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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#551

Post by koyote »

brailsafe wrote: post #456
cannolicannon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…

That Dell Pro Max Plus (that I legit thought might be a joke) is a big horkin laptop for ~$6k+. 3cm thick, nearly 3kg, and you can do wireframes on it, wow! A full HD screen with 500 nits brightness. What a piece of shit product comparatively speaking. I imagine someone would buy it for a niche specific engineering purpose that can only be practical on Intel Windows, but damn. I really don't think it would fair bette…

I use the non-Plus version as my work machine (not by choice).

It's massive and heavy and feels less snappy than my personal X1 Nano after all the corporate malware uses up most of the CPU and RAM.

The screen resolution is also shockingly bad (my 13 inch X1 Nano has a higher res than this 16 inch beast).

That being said, it's nice having 64gb of RAM, a fast CPU and an Nvidia card (we build stuff that runs on CUDA). Build times are quick and I can run some of our more demanding test suites without RAM filling up and slowing everything down.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#552

Post by dumpsterdiver »

gib444 wrote: post #376
cannolicannon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…

> Dell Pro Max Premium > Dell Pro Essential At least they have a sense of humour Pro... Essential?! If the sold hotel rooms they'd offer a Deluxe Economy ??

To be fair, the English language is the real victim here.

While “essential” cleanly maps to “can’t go without” - it doesn’t map to “bare minimum”.

For instance, let’s assume you’re surviving in the wilderness and you need to start a fire. Your fire starting kit is obviously essential, but it could also be included in a “Camper Value Pack” - but those things don’t have anything to do with each other. The kit is essential, and it was obtained in a value pack. This message brought to you by Mr. Obvious.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#553

Post by alwillis »

ndiddy wrote: post #317
alwillis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1 I wouldn’t "way cheaper". A baseline Neo with 256GB SSD is $599 vs the first M1 MacBook Air with 256GB SSD was $999 ($1,251.09 in 2026 dollars) A Neo with 512GB SSD is $699 vs the M1 MacBook Air with 512GB SSD was $1249--that's $1,568.38 in 2026 dollars. So this is a big deal; the Neo is the first Apple Silicon MacBook where the starting price is less than…

Apple sold the the base model M1 Macbook Air through Walmart for $600 between when they stopped selling it directly up to early this year. It looks like this computer is about as performant as that one, so I guess they started to have trouble sourcing components and came up with the Neo as their replacement.

I know that Walmart and Costco sold discounted M1 MacBook Airs, which why I used introductory prices.

> so I guess they started to have trouble sourcing components and came up with the Neo as their replacement.

There’s no indication Apple had any issues with getting components; they’re have problems with sourcing more expensive components.

Apple tends to be very deliberate with products; this isn’t a replacement for something else.

In fact, there was an article stating unlike some other laptop manufacturers, Apple’s prices aren’t expected to rise because their buying power and having contracts in place [1].

A low-cost MacBook using an iPhone process has been rumored for at least a year.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/10/apple-holds-edge-laptop...

Re: The MacBook Neo

#555

Post by bombcar »

ndiddy wrote: post #317
alwillis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1 I wouldn’t "way cheaper". A baseline Neo with 256GB SSD is $599 vs the first M1 MacBook Air with 256GB SSD was $999 ($1,251.09 in 2026 dollars) A Neo with 512GB SSD is $699 vs the M1 MacBook Air with 512GB SSD was $1249--that's $1,568.38 in 2026 dollars. So this is a big deal; the Neo is the first Apple Silicon MacBook where the starting price is less than…

Apple sold the the base model M1 Macbook Air through Walmart for $600 between when they stopped selling it directly up to early this year. It looks like this computer is about as performant as that one, so I guess they started to have trouble sourcing components and came up with the Neo as their replacement.

It's pretty obvious to me that the Walmart Wonder sold better than they expected, and they wanted to make it widely available.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#556

Post by foldr »

starkparker wrote: post #418
foldr wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The A18's sustained single core performance is about the same as the M1's and the "burst" performance is quite a bit better. So I'd say it clearly has better single core performance overall.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#557

Post by mohsen1 »

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…

It's possible that they use the camera to measure room brightness

Re: The MacBook Neo

#558

Post by amatecha »

Closer and closer to the desktop and mobile devices running the same OS...

One other thing, how repairable is this thing going to be? I'm guessing it's going to end up with an extremely low repairability score, considering they seem to solder both RAM and storage these days. Looking at the MacBook Pro (repairability score 4/10) it seems crazy difficult even to swap the battery: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+(...

Re: The MacBook Neo

#559

Post by deathanatos »

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…

Even just within the Thinkpad lineup, their website is a mess. Let's even restrict ourselves to just T series Thinkpads.

First, the page looks like it misrenders with garish, inverse-color boxes breaking the apparent margin of the page. Then we get to the models:

  * ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (14" Snapdragon) Laptop
  * ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 (16" Intel) Laptop
  * ThinkPad T1g Gen 8 (16" Intel) Laptop
  * ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 (14" AMD) Laptop
  * ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 (14" Intel) Laptop
… that's just the first row. There are 17 items shown. Mostly it's just a poor presentation: there's ~3-4 actual lines, and the rest of what's show is combinatorical complexity of the various ways you can customize them. It's a crapshoot of a presentation.

The builds themselves seem worse now than they have before: they're overall more expensive for what you're getting vs. a few years ago. E.g., the GPU is … gone? They're all iGPUs now. They include a "45%NTSC" screen by default, which is something I've never heard of, and I thought sRGB was the literal bottom of the barrel, but I guess we can go deeper. The warranty is pathetic, but so too is Apple's.

You are right, you can get them without Windows now.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#560

Post by bombcar »

haunter wrote: post #360
needSomeCoffee wrote: post #334

I do not really understand why the Walmart $599 M1 MBA comparison is so lost in the MSM. The Neo is the same price (without edu discount). The Neo CPU benchmarks slightly better until the 4W performance limit factors in more real-world cases (then the M1 wins handily). So much is given up with the Neo: Worse screen, Worse keyboard, No TouchId, Worse Trackpad, etc. Yet Apple is praised for the Neo. No longer matters o…

Even cheaper if you buy from Walmart's refurb outlet, they are $380.

I never even knew Walmart sold refurbs: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Restored-Apple-MacBook-Air-Laptop...
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