IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.
You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
mikestew 18 minutes ago [-]
Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
ho_schi 6 minutes ago [-]
The last competitor remaining is Lenovo with the ThinkPads pre-installed Linux.
But even Lenovo cripples them:
* You need to be very careful selection CTO builds with the best screen. 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 of of the panel. There is a thick bezel and enough space for a much better camera. And for opening there used to be a dent in the palmrrest, nothing protruding.
* AMD, Intel and Lenovo fail to ship a fanless X13 and T14.
* Lenovo is drowning us in Yogas, Z13 or whatever Legion.
They still have huge advantages (keyboard, maintenance manual, replacement parts, Linux compatibility, much more ports in case of the X14 and T14). Apples keyboards are nowadays “acceptable” but not even comparable to a good ThinkPad keyboard.
PS: By the love of god. Don’t order them with Windows. You are putting 80 to 130 euro right into Microsoft’s stock owner and they will use it to harm Linux. And of course, making Windows even worse. Save that money. Select Linux. Donate the rest (Fasst, GNOME, KDE…) or use it for the better display.
whycome 21 minutes ago [-]
I had a Microsoft surface book 2. The provided charger could not provide enough power to the device when it was under heavy load and there was no higher charger option either. That shit should be illegal. And if the battery for the base/GPU died? You can't use the computer w the gpu even with a charger attached. The device itself could have been a dream and something i could have seen Apple doing : a touchscreen monitor that was also a computer and could be detached from the keyboard/gpu.
pier25 3 minutes ago [-]
For a couple of days I had a Surface Book 1 before returning it. The keyboard was really good but otherwise just a terrible device and experience.
The touch screen was completely useless. Super laggy and sometimes the pen would still believe it was touching the screen even at like 1cm away. Windows 10 had almost no features for touch based interaction. It was just regular Windows with the same microscopic buttons for mouse.
Plus a ton of display ghosting, GPU glitches, etc.
giancarlostoro 56 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, for a while my favorite laptop was the Surface Book 2. Decent specs, does what I want it to. Then Microsoft started going through "Marketing Driven Development" for Windows and its just been downhill for my experience with that laptop. It's not just the marketing trash, the OS has gotten noticeably slow despite me keeping it pretty vanilla. It's downright insulting. As for my desktops, I just smoosh over Windows and install Linux over now, I don't care about anything on Windows enough to keep it. I can play all my games on Linux just fine. I can do all my dev stuff on Linux too.
brewdad 2 minutes ago [-]
I put Linux on an old Surface tablet. Works better than Windows on the same device. The only thing that isn't working under Linux is the camera. Built in extra privacy as a bonus!
whycome 16 minutes ago [-]
lol i just posted about how I was also scorned by MS/Surface Book 2.
What a potentially amazing device. I hated that if you were playing a game or doing many video encodes, the charger (100w?) could not provide enough power -- so your battery drained. And make sure you don't let your base drain completely after being stored for a while -- the main computer won't be able to recognize it to even charge it again. And these were all known faults with no solution for the consumer other than to "buy the newer model." And you could never disable the damn windows update nag screens entirely. And you knew that you'd lose functionality if you upgraded something.
everdrive 39 minutes ago [-]
This is my advice anyone asks me about a laptop. The specs don't matter (at least if you're asking me, it means you don't know computers and will mostly just use a web browser, and therefore nearly any specs on the market will be fine) and the things that do matter are just never on a spec sheet -- keyboard, trackpad, speaker, screen quality. Some stuff won't be discovered until years later: for instance I had an Acer laptop in 2007 which was designed with insufficient cooling, and cooked its thermal paste in about a year or two. Once it was cooked, you couldn't play games or do anything intensive without rebooting the machine. I hadn't thought to research that issue since I figured cooling was a solved problem. But, I'm sure Acer saved a few dollars per unit. (and of course, the screen, trackpad, speaker (yes, singular!) and keyboard were all awful as well.)
Someone 37 minutes ago [-]
> IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models -
I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU.
> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
dylan604 14 minutes ago [-]
Creating SKUs to avoid price matching is still just having one product coming out of the factory. It's just extra space in a database somewhere, so it costs nothing. The PC makers do have to create new physical products for each of those SKUs though. So it's apples and oranges here
pxeboot 24 minutes ago [-]
> I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
mikestew 12 minutes ago [-]
And unless you looked it up, you'd never noticed the difference (save comparing the two side-by-side). Whereas the cheap laptop requires one to know the difference so you can get the right driver, or other jackery because your WiFi card was a mid-year change. It reminds of me of mid-year production changes on cars, where VINs XXX-YYY need part number ZZZ, but VINs AAA-BBB need part number CCC.
imglorp 20 minutes ago [-]
The epitome of "sku engineering" is mattresses, to keep consumers from comparison shopping. Retail HATES competition and informed shoppers.
cromka 10 hours ago [-]
> It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
ZiiS 51 minutes ago [-]
To me clear the Neo dose not have a glass, haptic trackpad.
selectodude 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
hutattedonmyarm 11 hours ago [-]
I recently helped a friend picking a new laptop. Just going through the options at the websites of manufacturers was a nightmare. Huge amount of choices, shitty filtering, separated into multiple product lines were I often enough had no idea what separated the lines from each other
drcongo 46 minutes ago [-]
If they're your friend, why didn't you just tell them to get a Mac?
retired 10 minutes ago [-]
15 years ago this comment would have been a troll.
Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
gabrielhidasy 17 minutes ago [-]
Why would I inflict that to my friends?
mastermage 11 hours ago [-]
Inarguably one of the great things done by apple is the rather easily overseeable models. And no mattter the processing power in the models you get a rather great experience from the haptics, audio and visual in all of them.
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
officeplant 9 minutes ago [-]
At the same time with effort they can run a surprising amount of games. Heroic Launcher makes it a bit easier to wrangle the game dev toolkit (riding off the back of work from the whisky dev before they quit dev work from all the complaining users).
I had Cyberpunk 2077 running on a M1 Macbook Air almost two years before the MacPort came at a very playable 30fps (900p Medium settings). Although I did have to use thermal pads to heatsink it to my metal laptop stand and added a slow spinning fan for good measure.
It's not perfect, but I've also spent a lot of time only buying games with no road blocks to running on Mac/Linux.
remuskaos 11 hours ago [-]
I've only recently gotten a MacBook after using Linux Pretty much exclusively for over twenty years. And I have to say I'm really surprised how much I like it. For gaming it's all right, but not great. Factorio works but not much else.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
deaux 8 hours ago [-]
> Factorio works but not much else.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
Oh i have a steam deck and am in the process of migrating to linux latest when Win 12 hits. Just some problems with some software like Fusion 360.
I do like Linux alot.
fxtentacle 8 hours ago [-]
It really is a pity that there’s no working business model around open source maintenance for software like wine. I’m the guy who fixed the wine bug that blocked new iTunes versions, because I like to keep my music in iTunes for easy iPhone sync. I also have Fusion 360 working flawlessly in wine, but the setup process required multiple sessions stepping manually with a debugger to avoid crashes and packaging that as scripts and/or just documenting all the little issues and their fixes and keeping that up to date with fusion updates would be serious work. So nobody is doing it.
timcobb 41 minutes ago [-]
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models
and as far as I know, they do this on purpose!
ryandrake 4 hours ago [-]
> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
Don't forget, one is going to be the "Business" version and the other identical one is going to be the "Consumer" version. God help whoever buys a "business" category laptop for personal use. The world will come to an end!
softfalcon 1 hours ago [-]
This... so much this.
> too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?"
