Only 8GB of RAM, and no option to upgrade even for the usual extortionate Apple prices seems like a bad idea in 2026. I know, AI RAMpocalypse probably has something to do with that. My Macbook Air...
Only 8GB of RAM, and no option to upgrade even for the usual extortionate Apple prices seems like a bad idea in 2026. I know, AI RAMpocalypse probably has something to do with that.
My Macbook Air running Tahoe is chilling with over 10GB of RAM in use with pretty much just the OS and Firefox with 5 tabs running.
Not to disregard your point, but how much RAM do you have? Because that might explain it, nowadays most OSes consume more RAM the more they have available. A fresh install of Windows 11 for...
My Macbook Air running Tahoe is chilling with over 10GB of RAM in use with pretty much just the OS and Firefox with 5 tabs running.
Not to disregard your point, but how much RAM do you have? Because that might explain it, nowadays most OSes consume more RAM the more they have available. A fresh install of Windows 11 for example can use about 10gb on a 64gb machine (wouldn't be surprised if it used over 20gb on a 128gb machine).
Browsers do the same thing, so your macOS and Firefox might just be filling the free space that they have rather than actually needing it.
I imagine that it’s due to a limitation of the A18 SOC they’re using. It was designed for phones and tablets, so I can’t imagine it has support for anything more than 8GB. I also imagine that the...
I imagine that it’s due to a limitation of the A18 SOC they’re using. It was designed for phones and tablets, so I can’t imagine it has support for anything more than 8GB.
I also imagine that the RAM won’t actually be an issue on the Neo. They aren’t shipping 8GB of RAM to lower the sticker price with the intention of everyone paying to upgrade at checkout. They must have done enough testing and OS optimization to ensure it’s sufficient for their target users’ use cases.
I’m curious to see how it fairs given that its a mobile processor with mobile levels of RAM. It basically a glorified phone running desktop mode iOS. Could be functional. But I too have a knee...
I’m curious to see how it fairs given that its a mobile processor with mobile levels of RAM. It basically a glorified phone running desktop mode iOS. Could be functional. But I too have a knee jerk reaction to low RAM numbers.
When I had an 8GB linux laptop I configured ZRAM (RAM compression) and so it effectively had more than 16GB "RAM" that way. The only drawback is a bit of CPU time to access compressed memory, but...
When I had an 8GB linux laptop I configured ZRAM (RAM compression) and so it effectively had more than 16GB "RAM" that way. The only drawback is a bit of CPU time to access compressed memory, but Apple silicon is so fast I doubt that matters. I don't know anything about the OS Apple is using on the Neo, does your Macbook Air have "compressed RAM"?
macOS has pretty good memory management, but there's limits to what you can do with software. I have an 8gb Air, and I feel the limitation pretty much constantly. 8gb just is not enough for the...
macOS has pretty good memory management, but there's limits to what you can do with software. I have an 8gb Air, and I feel the limitation pretty much constantly. 8gb just is not enough for the modern world.
Honestly I have to disagree with you here. I have an 8gb air, and it works perfectly for all lightweight tasks. The 256gb ssd is far more limiting than the ram. No, you won’t be doing Xcode on it,...
Honestly I have to disagree with you here. I have an 8gb air, and it works perfectly for all lightweight tasks. The 256gb ssd is far more limiting than the ram. No, you won’t be doing Xcode on it, but basic web browsing and pages document editing is fine. And that is what the target audience needs out of a laptop like this. If you are doing development, get a different computer. But I hope nobody needed me to say this. But for the way my mom and sister use computers, this would be absolutely fine.
That's a shame, that makes the Neo less interesting. On Linux even 8GB, without ZRAM, is reasonably comfortable for light use like web browsing and stuff. Would probably start to chug with any...
That's a shame, that makes the Neo less interesting. On Linux even 8GB, without ZRAM, is reasonably comfortable for light use like web browsing and stuff. Would probably start to chug with any kind of creative applications though.
Yeah, it does. Right now it shows it to be using about 740 MB of 'compressed RAM', 7.2 GB for apps, and about 1.8 GB of 'wired RAM', which as I understand it is Apple terminology for critical core...
Yeah, it does. Right now it shows it to be using about 740 MB of 'compressed RAM', 7.2 GB for apps, and about 1.8 GB of 'wired RAM', which as I understand it is Apple terminology for critical core system stuff that can't be swapped out.
