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juancn 2 hours ago [-]
I ended up getting two (one for each of my daughters).
The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
It really just works.
They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement.
These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever the Samsung printer jams.
RZelaya 2 hours ago [-]
Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.
I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.
My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year
I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.
porridgeraisin 21 minutes ago [-]
The price thing is really true.
My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.
Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.
So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.
Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.
For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.
Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
whateverboat 11 minutes ago [-]
I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.
It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit:
1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans
2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac.
3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.
I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.
Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.
Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
Drunk_Engineer 1 hours ago [-]
Enterprise Mac still has occasional problems -- mainly due to Microsoft crapware IT departments insist on installing.
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
It's much harder to manage Macs than Windows machines, especially if you are a Windows shop already (which most are). Microsoft is working on eroding the quality of their software, but for now the management tools they offer for Windows clients are simply unparalleled in the Mac world.
thewebguyd 1 hours ago [-]
Sure, if you're still on-prem AD or hybrid. For orgs that have already moved to full Intune/EntraID, managing windows via Intune is still years behind a good macOS MDM. InTune still feels half baked.
infecto 1 hours ago [-]
Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS.
bdamm 23 minutes ago [-]
How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well.
My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.
mountain_peak 3 minutes ago [-]
People might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess.
Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.
My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.
elorant 1 hours ago [-]
There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.
cortesoft 1 hours ago [-]
I haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine.
Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
thewebguyd 45 minutes ago [-]
> Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.
fragmede 25 minutes ago [-]
It's for specialist users. Eg video editors or CAD systems. They need a 10-Gig connectivity to the SAN and want a Mac and not a Dell.
Kirby64 58 minutes ago [-]
What company upgrades their windows PCs? They give them exactly as shipped. IT department is not wasting time swapping out RAM or SSDs. And they certainly are not upgrading them over time. You just replace the entire PC if you go to 'swap' it.
kyawzazaw 45 minutes ago [-]
my school IT department does this
but it's a small university
0x1d7 29 minutes ago [-]
IME edu operates much differently than [US] corporations which use a 3 - 5 year deprecation schedule. Edu is more 'run it until it doesn't'.
kasey_junk 51 minutes ago [-]
I have never, in 30 years, working across big companies and small, had a computer hardware upgrade. It’s _always_ just a new box.
robertlagrant 1 hours ago [-]
Most people have laptops now, in my experience of large corporations.
recursive 26 minutes ago [-]
I got the RAM upgraded in my work laptop.
GeekyBear 28 minutes ago [-]
I actually have seen a business upgrade PCs that were fairly recently purchased once, back during the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.
reaperducer 40 minutes ago [-]
There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable.
We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.
Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.
The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.
ioblomov 26 minutes ago [-]
There’s an accounting factor too. Businesses depreciate equipment as SOP. The laptops have already been written off by the time they need upgrading.
sgt 2 hours ago [-]
I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.
wil421 2 hours ago [-]
The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.
commandersaki 33 minutes ago [-]
I think Apple's era of unreliable laptops were the ones with Butterfly keyboards. So many issues back then, but they did a complete 180 once they reintroduced the magic keyboard and then Apple Silicon.
kstrauser 3 minutes ago [-]
Some older relatives asked for a computer recommendation. I told them a thousand reasons why a MacBook Air (at that moment) would be perfect for them. They went to Best Buy and came home with the Dellpaq thing that the guy there told them had better specs.
Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.
[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.
recursive 25 minutes ago [-]
I got my first ipad a year or two ago. It took me many tries over about an hour to setup the apple account I needed to log in to the device. I wish I had documented the process, because it's so different than what people typically claim about Apple ease of use.
nozzlegear 2 hours ago [-]
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
xp84 24 minutes ago [-]
They added a second right-click menu in Explorer now. IDK if this is Windows 11 or if 10 had this. When you right-click a file, you get a shorter menu with a larger font. But it might not have the option you want -- you have to click "Show more options" at the bottom. Then it lags for 1 second (this is a Core Ultra 9 with 64GB of RAM btw) and opens a new one, with the old font metrics, and that one also has all the things the original ones did.
This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.
I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.
adjejmxbdjdn 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve faced far more issues with relatives with Macs than when they had Linux.
The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all.
The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system.
Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.
wl 55 minutes ago [-]
I recently had an experience with a family member's Ubuntu LTS machine where it was stuck on an old release, /etc/apt/sources.list needed to be edited because of Ubuntu's obnoxious habit of breaking old repositories, and then I needed to debug apt issues to get do-release-upgrade to actually work.
