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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#571

Post by rtpg »

mikestew wrote: post #249
bigyabai wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem. It's much more comfortable to use it side-by-side with your keyboard, most of the time I'm reaching for the Trackpoint if my hands are on home row.

You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem. Yeah, that works great on the bus. It's one more thing to tote around to meetings, but hey, at least I didn't have to buy a MacBook! Or I could just buy a Mac and not have to resort to hacks to get a decent trackpad.

tbqh I think one can survive with a merely decent trackpad on a bus or at meetings.

I've dual run Macbooks and Thinkpads for a while and the Thinkpad trackpad really isn't that bad (the trackpoint getting randomly stuck in a non-neutral position is a common thing I've experienced though)

The nicest thing for the Macbook for me in practice (disclaimer: I don't do fancy things on the trackpad) is the size. It "feels" fancier but the thinkpad plastic works totally fine for me.

I think some Mac users overindex on the quality of like... $400 Acer laptops from 2008 or whatever as their metric for "cheap Windows laptop".

Software stuff is still garbage but lots of machines have just straightforwardly decent hardware. Apple hardware is _very very good_ but it's not like the bad old days of "I actually cannot use this trackpad" in windows land. As much

Re: The MacBook Neo

#572

Post by SchemaLoad »

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 problem is not that there is choice, it's that the choices don't make sense and overlap in weird ways. Apple presents a lineup that can be described as "good, better, best" while Windows OEMs have 20 models, all overlapping where one has a hinge that snaps in a year, the other has a defective trackpad, the other is the same thing as a another model but designed and manufactured in another country. You'd have to become fully invested in learning the companies products to understand which one you actually need and what the flaws of each model is.

It's like a restaurant that has a 30 page menu, where many of the options are bad, or cooked from stale frozen food from the back of the shelf. Fewer good options are better than numerous poor ones.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#573

Post by p1necone »

grumpyprole wrote: post #512
brailsafe wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, it will also have 5 mins of battery life when unplugged and have a power adapter the size of a shoe box. I tried a similar machine from Lenovo at work and quickly returned it.

My laptop is always either plugged into a dock at work, or plugged into a dock or just a power supply at home. I feel like there's an untapped market for 'same laptop, but slightly cheaper because there's no battery in it at all'.

Like you say most windows laptops have such garbage battery life already that it's not practical to use them unplugged.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#574

Post by 369548684892826 »

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.

I wouldn't say as a whole. KDE is way ahead of where it was 10 years ago!

Re: The MacBook Neo

#575

Post by simondotau »

calf wrote: post #354
Reason077 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn’t this bad, of course, but they’re slowly heading in that direction. The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days. Now there’s the MacBook Neo and a rumoured new MacBook Ultra in the pipeline. The easy days of “pick standard or pro, select a display size, select RAM & storage” are starting to fade.

It is giving me choice paralysis, last week I made a mental graph of the ones I wanted and went over all node pairs choose 2, now it's down to waiting for a fall M5 Mac mini paired with either: a MacBook Neo, or an iPad Air 13"; both options are very attractive for my intended usage though the latter seems higher risk since I've never used a 13 inch tablet before.

The iPad gives you touch interaction, hand-held operation, a higher quality (albeit smaller) display, and a more resilient operating system (albeit managed).

The Neo gives you a real keyboard, a bigger screen, and unified UX/software support with your desktop computer.

But are you sure you need two devices? Why not just get a MacBook Air (with the same spec as your proposed Mac mini) along with a USB-C dock accessory to connect charging/keyboard/mouse/video with a single cable? Also don't underestimate the value of having a battery in your "desktop" computer. It's a free UPS.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#576

Post by benjiro3000 »

nessus42 wrote: post #497
dhosek wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine. OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)

[dead]

Re: The MacBook Neo

#577

Post by p1necone »

mikestew wrote: post #189
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…

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…

The first thing I do with any new system is immediately wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows/Linux, so bundled shovelware is meaningless to me, and presumably many others.

(Of course it would be even better if they just came with a totally stock install already, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me)

Re: The MacBook Neo

#578

Post by whyenot »

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.…

As Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) mentioned in his review, the Neo has the same keyboard as Apple's MacBook Pro line, just without backlighting. That makes them really good for writing and potentially coding on the go.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#579

Post by wpm »

p_ing wrote: post #283
drcongo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how often people who post on here about hating macOS have only just got a Mac for the first time and simply can't be bothered to learn, or hate that the keyboard shortcuts are different, or desperately want their OS level adverts back or something. It's lazy.

Been using macOS for years, even main it for both personal and work. It has a LOT of UX issues and requires many 3rd party tools to "fix" it. macOS has plenty of it's own OS adverts.

Yeah but all OSes have UX problems that require third party tools to fix. Hell, you could argue that FDO/GNOMEs "no use an extension" attitude is exactly the same thing.

It's a useless metric.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#580

Post by NetMageSCW »

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.

That was a late run for the US only. This is a mainstream product for the world.
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