I worked in retail for a decade, a lot of that was selling computers. The vast majority of what people buy computers for could be done a toaster. You don't exactly need top end specs to browse the internet, reply to emails, and write the occasional document.
gaming is a different beast, but there are xboxes, ps5s, steam boxen, etc.
For the most part, there's gamers/editors and a few other groups who need a lot of horsepower. They're generally gonna have decent hardware. Then there's everyone else, who wouldn't notice a difference regardless of hardware (to a point). There just isn't a whole lot of middle ground.
https://youtu.be/d-VOt9559Gk?si=tYlDstnaxtQWoJ88
He opens 50+ apps at once while working in Final Cut and Lightroom. Obviously anyone doing those full time would benefit from more resources but I think this is going to be enough for a big chunk of the population, and will be more appealing than the windows alternatives.
I can open even 500 apps on any laptop. This is what swap for. But with only 8GB you are getting into the swap territory very fast because you need almost half of it for the OS and video memory.
As a glorified terminal? Sure.
> Did you even bother to watch the video for responsiveness before commenting?
I did, now what?
> Also it was a couple years after the transition to arm t
Hello, we are talking about Neo with the same 8GB.
My wife is using a fancy new air for 2500€, which is way better. But I still think of the good old MacAir times, they'll try to bring up again.
“MacBook Neo is built on an iPhone chip—the A18 Pro. It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
and that:
“It’s merely the right kind of performance for anybody who wants to browse the internet or stream video.”
...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Graphics-Ke...
Or a 15.6" Intel Core i7‑1255U/12650H laptop with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD in a similar price range:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Laptop-High-Performance-i7-1255U-4...
Both of these offer:
* A more traditional laptop CPU
* 2–4× the memory
* 2-4× the storage (1TB vs 256GB base on the Neo)
Standard HDMI/USB‑C video out for external displays
So I can definitely see the appeal of the Neo for people who just want an inexpensive way into macOS, but the claim that “no other budget laptop can compete.” doesn't track.
Maybe it should have been "The least expensive Macbook yet, but that comes with significant downsides."
Now the color options, that's a tragedy.
Thanks. Fixed.
>This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone
That was my conclusion to my comment in my original. The title of "no other budget laptop can compete" is not just sensationalized, it is factually wrong. It should have been "the least expensive macbook yet comes with a catch"
Maybe they need to bring back psychedelic iMacs.
https://www.slashgear.com/1706745/rare-apple-imac-designs-fl...
In terms of performance the raw compute people have in their pockets nowadays surpasses what they typically need by magnitudes for a while now. Granted: programmers and tech companies find new ways of wasting that compute on features that people ultimately do not need, so they may need that the compute so things feel snappy, but if I think about what my parents do on their devices you could easily enable them to do theirs tasks with far less. They are essentially doing the same as ca. 2006 with pictures and videos being higher fidelity & resolution and websites running hundred thousand lines of javascript being the main difference.
I’d give my entire family these ahead of Windows laptops any day.
Mister Gates, is that you ?
As for your comparisons: My aunt doesn't need a terabyte of storage or a Ryzen 7 5700U, she needs 15+ hours of battery life because the laptop is going to live next to her spot on the couch and she most likely can't remember to plug it in every night.
Also the first laptop is from a reputable brand called NIAKUN. They must have amazing customer service and unbeatable warranties, right? =) And they certainly will exist in 12 months when you go look for the brand on Amazon and won't be replaced by another random set of letters in all caps selling the exact same product?
The HP is on sale, it's MSRP is $699 and for some weird fucking reason has the numpad on it, making the whole keyboard wonky. Who wants that on a laptop?
And the final thing, as with all price-forward comparisons: build quality. We need an objective standard measurement for chassis and keyboard flex, the ability to open the lid with one finger, the amount of creaking and squeaking said laptop will do in normal use and how hot and loud it gets in your lap when doing light browsing.
But they're clearly not the majority of the people - the rest of us have to live with a lopsided keyboard because a few people for some reason do data entry on a laptop keyboard.