The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.
The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?
fragmede 21 minutes ago [-]
Eh. You just install codex or Claude code and tell it to fix it for you.
antaviana 21 minutes ago [-]
My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.
xmeadow 53 minutes ago [-]
I know what you mean but you will regret your choices Ehen your wife and doughters forget what a wifi-network is.
drnick1 40 minutes ago [-]
Apple and the NSA must know a lot about you.
bdamm 18 minutes ago [-]
What are you saying, that you think Windows or Linux are better platforms for evading covert government oversight?
Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.
Ah yes, the classic tech guys on Hacker News that fear technology.
uticus 1 hours ago [-]
sometimes the wizards know best when to fear magic
weirdmantis69 34 minutes ago [-]
fly... you fools...
panzagl 21 minutes ago [-]
Ah yes, the classic Mac user on Hacker News that thinks they're a tech guy.
:-)
notatoad 1 hours ago [-]
yeah, i think a lot of people on hacker news basically agree with that old meme that says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago [-]
"Do you fear technology?" should be "Do you have no fucks to give for all the bullshit?"
I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.
2001zhaozhao 2 hours ago [-]
I think Apple's cost efficiency advantages are really compounding now and it'll get increasingly hard for competitors to catch up. Everything they put in the product is either in-house or benefit from their scale and negotiating power.
In the MacBook Neo's case, everything from the in-house chipset and scale (for stuff like aluminum body) and the more RAM-efficient software is working in its favor. I'd bet that a different laptop manufacturer will struggle to make a profit at all if they made a $599 Neo-equivalent product with lower scale, having to pay for chips and Windows licenses, and having to put in 12GB of RAM instead of 8 to get a similar user experience.
adgjlsfhk1 1 hours ago [-]
I think the clear demonstration of this is how small Apple's motherboard is for the neo (and other M series) compared to everyone else). It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently. If you cap your chips TDP such that it can be cooled passively, you save money on heatsink, fan, vents, power circuitry (e.g. fewer capacitors), battery size, etc.
fragmede 22 minutes ago [-]
Chromebooks exist at a lower price point with even less RAM.
babypuncher 11 minutes ago [-]
and they suck
SonOfKyuss 1 hours ago [-]
It will be interesting to see what happens. Other large laptop makers such Dell have some of the same scale advantages (minus in-house silicon) and might be more willing to sacrifice on profit margin.
Jyaif 43 minutes ago [-]
Dell is screwed by the software and never made the investment in a good touchpad.
rationalist 36 minutes ago [-]
The touchpad on the new XPS 14 seems to be extremely good.
(Although a lot of their XPSes are shipping defective.)
everdrive 2 hours ago [-]
It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.
GeekyBear 1 hours ago [-]
Dell has just announced an 8 Gig of RAM version of their XPS laptop and the PR surrounding the launch is pretty funny.
> "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," said Dell.
Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?
burnte 1 hours ago [-]
> Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?
Truly a shocking outcome!
drnick1 38 minutes ago [-]
It is shocking that the XPS14 now starts at $2,000.
mmcnl 16 minutes ago [-]
Made me buy a MacBook Air instead. Waited for a long time because I was not a fan of macOS, but Apple is quite cheap in all segments nowadays. A well-specced MacBook Pro these days is cheaper than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The MacBook Air at ~$1000 price point with 16GB/512GB is also incredibly hard to beat in price, and even if you pay the premium for a Windows competitor (crazy sentence) you actually get a less than premium experience: worse build quality, worse display, worse battery life.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
They probably know that but don’t want to cannibalize their more expensive products.
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of the buyers were never going to be buyers for the more expensive products.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
You can afford to lose a lot of low-value low-margin buyers for not losing one high-value high-margin buyer.
MikeNotThePope 1 hours ago [-]
I’m guessing the Neo attracts a lot of new Apple customers, many of which will become subscribers of higher margin Apple services & apps in the App Store.
rjrjrjrj 1 hours ago [-]
New Mac customers, perhaps. But new Apple customers?
The vast majority of Neo buyers almost certainly already have an iPhone.
alooPotato 2 hours ago [-]
that doesn't, on its own, alleviate the cannibalization concerns
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
If they don't make this product at this pricepoint, a competitor does and that also cannibalizes potential higher sku macbook sales to a degree. Every chromebook sold is a potential macbook neo customer and apple let google eat their lunch for years.
varispeed 2 hours ago [-]
Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing. Nobody knows how to make things properly. Here in the UK you won't even find competent sheet metal fabricator (except for military or when you have more money than sense, but then whatever you want to sell will be dead in the water because of unaffordability).
the_other 1 hours ago [-]
> Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing.
