Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.
I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.
My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year
I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.
My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.
Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.
So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.
Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.
For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.
Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
It hurts, but I'll pay a premium for worse hardware that will run Linux. But for others in my family Macbooks are just far better value by a wide margin than Windows laptops. Vertical integration really wins these days.
Yeah, I'm waiting for the panther lake (or similar) ones to become mainstream and I'll get a higher end laptop with those next. The latest framework once they open their parts marketplace in india is my first choice for now.
This seems to be key. People must want Windows or Linux so badly they will pay 25-30% for a thinkpad with a track pad that is almost as good. Don't these manufacturers sell more machines than Apple and could benefit from better economies of scale. Maybe the scale is just at the low end and the iPhone subsidizes premium Mac hardware.
I have yet to read about someone who priced out something "as good" as the MacBook Air in terms of component quality and efficiency. What would the price premium be... over 50%?
Either way it costs money to avoid macOS at the higher end but not much when you’re spending thousands of US dollars.
> People must want Windows or Linux so badly they will pay 25-30% for a thinkpad
Yup, I got Thinkpad X9, the idea being "Air 15 but with Windows". It does the job. I still think Air 15 is better (and cheaper), but the software compatibility and not needing to switch platforms outweighs that.
Using both Linux (at home) and Mac (at work), the differences are small for development. But my dev stack is basically just Neovim & CLI tools.
That said, I’ll never work on Windows. 15ish years ago I did some .net work. C# was a fun language but development on windows is a special kind of torture.
I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.
It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit:
1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans
2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac.
3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.
I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.
Indeed there aren’t many of us, but macOS is easily the worst part of the Mac experience, and worryingly it’s getting comparatively worse vs kde or even gnome each year. ‘It’s POSIX’ doesn’t cut it when I deploy to Linux and I work in containers all day anyway (and wsl is better than macOS at this, too, but the rest of windows went downhill real bad recently).
The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.
I think the laptop hardware pre Apple M chips was just terrible and has pretty much stayed that way. There’s a reason why Apple moved away from Intel.
Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.
With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.
Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools.
On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.
I used Linux for a long time. I still prefer it. But I can’t justify the extra work. Last time I tried to move back to Linux, I spent far too long admiring the machine. This was only 5 years ago.
AI agents are incredibly useful in this regard. Omarchy even releases some skills, so anything you want to configure is just a matter of asking the agent to do it.
Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)
The M3 Ultra is no slouch. It sits at the top with best processors on both single-core and multi-core x64 processors.
Meanwhile my mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, which is nowhere near an M3 Ultra, feels much snappier using it as a day to day desktop in both Linux and Windows. I think this speaks more to the sluggishness of the macOS experience rather than hardware performance.
But, then I start doing something data/gpu/local LLM intensive and my M3 Max shines.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.
Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
A company CTO told me once that he was a linux user at home but windows was the only option from a soc2 auditing point of view as MacOs faired barely better than linux in the fleet device management area.
Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS.
Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.
Many companies nowadays only provide the most basic office license with only web access to office apps for most of their employees. So for those that puts all OS at the same level.
Having said that software lagging in versions/features doesn't mean users are less efficient using the older tool. Are todays office users more efficient in word and excel with the ribbon than they were using office97 a few decades ago? Has it been measured? I know I am still lost whenever I need to find something on the ribbon.
Anecdotal but I’m a sysadmin in the IT dept in my rather larger company and have zero issues with office on my daily driver m2 Mac Pro. On my Dell precision running win 11 I constantly have issues with outlook, teams, etc.
How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well.
My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.
I can't speak for Teams (that is just an Electron app), but all of the legacy Mac Office apps are still a subset of the capabilities of their Windows counterparts.
If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.
People might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess.
Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.
My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.
What's sad is that in my experience supporting 80 users, Word et al work with fewer issues on Mac. The stack integration on Windows is fine, until it isn't.
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted, agree with you, Microsoft Office is awful on macOS, it just doesn’t work the same, has awful integration with Sharepoint (and Sharepoint in MS Teams and OneDrive), and continuously forgets its properly licensed and complains with a big message that it isn’t licensed - sometimes downgrading to read only. It’s just a terrible thing to use.
Mac users are consistently the highest needs users in my environment. Ymmv. Samba is still broken. Microsoft apps don't work.
You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.
I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.
We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.
I have a friend who runs a video production company. He was a big PC guy, they used desktop tower PCs with power-hungry GPUs for editing. He recently switched them over to Macs after testing Premiere on the base-model Mac mini they got for the receptionist and finding it was on par with their expensive PCs. His M3 Max MacBook Pro runs their chroma key at twice the speed of the GPU in the previous editing PC, AI upscaling is the same speed despite being a laptop. Premiere is also far more stable on the Mac, he's spent days troubleshooting driver versions on the PC.
This reads like the last time you've evaluated is 2018. The entire office suite works great on Apple silicon with the exception of, obviously Win32 VBA macros and some PowerQuery features in Excel.
As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).
If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.
Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.
Was that side by side comparison with all the security cruft running, because this is totally contrary to my experience with both sets of hardware managed by IT.
It's much harder to manage Macs than Windows machines, especially if you are a Windows shop already (which most are). Microsoft is working on eroding the quality of their software, but for now the management tools they offer for Windows clients are simply unparalleled in the Mac world.
Sure, if you're still on-prem AD or hybrid. For orgs that have already moved to full Intune/EntraID, managing windows via Intune is still years behind a good macOS MDM. InTune still feels half baked.
Not really the case any longer. JAMF is pretty easy to use and it's way better to work with compared to Intune, which to me feels half baked compared to something like on Prem AD/GP/SCCM.
There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.
I haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine.
Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
> Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?
I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.
As a recent retiree from a Fortune 500 company...no, there's no such thing as an upgrade. We were virtually exclusively laptops on the desktop. It was full replacement every time.
If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.
> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
What company upgrades their windows PCs? They give them exactly as shipped. IT department is not wasting time swapping out RAM or SSDs. And they certainly are not upgrading them over time. You just replace the entire PC if you go to 'swap' it.
I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards.
Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.
Interesting. I’ve worked for company’s that were all Dell shops as well and were similarly large and they had no such deal. You got whatever PC was available (like two options, one large and one small) and no choice beyond that. If you were special and could adequately plead your case, you maybe got a desktop for the extra RAM which was special order.
Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.
I work I Ag retail (agronomic services, chemical sales) and while we have an IT department, a decade ago I’d occasionally act as “local” tech support and double a coworker’s RAM when their combination of browser/office/database front ends stopped gracefully fitting in 4GB (and later 8GB). I would also migrate them from HDD’s to SSD’s, and set them up with backups.
But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.
