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MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

macrumors.com

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Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#71

Post by lowbloodsugar »

benoau wrote: post #7
no_wizard wrote: post #3

I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses. It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice

It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

Hilarious comparison. I bought one. Unusable garbage. Tiny screen. Unusably slow. 8 second battery. Awful keyboard.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#72

Post by Centigonal »

mrinterweb wrote: post #61

The Neo's value prop is great for many people. I keep needing to remind myself that most computer users can get by fine with 8GB or RAM, and that the I'm not the target market for products like the Neo. I do get nervous with how future proof 8GB of RAM will be in terms of total usable lifespan for the Neo. Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but jus…

> if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.

I actually think right now is the perfect moment for this!

I suspect that the massively increased cost of memory will limit the amount of memory in most consumer PCs from increasing over the next few years. In turn, this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#73

Post by benoau »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #71
benoau wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

Hilarious comparison. I bought one. Unusable garbage. Tiny screen. Unusably slow. 8 second battery. Awful keyboard.

...and yet this sparked a revolution called netbooks that took over a full 20% of the laptop market at their peak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#74

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

I think Apple's cost efficiency advantages are really compounding now and it'll get increasingly hard for competitors to catch up. Everything they put in the product is either in-house or benefit from their scale and negotiating power.

In the MacBook Neo's case, everything from the in-house chipset and scale (for stuff like aluminum body) and the more RAM-efficient software is working in its favor. I'd bet that a different laptop manufacturer will struggle to make a profit at all if they made a $599 Neo-equivalent product with lower scale, having to pay for chips and Windows licenses, and having to put in 12GB of RAM instead of 8 to get a similar user experience.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#75

Post by thebruce87m »

mrinterweb wrote: post #61

The Neo's value prop is great for many people. I keep needing to remind myself that most computer users can get by fine with 8GB or RAM, and that the I'm not the target market for products like the Neo. I do get nervous with how future proof 8GB of RAM will be in terms of total usable lifespan for the Neo. Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but jus…

> Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.

It’s products like this that mean 8GB will remain fine for longer. If every base model had 16GB then sites like linkedin would just add more bullshit to use it. Let’s keep the bar at 8GB please - we’re not really doing anything different than I was doing 20 years ago with much less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561489

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#76

Post by asdff »

riffraff wrote: post #56
asdff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.

> I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright but that should cause extra wear on the SSD, or is this no longer a concern?

Certainly but I'd guess the problem won't manifest for years and other showstopping pieces might fail before then. That old frankenstein macbook of mine had the same 850 evo ssd I shoved in it for like 8 years of use and abuse, always high temps with that macbook too. People say you shouldn't use an ssd like that but oh well, it seems to work alright.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#77

Post by 866-RON-0-FEZ »

tencentshill wrote: post #4

It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.

It's not so amazing when you realize the Neo is an iPad's innards with a keyboard glued to it. $250 for a keyboard and a hinge.

This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#78

Post by infecto »

thewebguyd wrote: post #55
juancn wrote: post #24

I ended up getting two (one for each of my daughters). The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. It really just works. They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement. These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever…

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users. Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of comput…

Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS.

Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#79

Post by geodel »

thewebguyd wrote: post #65
PaulHoule wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no accident that they are bad computers. They aren't "fit for purpose" unless they are too weak to play Krunker.

Kids also destroy them every year. They need to be bad, and the absolute cheap pieces of crap possible because kids will throw them against walls and destroy them on purpose. "Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.

Not related to this discussion. But kids destroying school computers wantonly is expected? Is there no cost associated for destroying property on students or their parents?

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#80

Post by varispeed »

hylaride wrote: post #14
tencentshill wrote: post #4

It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.

My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.

Chromebook should be classified as torture device.
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