My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.
vablings 27 minutes ago [-]
Considering that Apple laptops are made by Foxconn in China that firmly proves your argumentation false.
People do know how to make things properly the problem is all those people are in China for a laundry list of reasons as long as my arms in a circle
Crunchified 2 hours ago [-]
Just so you know, the original Ford Maverick started out at just under $2,000 in 1970.
sethops1 1 hours ago [-]
That would be $17,165 adjusted for inflation to 2026.
thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago [-]
I would happily buy a laptop with medium specs but apple build quality. I don't know if the Neo's build quality is on par with their other laptops but if it is it's probably my next laptop.
wyre 2 hours ago [-]
From the reviews, my impression is that the Neo has Apple's build quality, but they cut some costs to save on machining the chassis, and the trackpad doesn't have the haptic motor.
erelong 2 minutes ago [-]
sad to hear if true, apple products are locked down / proprietary disappointments
would enjoy seeing them open them up though (push for this?)
tencentshill 3 hours ago [-]
It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
hylaride 3 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
vovavili 2 hours ago [-]
Would be foolish of them not to take advantage of Microsoft having self-sabotage as its favorite pastime.
bigyabai 33 minutes ago [-]
Apple has taken advantage of that for the past 2 decades, to the tune of a minority share in the PC market.
Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
... and a huge amount of help from Dell, Lenovo and the like.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
Chromebook should be classified as torture device.
actionfromafar 59 minutes ago [-]
Enhanced interrogation computing device. We just need your personal data!
microtonal 2 hours ago [-]
It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.
Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).
Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.
Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]
An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.
My first Mac was the same white plastic one, I think it was called the iBook back then? Cost me the majority of my summer job earnings going into freshman year, but it was a great machine for me back then! I still have it in a box somewhere in the basement, might be fun pull it out and resurrect it :)
sva_ 3 hours ago [-]
Someone who uses a MacBook Neo in School/University probably has a much higher chance of getting a higher-end MacBook later on.
43 minutes ago [-]
866-RON-0-FEZ 1 hours ago [-]
It's not so amazing when you realize the Neo is an iPad's innards with a keyboard glued to it. $250 for a keyboard and a hinge.
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
reaperducer 27 minutes ago [-]
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right?
You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.
nikcub 12 minutes ago [-]
and an iPhone 17e for $599
saltyoldman 2 hours ago [-]
I think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.
cls59 56 minutes ago [-]
If Apple keeps using A Pro-series chips for the Neo, then the RAM will go to at least 12GB when they swap to the A19 Pro, or newer.
riffraff 2 hours ago [-]
> I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright
but that should cause extra wear on the SSD, or is this no longer a concern?
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Certainly but I'd guess the problem won't manifest for years and other showstopping pieces might fail before then. That old frankenstein macbook of mine had the same 850 evo ssd I shoved in it for like 8 years of use and abuse, always high temps with that macbook too. People say you shouldn't use an ssd like that but oh well, it seems to work alright.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
Friend of mine has 32GB laptop with top spec last gen Intel 9 and it barely handles larger Word documents and Teams calls.
The fan is just obnoxious on top of that.
asdff 1 hours ago [-]
There is just no way it is actually barely handling them. My 2012 with the dual core handles that. Fans turning on doesn't mean it barely handles it. That is just how those intel macs were. They were like that on day 1 in 2012. Spotlight indexing could be enough to spin the fans. Still does the job though even if its hot and noisy.
rationalist 32 minutes ago [-]
Top-spec computers will always shit the bed when they aren't taken care of properly (bloatware, blocked airflow, etc)
asdff 17 minutes ago [-]
Even for the arm series macs the max cpus run way hotter and spin fans sooner than base model in general tasks. Just how those chips are designed. They aren't designed to throttle to keep temps down, they are designed to give you all the horsepower knowing you don't care about noise and heat and care about performance.
lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago [-]
>a decade ago
It's more powerful than my $4000 M1 Max until it heat soaks.
no_wizard 3 hours ago [-]
I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses.