The rumours were true; Apple has announced the Macbook Neo, a Mac with an A18 Pro CPU that runs full MacOS. The specs are pretty ho-hum, and this definitely isn't something I'd choose for any kind...
The rumours were true; Apple has announced the Macbook Neo, a Mac with an A18 Pro CPU that runs full MacOS. The specs are pretty ho-hum, and this definitely isn't something I'd choose for any kind of heavy workload, especially given how much my M1 Air is struggling with only 8GB memory these days. That said, it's a tempting proposition for a family computer that the kids can use for homework and whatnot.
Pretty cool, I never thought Apple would reach below the $1000 laptop market - just seemed too low value, and could impact iPad sales. Specs seem great, it’s would definitely be hard to find...
Pretty cool, I never thought Apple would reach below the $1000 laptop market - just seemed too low value, and could impact iPad sales.
Specs seem great, it’s would definitely be hard to find anything else remotely as performant at this price bracket, especially at the education price.
In this price bracket most other laptops cut corners in a lot of other places too. Cheap flexy chassis, bad screen, finicky diving board trackpad, etc. None of those are problems here.
In this price bracket most other laptops cut corners in a lot of other places too. Cheap flexy chassis, bad screen, finicky diving board trackpad, etc. None of those are problems here.
Hmm, seems they are going for the Chromebook market after all. I almost certainly won’t be getting this because I have been too spoiled by the MacBook Air, but it seems that the one thing people...
Hmm, seems they are going for the Chromebook market after all.
I almost certainly won’t be getting this because I have been too spoiled by the MacBook Air, but it seems that the one thing people tend to hate about inexpensive Chromebooks is the poor build quality. $600 is still a bit high for that market, but I think they will get more than a few bites, especially because the MacBook Neo is a “real computer” that can run “real apps” such as the Adobe suite and Microsoft Office’s native apps.
It feels weird that it is using a cell phone processor but I don’t think that will be a problem. Frankly it feels like this is something like a re-release of the original base model M1 MacBook Air in terms of specs - while I haven’t bothered to see any kind of benchmarks on them (and frankly I never really trusted benchmark programs for apple phones for fairly irrational reasons), the CPU on my iPhone 17 - which should be noted is newer and faster than the one they are putting in the MacBook Neo - seems to be faster than my current 8-core M1 MacBook Air in terms of gaming and AI tasks.
It’ll be interesting so see what the Neo means for local AI applications on MacOS. Apple currently has a .coreml framework that lets developers access the AI hardware acceleration features of the...
It’ll be interesting so see what the Neo means for local AI applications on MacOS. Apple currently has a .coreml framework that lets developers access the AI hardware acceleration features of the A-series chips. That same framework is not optimized for the M-series chip architectures.
It was less of an issue before because developers could generally assume that iOS apps ran on A-series chips and macOS apps on M-series chips, but now that will not be a generalization developers can make.
Yeah but 8gb soldered non-upgradable ram. That retina display has to come from somewhere. You'll feel that lack of ram in the performance almost immediately but that 220ppi will make it look...
Yeah but 8gb soldered non-upgradable ram. That retina display has to come from somewhere. You'll feel that lack of ram in the performance almost immediately but that 220ppi will make it look pretty while it's loading?
I don't disagree that plenty of machines need to get rid of the substandard 1080p either.
This will be significantly more powerful than any other windows laptop at this price bracket; you can't replace CPUs in laptops, either. In the end, you have to make tradeoffs. I have an iPad Pro...
This will be significantly more powerful than any other windows laptop at this price bracket; you can't replace CPUs in laptops, either. In the end, you have to make tradeoffs.
I have an iPad Pro with 8gb, and it hasn't really been an issue. macOS would allow you to use more memory than iOS since the latter aggressively culls background activities, but macOS also means this device has swap, which iOS doesn't.
CPUs, especially well made silicon like the M-series have significantly more longevity than the already bottlenecked 8GB RAM. "Just swap" is nothing more than a workaround for a glaring...
CPUs, especially well made silicon like the M-series have significantly more longevity than the already bottlenecked 8GB RAM.
"Just swap" is nothing more than a workaround for a glaring deficiency. If you're constantly swapping you'll see lower read/write across the board.