I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
I run both PC's and Mac devices in our house, we use what fills the job. Recommending PC laptops for family members feels like a total crapshoot though. Every time, I do all I can to find the right device for their needs and there are just so many trade-offs. Maybe I get all the right specs, ensure it doesn't thermal throttle, keyboard/trackpad are A-OK... but the webcam is trash. Ooof... now Mom is complaining about how no one can see her properly at bridge club call.
I brought up how the Neo might do to the PC industry what the Air did to Ultrabooks back in the day. The amount of hate I got on YouTube/Verge with copy-paste, "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" was expected, but also disappointing. There is clearly a market segment happy to continue to put up with the mess that Dell/Lenovo are selling (anything but a Mac).
Wild how tribal we are to our corporate computer overlords.
The era where something like Framework with its fully customizable, repairable, modular laptops becomes the standard can't come soon enough.
For the time being, I'll let Apple/PC continue to duke it out. Hope some competition helps in the long run. :shrug:
hackyhacky 47 minutes ago [-]
> I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
Yep.
I'm a long-time ThinkPad user, but I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from the ThinkPad E series or ThinkPad L series or ThinkPad X series, and their website certainly isn't going to tell me. I keep on buying T series because I'm honestly afraid of trying anything else.
To say nothing of Lenovo's non-ThinkPad laptop brands, including Ideapad, Legion, Yoga, ThinkBook (!), and LOQ.
I really don't know what laptop to recommend to a friend. One friend showed me specs for an Asus they found at Best Buy, and it looked okay, so I said "It's probably fine." Turns out it was shoddily made and overpriced: they had to sent it back not once but twice because the wifi and then the camera didn't work out of the box, then a few months later the hinge broke.
I am not a Mac fan, but it's easy to recommend them because you at least know they are universally well-built machines.
thewebguyd 31 minutes ago [-]
> "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!"
And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of.
The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry.
If you aren't a gamer, there is zero reason at this point to consider any other laptop besides a macbook. Apple now has one for every price point. This neo is going to destroy the consumer PC space. Dell, HP, Acer are probably sweating right now.
whalesalad 3 minutes ago [-]
It gets worse when you look at Intel/AMD's CPU naming schemes. Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Intel Core Ultra 9 285H. Clown show all around.
rramadass 10 hours ago [-]
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
efficax 32 minutes ago [-]
Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale. It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine without killing the browser, for example.
kccqzy 21 minutes ago [-]
> It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine
If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
zparky 4 minutes ago [-]
> The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors
If you ask me, all web devs should be forced to work on 4 Gb machines.
This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.
whycome 6 minutes ago [-]
I have a macbook pro m1 with 8gb ram and it has been surprisingly good for all kinds of work. And I've had it since about 2020.
nicole_express 30 minutes ago [-]
I can definitely see why the Asus CEO would want to put it in that box, though.
thesuitonym 25 minutes ago [-]
Content consumption definitely seems like the wrong term, it seems perfectly cromulent for let's say a college student, or an executive.
cryptos 10 hours ago [-]
Windows reputation is declining, so the operating system might be the actual crisis. Linux with modern desktops (e.g. Gnome 3) might fill the gap, but the market is far from broad adoption. Promoting and improving Linux desktop and apps would be a long endeavour, but betting only on Windows which degrades to a cloud and AI advertising surface might be fatal.
NoPicklez 12 hours ago [-]
As someone who buys Asus motherboards when he builds PC's, it hasn't been a shock for me as an owner of a Macbook for the last 18 years.
I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
vrighter 11 hours ago [-]
all of my normal pcs served me well for many many years. They don't get slower naturally, it was windows getting ever more bloated. I put linux on an 8 year old computer and it just flies again
fxtentacle 8 hours ago [-]
Fully agree. When I have to use Windows from time to time, I’m always surprised by how laggy the cursor feels even on hardware that can do 8K VR just fine.
drnick1 25 minutes ago [-]
> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality.
I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled gardens with app stores, excessive power over developers and users). MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games).
I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. If the stock OS can't be replaced for one reason or another, it's dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
pa7ch 21 minutes ago [-]
Its a shame there isn't more goodwill for some companies to bankroll a project like asahi linux. Keeping up with reverse engineering apple silicon seems like a very large task.
Teever 22 minutes ago [-]
How do you reconcile the fact that that Apple will sell millions of these devices without a compatible Linux distribution shipping for years if ever with your claim about it being DOA?
Like sure it’s DOA to you, but in what world does that really matter when it’s going to sell so well?
nicoburns 42 minutes ago [-]
> The Neo charges faster if you plug it into a more powerful power adapter, in either USB-C port.
The fact that the "usb 2" port works for (fast) charging is a big win. That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time.
blacksmith_tb 32 minutes ago [-]
I think that makes it a non-standard implementation though (I agree it's certainly more practical for the user), sounds like it's usb-c pd but with nerfed data, an odd choice that feels like it would actually have cost more to develop than just adding two identical usb-c 3.x ports...
nicoburns 23 minutes ago [-]
I suspect the limitation is that the SOC doesn't have the IO bandwidth to support two ports at usb 3 speeds (remembering that the SOC was designed for iphones which physically only have one port).
Someone 32 minutes ago [-]
> That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time.
For some use cases, you can do that with a single USB port, too. For example, a single USB cable connected to a monitor can both send video and charge the laptop.
cromka 10 hours ago [-]
Just imagine what Apple would do to the market if they also offered a full Linux support, but not Windows... They'd probably own some 70% of Linux market outright and also double its overall size overnight.
eloisant 51 minutes ago [-]
They already cannibalized a lot of Linux users, developers mainly when they released MacOS X around year 2000.
Suddenly you could have a Unix, with pretty much the same CLI as Linux but without all the supported hardware/driver issues. Laptop sleep in particular was pretty finicky.
If MacOS didn't pick a Unix/BSD base, I'm pretty sure all the tech companies running Mac would be on Linux.
throw0101d 14 minutes ago [-]
> They already cannibalized a lot of Linux users, developers mainly when they released MacOS X around year 2000.
Apple wants to make money with services, however, and buying more devices in their ecosystem. Full Linux support would counteract the lock-in.
beAbU 9 hours ago [-]
If apple came out with their own linux distro, with open drivers and a mainline kernel... A girl can dream!
starkparker 36 minutes ago [-]
The memory that XNU and Darwin are technically open-source projects is a curse that brings one only suffering.
kylec 36 minutes ago [-]
I feel like Apple wouldn't want to make full Linux work on their hardware, but they could enable their Darwin kernel to emulate Linux syscalls and provide a way to boot into a mode that basically loads the kernel and whatever Linux shell you want
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
This path is already taken and it didn't sell Apple hardware in masses.
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
kingstnap 8 hours ago [-]
1996 is not now. This comparision makes little to no sense.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Indeed, Apple from 1996 would not released Tahoe, most likely.
We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.
fsflover 8 hours ago [-]
> difficult installation process and the significant performance costs
So it was a failure in implementation.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
And the Apple that delivered Tahoe will do better?
cromka 6 hours ago [-]
All they would need is to provide complete DTBs and some drivers, no need to write a new OS from scratch.
GeekyBear 13 hours ago [-]
PC Magazine came to the same conclusion:
> Apple pulled off what I thought wasn't possible. The MacBook Neo is poised to set the budget-laptop world on fire as a $599 system that's better-built and sharper than anything else at or below its price.
> even the cheapest MacBook Neo is good enough to be the go-to Apple laptop for a lot of people. Actually, not just the go-to Apple laptop; the Neo’s hardware simultaneously embarrasses an entire class of affordable (and even far pricier) Windows laptops, as well as just about any Chromebook. And the thing runs on an iPhone chip.