It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice
OskarS 3 hours ago [-]
Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seems perfect for a second computer. I could pay premium prices for something better, but honestly: I don’t think I need to.
hadlock 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that everything bolts together inside like a ThinkPad and there's no glue means it's highly repairable. I've been looking at getting one as well, they're almost too good, I'm worried apple will revert to gluing things together as they're user repairable, which means they ought to last nearly forever. I've been eyeballing one as well, I would prefer the higher end air or pro but being able to take the whole thing apart with a single screwdriver is very appealing.
nyadesu 39 minutes ago [-]
I second this, MacBook Neo is a good balance between a cheap and more than good enough machine that you can carry in your backpack everywhere
The fact that I'm not carrying a +1k USD machine all the time gives me peace of mind
800xl 2 hours ago [-]
Agree. I could afford "better" but the Neo suits my needs perfectly and I don't like expensive laptops that are prone to damage and theft. Dollar for dollar it is the best computer I've ever bought.
fastball 2 hours ago [-]
Seems to be right on time. Hard to justify putting a mobile chip in your laptop until performance has reached a certain threshold.
brianwawok 3 hours ago [-]
Every school I know of is deep in the Chromebook pot. These are fairly bad computers, Neo would be a big upgrade. But I suspect it would be years for school systems to even evaluate this.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
It's no accident that they are bad computers. They aren't "fit for purpose" unless they are too weak to play Krunker.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Kids also destroy them every year. They need to be bad, and the absolute cheap pieces of crap possible because kids will throw them against walls and destroy them on purpose.
"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.
geodel 1 hours ago [-]
Not related to this discussion. But kids destroying school computers wantonly is expected? Is there no cost associated for destroying property on students or their parents?
thewebguyd 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, its expected. As for recovery, depends on the school district. Early on during COVID, it was basically a free for all because, well, if you didn't have one you wouldn't be participating in school remotely, and for some families they wouldn't be able to afford a replacement, best to just give the kids a new one.
Some districts (including my local one where I live) are now charging a "tech fee" but given these devices are still mandatory to participate, they don't withhold if they can't collect from the parents, which collection still remains a problem.
Another district near me does a keep your own device program, each student is issued a chromebook and it becomes theirs after they graduate, which seemed to have helped a little bit knowing they have to use that same device for 4 years and it becomes their own after.
edit My own solution would be just make sure the devices can't leave the classroom. Letting kids take them home is a huge part of the problem, but schools are now totally reliant on assignments being done digitally instead of just sending kids home with a textbook and worksheets.
LgWoodenBadger 27 minutes ago [-]
I think the "keep it after 4 years" program is to eliminate a huge disposal/recycling cost from the schools. A 4 year old ChromeBook is effectively worthless, and can't (shouldn't) just be thrown in the garbage.
What better way to save than to push that cost out to your students' families, all while selling it as a positive?
benoau 3 hours ago [-]
It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular -
I had one, but even for those days it had a mediocre screen, mediocre keyboard, mediocre CPU, and mediocre slow storage. The MacBook Neo has none of that.
lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago [-]
Hilarious comparison. I bought one. Unusable garbage. Tiny screen. Unusably slow. 8 second battery. Awful keyboard.
benoau 2 hours ago [-]
...and yet this sparked a revolution called netbooks that took over a full 20% of the laptop market at their peak.
They sold well. In my experience working at Staples at that time, small and cheap beat any other consideration for many customers. Hard to argue with a $99 PC.
A few months later, they'd realize it wasn't working out, come back, scream at us, and buy something bigger and faster.
I really liked the MSI one I had, but I knew what I was getting into.
fragmede 11 minutes ago [-]
Even Apple made an 11" laptop in that era!
lowbloodsugar 21 minutes ago [-]
I mean, I did buy one =)
baal80spam 2 hours ago [-]
You must be joking. I had Eee PC, and it was terrible.
mrinterweb 2 hours ago [-]
The Neo's value prop is great for many people. I keep needing to remind myself that most computer users can get by fine with 8GB or RAM, and that the I'm not the target market for products like the Neo. I do get nervous with how future proof 8GB of RAM will be in terms of total usable lifespan for the Neo. Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
thebruce87m 2 hours ago [-]
> Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
It’s products like this that mean 8GB will remain fine for longer. If every base model had 16GB then sites like linkedin would just add more bullshit to use it. Let’s keep the bar at 8GB please - we’re not really doing anything different than I was doing 20 years ago with much less.
Neither is normal - mere 8GB of RAM in a new computer, nor website consuming over 1GB.
In a defense of the latter case - there are many decisive people in the company explicitly demanding the website to be so bloated and overengineered.
Centigonal 2 hours ago [-]
> if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
I actually think right now is the perfect moment for this!