The latest reviews are showing that's not really the case
Laughable. Seriously, how long has it been since the M1 Air dropped? And we're still this clueless?
> For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Awesome spec dump. Now, what's the real life usage battery life of that laptop like? Oh? Yeah, thought so.
Nobody buys a list of specs, they buy a set of capabilities. And the Neo is capable of supporting normal usage for 12h+ on battery. Go ahead and link me some alternative laptops that can do that, with comparable performance of course — which is on par or better than the original M1 Air mind you.
Killer move by Apple, and I'm shocked there's still so much ignorance around.
I own one. It lives long enough not to get bothered by charging.
plastic chassis: gross. keyboard with a numberpad: yuck no inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck limited size trackpad, not to mention a PC trackpad: yuck display looks good and is matte: nice fans: gross usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array: yuck supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
But at least it seems to have comparable battery life to the neo.
I don't care, it holds, it is not slippery (a huge problem with my current phone with metal body). What exactly is better with metal?
> keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
I would prefer one without, but that's just a matter of preference here. The layout is good. In fact, it's the keyboard that mostly makes me feel good whenever I use this laptop.
> inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
In theory I agree, but for some reason that did not feel problematic on this particular keyboard.
> limited size trackpad
?
> not to mention a PC trackpad
To each their own
> fans: gross
Never heard them, not even sure they are there.
> usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array
Sounds like a minor issue
> supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
I prefer "bricks" on the wire to "bricks" on the plug like Apple does because it does not take 10 slots on a power strip.
eww
I'm sure a similar story can be said about the HP.
If you didn't detect the sarcasm, a laptop is much more than cpu, memory, and storage; it'd be short-sighted to only fixate on this trio. PC laptops compromise on pretty much everything and usually do everything poorly, including CPU (since apple silicon Macs are much better performance per watt).
Then there's the whole aspect of Apple support for both hardware AND software, something no PC vendor can provide.
PS: I wrote this on my Macbook Air.
This is false. The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance. Most people would see no noticeable benefit to a faster CPU. Especially with a fanless design, the additional cores of a comparable M-series chip would give you better burst performance for some workloads, but possibly not much improvement in sustained performance.
For the first few minutes of sustained use. Then it drops like a rock: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...
> In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes. Both the M1 Air and the new M5 Air (4.46 GHz) are able to sustain their peak clock speeds indefinitely in single-core mode.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-apple-studio-displa...
> Apple pulled off what I thought wasn't possible. The MacBook Neo is poised to set the budget-laptop world on fire as a $599 system that's better-built and sharper than anything else at or below its price.
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-macbook-neo
Similar to the Verge:
> even the cheapest MacBook Neo is good enough to be the go-to Apple laptop for a lot of people. Actually, not just the go-to Apple laptop; the Neo’s hardware simultaneously embarrasses an entire class of affordable (and even far pricier) Windows laptops, as well as just about any Chromebook. And the thing runs on an iPhone chip.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/891741/apple-macbook-neo-a18-p...
> PC Magazine came to the same conclusion:
> Similar to the Verge:
Apple pays well. Budget laptop at 600 Euros ? And can't compete having a tablet processor, 8 MB RAM, 256 MB SSD. 2 USB ports (one i presume used for charging) ? Yeah. It really can't compete with better options.
If quality and in-hand feel matters to you at all, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more well rounded laptop than a MacBook at any price point.
HP OmniBook 5 Laptop Next Gen AI 16-fb0037nr
If I were shopping for a cheap laptop I would have given up and bought a Macbook Neo before I found that one.
Even IF the processor and RAM combined with Windows and bloatware is faster, you know they're going to have to cut corners on things like keyboard, trackpad, monitor, battery, webcams, heatsinks, etc.
Knocking it for having a tablet processor means you haven't actually been paying attention to Apple's in-house processor development.
I’m not the target market since I require Linux compatibility but I realize that is not a necessity in the market.
Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.
The form factor is the defining characteristic, because that informs how people use it. The CPU does not.