Something as simple as adding a stick of RAM might be worthwhile, but some upgrades will take more money in salary (you and the person whose computer you're working on) than the upgrade is actually worth. This is especially true if you replace several components one at a time in a what would otherwise be a single replace cycle.
This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.
I've generally been given additional decent-performance storage every year or two when working in video games, fairly reliably the case since 2000, seemingly regardless of company size. Somehow each new project would always require yet more working space (again), and projects would often overlap to some extent.
Aside from that, almost always a new PC - almost! When times haven't been so good, I've had spot upgrades.
All of the above is just a question of running the numbers and minimising for cost, I'm sure.
There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable.
We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.
Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.
The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.
I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.
The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.
I think Apple's era of unreliable laptops were the ones with Butterfly keyboards. So many issues back then, but they did a complete 180 once they reintroduced the magic keyboard and then Apple Silicon.
Apple Intel laptop + a butterfly keyboard was the absolute gutter tier experience. Not only it was slow and ran hot, but after a few months a random key would get stuck and stop working.
I got my first ipad a year or two ago. It took me many tries over about an hour to setup the apple account I needed to log in to the device. I wish I had documented the process, because it's so different than what people typically claim about Apple ease of use.
Some older relatives asked for a computer recommendation. I told them a thousand reasons why a MacBook Air (at that moment) would be perfect for them. They went to Best Buy and came home with the Dellpaq thing that the guy there told them had better specs.
Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.
[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.
The worst thing about those cheaper "Best Buy" Windows machines is that they're heavily laden with all kinds of software making the PC extremely slow from the start. I just don't understand who they can get away with it.
Yup. Around 2005 my 83 year old grandpa decided he wanted to learn how to use a computer.
I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed.
Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
They added a second right-click menu in Explorer now. IDK if this is Windows 11 or if 10 had this. When you right-click a file, you get a shorter menu with a larger font. But it might not have the option you want -- you have to click "Show more options" at the bottom. Then it lags for 1 second (this is a Core Ultra 9 with 64GB of RAM btw) and opens a new one, with the old font metrics, and that one also has all the things the original ones did.
This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.
I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.
I'm on win11 at work and when I right click in explorer it loads the normal menu but then immediately populates the menu with more options. It takes just long enough before it populates more options for you to maybe click on something which has then moved to somewhere else. Extremely annoying.
I’ve faced far more issues with relatives with Macs than when they had Linux.
The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all.
The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system.
Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.
I recently had an experience with a family member's Ubuntu LTS machine where it was stuck on an old release, /etc/apt/sources.list needed to be edited because of Ubuntu's obnoxious habit of breaking old repositories, and then I needed to debug apt issues to get do-release-upgrade to actually work.
The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.
My son had a Mac for college. But then the accounting department gave out assignments that required a PC based software package. And it took quite a while to crunch numbers. So I ended up having to get him a relatively high end PC laptop as well. It turns out the professor had never even used the software before. But, that's the academic world.
I got my mum onto Apple devices (mac and iPhone) over a decade ago, and support dropped sharply in the first 6 months. These days it's incredibly rare that she needs help with anything, and she does more on the computer than she ever did.
The mac has helped her improve here computer skills and confidence in a way that Windows never did.
My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.
I'd still say getting 7 years of free OS supports for hardware is pretty incredible. All-in-ones like iMacs are always going to be wasteful on the environmental side of things faster because displays will outlive the usefulness of the rest of it by a large large margin.
At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.
I have a 2019 GPU in my windows box and I’d be pissed off if it stopped working in the next few years. Computers nowadays are useful for much longer than they used to. Spectre class vulnerabilities which take 50% performance to properly (kinda) mitigate are the only reason to maybe upgrade if all you do is browse facebook and pay bills.
7 years is generous for phones but desktop computers have had a much slower performance ramp up where even a 10 year old desktop should be perfectly cromulent for office tasks as long as you give it an SSD and enough RAM.
The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.
Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?
How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for.
I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.
We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.
EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.
Linux has pretty good support for Macs, since they're so common (the T2 chip made it more annoying, but it's still very possible). That said, it's still Linux, for better or worse.
If nothing else, it'd be nice if those iMacs could be reused as external displays, but nope. No display-in on them, so no dice (at least not without a lot of dicking about).
Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
As a fellow family IT specialist, about a decade ago I took the stance that if it's not Apple, I'm not fixing it. I'm not dealing with some bullshit issue with weird proprietary drivers or crapware. The straw that broke the camel's back was a Dell laptop that wasn't working with the Wifi until I turned off IPv6.
It's also why I don't use Linux for a desktop unless I have to. I've had years of debugging weird issues with drivers, editing /etc files, changing X settings and so on.
MacOS isn't perfect. In fact, I think Apple keeps making it worse because they have no real product vision now and it's just a bunch of teams making local changes to justify their own existence. But you can look at MacOS in one of two ways: as a better Windows (by having a UNIX-like core) or as a better Linux (by having a better UI subsystem). Either way it's a win (IMHO).
I'm torn on the Macbook Neo, personally. It really is just a giant iPhone 18 with a keyboard. Plus you can get a Macbook Air at times for $900. That's $200 more than the high-end Neo. Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.
> Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.
For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.
The MacBook Air is a better machine, but the Neo is far better than an iPad because MacOS isn't constrained like iPadOS is. The Neo can't really be compared to an iPad for that reason alone.
It's very different to an ipad and keyboard because of the software being a proper OS rather than a phone one. I was a bit torn on Neo vs Air though - the Air's a bit cooler looking.
Yeah exactly, one of my kids has a Windows PC for gaming and just logging in to the thing is arduous sometimes... Microsoft's account auth system is so bad with its random redirects. Don't even me get me started on the parental controls, it's probably one of the laggiest systems I use.
Let’s not pretend Apple screen time is any good. My 13yo daughter figured out multiple ways around it by herself and googled a few more and if it wasn’t leaking like a sieve it isn’t granular enough anyway (e.g. music apps offering videos - I want to block videos but not music - can’t be done)
I easily guess that it is just that you are used to Mac, so you easily "forget" the common issues that you are usually encountering.
For example, one of the most common example is icloud subtly enabled by default for syncing photo and data, and that will get your mac and iphone stuck in a complicated mess when things get full with the limited free space.
What are you saying, that you think Windows or Linux are better platforms for evading covert government oversight?
Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.
What is your point? If anything, PRISM argues that Apple users are more secure; it took the NSA a solid five years longer to work their way into Apple. But at this point, every provider is compromised, every country is compromised, so again - what is your point? The government knows a lot about everyone, it has nothing to do with choice of computing platform.
It is also worth noting that the USA is not the only country collecting data on US persons (and everyone else.)
The question is not, does the USA know about you, the question is really, how many governments know all about you and how does that information manifest in your life?
