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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#321

Post by intrasight »

drnick1 wrote: post #174

> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality. I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled ga…

> it is the software that leaves to be desired

That is how I had interpreted "And certainly not software quality" - that the PC not only competes but crushes the Mac.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#322

Post by lordgroff »

kwanbix wrote: post #289
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…

As much as I like the performance and the power consumption of the current apple lineaup, the problems is I can not install Linux on the Neo. I can beraly install it on the M1, M2, and M3. And not everything works. If I could install Linux and have everything working, I will buy a Macbook (not a Neo) right away.

Linux will always be a second class citizen on Apple hardware. I have the M1 and have tried Linux a few times at different stages of maturity. As it is right now, it's still a far cry from the experience of a Linux on x86 hardware, and specifically Thinkpads. Bottom line is, even though I really like my laptop, I do NOT like Mac OS (and with every update I like it _less_) and will probably go back to a thinkpad for my next laptop. It's a big shame.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#323

Post by tock »

xp84 wrote: post #277
jitl wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

> $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software A vast library? With 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage you're not going to be running much, nor storing many files created by that library of software. Also, the only well-designed truly native software I have on my Mac, which I use daily, I can count on one hand. The vast majority…

It's a M1 Macbook Air substitute with significantly better single core performance. Any comparison with a chromebook is just hilarious.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#324

Post by zepolen »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #251
bigyabai wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo? Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by withou…

[flagged]

Re: The MacBook Neo

#325

Post by dangus »

While the impact of the MacBook Neo is huge, this type of review is really screaming of an inexperienced reviewer who can't actually make good purchase recommendations to average people.

It's really cool that this device is cheap but 8GB of RAM is the elephant in the room. Even non-technical web browsing users will notice the sluggishness coming from that spec.

The moment they upgrade it to the next iPhone processor, it'll get 12GB of RAM, and it will need it.

And the other elephant in the room that John doesn't bring up is the fact that you can definitely find in-warranty MacBook Air options for ~$700 and they'll be much better buys.

You'll get more RAM, keep your Touch ID, better trackpad, better screen, better battery life, better speakers, better mics, I think even a better webcam? Maybe.

That reminds me: the small battery in the Neo means that high screen brightness or more than light usage will more quickly deplete it compared to other Mac systems.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#326

Post by DauntingPear7 »

xp84 wrote: post #259

> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. Interesting metrics, though I'd add that if you count storage and memory as metrics, it'd be hard to find a worse PC laptop. And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison. https://www.bestbuy.com/product/…

I also am not a huge fan of the 256GB storage, but if someone doesn’t already know what ram is, they really won’t care and won’t notice much. I’m a tech guy. I bought an M1 air with 256GB storage and 8GB RAM. I was able to do development and mobile development fine. I never encountered RAM related slowdowns. I have an iCloud subscription because I don’t want to manage my own NAS. This is a heavier use case than what, say, a normal college student will do with it, and it worked just fine for me. This is by far the best laptop I have seen in this bracket. If I was just heading to college today, and I didn’t have the money for a Pro or Air, I would 100% get this far before a windows laptop.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#328

Post by dagmx »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #235
dagmx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More RAM is better. But doesn’t negate that it’s still very usable. Did you even bother to watch the video for responsiveness before commenting? Also it was a couple years after the transition to arm that Apple bumped the minimum RAM they shipped their laptops with.

> But doesn’t negate that it’s still very usable. As a glorified terminal? Sure. > Did you even bother to watch the video for responsiveness before commenting? I did, now what? > Also it was a couple years after the transition to arm t Hello, we are talking about Neo with the same 8GB.

It’s hard to take you seriously or at face value if you did watch the video and called it a glorified terminal.

What in the video is remotely glorified terminal like? What terminal are you using that gives you local 4K editing capabilities and the ability to run locally run Lightroom for 50MP files?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#329

Post by yegle »

> The A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013. More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly 1.1×) and was only 3 percent slower in multi-core.

Too bad that performance is (still) locked in the walled garden and cannot be used as a small Linux server.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#330

Post by dangus »

nottorp wrote: post #177
efficax wrote: post #164

Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale.…

If you ask me, all web devs should be forced to work on 4 Gb machines. This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.

That's dumb. You can hardly even buy a machine with 4GB of memory on sale, at any price.

If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.

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