> “Once or twice a day I need to manually bump the display brightness up or down.”
This is a daily, albeit minor, annoyance on my MacBook Air too.
The MacBook Neo
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: The MacBook Neo
#272> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality. 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 ga…
Is 2026 the year of the linux desktop? Can I update video drivers in Linux without seeing a console? OS X updates them automatically where it's a non-issue.
It's been Year Of The Linux Handheld for gaming since 2022, the best platform to play games is Steam Deck where updates are clicking "Update" in the System panel. You can run either Bazzite or SteamOS on your own hardware, although I haven't tried that.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#273600 is a bargain for a MacBook, but I can't see the public windows users switching en masse. Most people who buy cheap windows laptops do so because 1) they need to replace a broken laptop and want to pay the lowest amount possible 2) they don't want to learn some new thing 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 jus…
My dad the other month, in need of a computer with webcam and ideally portable, bought some $400-500 HP 17" laptop. He was so proud of it, proud of buying a piece of hardware without asking me, and rather than tell him the truth, I nodded and said "yeah this is neat". The monitor is awful . Like, the horrible way it changes color and brightness depending on exact viewing angle is sickening; I am shocked California ha…
I broke that circle by having a sibling ultimately follow my recommendation of getting a ThinkPad T at a discount (prev-gen during a sale) and then letting them advertise it to the rest of the family.
If you ask me, for a comparable price range, the ThinkPad still is a much better pick than the MacBook Neo: that thing has no IO and not even enough RAM for nowadays light web browsing.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#274Imagine if future versions had a sim card slot for data-only connections. That would be killer - a main reason I've considered an iPad is for "ambient internet" wherever you go. Why has that phone feature not made its way to laptops?
Re: The MacBook Neo
#275IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - 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. 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 doe…
The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…
at our company we just pick the most current X1 13in Thinkpad 32/1000 for the windows preferrers.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine 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…
> The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
True for Geekbench.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
$300 to thread the eye of a needle through a field of dogshit, that can only run Google Chrome, or $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software that doesn't use garbage collection. macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating…
> $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software
A vast library? With 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage you're not going to be running much, nor storing many files created by that library of software. Also, the only well-designed truly native software I have on my Mac, which I use daily, I can count on one hand. The vast majority of the apps most people use outside of "Pro" video and image editing, are in a browser, or are Electron apps that are exactly the same on a Mac as they are on a Chromebook.
And those "media" people using Premiere or Final Cut would never buy a computer that maxes out at 512GB SSD.
This is a pretty Chromebook substitute, which is cool, but it's obvious Apple doesn't want it to compete with the rest of their computers which start at $1,099.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#278IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - 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. 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 doe…
The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…
Apple isn’t this bad, of course, but they’re slowly heading in that direction.
The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.
Now there’s the MacBook Neo and a rumoured new MacBook Ultra in the pipeline. The easy days of “pick standard or pro, select a display size, select RAM & storage” are starting to fade.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#279But you’re stuck with MacOS. 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 generally run chrome/firefox and vscode full screen, and then alt-tab between those and my email (outlook at current company) and messaging (slack). Plus terminal window/s. That workflow is mostly reproducible across win/mac/linux. What features are you using that MacOS is getting in the way?
Decent package manager, brew is awful compared to apt. Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards. No Alt+Tab, Cmd+Tab is not the same. No window previews when hovering over dock, ridiculous animation speed when switching workspaces that can't be changed (and somehow Ctrl+1/2/3 is 2x faster than Ctrl+Left/Right? What is that all about). Needing third-party apps for basic things like: setting a custom resolution (BetterDisplay), setting scroll direction for mouse wheel independent of touchpad scroll direction. And the Settings app is super slow.
Re: The MacBook Neo
#280Windows reputation is declining, so the operating system might be the actual crisis. Linux with modern desktops (e.g. Gnome 3) might fill the gap, but the market is far from broad adoption. Promoting and improving Linux desktop and apps would be a long endeavour, but betting only on Windows which degrades to a cloud and AI advertising surface might be fatal.
Windows 11 has 1 Billion+ installs. That's not a decline and hardly a crisis. That's a huge install base.