> But at this point, every provider is compromised
Yes, and its probably fair to assume that Apple and/or the government can access any of your files on your devices or in the cloud. My suggestion is not to use any "provider." Use free software, and keep your data locally on encrypted drives.
yeah, i think a lot of people on hacker news basically agree with that old meme that says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
I have always had this notion that buying a Mac is the "premium" option, not just in quality, but maybe in price too.
I am in the process of trying to find a business notebook for my spouse who is a Windows user. The goal is to have something that is as close to a Macbook Air as possible in terms of price, weight, performance and durability.
What I am learning is that nothing that like that exists in the PC world. It's a minefield of tradeoffs: plastic chassis', bad screens, weird keyboards, bad trackpads, questionable reliability, etc.
The current contender is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon which even after a bunch of business discounts is still a good $300 more than a Macbook Air and appears to come with a pretty poor trackpad in comparison.
Apple has an incredible strength in distilling what a product or series of products should be down to its essence and selling it. You could argue that there is more "choice" among Windows PCs but the reality seems to be that it is an illogical mess of tradeoffs.
“Choice” is funny because consumers never choose what the products are, only from the existing products. People harp on choice as a boon for windows laptops but you cannot choose an affordable laptop with great build quality and speed and battery unless you buy a Mac. Framework is the closest company to providing real choice to consumers but you have to be technically minded to approach that product (and I’m glad it exists).
I think consumers’ expectations regarding what they can get is coloured by ages-old reddit opinions which have circulated into household knowledge. The answer is so clearly whatever apple is making at the moment yet no other company (except maybe Microsoft with the surface line) can string together direct competition
I would not mind if it was +50% more expensive... if it was TRULY a competition to f.ex. a Macbook Air. Many more techies would not mind it. But I don't think we ware there yet.
I don't know why there isn't a standard form-factor where parts from different manufacturers can't be mix and matched. It just seems so obvious.
A fully aluminum shell with air channels drawing air from the base unit through the back of the screen (via convection) seems like a good idea too.
Another interesting design would be "vertical laptops" - like an ipad but with a fold down keyboard/pointer slab to keep it upright. That would be good to get airflow moving up through the screen vertically. There could be space between the screen slab and the processor slab for the air to rise.
Yeah I was an X1 Carbon True Believer for a while but I cant justify their current prices.
It used to be 1200 bucks or so cheaper than the equivalent macbook (probably saying as much will piss off the "Thinkpads were never cheap weridos but thats fine)
At a certain level of build quality the Mac has at many times in this century been a good value. Except maybe if you load it up with RAM and/or storage which always seems to have a much higher marginal cost than non-MAC hardware.
I had high hopes for the Surface but between the confusion (is it arm is it x86 will your printer drivers work?) and some questionable decisions, it fell flat.
I just got a refurbished Surface laptop for like $350 on Amazon. I only bought it for traveling, but after I set it up for work, I've been using it now for three weeks and it's a pretty nice machine. I don't do gaming or graphics stuff though. And I use an external mouse.
I am totally a linux user. But even on the high end, the build quality of laptops more expensive than apple is often worse than apple.
Or it's hit and miss and you need to hope to get the good one. I want a lightweight, non-plastic laptop with good keyboard, solid battery life, and no hinge problems. Apple is consistently delivering it. Good luck finding that outside apple.
Intel this year seems to have something competitive with the core ultra cpus. The “wildcat” cpus are being released now in budget friendly machines. We’ll see how they do.
I’m not going back from Linux but I’m glad there is competition again.
I think Apple's cost efficiency advantages are really compounding now and it'll get increasingly hard for competitors to catch up. Everything they put in the product is either in-house or benefit from their scale and negotiating power.
In the MacBook Neo's case, everything from the in-house chipset and scale (for stuff like aluminum body) and the more RAM-efficient software is working in its favor. I'd bet that a different laptop manufacturer will struggle to make a profit at all if they made a $599 Neo-equivalent product with lower scale, having to pay for chips and Windows licenses, and having to put in 12GB of RAM instead of 8 to get a similar user experience.
I think the clear demonstration of this is how small Apple's motherboard is for the neo (and other M series) compared to everyone else). It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently. If you cap your chips TDP such that it can be cooled passively, you save money on heatsink, fan, vents, power circuitry (e.g. fewer capacitors), battery size, etc.
You are so right, and I blame some of the thinking on this very website. People are adamant that they need to upgrade the RAM, change the storage, and replace the battery on their laptops. Adamant. All that means that you need a separate memory controller, a separate this and that. It adds up, and PC makers are forced to put in a fan.
On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able to upgrade and maintain your laptop sounds elegant. But those people, they never argue that they must be able to change the CPU. Why not? It used to be that upgrading the CPU in a laptop was a common occurence. Why don't they throw a fit that they can't upgrade the CPU?
Because technology caught up with them. CPUs are now soldered on the board, for multiple very good reasons. Coupled with the fact that a good CPU is good enough for a very long time, and no one feels the need to upgrade their CPU on a laptop. Same thing with the math co-processor, no one's arguing to be able to change that!
> Because technology caught up with them..... a good CPU is good enough for a very long time
This is an excellent point but surely it lampshades that the exact opposite case is true for RAM. How many of apple's laptops become unusable when we know they would be fine for years more with the single addition of increasing the ram? Aside from those ruined by physical damage, it feels to me that this is the way the majority of those devices end their productive life years earlier than they would with a single change.
My opinion regarding RAM is meant to in no way dispute your excellent points about CPU soldering.
It’s not this websites thinking, it’s every tech person’s thinking.
Apple is an example of great consumer focus vs tech requests of “but I want to run Kubernetes on my iPad it’s powerful enough”.
That’s thanks to Steve Jobs. iPhone was a #1 smartphone for a decade without ever mentioning the RAM or CPU MHz in the announcements or marketing material. Even if there was less RAM or worse specs than the Snapdragon at the time, iPhone was still faster and sold more.
This philosophy is still at the core of Apple.
I wish more companies worked this way, but I don’t know anyone even close.
What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.
It's not the upgradable ram, cpu, or storage which is eat into the power consumption budget. Instead, it's the interface and the standard that can become dated. Apple gets to choose all the voltages and interfaces for each generation which allows for a tightly coupled integration with their firmware and hardware all around. A PC user is stuck with the likes of ACPI and UEFI coordinating everything. And of course, they have to play with the current DDR standard of the time which may not give the power profile they want.
However, the benefit of the PC route is that there is really no EOL for the hardware/firmware support. A 20 year old computer can run an operating system with the 7.2 linux kernel perfectly fine. Your IPad from that era is a brick. You can't do anything with it. But your laptop from that era? You can slap in a brand new SSD and it'll accept it and boot up just fine. (The one caveat is you'll be SOL if you have an nvidia device).
