I've got the 8GB M1 Air. It works fine for me memory wise.
In some ways the Neo looks better than the Air for things I have had problems with in that it looks easier to replace bits - my battery and speakers are both kind of knackered.
I think it’s too little for this day and age as well, but in Apple’s defense, their RAM compression on ARM works amazingly well and performs similarly to 12GB on Windows.
With that said, I hate that you can’t upgrade the RAM or storage.
I hope that at least one side effect of this is that developers will have a business case for performance improvement dev time, as those machines will become a juicy target, similar to video game consoles that may not have the best specs but are consistent and have a large number of units in the market.
I just ordered a base model Mac Mini a few days ago. The Mac Mini and the MacBook Neo serves different niches. They cost the same for students, teachers, and professors. The MacBook Neo is more portable, but the Mac Mini offers more processing cores and more RAM (16GB instead of 8GB), and it has an M4 processor instead of an A18.
Four sharp corners for the actual display and no notch are winning moves.