Modern software just needs dummy amounts of RAM. I'd argue we wouldn't have to if we stepped away from the highly RAM inefficient Electron and Chromium based shit but that's neither here nor there.
Look, I know I'm not the target audience for this. I understand that the use case for this notebook is light administrative work and the people needing this don't mind waiting a little. But even their higher end models with 8GB RAM tend to choke if you do anything hefty. I think even just 12GB would free up the system significantly.
You'll notice it a bit, but disk I/O speeds have grown much faster than ram I/O speeds have in the past decade, and Apple's disks are some of the fastest in consumer computers. Falling back to...
You'll notice it a bit, but disk I/O speeds have grown much faster than ram I/O speeds have in the past decade, and Apple's disks are some of the fastest in consumer computers.
Falling back to swap used to mean you were waiting ages for applications to chug along. It's not nearly as much of a performance hit nowadays though.
More RAM would be better, but it's not the end of the world.
It’s certainly a better situation than can be found on many Chromebooks and low end Windows laptops, which come with little RAM and also a tiny amount of very slow eMMC storage which makes the...
It’s certainly a better situation than can be found on many Chromebooks and low end Windows laptops, which come with little RAM and also a tiny amount of very slow eMMC storage which makes the inevitable paging downright painful.
That really depends on what you're doing. Like I said, I use an iPad Pro with 8GB of RAM quite often, mostly for painting, but I also browse the web on it, edit 60 MP photos in lightroom, and...
That really depends on what you're doing. Like I said, I use an iPad Pro with 8GB of RAM quite often, mostly for painting, but I also browse the web on it, edit 60 MP photos in lightroom, and occassionally edit 4k video on FCP, and it handles all of that without issue. Maybe it wouldn't handle all of that at the same time, but a $600 windows laptop is going to melt into lava the moment you start rendering something in davinci resolve. Sometimes CPU is the bottleneck, sometimes RAM is the bottleneck.
IMO people also vastly overestimate how much RAM browsers use, because they request a great deal from the OS. But a browser is, in essence, a virutal machine these days, and like a VM will very much request large blocks of memory and not release them in order to prevent the overhead from constantly allocating memory. But much of that won't actually be used.
You really have to measure how things feel in practice to see how a RAM limitation will effect daily use - merely seeing if swap is being used doesn't tell you much.
But even their higher end models with 8GB RAM tend to choke if you do anything hefty. I think even just 12GB would free up the system significantly.
This is part of the take-or-leave it costs of the SoCs. It's not trivial to add or remove memory from configurations, because the RAM is not soldered, but actually embedded into the chip itself. In this case, they're just reusing A18 Pros they have in stock for iPhones, which have 8GB as the top line.
I'd imagine as iPhone RAM increases, NEO ram will increase necessarily as well.
I've got a Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM and it's more than enough for basic computing, which is what this computer is aiming for. And the SSDs are so fast on even Apple's low end computers that...
I've got a Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM and it's more than enough for basic computing, which is what this computer is aiming for. And the SSDs are so fast on even Apple's low end computers that hitting your swap partition isn't as big a deal as it used to be.
I'm contemplating it. 8gb is enough for music, Safari, and vim. With agents, I could use this as a cheap platform to crank through small projects and word docs. I'll probably end up getting a...
I'm contemplating it. 8gb is enough for music, Safari, and vim. With agents, I could use this as a cheap platform to crank through small projects and word docs. I'll probably end up getting a MacBook Air because the extra ~$300 (on sale) won't kill me, but this is viable for my most of my use cases.
Honestly looks pretty nice and I like that they're bringing back colors. For reference, I am and have always been a PC guy. Never owned a Mac, do not like Apple products generally, but this looks...
Honestly looks pretty nice and I like that they're bringing back colors.
For reference, I am and have always been a PC guy. Never owned a Mac, do not like Apple products generally, but this looks nice and it's wonderfully affordable. Don't think I would ever buy one, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at it either.
This is promising. I’ve only ever used work-provided Macs because I’m cheap/broke. But this looks like a good candidate for my first personal Mac. Some light dev work, maybe very light gaming...
This is promising. I’ve only ever used work-provided Macs because I’m cheap/broke. But this looks like a good candidate for my first personal Mac. Some light dev work, maybe very light gaming (rimworld, MC, emulators, etc).
Yeah the limitations for running macOS on an iPad seem to be purely business-related. There are rumors about a redesigned MacBook Pro on the horizon though that does have a touchscreen, which...
