Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The MacBook Neo

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

Re: The MacBook Neo

#401

Post by ksec »

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…

>(then the M1 wins handily).

How do you came to this conclusion when both are passingly cooled and A19 Pro is faster. Not to mention AV1 and other newer codec hardware accelerator and NPU / GPU improvements.

Also remember M1 MBA is may be Walmart and US only. Around the world most dont even get a chance to buy M1 at $599. The display dont have P3 but is actually brighter than M1 400 nits. Not sure how Keyboard is worse. Neo also have 1080P webcam rather than 720P.

And if Walmart is selling M1 at $599, I am sure they will also sell Neo at lower than RSP may be even same as educational discount $499. And this point surely Neo would win?

What a lot of people dont talk about, and may be wait until iFixit to confirm. Neo is basically the iPhone 17 of MacBook. It is perhaps the easiest to repair and cheapest MacBook for Apple to services.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#402

Post by halapro »

madeofpalk wrote: post #368
zarzavat wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably with SIP a hardware indicator light is not strictly necessary, the OS could force the indicator pixels to be lit.

Isn't the argument that a hardware indicator light is (more) immune to bugs? If its just software, you're a software exploit/bug away from finding a way to access the sensor without tripping the software light.

Yes but also this has never been an issue on any phones (i.e. never heard a complaint), and you take that to the toilet. By comparison a laptop camera has much less access to your private life.

People who are truly worried about cameras will cover it regardless of indicator.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#403

Post by dhosek »

SllX wrote: post #351
Reason077 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 operat…

From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#404

Post by tasuki »

> 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.

My old x86 "PC" laptop with the $0 Debian certainly compares positively to Apple in terms of software quality.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#405

Post by ivanjermakov »

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.

I like to imagine the gaming landscape if developers were forced to work on 5yr old hardware.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#406

Post by yalogin »

This was always going to be the case. Apple has perfected the art of finding slots for different use cases and consumer buckets just as well as they have perfected the hardware and software. This is a no brained for most home use and particularly education. Only issue for home use is photos and able to process an entire photo database at once and doing ML operations on them. Of course apple’s photos is the one black mark in their software stack, or may be something I don’t like.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#407

Post by ivanjermakov »

pragmatic wrote: post #104

But 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,

> But you’re stuck with MacOS

I believe this is the whole reason this device exists. Apple saw Windows 11 fiasco and decided to push MacOS to low-end computer market.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#408

Post by jauntywundrkind »

It's remarkable to me that this shows what an iPhone chip has been capable of, and a reminder about how strongly Apple works to keep phone, tablet, and laptop in separate segments. Even though they share the same chips.

Going to be signficiantly harder for Qualcomm X2 Elite to make a splash, given the price here. I have high hopes for the X2 Elite Extreme (even if it is going to be cursed with incredible difficulty trying to get each of these non-ACPI / DeviceTree systems running Linux). But this raises the bar signficiantly.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#409

Post by halapro »

fsloth wrote: post #332
p_ing wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 11 has 1 Billion+ installs. That's not a decline and hardly a crisis. That's a huge install base.

This. Ofc a huge chunk of that is in companies but I'm fairly sure there are at least two windows 11 machines per one mac in consumer segment as well.

It's just momentum. You buy windows because you have windows. You buy windows because there's not really much of a choice. You have windows because you're not going out of your ways to reconfigure hundreds of laptops at your company just for your employees to be less comfortable with Linux.

Now introduce a choice… and things might change.

With the vast majority of software nowadays living in the browser, your OS matters less and less, especially for a business that buys machines for its employees.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#410

Post by kilpikaarna »

tasuki wrote: post #404

> 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. My old x86 "PC" laptop with the $0 Debian certainly compares positively to Apple in terms of software quality.

As much as I like the form factor and price point of the MB Neo, I just can't accept a computer that needs to phone home when reinstalling the (one approved) OS.

Bought yet another second hand 11" MBA instead. Now looking at SMT soldering equipmemt for doing ipgrades and repairs.

Post reply on HN