Pure  Speculation: MacBook Neo

Okay, fine. I'll make a speculation video about the MacBook Neo that just came out. I wasn't going to. I don't have one yet. This is just a 3D print I made. It's not even the right size. I think the file was meant for Blender and so like it's supposed to open up and so it really screwed up the 3D print. I ordered a blue one. I really like to test these computers and mess with these computers, but if everyone else is going to make a video before they have their hands on one, I am too. And there's a couple of things that I think some of you other YouTube folks are missing. How's that for a cliffhanger? But for real though, it's heat. It's always heat. It's a big coffee day today. The MacBook Neo, a $600 MacBook, but you should probably get the 512 one. So, a $700 MacBook. Mine's on its way right now, and I will test it and post the first thing with it on the 11th of March. So, if you're watching this after that, just go to this link and see what this thing can actually do rather than what I just think it can do and who it's for. Spoiler alert, I'll bet it's best suited for almost everyone. I've been saying MacBook Airs are way overpowered since the M4. Looking at the specs, I can tell you what jumps out to me. The media engine in bold print hardware accelerated H.264, HEVC, which is H.265, and ProRes, aka the two formats mirrorless cameras shoot in, and the one that editing proxy files work in. Mark my words, you'll be able to edit with this thing in Final Cut Pro. And I'll just bet you'll be able to do it shockingly smoothly. And if you compare this directly against a Chromebook or anything remotely in its price range, I don't have a great segue to the thing today. So, I'm just going to try special effects. [screaming] At first, I was pretty worried because I saw that the Neo does not come with Thunderbolt ports. The ports on this thing are just going to be USBC. But this word here in the specs, display port, means that you will be able to attach this computer to an external monitor. Oh, it says that too in the specs. I just had to keep reading. Although actually you may want to do that through a hub in my opinion because the other USBC port on the Neo is a slow port 480 megabits per second. So if you're going to want to plug in a monitor and use an external SSD, like if you want to try to use this as a lightweight editing rig, which again I'm betting you'll be able to do, you'll want that external SSD going through the same USB 3 port as the monitor. There are many other reasons to use an external drive, and all of those other reasons are equally valid and important. a hub like this or my very adorable Wakius USBC hub. Both of these come with external drives built into the hub so you wouldn't have to have another thing connected to a thing. But then they also have HDMI ports so you could plug your monitor into the HDMI and still use more ports and have an NVME SSD built into the hub. I'll put links below for these things. I'm curious to see how this little tiny screen would react with the Neo cuz technically the Neo can only drive one external monitor. We'll just have to see how that goes cuz so far all I can do or anyone else is speculate. The rear USBC port on this thing is 10 Gbits per second. So, the one closest to the hinge. It's 20 times faster than the other USBC port on the side of the computer. At first, that seems like a really strange design choice, but I'll just bet that it's because this chip was designed for a phone. It was only designed to have one lane for the USBC. And really, this laptop is just a phone with a huge screen and a built-in keyboard and no modem, but way better cooling capacity that's also running on full Mac OS. It'll be interesting to see if this thing can drive a studio display and an external SSD. The Neo is not on the compatibility list for the new studio display. And this is 5K. It says it can only drive up to a 4K monitor, but I believe in Apple's [clears throat] engineers cuz the Studio Display is a hub, too. It's got USBC ports. So, this thing is running on a phone chip and not even the newest phone chip. The A18 Pro was the iPhone 16 Pro's brain set. And that makes it sound like this is crazy weak for a laptop. But in reality, that chip was just ridiculously overpowered for a phone. So much so that in doing almost anything, that chip would need to thermal throttle when it was in the iPhone 16 Pro. It's in that past tense, like people don't still have the iPhone 16 Pro. That phone was covered in glass and titanium. Glass is basically a winter coat in terms of heat rejection for electronics. The performance cores of this little laptop will hit over 4 GHz. That's literally the M3 CPU speed, as in the chip that is currently in the Mac Studio Ultra, unless another announcement has gone out since I wrote this. So, one and two core processors might feel no different between the Neo and the Studio. This chip only has two performance cores, which again sounds like a crippling drawback, but I don't think it is. I think one of the things that means is this chip might never thermal throttle cuz there's just not enough going on. It does have four efficiency cores to handle every bit as much of the background activity as something like an M3 MacBook Air. But Mac OS's snappiness is determined by the speed of a CPU or GPU, not by the number of CPUs or GPUs. Now, exporting your work will be another story altogether. This will be much slower at that type of a thing than the Ultra. This is not an Ultra. But the normie computer things, things this is actually designed for things like web browsing, writing papers, doing spreadsheets, writing emails, using messaging apps like Teams, Slack, Discord, working in Notion or ASA, making PowerPoints or giving PowerPoint presentations or Keynote presentations. Actually, what presentation software do they use in college? Now, those things will be no problem on this computer. I'm going to bet that you could blind test the Neo against the M5 MacBook Pro for all of those things