple Silicon has settled into predictable generational gains rather than the wild leaps of the M1 era.
Worth reading the full source if you care about how hardware pricing actually gets decided. My take: if you're buying one, skip the 8GB SKU. It's engineered to make you regret it in 18 months.