(We've since merged the threads, but the pcmag.com link is in the toptext above)
hulitu 11 hours ago [-]
> MacBook Neo Review: No Other Budget Laptop Can Compete
> PC Magazine came to the same conclusion:
> Similar to the Verge:
Apple pays well.
Budget laptop at 600 Euros ? And can't compete having a tablet processor, 8 MB RAM, 256 MB SSD. 2 USB ports (one i presume used for charging) ?
Yeah. It really can't compete with better options.
stetrain 11 minutes ago [-]
It definitely would have competitive issues with 8MB RAM and a 256MB SSD.
Knocking it for having a tablet processor means you haven't actually been paying attention to Apple's in-house processor development.
akagr 10 hours ago [-]
Go beyond the specs, though. Which windows laptops have similar combination of all metal build with tight tolerances, a display hinge that doesn’t wobble, a nice keyboard and even close to similar feeling trackpad at this 600 dollar price point? Most non haptic trackpads are dive board designs where you can only press the lower part of it because they hinge from the top, whereas as Neo’s trackpad is completely floating and can be pressed even on the very top. Also, one of main target audiences - students - can have this for much cheaper with education pricing.
If quality and in-hand feel matters to you at all, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more well rounded laptop than a MacBook at any price point.
lostmsu 7 hours ago [-]
As I said in another thread $650 HP OmniBook 5 on Ryzen is faster, more RAM, feels great to use, and I don't have to deal with MacOS!
wlesieutre 5 minutes ago [-]
To save anyone else trying to figure out what computer lostmsu is talking about, at least going by the current prices on HP's website (not MSRP):
HP OmniBook 5 Laptop Next Gen AI 16-fb0037nr
If I were shopping for a cheap laptop I would have given up and bought a Macbook Neo before I found that one.
tuesdaynight 5 hours ago [-]
IMO, there's nothing comparable to MacBook Air in its price range if you are an average user. Neo is even better in that aspect. The model you cited sounds better if you are planning to use Linux and are computer literate. But if you just want something that is good (not perfect) at everything usual, a MacBook is a no-brainer.
lostmsu 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think MacOS is better than Windows, so I disagree with that take.
2 hours ago [-]
lukevp 11 hours ago [-]
What better options?
bdbdbdb 11 hours ago [-]
*Gb not Mb
ExoticPearTree 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe other manufacturers will actually stop making crappy hardware that feels like its taped together?
MengerSponge 35 minutes ago [-]
Hardware is hard, and Apple's scale lets them make things that are nice while still maintaining their margins.
More importantly, they need to find an alternative to Windows. A $10,000 computer wouldn't fix that dogshit.
ExoticPearTree 10 hours ago [-]
There's really nothing in between. If ChromeOS would have been an alternative, maybe more Chromebooks would have been sold.
It comes down to Microsoft not doubling down on "let's make Windows as annoying as possible" (with ads, with telemetry that can't be turned off).
fragmede 9 hours ago [-]
Depends what you want to do. ChromeOS is pretty great at certain things.
nottorp 27 minutes ago [-]
So the force touch stuff has also been available on Apple laptop trackpads?
Damned if i ever noticed, and all my laptops since like 2013 have been Apple.
I knew I had it on one of my previous iPhones but there it was an annoyance because I never knew what was going to happen on a touch.
pragmatic 6 hours ago [-]
But you’re stuck with MacOS.
I can’t stand it and every update makes it worse.
Been running popos abs everything I can and it’s petty nice.
Installed it on a new LG Gram and everything works including fingerprint reader. Is my favorite laptop and my old Mac sits gathering dust,
voidmain0001 23 minutes ago [-]
From work, I have a Thinkpad X1 gen 13 and it's awesome. Super lightweight, and great power. But, when I tried Linux a few months ago its hardware was still too bleeding edge. Things may be better with kernel v7 on the way. I like the Gram as a personal device so may I know what model Gram you have?
Kostic 22 minutes ago [-]
For now. These will be pretty cool Linux machines if Asahi starts supporting them at some point.
Carstairs 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah I got one from work. I was quite excited to get one as macos is supposed to be a paragon of design but after using it I'm so glad I didn't spend my own money on it as it's been a total disappointment. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't want to launch it off the roof.
FeloniousHam 2 hours ago [-]
I use it everyday, I love it. Native unix, great apps and ecosystem.
drcongo 35 minutes ago [-]
It's amazing how often people who post on here about hating macOS have only just got a Mac for the first time and simply can't be bothered to learn, or hate that the keyboard shortcuts are different, or desperately want their OS level adverts back or something. It's lazy.
alistairSH 29 minutes ago [-]
MacOS was the paragon of design 5-10 years ago. Sadly, Apple is subject to enshittification just like MS and others.
smackeyacky 11 hours ago [-]
My daughter just ordered one of these. She’s a student (not stem) and her ancient 8Gb MacBook Air with an intel processor was still serving well but the battery has become unuseable and her keyboard is becoming flaky.
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
ThePowerOfFuet 10 hours ago [-]
The keyboard issue was probably caused by the battery, which can be replaced, and the keyboard would have likely returned to normal after the battery replacement.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
smackeyacky 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting I will look at replacing the battery if that’s a possibility. Thanks!
greatgib 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wappieslurkz 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think you actually tried it.
bdbdbdb 11 hours ago [-]
600 is a bargain for a MacBook, but I can't see the public windows users switching en masse. Most people who buy cheap windows laptops do so because
1) they need to replace a broken laptop and want to pay the lowest amount possible
2) they don't want to learn some new thing
600 might seem budget, but it's out of budget for most people. And my guess is PC manufacturers will retaliate against this by cutting prices just a little to drop under that 600 price point for mid range ryzens, with more ram and space.
Any family members I've helped shop for computers only care about how much space it has, how cheap it is, and will it struggle to run things like the last one. As it sits the MacBook is more money for less gigabytes
basch 2 hours ago [-]
The thing about "switching" is you just need to capture the next generation. Kids who have an iPhone 17e. Then go off to college.
lm28469 10 hours ago [-]
> 600 might seem budget, but it's out of budget for most people.
Out of budget for my parents but I'll pay the difference myself. It's just painful to see them use their pile of shit $300 laptop that can barely open a text editor, sounds like a jet engine and has about 45 minutes of battery life.
The only haptic feedback they get if the entire fucking thing creaking as soon as you lightly touch it.
They've been through at least 5 of them since I bought my 2015 mbp, which is still working fine in every aspects
kreco 22 minutes ago [-]
The funny thing is that it would do the same for double the price.
You need to spend a ridiculous amount of time on research because the producer itself is selling very different product (very different quality) from a year to another.
I wish a "brand" would be consistant but it's not 99% of the time.
tim333 9 hours ago [-]
That's an important point - the been through 5 of them. The cost or running a $600 mac is probably similar to running $300 pc laptops that pack up.
My dad the other month, in need of a computer with webcam and ideally portable, bought some $400-500 HP 17" laptop. He was so proud of it, proud of buying a piece of hardware without asking me, and rather than tell him the truth, I nodded and said "yeah this is neat".
The monitor is awful. Like, the horrible way it changes color and brightness depending on exact viewing angle is sickening; I am shocked California hasn't declared it illegal. It feels cheap, keyboard is cheap, who knows what the battery life is.
If the Apple Neo were available then, and he had asked what to buy, I would have instantly told him to get one.
MarkusWandel 1 hours ago [-]
"It's a real Mac" - I get that!