and nine out of 10 people would not be able to register a difference. But then it's going to come down to you guys trying to save money and trying to use this computer for harder stuff. And I'm here for it. That 8 gigs of RAM has me a little scared. I'm not going to lie. And I'm really curious what Apple's done to get around that. It's got to be running some slight different variation or like Mac OS is just aware of its hardware limitations and will dramatically scale background tasks or something. If there's a Mac OS update on March 11th, then that's definitely the case because individual apps really don't take up that much RAM. It's just that we leave apps open all the time. And boy, does [clears throat] that take up a lot of RAM. I'm curious to see if we're going to get some sort of update to treat things more like iPad OS where whatever apps are not in the forefront get this really fast like suspended state and they dump all their RAM back into the pool because with 8 gigs on Mac OS, you'd basically be in the swap all the time otherwise. There's no way that they're putting out a brand new computer that lives its entire life in Chrome tab swap land. In fact, right now as I write this, that's a little meta because I'm talking as the the mei that wrote this. I'm somehow using 19 gigs of RAM on my M4 Max MacBook Pro and I don't really even have that much stuff running. I don't even have Chrome open. Oh, 21 gigs. And before you accuse me of using Chat GPT to write scripts, I know you saw it there. I was just asking it how I'm doing with my calorie intake today because I had two bags of Skittles in one day. We were cleaning out the warehouse, so I burned a bunch of extra calories. We went out to the county dump. What a sight to see. Anyway, where was I going with that? All right, RAM. I think this little Lappy 5000 will be able to edit video. And I don't just mean like Tik Toks you shoot on your phone. I think I'll be able to make a regular Space Design Warehouse video and edit it on this computer. And I intend to. Evidence. The iPhone 16 Pro can shoot 4K 120. And that means the media engines on this chip can encode at 4K 120 frames per second, which is the equivalent of five simultaneous 24 frames per second 4K streams. This chip was literally designed to deal with a shitload of very highresolution video. Maybe I'll have to turn the proxies down to 1080p just because of the RAM, but it's got the media engines. It can handle the playback for sure. It does have GPUs in it. It's a little nerfed in terms of the GPU count, but I'm pretty confident this little thing is going to surprise all of us with what it can do. It won't be running local LLMs, although that chip was also designed after Apple announced its Apple Intelligence push. So, it will have Apple's tiny LLMs running that proofread your grammar, rewrite your emails in different tones, do those little summaries of long texts and emails, but you're not going to be able to use this with O Lama or LM Studio or Exo or Draw Things. Won't work. I'm real curious to see how it handles music production. That's one of the things I'll be testing. That's really core count and RAM heavy, so probably not so good. But, I'll bet if you're not using a bunch of AIdriven effects, I finally got a 3D printer. You probably noticed it going in the background there. What's it printing? The suspense. But in order to make my very terrible designs, behold my Ford Maverick above infotainment screen phone holder apparatus. There's a little cubby above the screen in my truck. And I found someone who had made a 3D scan of the inside of that cubby. So I had like this shape. So I just really jankly added the size of a phone that has a little notch out for the charging. Whatever. To make this, I used Tinkercad. And I'm planning to learn Fusion. But this kind of thing is actually a perfect example of super lightweight 3D stuff that a super lightweight GPU can handle all day long. If you're a 3D printing specialist, this is the computer for you. I'm sure the Neo will struggle with like big Blender scenes, but making 3D models or modifying other people's 3D models that you find on the internet. It's basically a perfect use case for this computer. I'm going to be buying the entire M5 lineup this year. I've already got the M5 MacBook Pro. I actually have two variations of the M5 MacBook Pro cuz I wanted to test some RAM stuff. I've already ordered the M5 MacBook Air and this Neo thing. What is happening back there? Oh, it's switching colors. I've got the M4 Studio. I've got this M4 Max. I've got the M4 Pro Mac Mini. I've got the M4 base model Mac Mini. And I'll be selling each one of them after comparing them to their newer, younger, stierlier counterparts. And I'll be able to attract higher ticket sponsors once I hit that 100K subscriber mark. So, please check to see if you're subscribed. check to see if you're subscribed to the channel. It's actually going to help out quite a bit. I have a Discord channel set up now if you want to become a member and help out even harder. Today, at the time of filming, I have 81,153 subscribers. Isn't that nice? There's a donut that's going to be placed right in front of me. We're both after I light the fire, we're both going to scream, "Ah!" Then we're going to look at each other, scream. Ah, >> okay. >> And that's the whole thing. [snorts] >> You going to eat that? >> No, I bought two of them. [snorts] [clears throat] >> I'm going to snap again before I scream. Okay. OKAY. [screaming] >> That's all.

Apple Announced their VERY affordable, multicolored, powered by a phone chip, MacBook Neo yesterday. These are my thoughts about what it will be able to do. Orico Hub: https://amzn.to/4rW7Lb8 Tiny Retro Mac Hub: https://amzn.to/4d1KEHk MacBook NEO: https://amzn.to/4sAqUiJ Ugreen External NVMe SSD enclosure: https://amzn.to/3OYKyX9 My favorite battery bank by Anker: https://amzn.to/4udOvHH I shoot with this camera: https://amzn.to/4riCRIQ Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_lGMZMTN7Oh9DRKV2eaMtg/join