With a cheaper Windows alternative to the MacBook Neo, your options are inferior battery life with AMD 64, or Windows Arm’s inferior compatibility.
I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does. Not to mention they’ve been using their own chips.
While this is key it has nothing to do with the walled garden approach, and everything to do with Microsoft's contempt for users of its platforms.
The distinction matters because it changes what the lesson is for the rest of the industry. You don't need a walled garden to compete here. You need to own enough of the stack that you can make aggressive tradeoffs (like shipping 8GB and an A18 Pro) without everything falling apart at the integration boundaries. Microsoft can't do that because they don't make the hardware. Dell and Lenovo can't do that because they don't make the OS. Qualcomm can't do that because they don't control the software ecosystem.
The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.
I work professionally on a Macbook Air 16GB now and I have quite a few docker images and services running bare metal, + browser, vscode etc. on top. Not a problem until I start loading up some LLMs.
The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
If anything, I'm much more bound by the CPU limitations and the eco-cores than the memory.
On a PC, I wouldn't think about less than 32GB for a dev pc.
If I had a fulltime gig programming C, I'd even say I could work on this A14 8GB device. Why not? It's as powerful as a 10 year old powerful machine; probably. Or in that ballpark.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255765423?sortBy=rank
Why on Earth do I need a 32 GB PC?!?
Turbo C also worked just fine with 640 KB in MS-DOS, but then again MS-DOS wasn't full of Electron crap.
I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).
Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.
Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.
But nice for Apple. Millions of replacement on the Neo 16GB release next year I guess.
I don't see any way they can get out of this situation without seriously improving the UX of their products. Windows itself is likely implicated here too.
I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
I dream of the day I can kick windows into the next bin, but this is the one thing that the Neo fails hard on, all other compromises would've made this a great remote dev machine.
my mom might need a 2nd monitor, but probably not. that's who they're chasing.
my crappy business dell work computer can only do one too, but it comes with a docking station to do real multi-monitor
Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.
You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
They impose obsessive control over their walled garden, constant pressure to use Apple ecosystem products, and they are staunchly opposed to interoperability regardless of it being an obviously anti-consumer tactical moat.
Buying a Mac in spite of such anti-consumer behavior reminds me of voting for a bad person because you like their policies.
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
fusion360 is supported.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
I had Cyberpunk 2077 running on a M1 Macbook Air almost two years before the MacPort came at a very playable 30fps (900p Medium settings). Although I did have to use thermal pads to heatsink it to my metal laptop stand and added a slow spinning fan for good measure.
It's not perfect, but I've also spent a lot of time only buying games with no road blocks to running on Mac/Linux.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
Apple had solved the issue around 2012 and still PC manufacturer refuse to spend on trackpad quality.
Don't forget, one is going to be the "Business" version and the other identical one is going to be the "Consumer" version. God help whoever buys a "business" category laptop for personal use. The world will come to an end!
> too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?"
I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
I run both PC's and Mac devices in our house, we use what fills the job. Recommending PC laptops for family members feels like a total crapshoot though. Every time, I do all I can to find the right device for their needs and there are just so many trade-offs. Maybe I get all the right specs, ensure it doesn't thermal throttle, keyboard/trackpad are A-OK... but the webcam is trash. Ooof... now Mom is complaining about how no one can see her properly at bridge club call.
I brought up how the Neo might do to the PC industry what the Air did to Ultrabooks back in the day. The amount of hate I got on YouTube/Verge with copy-paste, "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" was expected, but also disappointing. There is clearly a market segment happy to continue to put up with the mess that Dell/Lenovo are selling (anything but a Mac).
Wild how tribal we are to our corporate computer overlords.
The era where something like Framework with its fully customizable, repairable, modular laptops becomes the standard can't come soon enough.
For the time being, I'll let Apple/PC continue to duke it out. Hope some competition helps in the long run. :shrug:
Yep.
I'm a long-time ThinkPad user, but I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from the ThinkPad E series or ThinkPad L series or ThinkPad X series, and their website certainly isn't going to tell me. I keep on buying T series because I'm honestly afraid of trying anything else.
