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MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

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Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#211

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.

Costco sells an ipad for $299 (and many memberships refund some of this price)

EDIT: also on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZ75TN5F/

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#212
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…

Andy Warhol, on Coca-Cola:

>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.

Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#213
post #159
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well. My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too…

Lack of parity. It’s getting better but my classic example is ribbon shortcuts for Excel. They did not exist until something like 6 months ago.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#214
post #13

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.

Someone who uses a MacBook Neo in School/University probably has a much higher chance of getting a higher-end MacBook later on.

This is a tried and true long-game. Microsoft did this with educational versions of office/etc

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#215

It's too expensive. As a long time user ('91) I am fully aware how blessed we are with Macs' prices today. However, an M5 Air 16G/512 is $1,100 without any discounts and Airs are frequently discounted by $200 at least in the States. $599 is dangerously close to $1,100. Yes, it's 40ish % diff before any discounts, but the Air is like 3x the value and the Air has much more runway in it. I would not recommend a Neo to a…

Nothing will ever be cheep enough. “599 is dangerously close to 1100”? It’s 1100 is nearly double! I bought the neo for my daughter to use in HS and it’s perfect. Fast, great build and great battery life. Ill be buying a second one for my son, and paying just a bit more for both than the one air you mentioned. You should just buy a chromebook and save the 100-200$ for a plastic laptop.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#216

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 doin…

I think devs forget how efficient and blazing fast server rendered pages can be, and ultimately what a great user experience non-SPA applications can provide. It seems like the dev community has locked in on SPAs for everything. There is so much complexity and other overhead associated with SPAs. At the end of the day a browser is rendering HTML + CSS, JS can handle some additional interactivity. Presently, we have some very complex SPAs that are handling large amounts of state, large dependencies (js libs), often optimized assets, etc. I remember people bemoaning Flash apps. I kind of feel like SPAs are kind of becoming the new Flash app.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Microsoft or giant piles of poo like crowdstrike?

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered Asahi Linux?

Does not run on the Neo, unfortunately.

Well if you're looking at XPS13 then a comparable machine is a MacBook Air M1 or M2, not a Neo. You can get an M1 refurb for 600 USD, AFAIK Costco sells them at that price in the US. Or buy used for even less. It will still match or surpass that XPS13's performance and battery life.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#219
post #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

well, also apple has been inflating the price for phones since forever.

the iphone launched at $499

EDIT: hmm.. I guess iphone 1 was $499 or $599 and that required a 2-year AT&T contract. Don't know what the actual price was.

I do know the top iphone 17 pro max is $1,999.

but it does have 2tb of storage, which is amazing in a different way.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#220
post #209

It's too expensive. As a long time user ('91) I am fully aware how blessed we are with Macs' prices today. However, an M5 Air 16G/512 is $1,100 without any discounts and Airs are frequently discounted by $200 at least in the States. $599 is dangerously close to $1,100. Yes, it's 40ish % diff before any discounts, but the Air is like 3x the value and the Air has much more runway in it. I would not recommend a Neo to a…

I could make a counterpoint: it's too cheap. It will cannibalize the market for better apple products. Mac pro is already gone. Sort of how $1.99 apps, then $0.99 apps drove the app price to free. Now apps are supported by advertising or trick subscriptions and the good/honest apps are pretty much gone. (except I do like and respect anything from omnigroup)

Fair, but I thought I addressed this in my last paragraph. My gut tells me the Neo sits at an uncomfortable price spot, given its specs, in the line up. Geeks won't buy it as a daily because they know what an Air costs and brings. I am with Christina Warren who more than twice said on MBW that the Neo is not a good fit for students as it’ll run out of air a year or two in (pun intended :)).
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