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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#351

Post by SllX »

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 iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder. Start from the bottom and climb up picking up features along the way until you reach the point where you’ve got what you want or you’re not willing to spend more money.

The Neo is either easy to recommend or rather easy to not recommend. It has a fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web. Others… disagree. Either way, it might entice some schools and school districts assuming they can volume discounts where 8GB is probably enough and it fills the spot in the Walmart part of the sales channel previously occupied by an 8GB RAM M1 MacBook Air Apple hadn’t sold itself in years.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#352

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

dangus wrote: post #330
nottorp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's dumb. You can hardly even buy a machine with 4GB of memory on sale, at any price. If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.

Not caring makes the world worse for everyone. All of us. Including you.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#353

Post by kvuj »

needSomeCoffee wrote: post #334

I do not really understand why the Walmart $599 M1 MBA comparison is so lost in the MSM. The Neo is the same price (without edu discount). The Neo CPU benchmarks slightly better until the 4W performance limit factors in more real-world cases (then the M1 wins handily). So much is given up with the Neo: Worse screen, Worse keyboard, No TouchId, Worse Trackpad, etc. Yet Apple is praised for the Neo. No longer matters o…

For me the longer software support would play a role in my decisions. The M1 MBA will probably lose support in 4-5 years whereas the Neo has a longer road ahead.

Combine that with the enormously improved single core performance (which matters more in the real world than sustained load for an entry level notebook), fun colors and 499 price tag for students and I can see the interest.

The screen is good compared to the MBA (only loses P3 colors) but the bummer seems to be ports and the "normal" trackpad.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#354

Post by calf »

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.

It is giving me choice paralysis, last week I made a mental graph of the ones I wanted and went over all node pairs choose 2, now it's down to waiting for a fall M5 Mac mini paired with either: a MacBook Neo, or an iPad Air 13"; both options are very attractive for my intended usage though the latter seems higher risk since I've never used a 13 inch tablet before.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#355

Post by pjmlp »

mhurron wrote: post #238
pjmlp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Apple from 1996 would not released Tahoe, most likely. We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.

Do you forget what Apple in '96 was? Or are you saying that Tahoe is too polished for the Apple of '96? 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 bleedin…

Yes the 1996 Apple was on the edge of bankruptcy, yet Mac OS 8 was definitely much more polished than Tahoe.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#356

Post by nouveaux »

needSomeCoffee wrote: post #334

I do not really understand why the Walmart $599 M1 MBA comparison is so lost in the MSM. The Neo is the same price (without edu discount). The Neo CPU benchmarks slightly better until the 4W performance limit factors in more real-world cases (then the M1 wins handily). So much is given up with the Neo: Worse screen, Worse keyboard, No TouchId, Worse Trackpad, etc. Yet Apple is praised for the Neo. No longer matters o…

Why compare the M1 MBA discounted at Walmart but not give the same edu discount to the Neo? The target audience for Neo is likely people who would be able to use the edu discount.

I know many people who would not care about the differences you have outlined and gladly pay $499 for the Neo.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#357

Post by Xfx7028 »

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…

What is bad about brew? I have used it in the past and I found it fine. With apt I have less experience since I only used it when playing with a raspberry pi.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#358

Post by basch »

everdrive wrote: post #155
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…

This is my advice anyone asks me about a laptop. The specs don't matter (at least if you're asking me, it means you don't know computers and will mostly just use a web browser, and therefore nearly any specs on the market will be fine) and the things that do matter are just never on a spec sheet -- keyboard, trackpad, speaker, screen quality. Some stuff won't be discovered until years later: for instance I had an Ace…

Specs only really matter to many relative to battery life. A higher specced system may unnecessarily burn energy.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#359

Post by foldr »

starkparker wrote: post #162
foldr wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.” 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…

> The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core 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.…

That's a fair point above sustained multicore, but this is probably the right tradeoff for this class of device. Few people are regularly maxing out all of their cores for more than a few minutes at a time, and the people who are doing that probably weren't going to buy Apple's budget $600 MacBook anyway. The increase in single core performance over the M1 is much more valuable to most users.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#360

Post by haunter »

needSomeCoffee wrote: post #334

I do not really understand why the Walmart $599 M1 MBA comparison is so lost in the MSM. The Neo is the same price (without edu discount). The Neo CPU benchmarks slightly better until the 4W performance limit factors in more real-world cases (then the M1 wins handily). So much is given up with the Neo: Worse screen, Worse keyboard, No TouchId, Worse Trackpad, etc. Yet Apple is praised for the Neo. No longer matters o…

Even cheaper if you buy from Walmart's refurb outlet, they are $380.
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