MacBook Neo: Questions.

A friend bought one and I borrowed it to try VoiceOver. I have for myself a Macbook Air M4. Honestly I did not see any difference in VO responsiveness and opening apps. My friend plays games on it and he has not complained of any issues.
One thing I noticed is that battery seems to last much less than the Air which I don't see as an issue.

I bought a MacBook Neo earlier this month, and so far VO is pretty responsive, though I'm also coming from Windows so VO keys, navigation etc takes some getting used to.
I wouldn't consider MacBook Neo a low-spec laptop by any mean; it uses iPhone 16 Pro chip, so anything that runs good on iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max should run fine on the MacBook Neo.
I do notice though; the usual page-up/page-down key (fn+up/fn+down) doesn't actually scroll VO focus up/down unlike with NVDA on Windows. For instance in my Apple Music library I have hundreds of songs (all of them MP3 songs so no Apple Music subscription or anything) and it can take time to manually use the arrow keys to scroll through.

For email, Web browsing, things like that, this runs really well. Also, the sound quality on the speakers is incredible. And the build quality. It feels and sounds like a machine that cost twice its price.

If you are still confused that the Neo can work for you, for its price you may get a refurbished Apple-Certified Macbook Air M3.

It's a bit off topic for this thread, but fyi the page up down keys behaviour you're describing is perfectly normal. Good? No. Ideal? No. But normal and expected. There are guides and plenty of threads on applevis discussing this. If you need more help you can always DM though I'm quite busy currently.
HTH.

I actually haven't try intensive web browsing myself, since I don't use mine as my daily driver.
Also, I have since switched to Firefox, so to get synced tabs and the like. So I'm not entirely sure how Safari would perform.
But yeah 8GB sounds like very little nowadays but I think this is likely the best that you're going to get from Apple for that price, at least for something that is completely brand-new.

I think 8 GB should be okay if you only keep a few programs and browser tabs open at a time. Remember that macOS and Linux are far better at managing RAM than Windows ever will be, so it's not that bad, particularly when you consider the target audience for this computer. I hope newer generations of the Neo will have more options for RAM, but only time will tell. You can always go into Activity Monitor and look at the memory section. You should only get concerned when it starts using swap, but I'm pretty sure it will try compressing data in RAM first.

Next NEO will have 12 Ram. LLC.

I don't have a neo, but given I'm using a macbook air with the m1 chip with 8 gb of ram, and it works just fine, the neo should be a perfectly good laptop. Shoot, I've even dabbled in app development and music production on this m1 macbook air. it is definitely a little slow, but it works for what it needs to do.

As others have indicated, macOS is reputedly relatively efficient in memory usage. See this article:
https://www.macworld.com/article/3121948/apple-ram-crisis-silicon-unified-memory-macbook-neo.html

As a Linux user (on a separate machine from the Mac), I can attest to the fact that Linux is also efficient in memory usage. I assume this is due in part to the UNIX heritage: Linux was designed from the beginning to be a UNIX-like operating system, and macOS is based partly on BSD UNIX.

I expect taht Apple's product strategists decided taht 8GB RAM in the MacBook Neo would be enough to meet the needs of their intended market for an entry-level device. I don't think VoiceOver and accessibility create a large additional demand on memory, although there is some, of course.

In general, I think Apple's operating system developers have tended to make good choices, e.g., moving away from kernel extensions, implementing the APFS file system, the design of the update process, application sandboxing, the smooth transition to the ARM CPU architecture, and so on, just to mention recent examples.

At least for me, VoiceOver seems more responsive under macOS Tahoe than under earlier releases. I would expect this to benefit macBook Neo users, as the CPU and RAM are much more constrained than on my relatively high-end MacBook Pro from 2021.

I have a MacBook Neo and VoiceOver performs very well on it, including in Safari. Besides page loading time, I have never noticed VoiceOver being unresponsive including in Safari. I also have a Windows VM inside Parallels, with 4 GB of RAM assigned to it. JAWS and NVDA are both very responsive, and VoiceOver does not slow down at all with Windows running. Sometimes opening Mac apps is kind of slow with Windows running and loading things on Windows seems slower than my mini PC with 32 GB of RAM, but besides that everything is very good. I can even multi-task between multiple apps on both MacOS and Windows open at the same time.

How would be if it becomes window 11 and install JAWS?

They go to 16gb, not just 8...

It will star with 12 for the one for $590 or more. It will need more if apple will keep making AI and Siri better. Long live cats.

In this current macbook neo generation, the maximum ram is 8 gb. However, when the next one comes out, with I'm assuming the a19 pro chip, that will have 12 gb of ram, which will be nice for those who need just a bit more headroom for AI or virtualization tasks.

I agree. I think it will start with 12 and go up to 16 or if they go from 16 to 20 but I do not see it happen. LLC.