I suspect that the massively increased cost of memory will limit the amount of memory in most consumer PCs from increasing over the next few years. In turn, this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software.
skrtskrt 2 hours ago [-]
I would like to know how these are on XCode - would love to have the cheapest/most lightweight possible way to build iOS apps (derived from some cross-platform builder like Expo/Lynx/Dioxus) since I have no other use for MacOS.
Looking at tech specs, it seems like the one with 512GB drive might be serviceable. I have a very old 256GB Air and I struggle to keep enough drive space open to have XCode installed on it.
fragmede 8 minutes ago [-]
It'll throttle itself when it gets hot during compiles and slow down. You can mod it to cool it down so it will run (compile) faster.
starkparker 2 hours ago [-]
you'll hit the RAM limit at some point, and you'd almost certainly want to mod it to alleviate the heat issues that kill sustained performance
skrtskrt 1 hours ago [-]
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onesociety2022 1 hours ago [-]
Apart from the price, I think what's really attracting people to the Neo are the cool colors. I was at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago trying to buy a M5 MacBook Air and I was eavesdropping on the conversations going on next to me from people looking at the Neo. Almost all of it was positive and people really love the colors!
I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo because I'm recommending the Neo to anyone like my mom who use their laptop mostly just for browsing and FaceTime calls, and even the MBA is overkill for that.
frollogaston 41 minutes ago [-]
It was like this back then with the iPhone 5C too
AdmiralAsshat 2 hours ago [-]
Not surprising. I've been looking at potentially getting one for my mother. Her last Windows 10 laptop is pretty long in the tooth, and there's no way in hell I'm getting her one with Windows 11 on it.
The Neo seems to fill the same niche that the Chromebook once did, and, since she's already in the Apple ecosystem due to her iPhone, an "Apple Chromebook" seems like an attractive proposition.
hackerbeat 43 minutes ago [-]
Can someone explain to me why the standard iPad ($349) is so much cheaper than the iPhone 17e ($599)?
Aunche 16 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure that they have a fatter margin on the the iPhone, but the iPhone does cost quite a bit more to manufacture. Cellular itself is probably $50 or so. The iPad has more material, so you may perceive you're getting more "device per the money" but the cost of those materials is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing the additional components.
This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
hbn 3 minutes ago [-]
> This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
Actually from what I understood, making a small display with modern specs like Apple did on the iPhone mini was MORE expensive because all of modern high-end smartphone display manufacturing is designed for larger, 6+ inch screens.
hbn 25 minutes ago [-]
It's more expensive to make a computer tiny. Plus the iPhone's cameras are better, cellular modem, vibration motor, etc.
drnick1 35 minutes ago [-]
Enough idiots buy $1000 phones, so $599 is cheap.
altairprime 35 minutes ago [-]
Compact density is expensive, cellular is expensive, and the iPhone has to pass all-day battery and pocket bending tests
vsgherzi 48 minutes ago [-]
Awesome, it’s nice to see a large company actually trying to make a decently crafted product for the entry level market and for it to be popular! I hope Apple can continue this and release more nice products at lower prices especially at a time where hardware is going parabolic.
ivraatiems 9 minutes ago [-]
I'm writing this from a Macbook Neo. It's goddam fantastic. The best product Apple has put out in years. There simply is not a Windows laptop out there that can compete on speed, price, and build quality all at the same time. The low amount of RAM is simply not noticeable for everyday tasks. The display is fantastic. It feels really solid and great to hold and use.
macOS is far and away the worst thing about it. It's never exactly been a customizable or flexible OS, but Tahoe is also loaded with bugs, has tons of unconfigurable settings (or buries useful things in "accessibility" layers), and is still missing basic features (still no NTFS write support out of the box? really?) for anybody who is not an entry-level user.
But that said, for about $500, I truly don't think anything better exists. One of the best bang-for-buck new electronics I've ever bought.
perarneng 2 hours ago [-]
I would rather own a used MacBook AIR than a new MacBook Neo. I usually don't like used computers but I just can't stand the anxiety of having to only have 8Gb RAM. Sure, it swaps, it compresses memory etc.. but still.
reaperducer 23 minutes ago [-]
According to Dell, 8GB is perfectly fine, even under Windows, since that's what its Neo competitor ships with.
sgt 2 hours ago [-]
With 12GB it's a seriously cool offering. I actually know 8GB works as well, and I've seen people on MacBook Airs with 50 tabs open, full IDE's and breezing. But I still would want at least 4GB more to be on the safe side.
paulpauper 2 hours ago [-]
Web applications and websites are more bloated than ever. I think you need more ram not less.