I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.
tfehring 40 minutes ago [-]
I thought I was so clever for buying one of those things for like $190 and putting Lubuntu on it to make it usable. It worked - but the joke was still on me when it died a year later.
system7rocks 27 minutes ago [-]
I notice they are sold out at MicroCenter - I was hoping to go look at one in person today.
timpera 47 minutes ago [-]
Does anyone know if it runs Windows 11 well? It seems like the Parallels app has not been tested by reviewers so far. This could make a great Windows machine.
giobox 20 minutes ago [-]
Given you only have 8gb of RAM to share between MacOS and the Windows VM, running a Windows 11 VM in Parallels is not a great usecase for this machine.
fxtentacle 7 hours ago [-]
The legacy PC makers are lucky that Ubuntu doesn’t work on this, or else they’d face even more competition. By now, everyone hates Windows. And I’d wager some people hate it enough to be willing to switch to whatever works and is halfway ad-free.
pjmlp 12 hours ago [-]
All these PC can't compete reviews are based on US prices, outside it is ridiculous expensive for a 8 GB laptop.
jsheard 46 minutes ago [-]
I can't be the only one who remembers the celebration 18 months ago when Apple stopped selling Macs with 8GB of memory... only for 8GB to suddenly be excused again when the Neo arrived. Perhaps it's not the same people but the general vibe is giving me whiplash.
kreco 18 minutes ago [-]
8GB is aweful. If you don't do a single task.
But nice for Apple. Millions of replacement on the Neo 16GB release next year I guess.
jsheard 16 minutes ago [-]
My money is on 12GB in the second gen since that's what the A19 Pro iPhones have. That would still be a decent step up though.
keyle 11 hours ago [-]
Note that 8GB of ram on a Mac plays out a lot more different than 8GB on a PC.
I work professionally on a Macbook Air 16GB now and I have quite a few docker images and services running bare metal, + browser, vscode etc. on top. Not a problem until I start loading up some LLMs.
The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
If anything, I'm much more bound by the CPU limitations and the eco-cores than the memory.
On a PC, I wouldn't think about less than 32GB for a dev pc.
If I had a fulltime gig programming C, I'd even say I could work on this A14 8GB device. Why not? It's as powerful as a 10 year old powerful machine; probably. Or in that ballpark.
Rohansi 17 minutes ago [-]
> The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).
Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.
Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.
pjmlp 10 hours ago [-]
PC work just fine with 16 GB, that is coping with Apple limitations.
Turbo C also worked just fine with 640 KB in MS-DOS, but then again MS-DOS wasn't full of Electron crap.
foldr 5 hours ago [-]
There are lots of reviews on YouTube of people demoing the performance of the Neo in typical non-power-user usage scenarios (multiple apps, lots of browser tabs, etc.) It works perfectly fine for typical consumer usage.
tim333 9 hours ago [-]
I've had an 8GB M1 since they came out and had almost no problems with memory shortage. The only thing is Firefox sometimes gets in a loop and takes up 20GB+ doing nothing much and you have to close it but that's not really the laptop's fault. You can have programs use >8GB because it swaps to the SSD very well.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Almost no problem seems that there is indeed a problem.
ZiiS 43 minutes ago [-]
I love Firefox but my 32GB MBP and 64GB desktop have both had it run out of memory.
TiredOfLife 4 hours ago [-]
Eastern europe here. At mobile operator that offers laptops for 2 year no interest loans. The only laptops that are cheaper than Neo are essentially atom garbage with crappy screens. And those that cost about the same are also 8gb ones.
dagmx 13 hours ago [-]
I was watching this video and it’s pretty impressive what can be done on this spec machine.
He opens 50+ apps at once while working in Final Cut and Lightroom. Obviously anyone doing those full time would benefit from more resources but I think this is going to be enough for a big chunk of the population, and will be more appealing than the windows alternatives.
justsomehnguy 11 hours ago [-]
I still remember how Apple fans run around singing praises what their 8GB M1 absolutely kicked ass of Intel Macs with 16GB (and even more). Only to quietly replace them with a model with more RAM next year or some even way earlier than that.
I can open even 500 apps on any laptop. This is what swap for. But with only 8GB you are getting into the swap territory very fast because you need almost half of it for the OS and video memory.
It did/does absolutely kick ass and 16GB is better. They’re not at odds with each other :D
dagmx 2 hours ago [-]
More RAM is better. But doesn’t negate that it’s still very usable. Did you even bother to watch the video for responsiveness before commenting? Also it was a couple years after the transition to arm that Apple bumped the minimum RAM they shipped their laptops with.
jackhalford 14 hours ago [-]
> Given Apple's historically very premium pricing, launching such an affordable product is certainly a shock to the entire market
No? Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1, this one is just even cheaper. I thought PC execs were asleep at the wheel but not this bad.
alwillis 3 hours ago [-]
> Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1
I wouldn’t "way cheaper".
A baseline Neo with 256GB SSD is $599 vs the first M1 MacBook Air with 256GB SSD was $999 ($1,251.09 in 2026 dollars)
A Neo with 512GB SSD is $699 vs the M1 MacBook Air with 512GB SSD was $1249--that's $1,568.38 in 2026 dollars.
So this is a big deal; the Neo is the first Apple Silicon MacBook where the starting price is less than $999.
pupppet 12 hours ago [-]
Microsoft will respond to this by furiously adding more garbage to Windows.
theshrike79 11 hours ago [-]
"We need to put Copilot into more places!" - Satya Nadella most likely
bdbdbdb 11 hours ago [-]
I've yet to meet anyone who wants AI added to anything. If they released a version of windows+office tomorrow that was "guaranteed free of AI" it would be their top seller
ryandrake 4 hours ago [-]
But, then all Microsoft's top managers, who apparently have bonuses based on how much AI is shoved down our throats, wouldn't get those bonuses. Nobody's cares whether or not something is a top seller because their incentives are obviously aligned toward cramming AI.
commandersaki 7 hours ago [-]
Needs more javascript for native functions in the OS.
ryandrake 4 hours ago [-]
Not Asus, but I have a crappy Lenovo plastic laptop that was around that price range when new, and it's horrible. The hinges have so much resistance that the garbage display panel flexes when you try to open the lid. The junk trackpad is the size of a credit card, and requires some amount of force to actually pick up the fact that your finger is moving on it. The SDCard reader has failed twice (I'm on my third). It's just a piece of garbage and is even then it's about middle of the road when it comes to PC laptop quality. And outside of specific defects, (and this is what's endemic throughout the PC laptop ecosystem) the build quality just subjectively feels like it's barely held together with tape and glue. Like what you'd expect from a toy from an old cracker jack box. These OEMs have been shipping absolute trash for years, and it's about time the industry got a shock.
bob1029 12 hours ago [-]
Looks like the PC laptop market is going to have to stop being bad on purpose. I hope this causes significant pain for vendors like Dell, Microsoft and Asus.
I don't see any way they can get out of this situation without seriously improving the UX of their products. Windows itself is likely implicated here too.
JSR_FDED 10 hours ago [-]
What's shocking is that this is a shock to the PC Industry.
rurban 13 hours ago [-]
I've used an MacAir with 8GB ram starting at 700€ for years, writing and testing compilers. This was until the macOS and butterfly keyboard desasters, which made me go back to 450€ ThinkPad Ryzen laptops with Fedora, upgraded to 64GB RAM.
My wife is using a fancy new air for 2500€, which is way better. But I still think of the good old MacAir times, they'll try to bring up again.
etothet 7 hours ago [-]
“I’ll just say it: I think I’m done with iPads. Why bother when Apple is now making a crackerjack Mac laptop that starts at just $600?”
I’m curious to see this machine in person, but I’d bet the an iPad is still the best large device in Apple’s ecosystem for anything that benefits from viewing in portrait mode.
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
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.
etchalon 46 minutes ago [-]
I look forward to the insane amount of bloatware HP will add to hit a 599 price point.
dmitrygr 56 minutes ago [-]
> Because the Neo’s only camera-in-use indicator is in the menu bar, that seems obviously possible to circumvent via software.
