The MacBook Neo • Hacker News Board

Re: The MacBook Neo

#771

Post by hayleox » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

seunosewa wrote: post #472

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.

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.

If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#772

Post by mproud » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #755

> my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro I was surprised that a guy who shills Apple for a living still uses a 5 year old MacBook. It goes to show how the longevity of laptops has increased over time. I'm also on a M1 Macbook and find it hard to justify an upgrade.

More of a testament to Apple device longevity.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#773

Post by gorgoiler » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:32 AM UTC

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…

My daily driver is a very basic Linux experience. From my perspective, both PCs and Apple computers come with bundled software that I don’t want. It’s hardly as awful as the experience you describe but, even so, with Apple it’s the OS so it’s even harder to drop.

I feel quite self conscious saying this. It feels like whataboutism, as well as being potentially contrarian — 100% of my colleagues use and love macOS — but I fell in love with being able to read and edit the source code for my whole computer, and I don’t ever want to relinquish that freedom.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#774

Post by croes » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

> 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.

You don’t have to if the software you need needs Windows.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#775

Post by fxtentacle » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

jitl wrote: post #262

fxtentacle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a pity that there’s no working business model around open source maintenance for software like wine. I’m the guy who fixed the wine bug that blocked new iTunes versions, because I like to keep my music in iTunes for easy iPhone sync. I also have Fusion 360 working flawlessly in wine, but the setup process required multiple sessions stepping manually with a debugger to avoid crashes and packaging that as…

CrossOver sells WINE and WINE consulting; I've been a happy customer on and off for about 20 years. If you're bothered by open source WINE i'd say give them a shot. In my experience it's worth the $70 or whatever to get a well-paved GUI path and support.

I’m a happy CrossOver customer myself. But they don’t have enough resources to keep all major Windows apps working well. Which, to me, indicates that the business model of selling support only to those who are willing to pay, while letting everyone use the results for free, isn’t such a great business model.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#776

Post by intrasight » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #635

herdymerzbow wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I've considered an alternative to my Mac laptop I'm confronted by this much choice (and that of other manufacturers) and I also have to deal with unknown and varying performance of keyboard, display and trackpad. One thing PC manufacturers seem to prioritise and focus on is tech specs + performance and interface is tacked on (or at least the interface designers departments in their companies aren't leading…

The choice is really simple: it's a Thinkpad series T, with an AMD APU, the most powerful configuration you can afford :)

Why AMD?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#777

Post by zdc1 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:41 AM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #633

NoPicklez wrote: post #23

As someone who buys Asus motherboards when he builds PC's, it hasn't been a shock for me as an owner of a Macbook for the last 18 years. I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many…

> Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years. I hope they fixed the ultra brittle screens of their Macbook lineup. I bought a MacBook Air M1 a few years ago and I've been royally pissed off when, after 13 months (one month out of warrant in my case/country) the "bendgate" hit me: the screen died overnight, without any reason (was fine the day…

Personally, I would not buy any laptop without 2-3 years of warranty support / Apple Care. Laptops are expensive and things can stop working for lots of reasons. It's why I've loved ThinkPads, though I now use Apple as my usage these days is less dev / more fun.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#778

Post by bitwize » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #739

emseetech wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's support is top in the industry. And it's not even that great, it's but everyone else's support is just that bad. Easily worth the extra money alone.

That's interesting because I have the opposite experience. An Android phone or Lenovo laptop I can bring to the street shop and get a 50-200usd repair that would cost upwards of 600 at Apple or just making me get a new device.

I've found that many repair shops acknowledge the existence of two smartphone brands: Apple and Samsung. Bring anything else in and the most you get is a puzzled look.

Apple has the distinction of the iPhone being what everybody thinks of when they hear the word "smartphone". Everybody is familiar with it. That little xylophone jingle that serves as the iPhone's default ringtone plays in every detective show my wife watches on streaming, and everybody knows instantly what it means. That sort of ubiquity has network effects that you're not going to get with a Motorola, Sony Xperia, or even a Pixel. I've had to turn to Aliexpress to score a decent protective cover for my Pixel.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#779

Post by bandrami » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:48 AM UTC

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…

I'd really love it if the manufacturers would just say what wireless chipset they use in a given model but the unfortunate truth is even they don't always know for a given run

Re: The MacBook Neo

#780

Post by rf15 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

NetMageSCW wrote: post #626

rf15 wrote: post #24

Except for the bit that immediately killed it for us in the office: only one external display. Even if you close the lid. I dream of the day I can kick windows into the next bin, but this is the one thing that the Neo fails hard on, all other compromises would've made this a great remote dev machine.

So what $599 Windows laptop are you using with multiple external displays?

Any shitty dell can support two external displays with a docking station. And I truly mean it when I say that for a second the Neo got me excited to drop Dell.