A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
MacBook Neo
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: MacBook Neo
#362Press release touts "built with the environment mind", but is silent on repairability.
Also this week: Lenovo's new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability showing that even popular modules of mainstream manufacturers can build with repairability in mind.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/115827/new-thinkpads-score-perfe...
Apple I imagine is still soldering their storage and memory to the motherboard.
Re: MacBook Neo
#363If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
Re: MacBook Neo
#364Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...
IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!
Re: MacBook Neo
#365It looks like a good value if you can get by with 8 GB of RAM. This is a market niche that will sell, but it doesn’t replace the Air. The Air has 16GB standard and can be ordered with up to 32. I’m also curious about the benchmarks between the A18 Pro and the M5, although for a lot of people that’s going to be less important than the RAM. Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio…
8gb was standard not that long ago and was just fine for most people.
Re: MacBook Neo
#366Crazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad. Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be…
> Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life?
A Chromebook with 8Gb ram and stock ChromeOS gets 10 hours doing real work. And with real work I mean full local dev with containers, vscode, Vivado, and 100+ chrome tabs open. And even running small VMs from time to time.
Re: MacBook Neo
#367Geekbench CPU single/multi and GPU Metal scores. - M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377 - M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712 - A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288 So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster single core speed.
For daily use the single core speed is the most important. Web browsing, UI render, etc., is still single threaded mostly.
Re: MacBook Neo
#368Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.
Who wants it? On my iPad I want an iPad OS, MacOS is not good for touch operation. MS tried merging two OS-es (surface) and see how it went.
Re: MacBook Neo
#369For those wondering: Geekbench CPU single/multi and GPU Metal scores. - M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377 - M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712 - A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288 So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster in single core speed.
A18 Pro is generations ahead of M1 and M2 on single thread if these scores are true.
Are you saying we had this incredibly overpowered silicon shipped on millions of Instagram machines?
I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.
Re: MacBook Neo
#370Its wild watching Apple change. They lost their luxury brand and have pivoted to general population.
Today, every unemployed teen and stay at home mom has a $40/mo iphone. It lost its status.
These are some final nails in the coffin. As an Apple stock holder, I might exit my position. They have no growth left, they are just another Blue Chip now..