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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#411

Post by halapro »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #408

It's remarkable to me that this shows what an iPhone chip has been capable of, and a reminder about how strongly Apple works to keep phone, tablet, and laptop in separate segments. Even though they share the same chips. Going to be signficiantly harder for Qualcomm X2 Elite to make a splash, given the price here. I have high hopes for the X2 Elite Extreme (even if it is going to be cursed with incredible difficulty t…

People keep calling this "a phone chip" when M1 was literally "a phone chip" to begin with, based on A14. It's entirely reasonable that in 4 generations of "phone chips", the A18 reaches the speed that M1 did during its "one-generation" rework.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#412

Post by extrabajs »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #405
nottorp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like to imagine the gaming landscape if developers were forced to work on 5yr old hardware.

You mean like consoles?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#413

Post by whalesalad »

ho_schi wrote: post #200
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 last competitor remaining is Lenovo with the ThinkPads and pre-installed Linux [1]. But even Lenovo cripples them: * You need to be very careful. Select alwaysCTO build with the best available display. But even then, Lenovo *removed* the HiDPI display from the X13. The only actual competitor to the MacBook Air is the ThinkPad X13. * Lenovo added useless camera humps protruding out of the panel. There is a thick b…

Lenovo's website is a disaster. Not only do they appear to have 100 sku's but on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display I can see four laptops in the grid[1], which are actually cut off with their prices below the fold. Every single grid item has a "Katapult" lease to own offer, a "My Lenovo Rewards" offer (who the fuck is collecting rewards points from Lenovo, and what customer prioritizes the rewards they might earn over literally every other piece of information about the laptop?). There are 30 copies of the "®" symbol on the page. It's honestly a lesson in how not to design an e-commerce site.

- [1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/subseries-results/?visi...

Re: The MacBook Neo

#414

Post by blemblemblam »

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 secret is to buy a used ThinkPad on eBay. I have two of them. I think the ridiculous MSRP for them combined is $7000 and I paid $1600 in total for a p series and an x1 carbon (3 years old, but essentially new).

These neos are for college and high school students.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#415

Post by emseetech »

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…

Apple's support is top in the industry. And it's not even that great, it's but everyone else's support is just that bad.

Easily worth the extra money alone.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#416

Post by throw0101d »

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…

> If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?

To not have to deal with Windows (or Linux (speaking as a Linux sysadmin)).

Re: The MacBook Neo

#417

Post by fsloth »

halapro wrote: post #409
fsloth wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Ofc a huge chunk of that is in companies but I'm fairly sure there are at least two windows 11 machines per one mac in consumer segment as well.

It's just momentum. You buy windows because you have windows. You buy windows because there's not really much of a choice. You have windows because you're not going out of your ways to reconfigure hundreds of laptops at your company just for your employees to be less comfortable with Linux. Now introduce a choice… and things might change. With the vast majority of software nowadays living in the browser, your OS matt…

As OS matters less that’s probably not going to entrench Microsoft less. Their relationship with OEM:s is not market based but a two way relationship.

At this point I would not be surprised if MS started to subvent the PC manufacturers to favour Windows over Linux if that ever comes to that.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#418

Post by starkparker »

foldr wrote: post #359
starkparker wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance. For the first few minutes of sustained use. Then it drops like a rock: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re... > In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes.…

That's a fair point above sustained multicore, but this is probably the right tradeoff for this class of device. Few people are regularly maxing out all of their cores for more than a few minutes at a time, and the people who are doing that probably weren't going to buy Apple's budget $600 MacBook anyway. The increase in single core performance over the M1 is much more valuable to most users.

That's probably true, although once again it's the sustained _single core_ performance that suffers. Statements like "the A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1" without this context still aren't true.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#419

Post by kimbernator »

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…

for 99% of consumers, the question is windows vs. macOS, and that's all there is to it. Between the two on a budget-price laptop, it's no competition.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#420

Post by dhosek »

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.

That’s because PC manufacturers compete on spec sheets and how much does the trackpad suck isn’t one of the numbers on the spec sheet so they don’t care.
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