> What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.
The insecure bricks hold their value weirdly well though, so if you care about the software limits, you can just sell at the end of the term to someone who doesn't, and it makes up for you not being able to keep the hardware longer yourself. Like I just sold off a low-spec 2012 macbook and 2013 iPad Air for a combined $140.
What are you even talking about. Every M1 Mac and earlier runs Linux. Even all the way back to PowerPC.
Granted, the M1 and up are not 100% covered yet (driver-wise), but they aren't EOL either. And if they were, Linux would still run anyway. Take a 20 year old Mac and you'll run Linux just fine. 10 year old Mac, Linux still runs fine. Take an M1 and it's a joy to use with Linux. Taken an M2 and it will boot and you can be pretty sure it will run very well long before it's EOL too. And even if it's EOL, it's not going to prevent you from running Linux later.
As for the PC example: definitely EOL problems there. Try getting your EDK2-based UEFI stack patched on an old computer. At some point you won't be getting certificate updates and if you either forget to install a local override or if the vendor didn't add it, you're SOL, especially on laptops where you can't disable secure boot.
> It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently.
I'm sure they would understand, if you could show them the equivalent 25 watt x86 part. If you find one at 25 watts or lower, it'll be too slow to really bother with. And if it uses much more power than that, then a fan quickly becomes mandatory. It's easier to excuse having a fan than having a processor that's just dog slow.
There are 15W intel CPUs and .. they suck. Idle, windows and corporate “stuff” will put that at 75% utilization with no input from the user other than simply logging on. And the fan starts about 30s in and never stops. It’s embarrassing for intel.
And it's not much better on the AMD side! Like, the closest thing they have is the APU they put in the Steam Deck, which has a fan! I'm sure it would be a bit better if you put that thing in an aluminum body, so the heat can dissipate better, but after you've installed Windows on it, forget it.
I can kind of imagine a world where a suitably low-power Intel or AMD chip can exist; they've got good engineers and can probably do it if they put their minds to it, but that chip will be next to useless without a Windows that won't throw out half the chip's potential before you've even started a program.
I think they understand, but they are also building machines that need to run Windows + pre-installed bloatware without being so obviously bogged down no the sales floor that no one buys them.
I agree and I think the most concrete demonstration of this for me is actually the current air.
It's basically the idea of the pro of 10 years ago but realised flawlessly, and improved upon actually in most ways, for significantly cheaper.
To do this they had to become an execution machine at huge scale to own and solve every piece that held them back in that pro design, and they did, and it's honestly amazing how it all came together.
Microsoft was considered the competitor and they lack in house phone dev which the neo is built on, no chip of their own etc. Everyone else is stuck with whatever the market gives them for CPU/GPU and probably less buying power on SSD and Ram. Then we have the operating system that has its own minimum requirements to work smoothly and for windows I don't really think 8gb total system memory is going to cut it.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Other large laptop makers such Dell have some of the same scale advantages (minus in-house silicon) and might be more willing to sacrifice on profit margin.
No, that's just OS war tribalism talking. I regularly use a M1 Macbook, Lenovo Ideapad 14 Pro with Windows 11, and an ARM Lenovo IP Slim 3 Chromebook. Each have their strengths and weakness at different price points.
Chromebooks (typical) strengths are 1. zero maintenance/instant updates 2. 10 years of OS support 3. battery life 4. touchpad 5. value/$ with options at very low price points.
I paid around $150 for my Lenovo ARM Chromebook (came out a few years ago) and got around 14-15 hours of battery life new with no noticeable fans/heat. Has virtually no self-discharge when in deep sleep and boots in <10 seconds after sitting around for 2+ weeks. Even with 4 GB RAM ChromeOS handles very well under memory pressure (with the memory saver tab mode turned on), that I can have multiple windows with dozens of tabs open before things start slowing down.
I use the Linux VM in ChromeOS for light dev work (and disabled Play Store/Android), the touchpad is absolutely fantastic (which isn't unusual on even cheap Chromebooks, Google actually prioritizes driver support for multitouch/palm rejection unlike the cheap Windows crap models), security is rock solid with essentially no risk of malware/viruses/etc and have literally no maintenance/stability issues that waste my time. Chromebooks are by far the best choice if the question is truly "how do I minimize Grandma needing help solving computer problems", even current locked down MacOS has so many more ways it can break/confuse compared to ChromeOS.
This is the fifth or so Chromebook I've owned over the years, having used both the ultra-premium end of the spectrum (original Pixelbook) and the very cheapo end, and this machine is one of my favorite tech purchases overall in the last few years. I'd definitely recommend 8GB of RAM if possible, but for the typical Chromebook casual web browsing use case 4GB is perfectly serviceable (especially on a newer ARM SoC).
A $150 Chromebook is not intended to replace a $3000 Macbook with 64GB of RAM to run a half dozen Docker images, etc so sure, they'll "suck" in that match up, but they are an extremely competitive option on most metrics for the "someone just needs to browse the web and I don't want to be pestered by IT issues" case.
It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.
> Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?
If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.
No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.
The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.
It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.
What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.
Made me buy a MacBook Air instead. Waited for a long time because I was not a fan of macOS, but Apple is quite cheap in all segments nowadays. A well-specced MacBook Pro these days is cheaper than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The MacBook Air at ~$1000 price point with 16GB/512GB is also incredibly hard to beat in price, and even if you pay the premium for a Windows competitor (crazy sentence) you actually get a less than premium experience: worse build quality, worse display, worse battery life.
Apple's chip count in their laptops is insanely low compared to the competition. They're reaping the rewards of their continued investment in simplicity. People are appalled that they don't use standard M.2 storage; Apple's thing is bespoke and incompatible. Evil Apple's trying to prevent us folks from upgrading our laptops!!
Nope. They use standard chips without a dedicated controller, because it's all controlled directly on the M-series chip, saving them a bunch of money. Which that, with the Macbook Neo, they absolutely pass the savings down to you.
I’m guessing the Neo attracts a lot of new Apple customers, many of which will become subscribers of higher margin Apple services & apps in the App Store.
If they don't make this product at this pricepoint, a competitor does and that also cannibalizes potential higher sku macbook sales to a degree. Every chromebook sold is a potential macbook neo customer and apple let google eat their lunch for years.
I would happily buy a laptop with medium specs but apple build quality. I don't know if the Neo's build quality is on par with their other laptops but if it is it's probably my next laptop.
From the reviews, my impression is that the Neo has Apple's build quality, but they cut some costs to save on machining the chassis, and the trackpad doesn't have the haptic motor.
It's more like they don't want paradox of choice. Think of how many windows or android products are out there. Frankly I hate thinking about buying them in case I screw up and get it wrong. Apple understands this.
Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing. Nobody knows how to make things properly. Here in the UK you won't even find competent sheet metal fabricator (except for military or when you have more money than sense, but then whatever you want to sell will be dead in the water because of unaffordability).
> Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing.
My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.
It's amazing you can get an iPad for $349 and a Macbook for $599. Even the plastic 2009 macbook alone was $999 at the lowest. Very strange to see a company do this when everything else just seems to have gone up and up.
My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.
Apple M series are competitive in inference at least. I wish Apple would just aim their chip people at NVIDIA in everything else. They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
I'm quite happy Apple stays focused on their products. They enter a market when they can own it end-to-end -- it makes no sense for them to all of a sudden become an AI chip house or AI server house.
There is a lot of money in AI chips, and Apple could definitely get a fairly large slice of that business if they put the work in (well, if they are putting the work in now, depending on what Baltra is really about).
They're honestly not competitive for inference, it's why datacenters largely ignore Apple Silicon. Even the M5 Max is still bottlenecked for dense models due to the relatively weak GPU and paltry ~500-600gb/s of GPU memory bandwidth. For reference, the RTX 5080 (a consumer GPU) has 1tb of VRAM bandwidth and runs circles around the M5 Max in GPU compute benchmarks: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box.
> They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.
Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.
NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?
It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.
Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).
Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.
Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]
An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.
My first Mac was the same white plastic one, I think it was called the iBook back then? Cost me the majority of my summer job earnings going into freshman year, but it was a great machine for me back then! I still have it in a box somewhere in the basement, might be fun pull it out and resurrect it :)
The white plastic Mac laptop, depending on the generation, was either called the iBook, or later the Macbook when they moved to Intel. Blame it on IBM who didn't want Apple to use PowerBook for a Mac with an Intel chip, which forced the company to rename the whole line.
It's not so amazing when you realize the Neo is an iPad's innards with a keyboard glued to it. $250 for a keyboard and a hinge.
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".
You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right?
You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.
I think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)
The ram is the real sticking point honestly. Yes they are more powerful but consider people's use case. My 2012 dual core mbp is still performant for what most people use their computers for: internet, email, office suite, etc. And I shoved 16gb RAM in that thing 10 years ago. I guess they will just swap on the fast ssd so it will be alright.
Certainly but I'd guess the problem won't manifest for years and other showstopping pieces might fail before then. That old frankenstein macbook of mine had the same 850 evo ssd I shoved in it for like 8 years of use and abuse, always high temps with that macbook too. People say you shouldn't use an ssd like that but oh well, it seems to work alright.
There is just no way it is actually barely handling them. My 2012 with the dual core handles that. Fans turning on doesn't mean it barely handles it. That is just how those intel macs were. They were like that on day 1 in 2012. Spotlight indexing could be enough to spin the fans. Still does the job though even if its hot and noisy.
Its so weird, something i noticed (or made up) is that at my workplaces, the topspec workstations are always taking ages to boot (counting the ram?). My 15 year old xeon win box boots in about 10sec. Maybe they dont have fastboot enabled idk…
My workplace installs a ton of background software on their PCs. God help you, if it's your first time logging into any PC there and it has to load everything in your account/profile for the first time.
They don't last more than a couple of years before they start becoming painfully slow, even after being reimaged.
Whereas my 10+ year old laptops and desktops are as fast as the day I bought or assembled them.
Even for the arm series macs the max cpus run way hotter and spin fans sooner than base model in general tasks. Just how those chips are designed. They aren't designed to throttle to keep temps down, they are designed to give you all the horsepower knowing you don't care about noise and heat and care about performance.
The first iPhone launched without a carrier subsidy.
When the iPhone 4 launched on Verizon in 2011, you could either spend $200 and get locked into a 2-year contract, $300 and get locked into a 1-year contract, or buy the thing outright for $650. Since you didn't get a discount for bringing your own phone to Verizon, it was more cost-effective to get the subsidized phone.
I bought one: I was hesitant about the 8 GB of memory at first. But I'm happily running Chrome with like 20 tabs and some other apps, and performance isn't an issue.
It's mostly a couch laptop.
I run Obsidean, messaging apps, writing tools. I use some CLI toolings...
I really wanted a Framework 12, but I got $180 credit on a ipad AIR 4, and sold a 2017 Macbook Pro for $150 (US), so that effectively made this a 280 upgrade, and reduced the risk in me going for it.
I love this thing.
* love the keyboard, it’s such an improvement over the older laptops. Worth getting rid of that old Macbook Pro for this alone
* Keyboard isn’t backlit. Thought that would be annoying, but i’m good enough touch typist that in the dark, i can still navigate around no problem.
* Lack of touch sensor. I just turned off most security prompting, like passwords when filling in websites, etc. and just rely on typing my password in once when logging on. On my todo is to turn on authentication from my Apple Watch, might make not having a touchid a non-issue.
* The screen!
Did I say I love the form factor?
I still wish it was shaped like my former favorite computer: the 11" Macbook Air, with the tapered edges and such.
I'm optimistic that the next version of Framework 12 will have better screen and be a nice aluminum body...but until then.....
Way too much keyboard backlight discourse around this laptop. Just learn to type folks, it takes 2-3 weeks.
As long as you're able to quickly feel out the homing bars, you should know where all your keys are. First thing I do on every laptop is turn off keyboard backlighting.
Ram wise, I agree that for light use, with mostly note-taking, writing, and browser use; 8GB shouldn't cause any serious problems. But those of you who know you regularly go over 8GB should really consider something else. There are plenty of used M2 and M3 airs with 16GB out there for reasonable prices. Of course if you're hard-capped at $600, then the Neo is pretty dang nice.
are you sure the demand is gone? The whole point of this article is that Apple had to double production because demand was so high.
EDIT: i just looked up how many ipads apple shipped in 2025: 60M, so yeah, no shortage of demand in iPads. Most people are consumptioners, though, so that kind of makes sense.
I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses.
It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice
Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seems perfect for a second computer. I could pay premium prices for something better, but honestly: I don’t think I need to.
The fact that everything bolts together inside like a ThinkPad and there's no glue means it's highly repairable. I've been looking at getting one as well, they're almost too good, I'm worried apple will revert to gluing things together as they're user repairable, which means they ought to last nearly forever. I've been eyeballing one as well, I would prefer the higher end air or pro but being able to take the whole thing apart with a single screwdriver is very appealing.
Agree. I could afford "better" but the Neo suits my needs perfectly and I don't like expensive laptops that are prone to damage and theft. Dollar for dollar it is the best computer I've ever bought.
I had one, but even for those days it had a mediocre screen, mediocre keyboard, mediocre CPU, and mediocre slow storage. The MacBook Neo has none of that.