Yeah the limitations for running macOS on an iPad seem to be purely business-related. There are rumors about a redesigned MacBook Pro on the horizon though that does have a touchscreen, which could explain some of the more iOS-y UI elements in macOS in Tahoe.
I was excited for this announcement upon hearing the leaks as I was looking for a new personal laptop. I am a little on the fence about this actually. I do think this will sell like hotcakes at...
I was excited for this announcement upon hearing the leaks as I was looking for a new personal laptop. I am a little on the fence about this actually. I do think this will sell like hotcakes at its price point, especially for those with the education discount as its $499 for the base model. However, being stuck at 8GB of RAM does sting a bit. Would've been nice to get a third SKU with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD/TouchID but since it runs on an A18, I imagine re-engineering it to accept 16GB was more effort than it was worth.
I've been wanting a Mac of some sort just to get into the OS and learn the environment more. I just purchased one in Silver. Maybe it'll tie in with my iPad nicely and give that some much-needed...
I've been wanting a Mac of some sort just to get into the OS and learn the environment more. I just purchased one in Silver. Maybe it'll tie in with my iPad nicely and give that some much-needed utility.
The integration with other Apple stuff if you have it really is excellent. I wish they'd open that stuff up to other platforms than Mac OS, but you know how Apple is...
The integration with other Apple stuff if you have it really is excellent. I wish they'd open that stuff up to other platforms than Mac OS, but you know how Apple is...
According to Geekbench, the iPhone 16 Pro is significantly faster in single-core performance and has a slight advantage in multi-core. The neural engine will have also had many improvements as...
According to Geekbench, the iPhone 16 Pro is significantly faster in single-core performance and has a slight advantage in multi-core. The neural engine will have also had many improvements as well, but that might not be terribly useful for something so memory-constrained.
I've always been a little Mac curious despite my FOSS intentions, and I do need a new laptop. I'm operating under the assumption that Asahi would need a little bit of work, and/or crossover might...
I've always been a little Mac curious despite my FOSS intentions, and I do need a new laptop. I'm operating under the assumption that Asahi would need a little bit of work, and/or crossover might need some finagling, but GameHub is there, so there may be some Steam dreaming in the future one way or another.
Only 8GB of RAM, and no option to upgrade even for the usual extortionate Apple prices seems like a bad idea in 2026. I know, AI RAMpocalypse probably has something to do with that.
My Macbook Air running Tahoe is chilling with over 10GB of RAM in use with pretty much just the OS and Firefox with 5 tabs running.
Not to disregard your point, but how much RAM do you have? Because that might explain it, nowadays most OSes consume more RAM the more they have available. A fresh install of Windows 11 for example can use about 10gb on a 64gb machine (wouldn't be surprised if it used over 20gb on a 128gb machine).
Browsers do the same thing, so your macOS and Firefox might just be filling the free space that they have rather than actually needing it.
16GB here.
I imagine that it’s due to a limitation of the A18 SOC they’re using. It was designed for phones and tablets, so I can’t imagine it has support for anything more than 8GB.
I also imagine that the RAM won’t actually be an issue on the Neo. They aren’t shipping 8GB of RAM to lower the sticker price with the intention of everyone paying to upgrade at checkout. They must have done enough testing and OS optimization to ensure it’s sufficient for their target users’ use cases.
I’m curious to see how it fairs given that its a mobile processor with mobile levels of RAM. It basically a glorified phone running desktop mode iOS. Could be functional. But I too have a knee jerk reaction to low RAM numbers.
When I had an 8GB linux laptop I configured ZRAM (RAM compression) and so it effectively had more than 16GB "RAM" that way. The only drawback is a bit of CPU time to access compressed memory, but Apple silicon is so fast I doubt that matters. I don't know anything about the OS Apple is using on the Neo, does your Macbook Air have "compressed RAM"?
macOS has pretty good memory management, but there's limits to what you can do with software. I have an 8gb Air, and I feel the limitation pretty much constantly. 8gb just is not enough for the modern world.
Honestly I have to disagree with you here. I have an 8gb air, and it works perfectly for all lightweight tasks. The 256gb ssd is far more limiting than the ram. No, you won’t be doing Xcode on it, but basic web browsing and pages document editing is fine. And that is what the target audience needs out of a laptop like this. If you are doing development, get a different computer. But I hope nobody needed me to say this. But for the way my mom and sister use computers, this would be absolutely fine.
