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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

#321

Post by brandon272 »

I have always had this notion that buying a Mac is the "premium" option, not just in quality, but maybe in price too.

I am in the process of trying to find a business notebook for my spouse who is a Windows user. The goal is to have something that is as close to a Macbook Air as possible in terms of price, weight, performance and durability.

What I am learning is that nothing that like that exists in the PC world. It's a minefield of tradeoffs: plastic chassis', bad screens, weird keyboards, bad trackpads, questionable reliability, etc.

The current contender is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon which even after a bunch of business discounts is still a good $300 more than a Macbook Air and appears to come with a pretty poor trackpad in comparison.

Apple has an incredible strength in distilling what a product or series of products should be down to its essence and selling it. You could argue that there is more "choice" among Windows PCs but the reality seems to be that it is an illogical mess of tradeoffs.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#322

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bigyabai wrote: post #268
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Even…

> For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#323

Post by Telaneo »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #85
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #74

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…

I think the clear demonstration of this is how small Apple's motherboard is for the neo (and other M series) compared to everyone else). It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently. If you cap your chips TDP such that it can be cooled passively, you save money on heatsink, fan, vents, power circuitry (e.g. fewer capacitors), battery size, etc.

> It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently.

I'm sure they would understand, if you could show them the equivalent 25 watt x86 part. If you find one at 25 watts or lower, it'll be too slow to really bother with. And if it uses much more power than that, then a fan quickly becomes mandatory. It's easier to excuse having a fan than having a processor that's just dog slow.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#324

Post by seanmcdirmid »

robertjpayne wrote: post #276
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.

There is a lot of money in AI chips, and Apple could definitely get a fairly large slice of that business if they put the work in (well, if they are putting the work in now, depending on what Baltra is really about).

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#325

Post by zdragnar »

Modified3019 wrote: post #203
kasey_junk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never, in 30 years, working across big companies and small, had a computer hardware upgrade. It’s _always_ just a new box.

I work I Ag retail (agronomic services, chemical sales) and while we have an IT department, a decade ago I’d occasionally act as “local” tech support and double a coworker’s RAM when their combination of browser/office/database front ends stopped gracefully fitting in 4GB (and later 8GB). I would also migrate them from HDD’s to SSD’s, and set them up with backups. But even I haven’t done that in several years now, on…

Something as simple as adding a stick of RAM might be worthwhile, but some upgrades will take more money in salary (you and the person whose computer you're working on) than the upgrade is actually worth. This is especially true if you replace several components one at a time in a what would otherwise be a single replace cycle.

This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#326

Post by mikestorrent »

kristianp wrote: post #217
Drunk_Engineer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise Mac still has occasional problems -- mainly due to Microsoft crapware IT departments insist on installing.

Microsoft or giant piles of poo like crowdstrike?

Crowdstrike is not what is slowing down my Mac. Web pages in Firefox that somehow take up 1GB of RAM are.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#327

Post by nxobject »

GeekyBear wrote: post #96
everdrive wrote: post #25

It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.

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?

> Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?

Did the old 11" MacBook Air not teach the Wintel brands anything?

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#328

Post by jerlam »

hackerbeat wrote: post #129

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

In addition to the iPad having cheaper parts than the iPhone, the iPad reuses many of the same components for several years. The current iPad uses the same display as the previous generation iPad that was released in 2022 - three years and counting. But every single iPhone generation has changes to most of its components, and every single year has a new iPhone.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#329

Post by protocolture »

brandon272 wrote: post #321

I have always had this notion that buying a Mac is the "premium" option, not just in quality, but maybe in price too. I am in the process of trying to find a business notebook for my spouse who is a Windows user. The goal is to have something that is as close to a Macbook Air as possible in terms of price, weight, performance and durability. What I am learning is that nothing that like that exists in the PC world. It…

Yeah I was an X1 Carbon True Believer for a while but I cant justify their current prices.

It used to be 1200 bucks or so cheaper than the equivalent macbook (probably saying as much will piss off the "Thinkpads were never cheap weridos but thats fine)

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#330

Post by protocolture »

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…

Planning to make my son deal with a broken Debian image.
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