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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#521

Post by Aperocky »

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…

I guess the market will speak for itself. I absolutely see the macOS percentage shoot to the sky, it's already almost 50% in the United States, with this, it will gravitate to 75%+ with significant penetration in Europe.

Microsoft is also helping by making Windows an absolute dump of an OS.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#522

Post by wrxd »

Xfx7028 wrote: post #357
mmcnl wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decent package manager, brew is awful compared to apt. Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards. No Alt+Tab, Cmd+Tab is not the same. No window previews when hovering over dock, ridiculous animation speed when switching workspaces that can't be changed (and somehow Ctrl+1/2/3 is 2x faster than Ctrl+Left/Right? What is that all about). Needing third-party apps for basic things like…

What is bad about brew? I have used it in the past and I found it fine. With apt I have less experience since I only used it when playing with a raspberry pi.

I find it generally slow and by default it gets in the way in a very annoying way. Without disabling the feature l, every single time I try to install something it also looks for updates so instead of installing a single package I end up upgrading many additional packages

Re: The MacBook Neo

#523

Post by Aperocky »

madeofpalk wrote: post #363
mmcnl wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, macOS has hardly improved in the past decade. The only improvements are about ecosystem integration, which I don't really care about. Everything else is stuck in the 2010s. UI has regressed if you ask me.

What improvements has Windows made in the last decade? I think what you're describing is a symptom of modern software development as a whole.

You get AI EMBEDDED EXPLORER! Just wait 2 seconds for LLM to open up your folder.

Oh and don't forget to watch the ads.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#525

Post by bombcar »

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…

If it runs 4 year old software then you'll likely have a "vast library" available.

This machine is on-par with the "world breaking" top performance M1 laptops when they came out; now it is "insufficient".

Re: The MacBook Neo

#526

Post by lotsofpulp »

thewebguyd wrote: post #339
enraged_camel wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days. One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence. Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.

The goal is different. Jobs wanted to make the product spread simple to understand. Apple's current method is a pricing ladder, make it simple to spend $200+ more than you planned. MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better. Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and…

> MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better.

Yes

>Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."

Disagree. The Air offers additional utility and longevity for the price, the Pro offers nothing that 90% of people will ever perceive.

I know a ton of people for whom the $500 would be nothing, but still get an Air rather than a Pro. Obviously, that’s not great data, but I feel like the jump from Air to Pro just doesn’t happen or won’t happen compared to jumps from Neo to Air.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#527

Post by Aperocky »

magic_hamster wrote: post #371
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 fully agree. My use case sees a fairly intensive use of MacOS, Linux and Windows, and out of all these, MacOS is the worst experience for me, and that's saying a lot when I prefer to use Windows 11 over MacOS. Macs have very strong advantages but the software, the OS is absolutely infuriating. There's so many annoyances over regular use. You can remedy some of them with third party software (which should have been…

Those extremely efficient and beautifully implemented software runs in macOS, probably from the same source code.

The only GUI I use on Mac is browser, so I never felt anything - maybe the only thing that I don't deal with on linux is the weird requirement of xcode, which is mostly a chore that you do once. Still can't beat the hardware.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#528

Post by flyrain »

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…

As a developer, MacOS is super reliable to me. I love Linux, but there are always somethings not working, which drive me crazy.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#529

Post by agumonkey »

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…

ThinkPads are also getting some real love, if ifixit didn't clickbait, the new lineup includes a lot of innovations to improve repairability

https://www.ifixit.com/News/115827/new-thinkpads-score-perfe...

Re: The MacBook Neo

#530

Post by ashdksnndck »

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.

I think for this plan to work you’d have to force the developers of Xcode to work on the 4 Gb machines first. If they could do that, the rest would follow naturally.
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