I have one. They were never fit for purpose for anything beyond reading email, watching 360p Youtube (back then, not so much now), and browsing very basic sites. I guess maybe Flash games were also on the table. The Celerons and Atoms in those machines were comparable to Pentium IIIs. There's a reason the Netbook was a fad. Most people discovered they didn't enjoy using them, while they not long after discovered that they did enjoy using these fancy new smartphone thingies.
They sold well. In my experience working at Staples at that time, small and cheap beat any other consideration for many customers. Hard to argue with a $99 PC.
A few months later, they'd realize it wasn't working out, come back, scream at us, and buy something bigger and faster.
I really liked the MSI one I had, but I knew what I was getting into.
Part of that was incidental factors. The 701 happened partly because of a glut of cheap, standardised screens designed for that first generation of in-car dashboard sat-nav systems.
It didn't help that those screens weren't particularly good.
Every school I know of is deep in the Chromebook pot. These are fairly bad computers, Neo would be a big upgrade. But I suspect it would be years for school systems to even evaluate this.
Kids also destroy them every year. They need to be bad, and the absolute cheap pieces of crap possible because kids will throw them against walls and destroy them on purpose.
"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.
Not related to this discussion. But kids destroying school computers wantonly is expected? Is there no cost associated for destroying property on students or their parents?
Yes, its expected. As for recovery, depends on the school district. Early on during COVID, it was basically a free for all because, well, if you didn't have one you wouldn't be participating in school remotely, and for some families they wouldn't be able to afford a replacement, best to just give the kids a new one.
Some districts (including my local one where I live) are now charging a "tech fee" but given these devices are still mandatory to participate, they don't withhold if they can't collect from the parents, which collection still remains a problem.
Another district near me does a keep your own device program, each student is issued a chromebook and it becomes theirs after they graduate, which seemed to have helped a little bit knowing they have to use that same device for 4 years and it becomes their own after.
edit My own solution would be just make sure the devices can't leave the classroom. Letting kids take them home is a huge part of the problem, but schools are now totally reliant on assignments being done digitally instead of just sending kids home with a textbook and worksheets.
I think the "keep it after 4 years" program is to eliminate a huge disposal/recycling cost from the schools. A 4 year old ChromeBook is effectively worthless, and can't (shouldn't) just be thrown in the garbage.
What better way to save than to push that cost out to your students' families, all while selling it as a positive?
The Neo's value prop is great for many people. I keep needing to remind myself that most computer users can get by fine with 8GB or RAM, and that the I'm not the target market for products like the Neo. I do get nervous with how future proof 8GB of RAM will be in terms of total usable lifespan for the Neo. Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
> Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
It’s products like this that mean 8GB will remain fine for longer. If every base model had 16GB then sites like linkedin would just add more bullshit to use it. Let’s keep the bar at 8GB please - we’re not really doing anything different than I was doing 20 years ago with much less.
While I worked at Apple a directive came out forbidding developers from adding more RAM to their systems without express upper-management permission. The reason was that the experience on stock-ram supported systems was getting really bad and management wanted the developers to feel the pain (so they would fix it). Note: dedicated compiler boxes were exempted from this (but still required management sign-off).
A similar directive came out about that same time forcing all managers to use the baseline phones, and limiting the upgraded models to only testing fleets, for about the same reason.
I think devs forget how efficient and blazing fast server rendered pages can be, and ultimately what a great user experience non-SPA applications can provide. It seems like the dev community has locked in on SPAs for everything. There is so much complexity and other overhead associated with SPAs. At the end of the day a browser is rendering HTML + CSS, JS can handle some additional interactivity. Presently, we have some very complex SPAs that are handling large amounts of state, large dependencies (js libs), often optimized assets, etc. I remember people bemoaning Flash apps. I kind of feel like SPAs are kind of becoming the new Flash app.
> if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.
I actually think right now is the perfect moment for this!
I suspect that the massively increased cost of memory will limit the amount of memory in most consumer PCs from increasing over the next few years. In turn, this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software.
> this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software
Ideally, yes, realistically, no. It is rare that I hear FE devs considering how much memory their apps are using. I really wish RAM use would be a much greater concern, but when I look at programs I normally run, I can tell RAM is not a concern (imagine me giving a dramatic accusing look at Docker Desktop, next-server, ...). RAM use for web pages is often not given much consideration either.
I would like to know how these are on XCode - would love to have the cheapest/most lightweight possible way to build iOS apps (derived from some cross-platform builder like Expo/Lynx/Dioxus) since I have no other use for MacOS.
Looking at tech specs, it seems like the one with 512GB drive might be serviceable. I have a very old 256GB Air and I struggle to keep enough drive space open to have XCode installed on it.
They're fine if you just need it mainly for the build/bundle step.
I've used an 8GB M1 mac for react-native iOS dev for over a year back when the M1 first came out.
If I had to look for the cheapest way to build iOS apps, but still on a laptop form factor (aka no mac minis), and I don't use macOS for day-to-day development, I'd do exactly this.
Mac Mini is the best bang for buck at the moment. I have an M1 Air as well, but if I'm away from my desk and doing anything that would push the SOC hard, I remote into my Mini.
I would say if it's only used as the build and publishing device and development happens elsewhere, this would work without problems. 8Gb for building the iOS app and testing on a real device or even an emulator would likely work. Apple's swap is also quite fast.
Not surprising. I've been looking at potentially getting one for my mother. Her last Windows 10 laptop is pretty long in the tooth, and there's no way in hell I'm getting her one with Windows 11 on it.
The Neo seems to fill the same niche that the Chromebook once did, and, since she's already in the Apple ecosystem due to her iPhone, an "Apple Chromebook" seems like an attractive proposition.
Apart from the price, I think what's really attracting people to the Neo are the cool colors. I was at an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago trying to buy a M5 MacBook Air and I was eavesdropping on the conversations going on next to me from people looking at the Neo. Almost all of it was positive and people really love the colors!
I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo because I'm recommending the Neo to anyone like my mom who use their laptop mostly just for browsing and FaceTime calls, and even the MBA is overkill for that.
> I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo ...
Hopefully it allows for the macbook air to return to being a ultra light machine, I held an Asus X14 ARM at 900 grams and it felt so much better.
There's also a huge market for the M1 MacBook Air because of the old form factor of being ultra thin even if faking it with bending the shell, the boxed layouts dont fit with MBA to me. Too bad there is no 15 2021 M1.
Awesome, it’s nice to see a large company actually trying to make a decently crafted product for the entry level market and for it to be popular! I hope Apple can continue this and release more nice products at lower prices especially at a time where hardware is going parabolic.
With 12GB it's a seriously cool offering. I actually know 8GB works as well, and I've seen people on MacBook Airs with 50 tabs open, full IDE's and breezing. But I still would want at least 4GB more to be on the safe side.
