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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#471

Post by drnick1 »

Aurornis wrote: post #312
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…

> MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games). For the average consumer looking for a $599 MacBook Neo, Mac is the better choice for apps they actually use. Linux can be used for gaming with a lot of titles, but both Mac and Linux are too far behind Windows or consoles to be considered as gaming machines.

> but both Mac and Linux are too far behind Windows or consoles to be considered as gaming machines.

That's absolutely not true, the vast majority of Windows games now run flawlessly on Linux via Proton. This is especially true for the kind of games you can expect to run on such modest hardware, i.e. not AAA games with kernel-level anticheat.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#472

Post by seunosewa »

dhosek wrote: post #403
SllX wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder. Start from the bottom and climb up picking up features along the way until you reach the point where you’ve got what you want or you’re not willing to spend more money. The Neo is either easy to recommend or rather easy to not recommend. It has a fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operat…

From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.

Large Java apps like Android Studio are not good at managing 8gb of RAM. Emulators are terrible as well. They don't play well with the swap feature.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#473

Post by eldaisfish »

lazerpants wrote: post #432
p_ing wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An all metal build doesn't stand up well to abuse versus higher quality plastics. Looks nicer. For a time, or if taken care of.

I actually dig the patinated look of my dented and scratched old MBP and my current MBA. My plastic Dells from work always look terrible after a few trips living in my backpack and getting banged around. Haven't had actual usability issues with either though.

I have.

Plastic is great, until your laptop falls and the plastic shell shatters. That's the weakness of plastic - it's brittle. I have a ten year old macbook with a dinged aluminium chassis. The structure of the shell is still intact despite a few falls.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#474

Post by giantrobot »

izacus wrote: post #291
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…

After growing up in eastern Europe it's still wild to see young Americans stupidly demand less choice and more monopolies in their market. Like seriously, having laptop choice is causing you crippling issues? Is other people having a laptop to choose based on preference causing you distress when you go to Apple store?

The issue isn't choices but meaningless choices. Most PC manufactures have tons of SKUs that are functionally identical but offered in different sales channels.

A dozen SKUs to describe the same hardware isn't real choice. It's the illusion of choice so a sales rep can offer a "deal" the buyer can't meaningfully compare to other SKUs. They're all machines out of an ODM's catalog with the "manufacture" logo pasted on.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#475

Post by colechristensen »

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…

>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.

Existential crisis?

This kind of nonsense has existed for the entire history of the laptop market.

One of the major reasons Apple is a trillion dollar company is they don't sell dozens of versions of their product. When it was a mystery which Dell laptop was the good one (or insert any other brand) you just picked the size of Apple that you wanted and it would be the good one.

The last Dell laptop I bought I really liked... except for the terrible battery life and the fact that the structure was so poor that if you held it at the corner it would force reboot because the circuit board flexed to much and shorted or unplugged something.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#476

Post by drnick1 »

bean469 wrote: post #430
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…

> I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. You mean confirmed by Apple? I think that seems unlikely

No, just supported by, say, Asahi.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#477

Post by eldaisfish »

nicoburns wrote: post #179
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that makes it a non-standard implementation though (I agree it's certainly more practical for the user), sounds like it's usb-c pd but with nerfed data, an odd choice that feels like it would actually have cost more to develop than just adding two identical usb-c 3.x ports...

I suspect the limitation is that the SOC doesn't have the IO bandwidth to support two ports at usb 3 speeds (remembering that the SOC was designed for iphones which physically only have one port).

Does this mean it is now possible to run OS X on an ipad? Those also tend to use phone processors.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#478

Post by hinkley »

saagarjha wrote: post #224

> The Neo doesn’t have a hardware indicator light for the camera. The indication for “camera in use” is only in the menu bar. There’s a privacy/security implication for this omission. According to Apple, the hardware indicator light for camera-in-use on MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads cannot be circumvented by software. If the camera is on, that light comes on, and no software can disable it. Because the Neo’s only came…

That's going to be a problem for the education market though.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#479

Post by nozzlegear »

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…

> macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.

If you need someone to rave about macOS, you simply need to ask me. Going from Windows to Linux to macOS was like coming home.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#480

Post by duskwuff »

nektro wrote: post #299
pa7ch wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a shame there isn't more goodwill for some companies to bankroll a project like asahi linux. Keeping up with reverse engineering apple silicon seems like a very large task.

asahi is great and i hope they keep going but i can't help but wonder why apple appears to be fully singular in their arm dominance

> i can't help but wonder why apple appears to be fully singular in their arm dominance

I have to imagine that a big part of it is the company can plan and act as a single unit. The teams building the CPU, the computers which house that CPU, and the operating system and software that'll run on those computers are all working together, and can plan new features which cut across those boundaries. Other ARM CPU/system manufacturers don't have that advantage.

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