this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Ohhh ... 8GB is max RAM.
Its worth noting that everyone commenting on memory forgets they aren't losing 8+ gigs to their operating system so it can track them harder (now with AI!)
Most laptops with considerably older chipsets run flawlessly for moderate use on Linux with 8 gigs. OS makes a massive difference and that's before we discuss hardware.
I have my dad's old 8gb M1 mini at home, being used as my Home Assistant machine. 4Gb of the RAM is allocated to UTM for running HAOS, while the other 4Gb is for macOS (Tahoe, annoyingly) to do with as it pleases, including running a modest LLM in Ollama so I can use speech commands. It works perfectly well.
The same setup under Asahi kept falling over, because only macOS seems to get access to a bunch of the shit that it needs to (presumably) swap memory to the SSD.
So yeah, I wouldn't be at all worried about 8Gb in the Neo. Not for its intended market, anyway.
That said, say a kid gets one to use at school, after a couple of years they're going to want to upgrade to something with more RAM, which is kinda what Apple are betting on, so they can sell more units. But yeah, as an entry level laptop, this Neo looks like a decent bet.
I've got a Celeron laptop with 12GB RAM & it uses it.
And no, I was interested in these Macbooks bcs Asahi might one day reverse-engineer the drivers. I don't have much interest in macOS or Windows.