Look, I know everyone's freaking out about the MacBook Neo at $599. I get it. It's cheap, it's Apple, take my money. But honestly? If you spend like five minutes actually reading the specs, the MacBook Air is the obvious buy here. The Neo sounds sick until you look at what they actually shipped. It's running an A18 Pro. That's a phone chip. Not even an M-series. 8 gigs of RAM. One of the USB-C ports is USB 2.0, which, like... it's 2026, what are we doing. No MagSafe. No Thunderbolt, so forget plugging in a Studio Display. No backlit keyboard. No Force Touch. The base model doesn't even have Touch ID. Someone on 512pixels put together a list of everything they cut and it's honestly kind of depressing. Just cut after cut after cut. The Air at $1099 gets you the M5, 16 gigs of RAM, Thunderbolt 4, MagSafe, Wi-Fi 7, P3 display, backlit keyboard. The whole deal, no weird gotchas. Yeah it's 500 bucks more. But you're getting double the RAM, a way better chip, and you don't have to keep a mental list of stuff your laptop randomly can't do. The RAM thing is what really kills the Neo for me though. macOS eats like 5 gigs just sitting there doing nothing. Someone on HN said they're running VSCode, Xcode, Blender, and ChatGPT all at once on 8 gigs and sure, macOS is clever with swap and compression, but come on. You're redlining it from the jump with zero room to grow. And you can never upgrade it. 16 gigs on the Air means you're actually comfortable for years. This matters way more now because of the local AI stuff that's blowing up. OpenClaw just dropped, open-source AI agent that runs right on your Mac, handles your email, calendar, does actual useful stuff on its own. The LocalLLaMA crowd is going absolutely feral setting it up with Ollama, running local models for free. People are hitting 49 tokens per second, running 30B parameter models on their Macs. That kind of thing eats RAM for breakfast and really wants those M-series GPU cores and the Neural Engine. On 16 gigs with an M5? You're golden. On 8 gigs with a phone chip and a 5-core GPU? Yeah no. The move in 2026 isn't buying the cheapest Mac. It's buying the one that doesn't feel slow in two years. Grab a refurb M4 Air for like $900, or just pay full price for the M5. Either way you've got a machine that handles everything for the next five or six years easy. Browsing, dev work, local AI stuff, whatever. The Neo is gonna start choking the second you try anything beyond Safari and Netflix, and at that point just buy a Chromebook for 300 bucks. Apple built the Neo to hit a price tag. The Air is where the math actually works out. Spend the extra 500 now, forget about it for five years. Done.