I started thinking, ok I was going to buy an iPad maybe, why not neo? It makes so much sense since my wife could do much more with it. Then I started looking at what the market has to offer for the price and it stopped making sense. The marketing does seem great on this. I am sure it makes a lot of sense to some people who wanted a cheap macOS laptop and got it.
The bargain HP laptops don’t compare at all to MacBook build quality or battery life.
That laptop is also 4lbs and has below average battery life.
We recently got a higher end HP laptop for someone and the build quality on it is marginal at best.
If you’re only looking at spec sheets and trying to treat this like a comparison table of simple points then you’re going to miss the reason why these products appeal to buyers.
If your needs are satisfied by 4 year old second hand machines and you’re still happy with them when they’re 10-12 years old, that’s great for you.
I think you’re not the target audience. Your decade old Dell Latitude is not even close to the performance or usefulness of a MacBook Neo so the fact that you’re bringing it up is a good indicator that you don’t understand who the MacBook Neo is for.
The MacBook Neo is a great value for anyone who wants a high quality, long battery life, fast laptop for a bargain price.
You said you didn’t understand why anyone would buy a MacBook Neo and then went on to talk about old second-hand laptops. You’re not the target audience.
Also no, there won’t be any need for different code depending on A* vs M* chips (unless doing very specific code, but if you’re wondering whether to take the Neo, that won’t be your case).
I imagine XCode will run on this ok but it might be a bit painful
We used to do hardcore content creation on Intel processors and spinning hard drives that were way shittier. Heck even my M1 still 100% suffices for everything I wanna do.
In this age of price hikes on components and hardware, this is Apple’s “price heard around the world” like they were on stage at E3 in 1995.[1]
Ironically they pulled it off with Sony’s worst price at an announcement… five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars.
Pretty sure most of the encoding/decoding of video is handled with special circuits these days.
Now, add enough layers and it'll probably falter, but with dedicated encoding/decoding circuits combined with a modern GPU it will definetly be a usable experience with some lower res quick pre-renders at worst but probably realtime for most content creator usages.
The Macbook Neo has a 2.5x higher multi-core Geekbench score compared to the i7-4960X's, the top consumer CPU of 2013 (which could handle 4K video editing in h264), and its single-core performance is 5x higher. Plus, I'm 99% sure the MacBook Neo has a dedicated video decoding ASIC anyway.
We also used to work fields with our backs and hands, but that doesn't mean we should still do that today when John Deere exists.
I also did my engineering masters on a core 2 duo with 2 GB of RAM, but if I had money i would have definitely preferred something a lot better like an i7 with 8gb of RAM so I wouldn't be constantly hitting the spinning rust SWAP.
My point is, this shouldn't turn into a competition on who suffered the most, doing the most amount of labor with the shittiest possible potato PC, like its happening in the comments right now, as none of these anecdotes proves powerful modern computers aren't useful today.
A few more generations and we might see < 1kg, 120hz oled and multi day battery life.
But I'm most excited about the near future because if the macbook neo becomes a huge success it will hopefully encourage app devs to waste less ram.
Plenty of devices with limited RAM existed before this and we didn't see devs cater to them. I highly doubt this temporary spike in memory prices is going to cause a long lasting change in behavior.
Spec-wise, this is as good as an M1-M2 Air, which is already an over-powered device for most non-professionals. All the "compromises" they made, like no center stage in the camera, less ports, only one monitor support, "just WiFi 6E", and others, are all non-issues for a typical average consumers.
And the price is the best it could be. At $499 for students, in a year's time when Gen2 is released, you will find a new Gen1 at possibly $399, and a refurbished Gen1 at even less. I don't see why anyone who wants an "entry-level/starter laptop" would buy anything but a Neo. We already are in a world in which average people don't need specific Windows-only apps. Most common apps are either cross-platform or web-based.
Dell, HP and alike are lucky that they're being enamored with datacenter server demand. I expect them to shift-away from the consumer laptop market and focus more on the enterprise in the coming years, which could have negative consequences for their pro-lineups.
I’d still get a Neo and for students it’s probably the right choice - chromebooks are just a browsers after all.
But pricing wise this laptop is a decade too late. The netbook of the day (chromebooks?) are just unbelievably cheap. Apple will still sell millions of these and keep on eating up market share.
I use an iPad mounted to an arm in the kitchen for cooking but always had issues whenever I needed to modify a recipe (or add a note for later modification), I am debating on switching it out for a Neo. Possibly some other use cases of a permanent computer in places that a tablet worked but a full computer would be far more flexible.
I just first need to find an arm that would be rock solid enough to not wobble a ton while typing, if anyone has any recommendations.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/compelled-biometri...
You don’t have to buy a specific model without it. Just don’t use it.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136764705675
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686
This HP laptop also has 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD and is an excellent machine overall. I'm speaking from experience. There's an even cheaper $570 model with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD and still slightly better than this Mac on multicore.
signa11•7h ago
LeonM•7h ago
It is my understanding that the A18 CPU is pretty well understood already. AFAIK it doesn't have the new architecture that is keeping the Asahi team from supporting the M4 and M5 for example.
But I guess we'll have to wait for devs to get their hands on a Neo device
jmkni•7h ago
Synaesthesia•7h ago
M1 was A14, albeit upscaled.