One month with a MacBook Neo and feeling the limits

I didn’t need 4K video editing or complex AI prompts to push the Neo to its limits. All it takes is for me to crash Apple MacBook budget bestseller Too many Safari tabs open (about 64, give or take).

I’ve been using a MacBook Neo as my main machine for a month, switching from my work-issued (and more powerful) MacBook Pro. Neo is The first MacBook to rock an iPhone processorA18 Pro chip. It comes with some trade-offs, but my overall experience has been pretty great. It handles every program I need. It’s lightweight with great battery life. And it’s pink and cute to boot.

Watch this: One month with MacBook Neo: Yes, I feel the limits

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But more often than not, there are annoying lags when I’m switching between Safari tabs. I especially notice this when several Google Workspace tools are open at the same time.

Last week, I exaggerated this while researching. My habit of opening too many tabs choked the laptop’s meager 8GB of RAM. Everything stopped, the spinning color wheel appeared, and a pop-up warned me that I needed to force-quit the programs to bring them back to life.

It makes me wonder whether other users who downgrade from more powerful MacBooks will notice the same lag moments — and whether I need to change my “too many tabs open” work style.

In this week’s episode of One More Thing, which you can watch embedded above, I explain my experience and wonder if other students searching and using a bunch of Google Cloud services (or obsessed with disorganized tabs like me) will experience the same wonky moments.

Was it just a fluke or can I recreate it on camera? It wasn’t easy, but I was able to mess it up again enough to get the same pop-up warning saying the app was out of memory. But the second time was not so easy.

Everything you said, I still believe The Neo is a great MacBook And even a great secondary travel machine for commuters. It is too Apple’s most repairable laptop of all time. I’m on another trip this week, and I’m packing my Neo without a second thought.

But it does make me think about working a little differently as my week progresses to avoid slowing down and perhaps closing some tabs.

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