To say nothing of Lenovo's non-ThinkPad laptop brands, including Ideapad, Legion, Yoga, ThinkBook (!), and LOQ.
I really don't know what laptop to recommend to a friend. One friend showed me specs for an Asus they found at Best Buy, and it looked okay, so I said "It's probably fine." Turns out it was shoddily made and overpriced: they had to sent it back not once but twice because the wifi and then the camera didn't work out of the box, then a few months later the hinge broke.
I am not a Mac fan, but it's easy to recommend them because you at least know they are universally well-built machines.
My personal rundown and how they get assigned:
E - Educational / Lower office personnel spec
L - Office personnel you hate spec, but don't offer the E because they might complain.
T - Give this to all the technicians because they can't take care of anything and it will survive typically.
P - Give this to the engineers who believe having an RTX gpu will actually help them so that they are happy, and to the CAD operators who actually need it.
X - Smaller/Ultrabooks before the term got started, now somewhat a blurry line because T series have gotten lighter/thinner. But the X1 Carbon sure is a great way to spend a ton of money for a light laptop when a T-series would suffice.
Personally I stick to older used X series (currently x250) because I just enjoy a small laptop and they are dirt cheap now.
And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of.
The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry.
If you aren't a gamer, there is zero reason at this point to consider any other laptop besides a macbook. Apple now has one for every price point. This neo is going to destroy the consumer PC space. Dell, HP, Acer are probably sweating right now.
and as far as I know, they do this on purpose!
I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU.
> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
The touch screen was completely useless. Super laggy and sometimes the pen would still believe it was touching the screen even at like 1cm away. Windows 10 had almost no features for touch based interaction. It was just regular Windows with the same microscopic buttons for mouse.
Plus a ton of display ghosting, GPU glitches, etc.
My big problem with it is that the battery got swollen a few years ago, pushing out the bottom panel, and the device is way our of warranty to get it replaced. I'm waiting to find time to get that replaced.
But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?
macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore. The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
The edu price is $499. Of course that seriously competes with the base iPad ($329 without keyboard).
Again, the trackpad will suck and the screen will be a dim, binned display panel, etc. If that works for you, fine, but that's not the conversation. The conversation everyone else is having is that your plastic $400 laptop with the bargain-bin components isn't the equivalent of $MACBOOK, no matter what the spec sheet says.
But even Lenovo cripples them:
* You need to be very careful. Select alwaysCTO build with the best available display. But even then, Lenovo *removed* the HiDPI display from the X13. The only actual competitor to the MacBook Air is the ThinkPad X13.
* Lenovo added useless camera humps protruding out of the panel. There is a thick bezel and enough space for a much better camera. And for opening the laptop used to be a dent in the (round!) palmrest, nothing protruding.
* AMD, Intel and Lenovo fail to ship a fanless X13 and T14. I would happily keep same performance for two years, just getting rid of it.
* Lenovo is drowning us in Yogas, Z13 or whatever Legion.
[1] By the love of god. Don’t order them with Windows! You are putting 80 to 130 euro right into Microsoft’s stock owners. And they will use it to harm Linux. And of course, making Windows even worse. They use it to harm you. Select Linux. Donate the rest (Fasst, GNOME, KDE…) or use it for the better display.
Every time someone turns on their PC laptop next to me, my ears feel assaulted.
My Mac does engage fans from time to time, but I never notice the noise.
He was referring to the supply chain. The shock is that Apple was able to build something like this with current component costs.
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
It comes down to Microsoft not doubling down on "let's make Windows as annoying as possible" (with ads, with telemetry that can't be turned off).
A decade ago, but still relevant: https://beneinstein.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-ap...
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
At some point the XPS 13 dev edition was the almost perfect laptop. Then they ruined it with the following generations of it.
System 76 already has Pop!_OS. Lenovo.com/linux will redirect you to a list of linux compatible lenovo laptops that's a mile long.
nudge/"help" people to join the party?
trying to ride something around the windows-bullshitization , recent memory-prices etc..