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
Well, you'll be fine on pretty much all websites out there with 8GB, and virtual memory helps you with multiple apps, dozens of tabs. They don't all need to be in memory at once. Apple Silicon helps move that data around very fast.
drnick1 31 minutes ago [-]
I am more interested in the XPS13 at a similar price point mentioned in the article. My intention is to run Linux, and that probably won't happen for a long time on modern Apple hardware.
ioblomov 7 minutes ago [-]
Have you considered Asahi Linux?
drnick1 3 minutes ago [-]
Does not run on the Neo, unfortunately.
hbn 30 minutes ago [-]
I purchased my girlfriend a refurbished M2 MacBook Air literally a week before the Neo was announced. Been kicking myself ever since.
fragmede 3 minutes ago [-]
Too late now, but if it's within a week you can usually get the Apple store to take it back.
usefulcat 1 hours ago [-]
I am hopeful (not exactly optimistic, but hopeful) that increased sales of MacOS devices will warrant increased investment in MacOS by Apple.
lostlogin 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder what effect the colours have on sales?
It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than silver or dark grey.
codedokode 1 hours ago [-]
The screen is too small, not usable for work, you can buy a 15-inch Linux laptop for the same price. And it might even have replaceable RAM and SSD. Also, 8 Gb is too little, it will become a useless toy several years later. Also, there are just 2 USB ports and no USB-A.
Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.
commandersaki 24 minutes ago [-]
Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.
Can't say how long the keyboard will last since it's only been out for a few months, but I expect a long time as these are their new (now old) magic keyboards.
As for replacement, the keyboard is comes out as a module, so it just takes about 10-15 minutes of disassembling and putting a new keyboard in. Macbook Neo is one of Apple's best repairable laptops.
nicole_express 39 minutes ago [-]
Personally I prefer having a smaller screen on my laptop, because I can plug it into a monitor when I need a large screen but it makes it more portable.
Still miss the 11" MacBook Air, what a great form factor.
wat10000 56 minutes ago [-]
I guess all these buyers must be idiots.
newobj 58 minutes ago [-]
Having "accidentally" purchased one, I can tell you that doing anything 8GB or RAM on a mac laptop is impossible. I have no idea what people are doing with this laptop. Macs are absolute dogs at 8GB.
kylehotchkiss 20 minutes ago [-]
I've already sold (recommended) 4 of these. I will continue to do so. These are the right computer for the non-creative/non-technical people in your life. HP/Acer/Dell/etc etc have decided to die on the hill of plasticy laptops with alien sounding model numbers. Good riddance.
alberth 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the margin profile is of the Neo vs Air vs MacBook Pro.
I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
ksec 3 hours ago [-]
Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago [-]
> The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
And Studio and Mac Mini - which have gotten a lot more popular as of late.
GeekyBear 2 hours ago [-]
Apple's advantage is that they design a large share of their own parts, and their partners build them at a very high volume since they are used in more than one product line.
They don't have to pay a margin to so many component vendors in addition to economy of scale gains.
At a lower Neo volumes, they were using already manufactured iPhone Pro chips that were binned due to a bad GPU core, but they reportedly have already blown through that supply.
They also came up with a new process that uses extruded recycled aluminum for the case, which needs much less CNC time to clean up.
microtonal 2 hours ago [-]
Lower margin, but higher volume. Plus a subset of the buyers will subscribe to Apple Music, buy apps from the App Store, etc.
I am surprised that they only do it now, since Mac marketshare growth has stagnated for a long time and it's even hard to grow the iPhone marketshare. Growing the Mac marketshare by making very competitive models is one of the best ways for them to grow and to grow services fees.
I think the problem was Apple management was too obsessed with the iPad, believing they would replace laptops.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
If they had really thought the iPad could replace laptops they would have tried harder the way Microsoft did with Win 8.
jmkni 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if they're losing money on the actual units to get more people into the ecosystem?
rjrjrjrj 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think so.
For most people in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone is central and the Neo is another useful (but secondary) companion device. Not unlike the Watch and Airpods.
_fw 2 hours ago [-]
Leaving money on the table, as opposed to losing it. They make a decent buck on the hardware, but could have charged more (though likely would have sold fewer units).
fra 3 hours ago [-]
no chance
cute_boi 2 hours ago [-]
actually i am thankful that microslop is losing more than apple. They could've made better OS than macos by not adding candy crush or copilot slop.
ryandvm 2 hours ago [-]
I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.
I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
snowwrestler 1 hours ago [-]
Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped.