Not as obvious as the author implies. Apple has some docs out, IIRC, explaining how it is implemented. Worth a read...
VerifiedReports 11 hours ago [-]
Windows is such an offensive, defect-ridden pile of shit now that every PC maker should be blaming Microsoft for their inability to compete with the Neo.
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
nubinetwork 11 hours ago [-]
Dell has been pushing Linux for like 20 years? I don't remember which distro, probably fedora or ubuntu...
greatgib 9 hours ago [-]
They have a very limited set of choices.
I would have bought more if you were not too limited in term of choice in their inventory.
At some point the XPS 13 dev edition was the almost perfect laptop. Then they ruined it with the following generations of it.
franktankbank 3 hours ago [-]
I got an xps long time back that had the option to pay extra for ubuntu. I'm not going to pay to plug in a usb and I also get the joy of erasing a windows install from the face of this earth.
BoredPositron 10 hours ago [-]
It's an option for maybe 2 SKUs... hardly pushing anything.
ZiiS 40 minutes ago [-]
That you couldn't actual order; at least as a UK SME.
Marazan 37 minutes ago [-]
It's good but it's no Asus eee901
shrubble 12 hours ago [-]
It’s really an iPad running MacOS instead of iOS; the question is whether people want that.
I’m not the target market since I require Linux compatibility but I realize that is not a necessity in the market.
musicale 12 hours ago [-]
The iPad has a touchscreen, supports Apple Pencil, etc. but the observation that the iPad has been Apple's "budget" computing platform for a while is spot on. It is interesting that they have reformulated it into a Mac laptop (and also that A-series iPhone chips offer M1-class performance.)
Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.
exidy 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's a useful distinction. I wouldn't describe my car as "really a vacuum cleaner", despite them both having an electric motor.
The form factor is the defining characteristic, because that informs how people use it. The CPU does not.
frankacter 13 hours ago [-]
I’m a bit confused about who this article is really for. The MacBook Neo starts at $600 so when I read:
“MacBook Neo is built on an iPhone chip—the A18 Pro. It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
and that:
“It’s merely the right kind of performance for anybody who wants to browse the internet or stream video.”
...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Standard HDMI/USB‑C video out for external displays
So I can definitely see the appeal of the Neo for people who just want an inexpensive way into macOS, but the claim that “no other budget laptop can compete.” doesn't track.
Maybe it should have been "The least expensive Macbook yet, but that comes with significant downsides."
theshrike79 11 hours ago [-]
MKBHD said it best: If you're looking at the reviews of the product on tech youtube channels or tech news sites - it's not the laptop for you.
As for your comparisons: My aunt doesn't need a terabyte of storage or a Ryzen 7 5700U, she needs 15+ hours of battery life because the laptop is going to live next to her spot on the couch and she most likely can't remember to plug it in every night.
Also the first laptop is from a reputable brand called NIAKUN. They must have amazing customer service and unbeatable warranties, right? =) And they certainly will exist in 12 months when you go look for the brand on Amazon and won't be replaced by another random set of letters in all caps selling the exact same product?
The HP is on sale, it's MSRP is $699 and for some weird fucking reason has the numpad on it, making the whole keyboard wonky. Who wants that on a laptop?
And the final thing, as with all price-forward comparisons: build quality. We need an objective standard measurement for chassis and keyboard flex, the ability to open the lid with one finger, the amount of creaking and squeaking said laptop will do in normal use and how hot and loud it gets in your lap when doing light browsing.
bdbdbdb 11 hours ago [-]
Anyone doing accounts and data entry wants a numpad. My dad recently damaged his laptop keyboard. I gave him a spare usb keyboard, and he still went out and bought a new keyboard just for the numpad. There's a reason pc makers keep stuffing those lopsided monstrosities in there
theshrike79 10 hours ago [-]
Anyone doing data entry with a numpad will also want a proper one, not a squishy laptop one.
But they're clearly not the majority of the people - the rest of us have to live with a lopsided keyboard because a few people for some reason do data entry on a laptop keyboard.
commandersaki 7 hours ago [-]
Ah the classic NIAKUN, what we expect from brand name quality: awesome keyboard layout (love a number pad that smashes into the arrow keys), great resolution (1920x1080 so good for 2026!). I'm sure the speakers are state of the art for the form factor, gets amazing battery life (love me max 4-5 hrs on moderate usage), and of course can't forget the plastic body.
I'm sure a similar story can be said about the HP.
If you didn't detect the sarcasm, a laptop is much more than cpu, memory, and storage; it'd be short-sighted to only fixate on this trio. PC laptops compromise on pretty much everything and usually do everything poorly, including CPU (since apple silicon Macs are much better performance per watt).
Then there's the whole aspect of Apple support for both hardware AND software, something no PC vendor can provide.
drcongo 25 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't even let someone connect that thing to my home network, let alone pay money for one.
glimshe 5 hours ago [-]
I was about to say the same thing. How can people compare Apple to a NIAKUN throwaway laptop? I'm no Mac fanboy - I use Windows, Linux and Mac at home. I find MacOS somewhat annoying, but as a Internet browsing laptop, I'd much rather pay for the Mac Neo than "NIAKUN".
PS: I wrote this on my Macbook Air.
JSR_FDED 10 hours ago [-]
> It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks
The latest reviews are showing that's not really the case
TiredOfLife 4 hours ago [-]
Single thread performance on the Neo (important to web browsing) is literally 2-3 times faster than those laptops
apimade 12 hours ago [-]
Total cost of ownership.
I’d give my entire family these ahead of Windows laptops any day.
hulitu 12 hours ago [-]
> Total cost of ownership.
Mister Gates, is that you ?
sockaddr 12 hours ago [-]
Your amazon links are broken. But I think you're missing the point of this thing. This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone, does all the things their school needs them to do in a browser, and doesn't come with a complete dogsh*t OS, and isn't of dubious quality like an HP or a "NIAKUN", whatever that is.
Now the color options, that's a tragedy.
frankacter 12 hours ago [-]
>Your amazon links are broken.
Thanks. Fixed.
>This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone
That was my conclusion to my comment in my original. The title of "no other budget laptop can compete" is not just sensationalized, it is factually wrong. It should have been "the least expensive macbook yet comes with a catch"
"No other budget laptop can compete on offering MacOS" is certainly a correct statement, but it's not a particularly interesting one. If they're missing the point, it's because it was exaggerated to the point of not being recognizable.
x0x0 51 minutes ago [-]
And for their kids sick and tired of trying to help them fix Window's incompetence. You're into Dell for at least $800 for anything approaching an actually usable laptop. This is definitely my mom's next laptop.
kasabali 8 hours ago [-]
> 15.6"
eww
atoav 12 hours ago [-]
I would ask the opposite. For years now for most of my family even a Raspberry Pi 3B+ 3ould be enough. 95% of people use their machine to run a web browser, that easily ran on hardware that was old 20 years ago.
frankacter 11 hours ago [-]
Agreed, which is why a $600 price point on a "budget laptop" targeting users running a web browser seems quite over priced.
tim333 8 hours ago [-]
The thing with laptops in my experience is a) they last ~6 years (macs at any rate) so that's ~$100/year or 27c a day and b) people spend a lot of time on them, hours a day often. Is it really worth cutting back much on that when it's like 1/10th the cost of getting a cup of coffee?
atoav 10 hours ago [-]
Well but that's the thing. It is priced like a phone for exactly the kind of person who would spend 600 bucks on a phone. I don't think this is a coincidence.
