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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#241

Post by philistine »

thewebguyd wrote: post #167
softfalcon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This... so much this. > too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?" I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing p…

> "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of. The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry. If you aren't a ga…

They're not sweating at all; they'll do what they always do. They'll release a new model to compete in time for Christmas 2026. They'll call it the ASUS Nuevo X856G-L or the Acer Nova 9500X or the Alienware Morpheus ZS and that will be it. They won't even consolidate their line at the 600$ price point; just one more model, bro!

Their sales will continue tapering off and they'll do what they always do; reduce investments, fire some designers and engineers, keep old models out even longer, and move out of Apple's way by selling even more 380$ laptops for 400$ while Apple siphons even more profits by selling a 400$ laptop at 600$.

That's how PCs die.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#242

Post by cosmic_cheese »

jclardy wrote: post #240
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #31

IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doe…

In addition to your research categories - is the fan going to sound like a jet engine when just opening slack? Is the case going to wobble and creak after a few weeks? Is it going to tank performance when unplugged? And if not - is battery life going to be a concern?

In low price brackets those awful barrel jack charger ports that get loose at record speeds still appear too, which isn’t something people necessarily think about but will end up dragging down the user experience.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#243

Post by rjrjrjrj »

bigyabai wrote: post #223
mikestew wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes. But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name…

> It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness. It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo? macOS itself…

Better integration with your iPhone is a very compelling reason to buy a Macbook Neo.

The edu price is $499. Of course that seriously competes with the base iPad ($329 without keyboard).

Re: The MacBook Neo

#244

Post by mikestew »

bigyabai wrote: post #223
mikestew wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes. But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name…

> It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness. It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo? macOS itself…

You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.

Again, the trackpad will suck and the screen will be a dim, binned display panel, etc. If that works for you, fine, but that's not the conversation. The conversation everyone else is having is that your plastic $400 laptop with the bargain-bin components isn't the equivalent of $MACBOOK, no matter what the spec sheet says.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#245

Post by randusername »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #31

IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doe…

> The big players are just awful at marketing

Apple is great at marketing to consumers. The other big players, I have to assume, are more focused on B2B where the threshold for UX acceptability is lower.

The only ads I ever hear from them are on economics podcasts ostensibly aimed at business owners. For "Copilot+ AI PCs" no less, whatever that means. They're chasing a target audience of approximately 3 people in the world that are improbably held back from achieving their wildest AI dreams by not having a commodity laptop with an NPU.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#246

Post by pipeline_peak »

perfmode wrote: post #154
pipeline_peak wrote: post #14

This feels like the first time Apple’s walled garden approach has paid off in the desktop arena. With a cheaper Windows alternative to the MacBook Neo, your options are inferior battery life with AMD 64, or Windows Arm’s inferior compatibility. I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does. Not to mention they’ve been using their own chips.

I think what you're describing is vertical integration rather than the walled garden specifically. The walled garden is the App Store restrictions, iMessage lock-in, that kind of thing. What made the Neo possible is that Apple controls the silicon, the OS, the firmware, and the industrial design as a single unit. They could put a phone chip in a laptop form factor and have it feel coherent because there's no seam bet…

>The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.

Successful Chromebook’s have always been the throwaway $200 models. Higher end ones like the Pixelbook served more as flagship devices to prove they could do more but were never really marketed.

I don’t think Google’s gonna make a souped up Chromebook because they know their place. They’re entirely internet dependent devices with little brand recognition and no serious software. The Neo serves somewhere in between that. They have the brand recognition and MacOS.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#247

Post by cosmic_cheese »

varispeed wrote: post #217
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #31

IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doe…

In my opinion PC industry is also cooked because of fans. I simply cannot use any recent PC laptop, because the moment you do something it engages fans in the most obnoxious way. Every time someone turns on their PC laptop next to me, my ears feel assaulted. My Mac does engage fans from time to time, but I never notice the noise.

How little attention cooling gets in the laptop industry outside of expensive gaming laptops is crazy. I have a ThinkPad that gets huffy when I plug it into a 2560x1440 external display while otherwise idle (yes, under Linux too) which shouldn’t even be possible.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#248

Post by Kirby64 »

philistine wrote: post #230
selectodude wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s glass but not haptic. Honestly the fact that they figured out how to make the entire pad clickable without haptics is pretty impressive.

Their trackpads were that way since the move to aluminium for the chassis until the release of the 2017 Macbook. Apple had solved the issue around 2012 and still PC manufacturer refuse to spend on trackpad quality.

Not really, not exactly. The older “clicky” MacBook trackpads couldn’t quite be “clicked” anywhere. They were levered at the top of the trackpad, so if you tried to click on the very top edge then they wouldn’t really click. Anywhere else, it felt fine, but maybe the top inch didn’t feel good. Not really a problem in normal use cause most people don’t try to click on the very top edge, but perhaps this new trackpad fixes that (I haven’t tested one myself). The current gen haptic ones have the same exact click feeling no matter where you press, of course.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#249

Post by mikestew »

bigyabai wrote: post #226
cromka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually…

You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem. It's much more comfortable to use it side-by-side with your keyboard, most of the time I'm reaching for the Trackpoint if my hands are on home row.

You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem.

Yeah, that works great on the bus. It's one more thing to tote around to meetings, but hey, at least I didn't have to buy a MacBook!

Or I could just buy a Mac and not have to resort to hacks to get a decent trackpad.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#250

Post by jitl »

bigyabai wrote: post #223
mikestew wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes. But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name…

> It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness. It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo? macOS itself…

$300 to thread the eye of a needle through a field of dogshit, that can only run Google Chrome, or $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software that doesn't use garbage collection.

macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating systems out of the box

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