They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.
bradyd 10 minutes ago [-]
Apple definitely still has products that cross into the luxury brand category. For example the Apple Watch Hermès, which starts at $1249.
Acura and Audi then. They're still expensive vs the competition.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think it'll dilute the brand at all. The neo still feels like a premium product. Other laptop OEMs are now starting to come out with their competitors, and they are putting 1080p crap display panels on them like they always do. A $599 laptop with a 1080p screen from Dell is going to feel like a cheap piece of junk next to a Neo.
elicash 2 hours ago [-]
I haven't had the chance to touch one yet. But the reviews seem to suggest the hardware doesn't "feel" cheap in the way a lot of low priced computers can.
I can't vouch on whether it's true, but that's the brand question here in my opinion. If the hinge was crappy and it felt like it was going to break any second and the keyboard was a return to the butterfly and it was slow and so on, because they wanted to make it cheap, then yeah I think that'd hurt their brand overall.
rjrjrjrj 2 hours ago [-]
They make the best-selling phone model in the world. Best-selling smart watch, etc. Apple is not a luxury brand.
webnrrd2k 1 hours ago [-]
It's not Lamborghini, but Lotus had the $40,000 Elise a while ago. I don't remember how it worked out in the end, but a lot of people were excited about them at the time.
Edit lot -> not
fragmede 40 seconds ago [-]
Same for the Porsche 914.
summermusic 2 hours ago [-]
> I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
Oh no, won’t someone think of the millionaires
rrgok 48 minutes ago [-]
I need a new home laptop. Just for web browsing, streaming videos.
I hate MacOS. I used MacOS for 10 years. When came back to Windows, I felt as I can breathe again.
I hate there are no comparable price/performance in Windows world.
commandersaki 23 minutes ago [-]
All the PC manufactures are rallying to make a comparable Neo at the price point, it's been making waves in tech media for the last 2 weeks.
3 hours ago [-]
surcap526 13 minutes ago [-]
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startpage_com 3 hours ago [-]
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annagio_ 57 minutes ago [-]
It's a product that you can't upgrade and you can't fix easy. It's no for me.
commandersaki 18 minutes ago [-]
Sure it's not upgradable but you're completely wrong about repairability, unless you're talking about micro component repair ala Louis Rossmann, which as a whole is going the way of the Dodo.
ksec 3 hours ago [-]
It was not the normal Apple Mac Pricing to begin with. But let see if they will stick to $599 next year when it comes with 12GB RAM and hopefully double the SSD speed. I wouldn't be surprised it would have similar sales if it was priced $699.
It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
CharlesW 2 hours ago [-]
> So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand.
Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!
ksec 1 hours ago [-]
>occasionally $499)
Only in selected store and only in US.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
> It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
Doesn't that mean precisely that the sales are above Apple's expectations which is everyone in all that matters here.
ksec 1 hours ago [-]
Well yes. But it is also a mistake that should have avoided and Apple are usually better than this. This suggest they have under estimated for one reason or another.
My guess is that they were extra cautious in case of a flop just before new CEO was appointed.
The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
It really just works.
They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement.
These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever the Samsung printer jams.
I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.
My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year
I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.
My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.
Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.
So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.
Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.
For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.
Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.
I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.
Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.
This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.
Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.
Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.
My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.
Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.
We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.
Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.
The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.
Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.
[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.
Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.
I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.
The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all.
The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system.
Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.
The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.
https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?
Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.
It used to be,
> Do you fear technology?
> > Yes
> Is your daddy rich?
> > Yes
> MacOS
I guess we can remove the second question now.
I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.
In the MacBook Neo's case, everything from the in-house chipset and scale (for stuff like aluminum body) and the more RAM-efficient software is working in its favor. I'd bet that a different laptop manufacturer will struggle to make a profit at all if they made a $599 Neo-equivalent product with lower scale, having to pay for chips and Windows licenses, and having to put in 12GB of RAM instead of 8 to get a similar user experience.
(Although a lot of their XPSes are shipping defective.)
> "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," said Dell.
Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?
Truly a shocking outcome!
My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.
People do know how to make things properly the problem is all those people are in China for a laundry list of reasons as long as my arms in a circle
would enjoy seeing them open them up though (push for this?)
Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.
Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).
Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.
Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]
An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.
[1] https://www.iculture.nl/nieuws/iphone-3g-als-los-toestel-87-...
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right?
You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.
but that should cause extra wear on the SSD, or is this no longer a concern?
The fan is just obnoxious on top of that.
It's more powerful than my $4000 M1 Max until it heat soaks.