That's a shame, that makes the Neo less interesting. On Linux even 8GB, without ZRAM, is reasonably comfortable for light use like web browsing and stuff. Would probably start to chug with any kind of creative applications though.
Yeah, it does. Right now it shows it to be using about 740 MB of 'compressed RAM', 7.2 GB for apps, and about 1.8 GB of 'wired RAM', which as I understand it is Apple terminology for critical core system stuff that can't be swapped out.
The rumours were true; Apple has announced the Macbook Neo, a Mac with an A18 Pro CPU that runs full MacOS. The specs are pretty ho-hum, and this definitely isn't something I'd choose for any kind of heavy workload, especially given how much my M1 Air is struggling with only 8GB memory these days. That said, it's a tempting proposition for a family computer that the kids can use for homework and whatnot.
Always nice to see more "affordable" options from Apple.
Pretty cool, I never thought Apple would reach below the $1000 laptop market - just seemed too low value, and could impact iPad sales.
Specs seem great, it’s would definitely be hard to find anything else remotely as performant at this price bracket, especially at the education price.
In this price bracket most other laptops cut corners in a lot of other places too. Cheap flexy chassis, bad screen, finicky diving board trackpad, etc. None of those are problems here.
Hmm, seems they are going for the Chromebook market after all.
I almost certainly won’t be getting this because I have been too spoiled by the MacBook Air, but it seems that the one thing people tend to hate about inexpensive Chromebooks is the poor build quality. $600 is still a bit high for that market, but I think they will get more than a few bites, especially because the MacBook Neo is a “real computer” that can run “real apps” such as the Adobe suite and Microsoft Office’s native apps.
It feels weird that it is using a cell phone processor but I don’t think that will be a problem. Frankly it feels like this is something like a re-release of the original base model M1 MacBook Air in terms of specs - while I haven’t bothered to see any kind of benchmarks on them (and frankly I never really trusted benchmark programs for apple phones for fairly irrational reasons), the CPU on my iPhone 17 - which should be noted is newer and faster than the one they are putting in the MacBook Neo - seems to be faster than my current 8-core M1 MacBook Air in terms of gaming and AI tasks.
This is going to be a great Chromebook competitor! I sent the product link to my wife, and she saw that immediately, too.
It’ll be interesting so see what the Neo means for local AI applications on MacOS. Apple currently has a .coreml framework that lets developers access the AI hardware acceleration features of the A-series chips. That same framework is not optimized for the M-series chip architectures.
It was less of an issue before because developers could generally assume that iOS apps ran on A-series chips and macOS apps on M-series chips, but now that will not be a generalization developers can make.
220 PPI on a $500 budget laptop when you have Windows manufacturers still selling $1k+ laptops with a 1080p screen.
Yeah but 8gb soldered non-upgradable ram. That retina display has to come from somewhere. You'll feel that lack of ram in the performance almost immediately but that 220ppi will make it look pretty while it's loading?
I don't disagree that plenty of machines need to get rid of the substandard 1080p either.
Nevertheless, this Neo ain't it.
This will be significantly more powerful than any other windows laptop at this price bracket; you can't replace CPUs in laptops, either. In the end, you have to make tradeoffs.
I have an iPad Pro with 8gb, and it hasn't really been an issue. macOS would allow you to use more memory than iOS since the latter aggressively culls background activities, but macOS also means this device has swap, which iOS doesn't.
CPUs, especially well made silicon like the M-series have significantly more longevity than the already bottlenecked 8GB RAM.
"Just swap" is nothing more than a workaround for a glaring deficiency. If you're constantly swapping you'll see lower read/write across the board.
Modern software just needs dummy amounts of RAM. I'd argue we wouldn't have to if we stepped away from the highly RAM inefficient Electron and Chromium based shit but that's neither here nor there.
Look, I know I'm not the target audience for this. I understand that the use case for this notebook is light administrative work and the people needing this don't mind waiting a little. But even their higher end models with 8GB RAM tend to choke if you do anything hefty. I think even just 12GB would free up the system significantly.
Edit: or at least a variant with 12 or 16.
You'll notice it a bit, but disk I/O speeds have grown much faster than ram I/O speeds have in the past decade, and Apple's disks are some of the fastest in consumer computers.
