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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#301

Post by thepryz »

drcongo wrote: post #160
FeloniousHam wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it everyday, I love it. Native unix, great apps and ecosystem.

It's amazing how often people who post on here about hating macOS have only just got a Mac for the first time and simply can't be bothered to learn, or hate that the keyboard shortcuts are different, or desperately want their OS level adverts back or something. It's lazy.

As a lifetime Mac user, I will say that the last few updates to MacOS have made me start looking towards linux. Ignoring the many sins of liquid glass, Disk utility is almost nonfunctional, as are many of the built-in utilities. Sure I can use the command line tools but to me it's a concerning trend that highlights poor attention to detail that the Mac was always known for.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#302

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust.

In some countries Apple is (or was) a status symbol of luxury, but I haven't observed that much in the United States. Macs and iPhones are both mainstream and affordable. AirPods can be bought for $100 on sale. These are commodity items now, not symbols of luxury.

Now, most people go to Apple because they see it as a premium option, not a status symbol or luxury. If you get AirPods or an iPhone you know what you're getting. If you buy those $50 wireless earbuds on Amazon your expectations are lower.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#303

Post by asdff »

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…

Is the laptop market even choosy or discerning? Very few people I know would actually understand specs. Especially when you step outside people who majored in fields that require some programming. I assume they must buy laptops, if they still even buy laptops, based on things like yearly sales periods at retailers, since you do see a surprising amount of square footage reserved for laptops to sit open on tables (not just apple's) in places like best buy, costco, target, etc. So there must be buyers. Maybe their comparison only goes as far as whatever bullet points Costco highlights on the price tag I suspect, in a "bigger number is better for the price" sort of way vs understanding a persons own compute needs.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#304

Post by mietek »

oompydoompy74 wrote: post #286
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…

I have a relatively recent expensive gaming laptop from Asus for the occasional LAN party with friends. I hate it and it’s a huge piece of shit. Windows 11 is necessary for anti-cheat shenanigans. Apple could change the Mac OS wallpaper to a permanent photo of a turd and it would still be better than Windows 11. Also the trackpad and keyboard suck.

FYI, the very recently released Marathon with the BattleEye rootkit works fine on a maximally trimmed down Windows 10 LTSC, which is what I'm running on my PC (personal console).

Re: The MacBook Neo

#305

Post by bryanlarsen »

Aurornis wrote: post #290
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…

> You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. Or you could spend $200 more (or $100 more with edu pricing) and get a MacBook Neo which has significantly higher build quality, a much better screen, a great trackpad, and amazing performance. Seeing how college students throw laptops in backpacks, that extra $100 (edu pricing) could very easily save them money in the long run. > There are damn g…

First impressions can be a very poor judge of build quality. If you pick up a mil-spec laptop it'll feel a lot more like the $200 Chromebook. Yet it'll survive endurance tests that neither the Chromebook nor the Macbook will.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#306

Post by fragmede »

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…

For me, the one feature that sells having an iphone and a Mac laptop to me is copy and paste between the two devices. I spend way more time on my phone than I should, but being able to go from my phone to my laptop and back is what has me in Apple's ecosystem (for now). MacOS and iOS feel like they are buggier than they used to be, (don't get me started on 26) but framing it purely as a luxury and brand identity thing, without looking at usability details like battery life is an oversimplification.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#307

Post by p_ing »

starkparker wrote: post #158
beAbU wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If apple came out with their own linux distro, with open drivers and a mainline kernel... A girl can dream!

The memory that XNU and Darwin are technically open-source projects is a curse that brings one only suffering.

I would call them open access. Apple doesn't accept contributions.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#308

Post by gehsty »

ezst wrote: post #221
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…

Same here, MacBooks are decent hardware but nowhere near so superior as to justify all the downsides and increasingly dark patterns Apple has been pushing left and right.

I agree that it isn’t as good as it was but compared to windows (with adds in the start menu, and two different settings menus for a decade as examples) it’s still better. More of a glass of warm cheap whiskey, than a glass of cool ice water in hell.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#309

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

> The biggest shortcoming of the decade-ago MacBook “One”, aside from the baffling decision to include just one USB-C port that was also its only means of charging, was the shitty performance of Intel’s Core M chips.

MMMMMMM.....I don't know. I think the biggest shortcomings of that laptop were super common keyboard (dustgate), SSD, USB-C port, display, battery, and CPU (popcorning) failure.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#310

Post by p_ing »

akagr wrote: post #53
hulitu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Go beyond the specs, though. Which windows laptops have similar combination of all metal build with tight tolerances, a display hinge that doesn’t wobble, a nice keyboard and even close to similar feeling trackpad at this 600 dollar price point? Most non haptic trackpads are dive board designs where you can only press the lower part of it because they hinge from the top, whereas as Neo’s trackpad is completely floati…

An all metal build doesn't stand up well to abuse versus higher quality plastics.

Looks nicer. For a time, or if taken care of.

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