Well, you'll be fine on pretty much all websites out there with 8GB, and virtual memory helps you with multiple apps, dozens of tabs. They don't all need to be in memory at once. Apple Silicon helps move that data around very fast.
I wonder if this will cannibalize their other more expensive product lines. I know some people and have recommended this to folks that would have purchased more expensive laptops otherwise. My grandpa never needed the macbook air he has continually repurchased over the years. I am planning on purchasing one of these for my oldest, would have opted for a more expensive macbook air as well otherwise. Others that thought the macbook air was too expensive may have purchased used or not at all so this does bring in some more money with that demographic. I have to imagine the margins are smaller if the product is cheaper. I guess time will tell.
Apple is more interested in getting people into ecosystem to milk services recurring revenue. They even killed high end top ram options to pump more NEOs.
I'd like to see the same thing applied to desktop computers, a Mac Neo maybe. The Mac mini has moved up the cost/performance ladder, there's room at the bottom for a simple, low cost desktop, maybe with Neo colours too.
Is the MacBook Neo like my Xiaomi phone: fully locked down; no way to put custom software on it? That would be bad. My laptop is the last bastion of control left.
Got my and my wife's parents all-in on iPhone + Macbook Air/Pro + Watch (with a single iPad Pro) and honestly it's been fantastic. Only problem is that they forget a password here and there and I just have that in my password manager. After that, the ecosystem is just super convenient: watch finds their phone, find my friends has their/our location, Facetime dials in pretty easily.
Honestly, the problem with the Apple ecosystem is that hooking it up into a machine is annoying, so our claw-like has to be on a Mac Mini. But apart from that, everything is pretty good.
Compact density is expensive, cellular is expensive, and the iPhone has to pass all-day battery and pocket bending tests. (Edit: also being dropped on gravel)
In addition to the iPad having cheaper parts than the iPhone, the iPad reuses many of the same components for several years. The current iPad uses the same display as the previous generation iPad that was released in 2022 - three years and counting. But every single iPhone generation has changes to most of its components, and every single year has a new iPhone.
I'm sure that they have a fatter margin on the the iPhone, but the iPhone does cost quite a bit more to manufacture. Cellular itself is probably $50 or so. The iPad has more material, so you may perceive you're getting more "device per the money" but the cost of those materials is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing the additional components.
This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
> This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
Actually from what I understood, making a small display with modern specs like Apple did on the iPhone mini was MORE expensive because all of modern high-end smartphone display manufacturing is designed for larger, 6+ inch screens.
I love my macbook neo. I have more powerful macmini at home as my daily driver, but neo is amazing for me basically as a companion to my corporate laptop. I use it:
- to take as my personal device when I travel
- do personal stuff when my corporate laptop is connected to my home setup and constant switching between computers is a hassle (even with a built in kvm in a monitor). i know, 1st world problems
It has a price point that makes it no brainer for me.
I would rather own a used MacBook AIR than a new MacBook Neo. I usually don't like used computers but I just can't stand the anxiety of having to only have 8Gb RAM. Sure, it swaps, it compresses memory etc.. but still.
I bought two Touch-ID models as gifts and while doing the setup I must say the lack of keyboard backlight is the only thing that bothered me A LOT. Great machines otherwise.
Imagine the potential sales overseas where the Neo fits into the budget of many more people who maybe wanted to get a Mac but could not afford it because it was just out of reach. But now there is a possibility.
I am more interested in the XPS13 at a similar price point mentioned in the article. My intention is to run Linux, and that probably won't happen for a long time on modern Apple hardware.
I don't follow this scene. Have they effectively reverse engineered most of Apple hardware? So everything just works? Or is it more like, "hey it boots! and we hope to get networking operational next". I'm kind of surprised that Apple wouldn't lock things down so that it only boots signed-by-Apple executables/bootloaders.
Well if you're looking at XPS13 then a comparable machine is a MacBook Air M1 or M2, not a Neo. You can get an M1 refurb for 600 USD, AFAIK Costco sells them at that price in the US. Or buy used for even less. It will still match or surpass that XPS13's performance and battery life.
I think they were talking about the upcoming XPS 13 that's based on the new Intel Wildcat Lake platform and will be priced very close to the MB Neo, so it's pretty comparable. It wouldn't be fair to compare it to something that starts at $1000.
You're right, I skimmed over the latter part of your comment. I don't know about your claim that M1/M2 will outperform Wildcat Lake in performance and battery life though, do we know specific figures to be able to say that for sure?
Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.
The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.
Apple's advantage is that they design a large share of their own parts, and their partners build them at a very high volume since they are used in more than one product line.
They don't have to pay a margin to so many component vendors in addition to economy of scale gains.
At a lower Neo volumes, they were using already manufactured iPhone Pro chips that were binned due to a bad GPU core, but they reportedly have already blown through that supply.
They also came up with a new process that uses extruded recycled aluminum for the case, which needs much less CNC time to clean up.
Lower margin, but higher volume. Plus a subset of the buyers will subscribe to Apple Music, buy apps from the App Store, etc.
I am surprised that they only do it now, since Mac marketshare growth has stagnated for a long time and it's even hard to grow the iPhone marketshare. Growing the Mac marketshare by making very competitive models is one of the best ways for them to grow and to grow services fees.
I think the problem was Apple management was too obsessed with the iPad, believing they would replace laptops.
For most people in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone is central and the Neo is another useful (but secondary) companion device. Not unlike the Watch and Airpods.
Leaving money on the table, as opposed to losing it. They make a decent buck on the hardware, but could have charged more (though likely would have sold fewer units).
Amazing hardware, 8GB out to keep developers in check with sane memory management, if only Apple themselves cut down on their macOS operating system memory usage, 3GB idle is too much. The obvious out of spec for this laptop is emulated gaming with rosetta and wine, this need minimal 16GB.
I'm writing this from a Macbook Neo. It's goddam fantastic. The best product Apple has put out in years. There simply is not a Windows laptop out there that can compete on speed, price, and build quality all at the same time. The low amount of RAM is simply not noticeable for everyday tasks. The display is fantastic. It feels really solid and great to hold and use.
macOS is far and away the worst thing about it. It's never exactly been a customizable or flexible OS, but Tahoe is also loaded with bugs, has tons of unconfigurable settings (or buries useful things in "accessibility" layers), and is still missing basic features (still no NTFS write support out of the box? really?) for anybody who is not an entry-level user.
But that said, for about $500, I truly don't think anything better exists. One of the best bang-for-buck new electronics I've ever bought.
I've already sold (recommended) 4 of these. I will continue to do so. These are the right computer for the non-creative/non-technical people in your life. HP/Acer/Dell/etc etc have decided to die on the hill of plasticy laptops with alien sounding model numbers. Good riddance.