In terms of performance the raw compute people have in their pockets nowadays surpasses what they typically need by magnitudes for a while now. Granted: programmers and tech companies find new ways of wasting that compute on features that people ultimately do not need, so they may need that the compute so things feel snappy, but if I think about what my parents do on their devices you could easily enable them to do theirs tasks with far less. They are essentially doing the same as ca. 2006 with pictures and videos being higher fidelity & resolution and websites running hundred thousand lines of javascript being the main difference.
foldr 4 hours ago [-]
> It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
This is false. The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance. Most people would see no noticeable benefit to a faster CPU. Especially with a fanless design, the additional cores of a comparable M-series chip would give you better burst performance for some workloads, but possibly not much improvement in sustained performance.
starkparker 34 minutes ago [-]
> The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance.
> In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes. Both the M1 Air and the new M5 Air (4.46 GHz) are able to sustain their peak clock speeds indefinitely in single-core mode.
Mawr 9 hours ago [-]
> ...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
Laughable. Seriously, how long has it been since the M1 Air dropped? And we're still this clueless?
> For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Awesome spec dump. Now, what's the real life usage battery life of that laptop like? Oh? Yeah, thought so.
Nobody buys a list of specs, they buy a set of capabilities. And the Neo is capable of supporting normal usage for 12h+ on battery. Go ahead and link me some alternative laptops that can do that, with comparable performance of course — which is on par or better than the original M1 Air mind you.
Killer move by Apple, and I'm shocked there's still so much ignorance around.
tim333 8 hours ago [-]
The Windows ones sound good for running games. Wouldn't suit me as I don't game on them and want battery life for reading.
I own one. It lives long enough not to get bothered by charging.
commandersaki 5 hours ago [-]
Looked up more info on this laptop, my cursory thoughts:
plastic chassis: gross.
keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
no inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
limited size trackpad, not to mention a PC trackpad: yuck
display looks good and is matte: nice
fans: gross
usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array: yuck
supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
But at least it seems to have comparable battery life to the neo.
lostmsu 3 hours ago [-]
> plastic chassis: gross.
I don't care, it holds, it is not slippery (a huge problem with my current phone with metal body). What exactly is better with metal?
> keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
I would prefer one without, but that's just a matter of preference here. The layout is good. In fact, it's the keyboard that mostly makes me feel good whenever I use this laptop.
> inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
In theory I agree, but for some reason that did not feel problematic on this particular keyboard.
> limited size trackpad
?
> not to mention a PC trackpad
To each their own
> fans: gross
Never heard them, not even sure they are there.
> usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array
Sounds like a minor issue
> supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
I prefer "bricks" on the wire to "bricks" on the plug like Apple does because it does not take 10 slots on a power strip.
ozlikethewizard 9 hours ago [-]
When did $600 become budget?
mixmastamyk 2 minutes ago [-]
Recently after another round of 30-40% inflation.
JumpCrisscross 27 minutes ago [-]
When it lasts 5 to 10 years. I’m still using my 2020 MacBook Pro, and figure I’ll get another half decade out of it. That’s <$200/year. The Neo could be a <$100/year laptop, which puts it in the same class as $200 shitbooks that crap out after two or three years.
Schmerika 3 hours ago [-]
Would you be surprised if I told you that $600 is slightly under 11 days of the average rent [0]?
Is that more rents are insane though, british perspective but 600 ~ £450, £450 is still around a third of an average rent, but I'd consider a budget laptop those in the £2-350 range. For the average user £400+ (so $500+) is decidely midrange purely on the virtue that its the middle of the range for general use laptops (being £150-1000 really, anything more than that and you're entering decent gaming/workstation specs).
"Of course, it's not that it cannot do all the work, but considering user experience and those hardware limitations, the experience, I think, differs significantly from mainstream products..."
I worked in retail for a decade, a lot of that was selling computers. The vast majority of what people buy computers for could be done a toaster. You don't exactly need top end specs to browse the internet, reply to emails, and write the occasional document.
red-iron-pine 4 hours ago [-]
the average user could probably do most of their computing on a $150 cell phone and a raspberry pi 4.
gaming is a different beast, but there are xboxes, ps5s, steam boxen, etc.
scuff3d 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly. That's why the comment was seemed arranged to me.
For the most part, there's gamers/editors and a few other groups who need a lot of horsepower. They're generally gonna have decent hardware. Then there's everyone else, who wouldn't notice a difference regardless of hardware (to a point). There just isn't a whole lot of middle ground.
vrighter 14 hours ago [-]
electron...
rf15 12 hours ago [-]
Except for the bit that immediately killed it for us in the office: only one external display. Even if you close the lid.
I dream of the day I can kick windows into the next bin, but this is the one thing that the Neo fails hard on, all other compromises would've made this a great remote dev machine.
red-iron-pine 4 hours ago [-]
does the ~$400 consumer PC market -- which is what theyre aiming at -- need multiple external displays?
my mom might need a 2nd monitor, but probably not. that's who they're chasing.
my crappy business dell work computer can only do one too, but it comes with a docking station to do real multi-monitor
locallost 10 hours ago [-]
Was my first thought also when I saw it. I honestly planned to ditch Macbooks before they released M1, but this hardware is just so much better than anything Intel or AMD can offer at least for laptops. For people that are not too demanding I've recommended Airs for a while, but this basically has the potential to destroy the entire midrange PC market. Some people will be reluctant to switch, but I don't think the OS is as important today as it was before. So much happens on the web anyway.
edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.
gamblor956 11 hours ago [-]
He wasn't referring to the build quality which is about average, or the ipad level performance.
He was referring to the supply chain. The shock is that Apple was able to build something like this with current component costs.
BoredPositron 10 hours ago [-]
Planning beyond the next quarter? That’s a rare level of foresight for most.
financetechbro 5 hours ago [-]
“Average” build quality? All the reviews I’ve seen rage about the build quality of the Neo
pipeline_peak 12 hours ago [-]
This feels like the first time Apple’s walled garden approach has paid off in the desktop arena.
With a cheaper Windows alternative to the MacBook Neo, your options are inferior battery life with AMD 64, or Windows Arm’s inferior compatibility.
I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does. Not to mention they’ve been using their own chips.
perfmode 40 minutes ago [-]
I think what you're describing is vertical integration rather than the walled garden specifically. The walled garden is the App Store restrictions, iMessage lock-in, that kind of thing. What made the Neo possible is that Apple controls the silicon, the OS, the firmware, and the industrial design as a single unit. They could put a phone chip in a laptop form factor and have it feel coherent because there's no seam between the hardware and software teams.
The distinction matters because it changes what the lesson is for the rest of the industry. You don't need a walled garden to compete here. You need to own enough of the stack that you can make aggressive tradeoffs (like shipping 8GB and an A18 Pro) without everything falling apart at the integration boundaries. Microsoft can't do that because they don't make the hardware. Dell and Lenovo can't do that because they don't make the OS. Qualcomm can't do that because they don't control the software ecosystem.
The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.
happymellon 12 hours ago [-]
> I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does.
While this is key it has nothing to do with the walled garden approach, and everything to do with Microsoft's contempt for users of its platforms.
operatingthetan 12 hours ago [-]
People may not be very happy with recent UI changes in Tahoe but it's still another universe compared to some the clunky Windows 2000-ish stuff still in Windows 11.
calf 7 hours ago [-]
"I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant."
I think a lot of us wish that! I'm struggling to pick either the Neo or the new iPad Air 13", the former for having MacOS, or the latter for light weight and light usage purposes. And come this fall pair whichever choice with an M5 mini at home.
11 hours ago [-]
shablulman 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
svilen_dobrev 11 hours ago [-]
maybe Apple is "subsidizing" this ?
nudge/"help" people to join the party?
trying to ride something around the windows-bullshitization , recent memory-prices etc..