It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice
The fact that I'm not carrying a +1k USD machine all the time gives me peace of mind
"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.
Some districts (including my local one where I live) are now charging a "tech fee" but given these devices are still mandatory to participate, they don't withhold if they can't collect from the parents, which collection still remains a problem.
Another district near me does a keep your own device program, each student is issued a chromebook and it becomes theirs after they graduate, which seemed to have helped a little bit knowing they have to use that same device for 4 years and it becomes their own after.
edit My own solution would be just make sure the devices can't leave the classroom. Letting kids take them home is a huge part of the problem, but schools are now totally reliant on assignments being done digitally instead of just sending kids home with a textbook and worksheets.
What better way to save than to push that cost out to your students' families, all while selling it as a positive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
A few months later, they'd realize it wasn't working out, come back, scream at us, and buy something bigger and faster.
I really liked the MSI one I had, but I knew what I was getting into.
It’s products like this that mean 8GB will remain fine for longer. If every base model had 16GB then sites like linkedin would just add more bullshit to use it. Let’s keep the bar at 8GB please - we’re not really doing anything different than I was doing 20 years ago with much less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561489
In a defense of the latter case - there are many decisive people in the company explicitly demanding the website to be so bloated and overengineered.
I actually think right now is the perfect moment for this!
I suspect that the massively increased cost of memory will limit the amount of memory in most consumer PCs from increasing over the next few years. In turn, this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software.
Looking at tech specs, it seems like the one with 512GB drive might be serviceable. I have a very old 256GB Air and I struggle to keep enough drive space open to have XCode installed on it.
I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo because I'm recommending the Neo to anyone like my mom who use their laptop mostly just for browsing and FaceTime calls, and even the MBA is overkill for that.
The Neo seems to fill the same niche that the Chromebook once did, and, since she's already in the Apple ecosystem due to her iPhone, an "Apple Chromebook" seems like an attractive proposition.
This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
Actually from what I understood, making a small display with modern specs like Apple did on the iPhone mini was MORE expensive because all of modern high-end smartphone display manufacturing is designed for larger, 6+ inch screens.
macOS is far and away the worst thing about it. It's never exactly been a customizable or flexible OS, but Tahoe is also loaded with bugs, has tons of unconfigurable settings (or buries useful things in "accessibility" layers), and is still missing basic features (still no NTFS write support out of the box? really?) for anybody who is not an entry-level user.
But that said, for about $500, I truly don't think anything better exists. One of the best bang-for-buck new electronics I've ever bought.
It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than silver or dark grey.
Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.
Can't say how long the keyboard will last since it's only been out for a few months, but I expect a long time as these are their new (now old) magic keyboards.
As for replacement, the keyboard is comes out as a module, so it just takes about 10-15 minutes of disassembling and putting a new keyboard in. Macbook Neo is one of Apple's best repairable laptops.
Still miss the 11" MacBook Air, what a great form factor.
I have to imagine the Neo is lower margin %, but maybe I'm wrong.
The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
And Studio and Mac Mini - which have gotten a lot more popular as of late.
They don't have to pay a margin to so many component vendors in addition to economy of scale gains.
At a lower Neo volumes, they were using already manufactured iPhone Pro chips that were binned due to a bad GPU core, but they reportedly have already blown through that supply.
They also came up with a new process that uses extruded recycled aluminum for the case, which needs much less CNC time to clean up.
I am surprised that they only do it now, since Mac marketshare growth has stagnated for a long time and it's even hard to grow the iPhone marketshare. Growing the Mac marketshare by making very competitive models is one of the best ways for them to grow and to grow services fees.
I think the problem was Apple management was too obsessed with the iPad, believing they would replace laptops.
For most people in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone is central and the Neo is another useful (but secondary) companion device. Not unlike the Watch and Airpods.
I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch-hermes
I can't vouch on whether it's true, but that's the brand question here in my opinion. If the hinge was crappy and it felt like it was going to break any second and the keyboard was a return to the butterfly and it was slow and so on, because they wanted to make it cheap, then yeah I think that'd hurt their brand overall.
Edit lot -> not
Oh no, won’t someone think of the millionaires
I hate MacOS. I used MacOS for 10 years. When came back to Windows, I felt as I can breathe again.
I hate there are no comparable price/performance in Windows world.
It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!
Only in selected store and only in US.
Doesn't that mean precisely that the sales are above Apple's expectations which is everyone in all that matters here.
My guess is that they were extra cautious in case of a flop just before new CEO was appointed.