I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.
I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped.
They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.
>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.
Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.
The monitor stand was always priced to avoid people buying it. I'm yet to see non-custom monitor stand at any of my workplaces, besides hyperspecific situations like a ultrawide monitor.
I don't think it'll dilute the brand at all. The neo still feels like a premium product. Other laptop OEMs are now starting to come out with their competitors, and they are putting 1080p crap display panels on them like they always do. A $599 laptop with a 1080p screen from Dell is going to feel like a cheap piece of junk next to a Neo.
I agree with your comment generally, but note that Dell's $699 competitor they announced this week has has a slightly larger screen than the Neo with similar resolution and brightness but better color coverage.
I haven't had the chance to touch one yet. But the reviews seem to suggest the hardware doesn't "feel" cheap in the way a lot of low priced computers can.
I can't vouch on whether it's true, but that's the brand question here in my opinion. If the hinge was crappy and it felt like it was going to break any second and the keyboard was a return to the butterfly and it was slow and so on, because they wanted to make it cheap, then yeah I think that'd hurt their brand overall.
It's not Lamborghini, but Lotus had the $40,000 Elise a while ago. I don't remember how it worked out in the end, but a lot of people were excited about them at the time.
Sure it's not upgradable but you're completely wrong about repairability, unless you're talking about micro component repair ala Louis Rossmann, which as a whole is going the way of the Dodo.
Having "accidentally" purchased one, I can tell you that doing anything 8GB or RAM on a mac laptop is impossible. I have no idea what people are doing with this laptop. Macs are absolute dogs at 8GB.
The screen is too small, not usable for work, you can buy a 15-inch Linux laptop for the same price. And it might even have replaceable RAM and SSD. Also, 8 Gb is too little, it will become a useless toy several years later. Also, there are just 2 USB ports and no USB-A.
Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.
Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.
Can't say how long the keyboard will last since it's only been out for a few months, but I expect a long time as these are their new (now old) magic keyboards.
As for replacement, the keyboard is comes out as a module, so it just takes about 10-15 minutes of disassembling and putting a new keyboard in. Macbook Neo is one of Apple's best repairable laptops.
I was hoping that this would be a return of the 2015 12" Macbook, but good. I’d love to have a sporty little alternative to my 16" Tankbook for sunny, light work days.
> Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.
Apple has been using a single keyboard across their entire line going back at least 25 years. This one is the same as every other current model, and the teardowns report that replacing it is a breeze.
Personally I prefer having a smaller screen on my laptop, because I can plug it into a monitor when I need a large screen but it makes it more portable.
Still miss the 11" MacBook Air, what a great form factor.
What do you use the USB-A for? I mean, I get it, I still have flash drives with the A-style connector. Is there some other critical item that you use on the regular (and is awkward with the little adapters)?
It was not the normal Apple Mac Pricing to begin with. But let see if they will stick to $599 next year when it comes with 12GB RAM and hopefully double the SSD speed. I wouldn't be surprised it would have similar sales if it was priced $699.
It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
> So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand.
Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!
> It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.
Doesn't that mean precisely that the sales are above Apple's expectations which is everyone in all that matters here.
Well yes. But it is also a mistake that should have avoided and Apple are usually better than this. This suggest they have under estimated for one reason or another.
My guess is that they were extra cautious in case of a flop just before new CEO was appointed.
Not really sure how else to unconfuse your logic here. If Apple's expectations were low where you say they underestimated, then it is exceeding their expectations. Whatever logic Apple used to decide that number doesn't matter. They expected sales to be X, but the demand is >X. I seriously doubt Apple planned this just get an extra news cycle like this. That's something a start up would do.
As a long time user ('91) I am fully aware how blessed we are with Macs' prices today. However, an M5 Air 16G/512 is $1,100 without any discounts and Airs are frequently discounted by $200 at least in the States.
$599 is dangerously close to $1,100. Yes, it's 40ish % diff before any discounts, but the Air is like 3x the value and the Air has much more runway in it. I would not recommend a Neo to anyone in my circles at this price.
They deleted the wrong things, imo. I'd rather it was plastic, with a backlighted kb and TouchID at $400. TouchID by default should be table stakes on Apple hardware today, it's that useful. Then, I'd have 3 right now.
I am just talking about surface level stuff, they thought of cannibalization, repair costs, upgrade ramps (8GB), etc, they are smart.
It's not designed for your circles or for people where paying 40% more is a choice. Many products make no "sense" when you can hand wave the price away.
I'm pretty price insensitive myself. That said, I have an M1 air, and if someone gave me a brand-new air today, I wouldn't switch, because the M1 feels as good as new, and the hassle of switching machines simply isn't worth it.
No doubt a new Neo is faster than my M1 air. So I just can't really imagine how the Neo is 3x the 'value' of a brand-new Air, when I don't value the performance of the M4/M5 (?) Air above the hassle of swapping machines.
I was saying that the Air is 3x value of Neo at being 40% more expensive.
To piggyback on your M1 Air comment, if I hadn't spilled a coke on my own M1 2020 2 years ago, I'd still be using it. It's a legendary machine. Logic board repair would've been $700, so it sits on my shelf. I'm thinking of getting a rotary tool and cutting out the aluminum off of its case for some cyberdeck projects.
Nothing will ever be cheep enough. “599 is dangerously close to 1100”? It’s 1100 is nearly double! I bought the neo for my daughter to use in HS and it’s perfect. Fast, great build and great battery life. Ill be buying a second one for my son, and paying just a bit more for both than the one air you mentioned. You should just buy a chromebook and save the 100-200$ for a plastic laptop.
My guy, I was just pontificating from the comfort of my backlit M5 MBP kb :) I do not need to buy anything. I am set for 3-4 years, but you will be shelling a couple of K$ 1-2 years from now. I think!
Joking and sarcasm aside, I was talking about the value proposition. Pound for pound, I don't think the Neo's MSRP pulls its weight compared to the Air. As in performance for $ ratio. And, I am not looking down at people who do buy it, the more of us, the better.
It will cannibalize the market for better apple products. Mac pro is already gone.
Sort of how $1.99 apps, then $0.99 apps drove the app price to free. Now apps are supported by advertising or trick subscriptions and the good/honest apps are pretty much gone. (except I do like and respect anything from omnigroup)
Fair, but I thought I addressed this in my last paragraph. My gut tells me the Neo sits at an uncomfortable price spot, given its specs, in the line up. Geeks won't buy it as a daily because they know what an Air costs and brings. I am with Christina Warren who more than twice said on MBW that the Neo is not a good fit for students as it’ll run out of air a year or two in (pun intended :)).
The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.
It really just works.
They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement.
These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever the Samsung printer jams.
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