Apple Business

Did you know the MacBook Neo has no fan? It can go 2x faster FPS in games if it’s cooled better:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lswbpVtAhrc

Even a simple quiet and mostly-off fan would have been a $5 addition to the system that would have boosted performance by ~10%. But Apple wanted to make an iPad computer.

Apple advertises their subscription services directly in the system settings when you buy the system (they give you a trial that is shown as a system settings notification and when you refer it they do the thing where you have to cancel on the last day or else forfeit the remaining trial term before it’s over; accidental subscription dark pattern where you can’t turn off auto-renew without forfeiting remaining time) and also advertises apple subs via toast notifications.

As far as device firmware, I dunno, I felt like my Intel MacBook Pro 16” had pretty shit firmware that ended up abandoned because Apple went straight to M1 and the whole T2 thing where they tried to customize Intel’s stack never really worked all that well. Apple almost certainly half-assed that machine knowing their next platform was on the way.

Like the whole “instant open lid wake from sleep” that was great in the past but turned into crazy lag on those late Intel machines.

Oh yeah and I just got my last settlement check for my 2016 butterfly keyboard. That machine was a lovely ownership experience.

So this idea that only PC laptops have firmware issues and bad long term support…idk man, I just don’t fully buy that. I’m sure Apple is mostly better but I’ve had enough bad experiences that I don’t consider them to be anything wildly special.

A lot of menu options don’t seem to have keyboard shortcuts. I know I can assign them, but defaults should be better.

But the second one hits harder for me: “Or is your issue that Numbers has different keyboard shortcuts from the ones you're used to in Excel?” Considering that Numbers came much later than Excel, some of the common ones could’ve been directly adapted with Mac specific substitutions (like using Cmd instead of Ctrl).

Windows: Yes, the user experience is that bad. My observations of Windows users is that it's hard for them to get things done effectively because of the faults of the system. Talking about non-hacker people, who might be very proficient in photo editing or spreadsheets or word processing.

Just booting a Windows machine is a chore. These have the same specs or better specs than Macs, but how come you can instantly use a Mac by opening the lid, and Windows PCs take their merry minutes to be ready?

I won't even mention malware and such.

For a normal, non-technical person, there isn't any problem in using stock Mac Mail, Safari, and native productivity tools. And honestly, those memory hogs you mention aren't a problem either on Apple silicon. It's still faster to use than on a PC with double the RAM.

Sorry in advance to continue ranting about this, but the consumer-hostile bit is it’s used as a price segmentation strategy. Consumers don’t care if their laptop has a modest quiet cooling fan, but Apple acts like customers hate them. The cooling fan inside the Nintendo Switch has alienated zero potential customers, is basically inaudible, and it’s still an extremely portable device.

The only reason the MacBook Air M5 is slower than the MacBook Pro M5 is the lack of cooling. It’s done on purpose. It’s not “save costs and offer a cheaper product,” it’s “purposefully remove a ‘free’ benefit to push you up the product lineup.”

Similarly, it would have cost Apple almost nothing to bump the Neo to 12GB of memory but they’re going to hold back that upgrade so that first gen buyers buy their next system sooner.

I think I got the settlement email because I took my system in to Apple to get the keyboard fixed and the lawyers for the class action had my contact info as a result.

They really aren’t that far off as it is. I’ve brought up a number of similarly priced models in my other comments on this thread.

Even on the premium end, the surface laptop really isn’t that far off on pricing. It was priced and specced to essentially match the Air. I think there’s no reason a cut down model couldn’t match the Neo.

I think the most important thing is for Microsoft to crack down more on OEMs’ use of third party junkware like McAfee. They need to just disallow it as a hard policy. Hopefully the Neo is also a wake up call to Microsoft.

I also think that an x86 processor that performs 20-40% slower really isn’t a big deal in the context of the Neo’s competitors. They mostly need to match the pricing and build quality. Nobody cares that the hybrid Toyota Corolla is slower than the hybrid Honda Civic when they go buy the car. They care that it has the attributes they’re looking for (packaging, reliability, quality, price). And I think the Neo’s great chip is hampered by RAM anyway. The SoC package was designed for a mobile system that only has partial multitasking.