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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#291

Post by izacus »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #31

IMO 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…

After growing up in eastern Europe it's still wild to see young Americans stupidly demand less choice and more monopolies in their market.

Like seriously, having laptop choice is causing you crippling issues? Is other people having a laptop to choose based on preference causing you distress when you go to Apple store?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#292

Post by izacus »

mikestew wrote: post #189
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #31

IMO 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…

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. But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get 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…

[flagged]

Re: The MacBook Neo

#293

Post by whynotmaybe »

nottorp wrote: post #177
efficax wrote: post #164

Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale.…

If you ask me, all web devs should be forced to work on 4 Gb machines. This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.

Should be forced to Test on a 4gb machine.

A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen.

I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#294

Post by allarm »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #251
bigyabai wrote: post #223

Earlier 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…

>If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo? Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by withou…

[flagged]

Re: The MacBook Neo

#296

Post by enraged_camel »

Reason077 wrote: post #278
cannolicannon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.

One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence.

Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#297

Post by zarzavat »

xp84 wrote: post #259

> 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. Interesting metrics, though I'd add that if you count storage and memory as metrics, it'd be hard to find a worse PC laptop. And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison. https://www.bestbuy.com/product/…

The manufacturers don't care about display quality, because displays are hard and expensive. Apple has enough volume that they can get a custom panel.

Users on the other hand, they definitely care about display quality more than they care about RAM. The display is the part you look at!

If you're in store and there's a Neo with a crisp 200 PPI screen and a Windows laptop with a cheap screen but more RAM, the vast majority of consumers will choose the laptop with the better display. People make purchasing decisions based on feels and the Neo has great feels.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#298

Post by doubled112 »

mikestew wrote: post #196
pxeboot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And unless you looked it up, you'd never noticed the difference (save comparing the two side-by-side). Whereas the cheap laptop requires one to know the difference so you can get the right driver, or other jackery because your WiFi card was a mid-year change. It reminds of me of mid-year production changes on cars, where VINs XXX-YYY need part number ZZZ, but VINs AAA-BBB need part number CCC.

What colour is the stripe on the spring? I can't look this up, not even by VIN.

Wore off eight years ago. Can we guess?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#299

Post by nektro »

pa7ch wrote: post #183
drnick1 wrote: post #174

> 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…

Its a shame there isn't more goodwill for some companies to bankroll a project like asahi linux. Keeping up with reverse engineering apple silicon seems like a very large task.

asahi is great and i hope they keep going but i can't help but wonder why apple appears to be fully singular in their arm dominance

Re: The MacBook Neo

#300

Post by Howietje »

mmcnl wrote: post #279
hadlock wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nix darwin + package manager with aerospace and sketchybar make it almost the same as my desktop pc. Could that be an alternative?
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