Falling back to swap used to mean you were waiting ages for applications to chug along. It's not nearly as much of a performance hit nowadays though.
More RAM would be better, but it's not the end of the world.
It’s certainly a better situation than can be found on many Chromebooks and low end Windows laptops, which come with little RAM and also a tiny amount of very slow eMMC storage which makes the inevitable paging downright painful.
That really depends on what you're doing. Like I said, I use an iPad Pro with 8GB of RAM quite often, mostly for painting, but I also browse the web on it, edit 60 MP photos in lightroom, and occassionally edit 4k video on FCP, and it handles all of that without issue. Maybe it wouldn't handle all of that at the same time, but a $600 windows laptop is going to melt into lava the moment you start rendering something in davinci resolve. Sometimes CPU is the bottleneck, sometimes RAM is the bottleneck.
IMO people also vastly overestimate how much RAM browsers use, because they request a great deal from the OS. But a browser is, in essence, a virutal machine these days, and like a VM will very much request large blocks of memory and not release them in order to prevent the overhead from constantly allocating memory. But much of that won't actually be used.
You really have to measure how things feel in practice to see how a RAM limitation will effect daily use - merely seeing if swap is being used doesn't tell you much.
This is part of the take-or-leave it costs of the SoCs. It's not trivial to add or remove memory from configurations, because the RAM is not soldered, but actually embedded into the chip itself. In this case, they're just reusing A18 Pros they have in stock for iPhones, which have 8GB as the top line.
I'd imagine as iPhone RAM increases, NEO ram will increase necessarily as well.
I've got a Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM and it's more than enough for basic computing, which is what this computer is aiming for. And the SSDs are so fast on even Apple's low end computers that hitting your swap partition isn't as big a deal as it used to be.
I'm contemplating it. 8gb is enough for music, Safari, and vim. With agents, I could use this as a cheap platform to crank through small projects and word docs. I'll probably end up getting a MacBook Air because the extra ~$300 (on sale) won't kill me, but this is viable for my most of my use cases.
Honestly looks pretty nice and I like that they're bringing back colors.
For reference, I am and have always been a PC guy. Never owned a Mac, do not like Apple products generally, but this looks nice and it's wonderfully affordable. Don't think I would ever buy one, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at it either.
This is promising. I’ve only ever used work-provided Macs because I’m cheap/broke. But this looks like a good candidate for my first personal Mac. Some light dev work, maybe very light gaming (rimworld, MC, emulators, etc).
MacOS on an A18? Yet we still can't have MacOS on an iPad. Sigh.
I know some of those iPads have M-series CPUs, too...
Yeah the limitations for running macOS on an iPad seem to be purely business-related. There are rumors about a redesigned MacBook Pro on the horizon though that does have a touchscreen, which could explain some of the more iOS-y UI elements in macOS in Tahoe.
I was excited for this announcement upon hearing the leaks as I was looking for a new personal laptop. I am a little on the fence about this actually. I do think this will sell like hotcakes at its price point, especially for those with the education discount as its $499 for the base model. However, being stuck at 8GB of RAM does sting a bit. Would've been nice to get a third SKU with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD/TouchID but since it runs on an A18, I imagine re-engineering it to accept 16GB was more effort than it was worth.
I've been wanting a Mac of some sort just to get into the OS and learn the environment more. I just purchased one in Silver. Maybe it'll tie in with my iPad nicely and give that some much-needed utility.
The integration with other Apple stuff if you have it really is excellent. I wish they'd open that stuff up to other platforms than Mac OS, but you know how Apple is...
Asahi Linux exists if you have an M1 or M2, at least.
The fact that I paid a crapton to get my M1 Air to 16/512 still hurts. But I wonder how this laptop compares to a stock 8/256 GB M1 Chip.
According to Geekbench, the iPhone 16 Pro is significantly faster in single-core performance and has a slight advantage in multi-core. The neural engine will have also had many improvements as well, but that might not be terribly useful for something so memory-constrained.
Supposedly this chip is ~30% faster, so it should be a bit more performant. The 8 GB will definitely limit multitasking.
I've always been a little Mac curious despite my FOSS intentions, and I do need a new laptop. I'm operating under the assumption that Asahi would need a little bit of work, and/or crossover might need some finagling, but GameHub is there, so there may be some Steam dreaming in the future one way or another.