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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

#281

Post by vitorbaptistaa »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #266
whateverboat wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI agents are incredibly useful in this regard. Omarchy even releases some skills, so anything you want to configure is just a matter of asking the agent to do it.

Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#282

Post by baq »

robertjpayne wrote: post #269
antaviana wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a 2019 GPU in my windows box and I’d be pissed off if it stopped working in the next few years. Computers nowadays are useful for much longer than they used to. Spectre class vulnerabilities which take 50% performance to properly (kinda) mitigate are the only reason to maybe upgrade if all you do is browse facebook and pay bills.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#283

Post by lobf »

emp_ wrote: post #241
onesociety2022 wrote: post #111

Apart from the price, I think what's really attracting people to the Neo are the cool colors. I was at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago trying to buy a M5 MacBook Air and I was eavesdropping on the conversations going on next to me from people looking at the Neo. Almost all of it was positive and people really love the colors! I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo because I'm recomme…

> I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo ... Hopefully it allows for the macbook air to return to being a ultra light machine, I held an Asus X14 ARM at 900 grams and it felt so much better. There's also a huge market for the M1 MacBook Air because of the old form factor of being ultra thin even if faking it with bending the shell, the boxed layouts dont fit with MBA to me. Too bad there…

The wife just bought an Air and it’s incredibly light. Not as thin as they used to be but shockingly light still!

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#284

Post by frollogaston »

raspasov wrote: post #264
commandersaki wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also touch bar, also was all USB-C at a time when there was 0 adoption (2016). I went out of my way to buy a 2015 model instead, held up for 10 years.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#285

Post by baq »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #210
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…

Yeah exactly, one of my kids has a Windows PC for gaming and just logging in to the thing is arduous sometimes... Microsoft's account auth system is so bad with its random redirects. Don't even me get me started on the parental controls, it's probably one of the laggiest systems I use.

Let’s not pretend Apple screen time is any good. My 13yo daughter figured out multiple ways around it by herself and googled a few more and if it wasn’t leaking like a sieve it isn’t granular enough anyway (e.g. music apps offering videos - I want to block videos but not music - can’t be done)

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#286

Post by Insanity »

anoncow wrote: post #238
nixass wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Using both Linux (at home) and Mac (at work), the differences are small for development. But my dev stack is basically just Neovim & CLI tools.

That said, I’ll never work on Windows. 15ish years ago I did some .net work. C# was a fun language but development on windows is a special kind of torture.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#287

Post by Jblx2 »

ioblomov wrote: post #183
drnick1 wrote: post #144

I am more interested in the XPS13 at a similar price point mentioned in the article. My intention is to run Linux, and that probably won't happen for a long time on modern Apple hardware.

Have you considered Asahi Linux?

I don't follow this scene. Have they effectively reverse engineered most of Apple hardware? So everything just works? Or is it more like, "hey it boots! and we hope to get networking operational next". I'm kind of surprised that Apple wouldn't lock things down so that it only boots signed-by-Apple executables/bootloaders.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#288

Post by Insanity »

recursive wrote: post #156
sgt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.

I got my first ipad a year or two ago. It took me many tries over about an hour to setup the apple account I needed to log in to the device. I wish I had documented the process, because it's so different than what people typically claim about Apple ease of use.

Interesting experience. I set up 2 iPad pros, basically one shot experience that took a few minutes.

Even the first one I owned was straightforward

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#289

Post by frollogaston »

emp_ wrote: post #241
onesociety2022 wrote: post #111

Apart from the price, I think what's really attracting people to the Neo are the cool colors. I was at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago trying to buy a M5 MacBook Air and I was eavesdropping on the conversations going on next to me from people looking at the Neo. Almost all of it was positive and people really love the colors! I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo because I'm recomme…

> I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo ... Hopefully it allows for the macbook air to return to being a ultra light machine, I held an Asus X14 ARM at 900 grams and it felt so much better. There's also a huge market for the M1 MacBook Air because of the old form factor of being ultra thin even if faking it with bending the shell, the boxed layouts dont fit with MBA to me. Too bad there…

Yeah it's funny, my M4 Air looks and feels like my wife's M1 MBP. It makes sense though, they made the MBP actually pro instead of being the default.

Re: MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

#290

Post by cogman10 »

philistine wrote: post #197
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are so right, and I blame some of the thinking on this very website. People are adamant that they need to upgrade the RAM, change the storage, and replace the battery on their laptops. Adamant . All that means that you need a separate memory controller, a separate this and that. It adds up, and PC makers are forced to put in a fan. On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able…

What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.

It's not the upgradable ram, cpu, or storage which is eat into the power consumption budget. Instead, it's the interface and the standard that can become dated. Apple gets to choose all the voltages and interfaces for each generation which allows for a tightly coupled integration with their firmware and hardware all around. A PC user is stuck with the likes of ACPI and UEFI coordinating everything. And of course, they have to play with the current DDR standard of the time which may not give the power profile they want.

However, the benefit of the PC route is that there is really no EOL for the hardware/firmware support. A 20 year old computer can run an operating system with the 7.2 linux kernel perfectly fine. Your IPad from that era is a brick. You can't do anything with it. But your laptop from that era? You can slap in a brand new SSD and it'll accept it and boot up just fine. (The one caveat is you'll be SOL if you have an nvidia device).

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