10 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 18:21:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.
You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
But even Lenovo cripples them:
They still have huge advantages (keyboard, maintenance manual, replacement parts, Linux compatibility, much more ports in case of the X14 and T14). Apples keyboards are nowadays “acceptable” but not even comparable to a good ThinkPad keyboard.PS: By the love of god. Don’t order them with Windows. You are putting 80 to 130 euro right into Microsoft’s stock owner and they will use it to harm Linux. And of course, making Windows even worse. Save that money. Select Linux. Donate the rest (Fasst, GNOME, KDE…) or use it for the better display.
The touch screen was completely useless. Super laggy and sometimes the pen would still believe it was touching the screen even at like 1cm away. Windows 10 had almost no features for touch based interaction. It was just regular Windows with the same microscopic buttons for mouse.
Plus a ton of display ghosting, GPU glitches, etc.
I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU.
> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
I had Cyberpunk 2077 running on a M1 Macbook Air almost two years before the MacPort came at a very playable 30fps (900p Medium settings). Although I did have to use thermal pads to heatsink it to my metal laptop stand and added a slow spinning fan for good measure.
It's not perfect, but I've also spent a lot of time only buying games with no road blocks to running on Mac/Linux.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
[0] https://steamdb.info/charts/
and as far as I know, they do this on purpose!
Don't forget, one is going to be the "Business" version and the other identical one is going to be the "Consumer" version. God help whoever buys a "business" category laptop for personal use. The world will come to an end!
> too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?"
I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
I run both PC's and Mac devices in our house, we use what fills the job. Recommending PC laptops for family members feels like a total crapshoot though. Every time, I do all I can to find the right device for their needs and there are just so many trade-offs. Maybe I get all the right specs, ensure it doesn't thermal throttle, keyboard/trackpad are A-OK... but the webcam is trash. Ooof... now Mom is complaining about how no one can see her properly at bridge club call.
I brought up how the Neo might do to the PC industry what the Air did to Ultrabooks back in the day. The amount of hate I got on YouTube/Verge with copy-paste, "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" was expected, but also disappointing. There is clearly a market segment happy to continue to put up with the mess that Dell/Lenovo are selling (anything but a Mac).
Wild how tribal we are to our corporate computer overlords.
The era where something like Framework with its fully customizable, repairable, modular laptops becomes the standard can't come soon enough.
For the time being, I'll let Apple/PC continue to duke it out. Hope some competition helps in the long run. :shrug:
Yep.
I'm a long-time ThinkPad user, but I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from the ThinkPad E series or ThinkPad L series or ThinkPad X series, and their website certainly isn't going to tell me. I keep on buying T series because I'm honestly afraid of trying anything else.
To say nothing of Lenovo's non-ThinkPad laptop brands, including Ideapad, Legion, Yoga, ThinkBook (!), and LOQ.
I really don't know what laptop to recommend to a friend. One friend showed me specs for an Asus they found at Best Buy, and it looked okay, so I said "It's probably fine." Turns out it was shoddily made and overpriced: they had to sent it back not once but twice because the wifi and then the camera didn't work out of the box, then a few months later the hinge broke.
I am not a Mac fan, but it's easy to recommend them because you at least know they are universally well-built machines.
And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of.
The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry.
If you aren't a gamer, there is zero reason at this point to consider any other laptop besides a macbook. Apple now has one for every price point. This neo is going to destroy the consumer PC space. Dell, HP, Acer are probably sweating right now.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.
I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled gardens with app stores, excessive power over developers and users). MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games).
I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. If the stock OS can't be replaced for one reason or another, it's dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
Like sure it’s DOA to you, but in what world does that really matter when it’s going to sell so well?
The fact that the "usb 2" port works for (fast) charging is a big win. That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time.
For some use cases, you can do that with a single USB port, too. For example, a single USB cable connected to a monitor can both send video and charge the laptop.
Suddenly you could have a Unix, with pretty much the same CLI as Linux but without all the supported hardware/driver issues. Laptop sleep in particular was pretty finicky.
If MacOS didn't pick a Unix/BSD base, I'm pretty sure all the tech companies running Mac would be on Linux.
FoxTrot comic from 2002:
* https://archive.is/https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
I would argue that things have changed significantly since then.
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.
So it was a failure in implementation.
> Apple pulled off what I thought wasn't possible. The MacBook Neo is poised to set the budget-laptop world on fire as a $599 system that's better-built and sharper than anything else at or below its price.
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-macbook-neo
Similar to the Verge:
> even the cheapest MacBook Neo is good enough to be the go-to Apple laptop for a lot of people. Actually, not just the go-to Apple laptop; the Neo’s hardware simultaneously embarrasses an entire class of affordable (and even far pricier) Windows laptops, as well as just about any Chromebook. And the thing runs on an iPhone chip.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/891741/apple-macbook-neo-a18-p...
> PC Magazine came to the same conclusion:
> Similar to the Verge:
Apple pays well. Budget laptop at 600 Euros ? And can't compete having a tablet processor, 8 MB RAM, 256 MB SSD. 2 USB ports (one i presume used for charging) ? Yeah. It really can't compete with better options.
Knocking it for having a tablet processor means you haven't actually been paying attention to Apple's in-house processor development.
If quality and in-hand feel matters to you at all, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more well rounded laptop than a MacBook at any price point.
HP OmniBook 5 Laptop Next Gen AI 16-fb0037nr
If I were shopping for a cheap laptop I would have given up and bought a Macbook Neo before I found that one.
A decade ago, but still relevant: https://beneinstein.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-ap...
It comes down to Microsoft not doubling down on "let's make Windows as annoying as possible" (with ads, with telemetry that can't be turned off).
Damned if i ever noticed, and all my laptops since like 2013 have been Apple.
I knew I had it on one of my previous iPhones but there it was an annoyance because I never knew what was going to happen on a touch.
I can’t stand it and every update makes it worse.
Been running popos abs everything I can and it’s petty nice.
Installed it on a new LG Gram and everything works including fingerprint reader. Is my favorite laptop and my old Mac sits gathering dust,
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
600 might seem budget, but it's out of budget for most people. And my guess is PC manufacturers will retaliate against this by cutting prices just a little to drop under that 600 price point for mid range ryzens, with more ram and space.
Any family members I've helped shop for computers only care about how much space it has, how cheap it is, and will it struggle to run things like the last one. As it sits the MacBook is more money for less gigabytes
Out of budget for my parents but I'll pay the difference myself. It's just painful to see them use their pile of shit $300 laptop that can barely open a text editor, sounds like a jet engine and has about 45 minutes of battery life.
The only haptic feedback they get if the entire fucking thing creaking as soon as you lightly touch it.
They've been through at least 5 of them since I bought my 2015 mbp, which is still working fine in every aspects
You need to spend a ridiculous amount of time on research because the producer itself is selling very different product (very different quality) from a year to another.
I wish a "brand" would be consistant but it's not 99% of the time.
The monitor is awful. Like, the horrible way it changes color and brightness depending on exact viewing angle is sickening; I am shocked California hasn't declared it illegal. It feels cheap, keyboard is cheap, who knows what the battery life is.
If the Apple Neo were available then, and he had asked what to buy, I would have instantly told him to get one.
I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.
But nice for Apple. Millions of replacement on the Neo 16GB release next year I guess.
I work professionally on a Macbook Air 16GB now and I have quite a few docker images and services running bare metal, + browser, vscode etc. on top. Not a problem until I start loading up some LLMs.
The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
If anything, I'm much more bound by the CPU limitations and the eco-cores than the memory.
On a PC, I wouldn't think about less than 32GB for a dev pc.
