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MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

macrumors.com

171–180 of 524 posts

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend of mine has 32GB laptop with top spec last gen Intel 9 and it barely handles larger Word documents and Teams calls. The fan is just obnoxious on top of that.

Top-spec computers will always shit the bed when they aren't taken care of properly (bloatware, blocked airflow, etc)

Even for the arm series macs the max cpus run way hotter and spin fans sooner than base model in general tasks. Just how those chips are designed. They aren't designed to throttle to keep temps down, they are designed to give you all the horsepower knowing you don't care about noise and heat and care about performance.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#172
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and the NSA must know a lot about you.

What are you saying, that you think Windows or Linux are better platforms for evading covert government oversight? Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.

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

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#173

Can someone explain to me why the standard iPad ($349) is so much cheaper than the iPhone 17e ($599)?

I'm sure that they have a fatter margin on the the iPhone, but the iPhone does cost quite a bit more to manufacture. Cellular itself is probably $50 or so. The iPad has more material, so you may perceive you're getting more "device per the money" but the cost of those materials is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing the additional components.

This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell has just announced an 8 Gig of RAM version of their XPS laptop and the PR surrounding the launch is pretty funny. > "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," said Dell. Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?

It is shocking that the XPS14 now starts at $2,000.

Made me buy a MacBook Air instead. Waited for a long time because I was not a fan of macOS, but Apple is quite cheap in all segments nowadays. A well-specced MacBook Pro these days is cheaper than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The MacBook Air at ~$1000 price point with 16GB/512GB is also incredibly hard to beat in price, and even if you pay the premium for a Windows competitor (crazy sentence) you actually get a less than premium experience: worse build quality, worse display, worse battery life.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#176

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.

and an iPhone 17e for $599

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#177

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 dif…

Chromebooks exist at a lower price point with even less RAM.

and they suck

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#178
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even Apple made an 11" laptop in that era!

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#179
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…

I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.

It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.

I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.

Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#180
post #51

I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex. I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...

Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped. They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim f…

Apple definitely still has products that cross into the luxury brand category. For example the Apple Watch Hermès, which starts at $1249.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch-hermes

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