Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 524 posts

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#261

Post by grosswait »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #239
thewebguyd wrote: post #55

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…

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…

Was that side by side comparison with all the security cruft running, because this is totally contrary to my experience with both sets of hardware managed by IT.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#262

Post by justapassenger »

I love my macbook neo. I have more powerful macmini at home as my daily driver, but neo is amazing for me basically as a companion to my corporate laptop. I use it:

- to take as my personal device when I travel

- do personal stuff when my corporate laptop is connected to my home setup and constant switching between computers is a hassle (even with a built in kvm in a monitor). i know, 1st world problems

It has a price point that makes it no brainer for me.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#263

Post by baq »

whateverboat wrote: post #179
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…

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…

Indeed there aren’t many of us, but macOS is easily the worst part of the Mac experience, and worryingly it’s getting comparatively worse vs kde or even gnome each year. ‘It’s POSIX’ doesn’t cut it when I deploy to Linux and I work in containers all day anyway (and wsl is better than macOS at this, too, but the rest of windows went downhill real bad recently).

The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#264

Post by raspasov »

commandersaki wrote: post #141
wil421 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.

I think Apple's era of unreliable laptops were the ones with Butterfly keyboards. So many issues back then, but they did a complete 180 once they reintroduced the magic keyboard and then Apple Silicon.

Apple Intel laptop + a butterfly keyboard was the absolute gutter tier experience. Not only it was slow and ran hot, but after a few months a random key would get stuck and stop working.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#265

Post by djyde »

jdswain wrote: post #258

I'd like to see the same thing applied to desktop computers, a Mac Neo maybe. The Mac mini has moved up the cost/performance ladder, there's room at the bottom for a simple, low cost desktop, maybe with Neo colours too.

The Mac Mini's price is already quite low while its performance keeps getting stronger.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#266

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

whateverboat wrote: post #179
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…

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…

I used Linux for a long time. I still prefer it. But I can’t justify the extra work. Last time I tried to move back to Linux, I spent far too long admiring the machine. This was only 5 years ago.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#267

Post by whazor »

OskarS wrote: post #10
no_wizard wrote: post #3

I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses. It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice

Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seem…

With remote virtual machines running Codex, your Mac is only rendering terminals.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#268

Post by bigyabai »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #251
bigyabai wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has taken advantage of that for the past 2 decades, to the tune of a minority share in the PC market. Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.

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 home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box.

> They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#269

Post by robertjpayne »

antaviana wrote: post #166
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…

My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programm…

I'd still say getting 7 years of free OS supports for hardware is pretty incredible. All-in-ones like iMacs are always going to be wasteful on the environmental side of things faster because displays will outlive the usefulness of the rest of it by a large large margin.

At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#270

Post by thewebguyd »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #239
thewebguyd wrote: post #55

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…

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…

This reads like the last time you've evaluated is 2018. The entire office suite works great on Apple silicon with the exception of, obviously Win32 VBA macros and some PowerQuery features in Excel.

As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).

If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.

Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.

Post reply on HN