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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

#231

Post by ghrl »

starkparker wrote: post #49
skrtskrt wrote: post #22

I would like to know how these are on XCode - would love to have the cheapest/most lightweight possible way to build iOS apps (derived from some cross-platform builder like Expo/Lynx/Dioxus) since I have no other use for MacOS. Looking at tech specs, it seems like the one with 512GB drive might be serviceable. I have a very old 256GB Air and I struggle to keep enough drive space open to have XCode installed on it.

you'll hit the RAM limit at some point, and you'd almost certainly want to mod it to alleviate the heat issues that kill sustained performance

I would say if it's only used as the build and publishing device and development happens elsewhere, this would work without problems. 8Gb for building the iOS app and testing on a real device or even an emulator would likely work. Apple's swap is also quite fast.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#232

Post by mywittyname »

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.

I think they understand, but they are also building machines that need to run Windows + pre-installed bloatware without being so obviously bogged down no the sales floor that no one buys them.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#233

Post by rconti »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #165
RZelaya wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense. I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier. My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never…

The price thing is really true. My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out. Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh. So it makes no…

For anyone else for whom the context clues were not enough, 1 lakh NR = 100,000INR

> The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully.

This is a really interesting insight! Never would have thought of that.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#234

Post by trvz »

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.

They did a smaller one with an Intel CPU in the 2015 Macbook.

There’s just no good low power x86 CPU.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#235

Post by rconti »

stasomatic wrote: post #204

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'm pretty price insensitive myself. That said, I have an M1 air, and if someone gave me a brand-new air today, I wouldn't switch, because the M1 feels as good as new, and the hassle of switching machines simply isn't worth it.

No doubt a new Neo is faster than my M1 air. So I just can't really imagine how the Neo is 3x the 'value' of a brand-new Air, when I don't value the performance of the M4/M5 (?) Air above the hassle of swapping machines.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#237

Post by vel0city »

codedokode wrote: post #103

The screen is too small, not usable for work, you can buy a 15-inch Linux laptop for the same price. And it might even have replaceable RAM and SSD. Also, 8 Gb is too little, it will become a useless toy several years later. Also, there are just 2 USB ports and no USB-A. Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.

> no USB-A

Also no RS-232 and Parallel. How do people expect to do real work if they can't connect their dot matrix printers directly?

Wait, it doesn't even have a faxmodem either! What if I need to do real work like sending and receiving faxes?

If its not happening on 3-part carbonless continuous paper its not work. This laptop is definitely not usable for real work.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#238

Post by anoncow »

nixass wrote: post #227
porridgeraisin wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price thing is really true. My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out. Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh. So it makes no…

> The price thing is really true. No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.

Agreed. For programming , Linux > Mac, but Mac > Windows.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#239

Post by trimethylpurine »

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…

Mac users are consistently the highest needs users in my environment. Ymmv. Samba is still broken. Microsoft apps don't work.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#240

Post by havaloc »

bdamm wrote: post #159
infecto wrote: 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…

What's sad is that in my experience supporting 80 users, Word et al work with fewer issues on Mac. The stack integration on Windows is fine, until it isn't.
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