alt Hacker News> Powered by A18 Pro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18
So this is basically running on a phone CPU
I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.
But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.
Replies
I think I'd put a phone CPU running netbook-like costing $599 still in the "overpriced premium brand" bucket myself.
(Not sure if that's really an apt description though, but then I was out as soon as I read they're neutering one of the usb-c speeds.)
Of course it’s an iPhone chip, which is why it’s got just 8 gigs of RAM. I think it’s the same exact SoC that went into the 16 Pro Max.
The A18Pro is a very powerful CPU, besting even the M1 in single-core performance (about even in multicore). Saying its just a "phone CPU" is disingenuous.
The A18 Pro performs about on par with an M4 in terms of single threaded performance, and a little better than M1 in terms of multi threaded performance.
The MacBook Neo has one of the fastest processors on the market for single threaded tasks, which is what has the most impact on how "fast" a processor feels for day to day usage.
Netbooks had processors that were glacially slow.