861–870 of 1001 posts
You greatly underestimate the utility used, serviceable laptops have provided to broke students. My first laptop was a decommissioned pos office dell ultrabook. By every metrics it would've been the worst option to choose, but since it had replaceable memory I was able to push it to 16 gigs and get through my computer science degree and many side projects. Computational speed was adequate for me, I ran Linux on it. I…
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> 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.
I, a developer, have never heard of Proton. Googling Proton, I only find Protonmail, and googling "Linux Proton," Valve's Proton is not even the first result. If you are not terminally online keeping up with Linux distro discourse, it's also difficult to even recognize any of the newer names and players. Linux is not even remotely considerable as an option for the average consumer, which is fine and fully intentional…
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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…
The original article doesn't dwell too much on the RAM limitation, but I agee with you that 8 GB is too little for the near future or even today. I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026. Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning so…
Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.
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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…
Lenovo's website is a disaster. Not only do they appear to have 100 sku's but on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display I can see four laptops in the grid[1], which are actually cut off with their prices below the fold. Every single grid item has a "Katapult" lease to own offer, a "My Lenovo Rewards" offer (who the fuck is collecting rewards points from Lenovo, and what customer prioritizes the rewards they might earn over li…
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To me clear the Neo dose not have a glass, haptic trackpad.
It’s glass but not haptic. Honestly the fact that they figured out how to make the entire pad clickable without haptics is pretty impressive.
MacBook Neo with 512 gigabytes of storage configuration costs 1,200,000 KRW (Approx. 810 USD for reference) in my nation. I can get ThinkPad E14 with a decent lunar lake CPU and 16 gigabytes of memory, at a slightly lower price. So I'm not as hyped as others...
That's interesting. In my country ThinkPad E14 16/512 is 37% more expensive and comes with garbage 60% srgb screen. It's actually more expensive than MacBook air M4 16/512.
Very obvious next step is to release 15" or 16" variant. It would put nail in coffin on cheap PC market. But would also cannibalize their own air/pro sales.
Limiting cannibalization wouldn't be hard. Just load up a Neo, a 13" Air, and a 15" Air on the Apple web store's Compare page - a 15" or 16" Neo would be the "obviously lesser" laptop by 90% of the metrics.
My bet is that Apple has prototypes of the larger variant, and is waiting to see how the situation develops.
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Portrait or landscape - if your use is dominated by looking at the screen and/or situations where it can't set it down (to use the KB), then the iPad is better. Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.
Am I the only person who manually rotates a laptop screen to portrait, then holds it like a book to use thus?
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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…
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.
Buying this for a kid would be a no-brainer for me - especially if it was on a discount (and it's not uncommon for Apple stuff to get 10-20% discount drops at retailers). Even the USB 3.0 is enough to power an audio interface - should be good enough to run some basic DAW, a MIDI keyboard, electronic drums etc. Will probably pick it up for my son at some point to motivate him to learn to type.
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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.
> Agreed, macOS has hardly improved in the past decade I would argue the opposite. Shared clipboard with my iPhone is a killer feature (i copy a lot of OTP tokens) and I envy you in the US that can remote access the iPhone (it is currently blocked in the EU, but hopefully will come eventually). Also mulit-monitor setup has become way better (I used to use 3rd party tools to restore window and monitor positions).
If there are reasons its not good enough, since it's open source you should be able to help fix them (excepting iOS issues, since those are mostly just apple locking down the OS too hard for various things to work).
We're on hacker news, we should all want something we can hack on. Shared clipboard between two devices with proprietary OSs we can't hack on is a great feature for the masses, but not us.