600 might seem budget, but it's out of budget for most people. And my guess is PC manufacturers will retaliate against this by cutting prices just a little to drop under that 600 price point for mid range ryzens, with more ram and space.
Any family members I've helped shop for computers only care about how much space it has, how cheap it is, and will it struggle to run things like the last one. As it sits the MacBook is more money for less gigabytes
Out of budget for my parents but I'll pay the difference myself. It's just painful to see them use their pile of shit $300 laptop that can barely open a text editor, sounds like a jet engine and has about 45 minutes of battery life.
The only haptic feedback they get if the entire fucking thing creaking as soon as you lightly touch it.
They've been through at least 5 of them since I bought my 2015 mbp, which is still working fine in every aspects
You need to spend a ridiculous amount of time on research because the producer itself is selling very different product (very different quality) from a year to another.
I wish a "brand" would be consistant but it's not 99% of the time.
The monitor is awful. Like, the horrible way it changes color and brightness depending on exact viewing angle is sickening; I am shocked California hasn't declared it illegal. It feels cheap, keyboard is cheap, who knows what the battery life is.
If the Apple Neo were available then, and he had asked what to buy, I would have instantly told him to get one.
edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.
I would argue that things have changed significantly since then.
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
So it was a failure in implementation.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.
Apple was not a bastion of quality in the 90's. They couldn't modernize the Mac OS, and that continued with little more than window dressing over what was released in the 80's. The Mac line up was a horrible mess of barely different models that needed a Ph.D to figure out what was different. The company was bleeding money and seriously close to bankruptcy.
The Apple of the mid 90's wishes it could release something like Tahoe.
Suddenly you could have a Unix, with pretty much the same CLI as Linux but without all the supported hardware/driver issues. Laptop sleep in particular was pretty finicky.
If MacOS didn't pick a Unix/BSD base, I'm pretty sure all the tech companies running Mac would be on Linux.
FoxTrot comic from 2002:
* https://archive.is/https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/...
<cough> xattr...
I’m curious to see this machine in person, but I’d bet the an iPad is still the best large device in Apple’s ecosystem for anything that benefits from viewing in portrait mode.
Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.
I think a lot of us wish that! I'm struggling to pick either the Neo or the new iPad Air 13", the former for having MacOS, or the latter for light weight and light usage purposes. And come this fall pair whichever choice with an M5 mini at home.
I can’t stand it and every update makes it worse.
Been running popos abs everything I can and it’s petty nice.
Installed it on a new LG Gram and everything works including fingerprint reader. Is my favorite laptop and my old Mac sits gathering dust,
I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.
Not as obvious as the author implies. Apple has some docs out, IIRC, explaining how it is implemented. Worth a read...
The fact that the "usb 2" port works for (fast) charging is a big win. That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time.
For some use cases, you can do that with a single USB port, too. For example, a single USB cable connected to a monitor can both send video and charge the laptop.
This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.
If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
Damned if i ever noticed, and all my laptops since like 2013 have been Apple.
I knew I had it on one of my previous iPhones but there it was an annoyance because I never knew what was going to happen on a touch.
I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled gardens with app stores, excessive power over developers and users). MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games).
I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. If the stock OS can't be replaced for one reason or another, it's dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
Like sure it’s DOA to you, but in what world does that really matter when it’s going to sell so well?
iPhone and iPad does not have a hardware indicator light
jackhalford•14h ago
No? Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1, this one is just even cheaper. I thought PC execs were asleep at the wheel but not this bad.
alwillis•3h ago
I wouldn’t "way cheaper".
A baseline Neo with 256GB SSD is $599 vs the first M1 MacBook Air with 256GB SSD was $999 ($1,251.09 in 2026 dollars)
A Neo with 512GB SSD is $699 vs the M1 MacBook Air with 512GB SSD was $1249--that's $1,568.38 in 2026 dollars.
So this is a big deal; the Neo is the first Apple Silicon MacBook where the starting price is less than $999.