If I had a fulltime gig programming C, I'd even say I could work on this A14 8GB device. Why not? It's as powerful as a 10 year old powerful machine; probably. Or in that ballpark.
I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).
Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.
Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255765423?sortBy=rank
Why on Earth do I need a 32 GB PC?!?
Turbo C also worked just fine with 640 KB in MS-DOS, but then again MS-DOS wasn't full of Electron crap.
https://youtu.be/d-VOt9559Gk?si=tYlDstnaxtQWoJ88
He opens 50+ apps at once while working in Final Cut and Lightroom. Obviously anyone doing those full time would benefit from more resources but I think this is going to be enough for a big chunk of the population, and will be more appealing than the windows alternatives.
I can open even 500 apps on any laptop. This is what swap for. But with only 8GB you are getting into the swap territory very fast because you need almost half of it for the OS and video memory.
Eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272996
No? Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1, this one is just even cheaper. I thought PC execs were asleep at the wheel but not this bad.
I wouldn’t "way cheaper".
A baseline Neo with 256GB SSD is $599 vs the first M1 MacBook Air with 256GB SSD was $999 ($1,251.09 in 2026 dollars)
A Neo with 512GB SSD is $699 vs the M1 MacBook Air with 512GB SSD was $1249--that's $1,568.38 in 2026 dollars.
So this is a big deal; the Neo is the first Apple Silicon MacBook where the starting price is less than $999.
I don't see any way they can get out of this situation without seriously improving the UX of their products. Windows itself is likely implicated here too.
My wife is using a fancy new air for 2500€, which is way better. But I still think of the good old MacAir times, they'll try to bring up again.
I’m curious to see this machine in person, but I’d bet the an iPad is still the best large device in Apple’s ecosystem for anything that benefits from viewing in portrait mode.
Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.
Not as obvious as the author implies. Apple has some docs out, IIRC, explaining how it is implemented. Worth a read...
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
At some point the XPS 13 dev edition was the almost perfect laptop. Then they ruined it with the following generations of it.
I’m not the target market since I require Linux compatibility but I realize that is not a necessity in the market.
Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.
The form factor is the defining characteristic, because that informs how people use it. The CPU does not.
“MacBook Neo is built on an iPhone chip—the A18 Pro. It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
and that:
“It’s merely the right kind of performance for anybody who wants to browse the internet or stream video.”
...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Graphics-Ke...
Or a 15.6" Intel Core i7‑1255U/12650H laptop with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD in a similar price range:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Laptop-High-Performance-i7-1255U-4...
Both of these offer:
* A more traditional laptop CPU
* 2–4× the memory
* 2-4× the storage (1TB vs 256GB base on the Neo)
Standard HDMI/USB‑C video out for external displays
So I can definitely see the appeal of the Neo for people who just want an inexpensive way into macOS, but the claim that “no other budget laptop can compete.” doesn't track.
Maybe it should have been "The least expensive Macbook yet, but that comes with significant downsides."
As for your comparisons: My aunt doesn't need a terabyte of storage or a Ryzen 7 5700U, she needs 15+ hours of battery life because the laptop is going to live next to her spot on the couch and she most likely can't remember to plug it in every night.
Also the first laptop is from a reputable brand called NIAKUN. They must have amazing customer service and unbeatable warranties, right? =) And they certainly will exist in 12 months when you go look for the brand on Amazon and won't be replaced by another random set of letters in all caps selling the exact same product?
The HP is on sale, it's MSRP is $699 and for some weird fucking reason has the numpad on it, making the whole keyboard wonky. Who wants that on a laptop?
And the final thing, as with all price-forward comparisons: build quality. We need an objective standard measurement for chassis and keyboard flex, the ability to open the lid with one finger, the amount of creaking and squeaking said laptop will do in normal use and how hot and loud it gets in your lap when doing light browsing.
But they're clearly not the majority of the people - the rest of us have to live with a lopsided keyboard because a few people for some reason do data entry on a laptop keyboard.
I'm sure a similar story can be said about the HP.
If you didn't detect the sarcasm, a laptop is much more than cpu, memory, and storage; it'd be short-sighted to only fixate on this trio. PC laptops compromise on pretty much everything and usually do everything poorly, including CPU (since apple silicon Macs are much better performance per watt).
Then there's the whole aspect of Apple support for both hardware AND software, something no PC vendor can provide.
PS: I wrote this on my Macbook Air.
The latest reviews are showing that's not really the case
I’d give my entire family these ahead of Windows laptops any day.
Mister Gates, is that you ?
Now the color options, that's a tragedy.
Thanks. Fixed.
>This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone
That was my conclusion to my comment in my original. The title of "no other budget laptop can compete" is not just sensationalized, it is factually wrong. It should have been "the least expensive macbook yet comes with a catch"
Maybe they need to bring back psychedelic iMacs.
https://www.slashgear.com/1706745/rare-apple-imac-designs-fl...
eww
In terms of performance the raw compute people have in their pockets nowadays surpasses what they typically need by magnitudes for a while now. Granted: programmers and tech companies find new ways of wasting that compute on features that people ultimately do not need, so they may need that the compute so things feel snappy, but if I think about what my parents do on their devices you could easily enable them to do theirs tasks with far less. They are essentially doing the same as ca. 2006 with pictures and videos being higher fidelity & resolution and websites running hundred thousand lines of javascript being the main difference.
This is false. The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance. Most people would see no noticeable benefit to a faster CPU. Especially with a fanless design, the additional cores of a comparable M-series chip would give you better burst performance for some workloads, but possibly not much improvement in sustained performance.
For the first few minutes of sustained use. Then it drops like a rock: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...
> In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes. Both the M1 Air and the new M5 Air (4.46 GHz) are able to sustain their peak clock speeds indefinitely in single-core mode.
Laughable. Seriously, how long has it been since the M1 Air dropped? And we're still this clueless?
> For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Awesome spec dump. Now, what's the real life usage battery life of that laptop like? Oh? Yeah, thought so.
Nobody buys a list of specs, they buy a set of capabilities. And the Neo is capable of supporting normal usage for 12h+ on battery. Go ahead and link me some alternative laptops that can do that, with comparable performance of course — which is on par or better than the original M1 Air mind you.
Killer move by Apple, and I'm shocked there's still so much ignorance around.
I own one. It lives long enough not to get bothered by charging.
plastic chassis: gross. keyboard with a numberpad: yuck no inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck limited size trackpad, not to mention a PC trackpad: yuck display looks good and is matte: nice fans: gross usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array: yuck supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
But at least it seems to have comparable battery life to the neo.
I don't care, it holds, it is not slippery (a huge problem with my current phone with metal body). What exactly is better with metal?
> keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
I would prefer one without, but that's just a matter of preference here. The layout is good. In fact, it's the keyboard that mostly makes me feel good whenever I use this laptop.
> inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
In theory I agree, but for some reason that did not feel problematic on this particular keyboard.
> limited size trackpad
?
> not to mention a PC trackpad
To each their own
> fans: gross
Never heard them, not even sure they are there.
> usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array
Sounds like a minor issue
> supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
I prefer "bricks" on the wire to "bricks" on the plug like Apple does because it does not take 10 slots on a power strip.
0 - https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/
I worked in retail for a decade, a lot of that was selling computers. The vast majority of what people buy computers for could be done a toaster. You don't exactly need top end specs to browse the internet, reply to emails, and write the occasional document.
gaming is a different beast, but there are xboxes, ps5s, steam boxen, etc.
For the most part, there's gamers/editors and a few other groups who need a lot of horsepower. They're generally gonna have decent hardware. Then there's everyone else, who wouldn't notice a difference regardless of hardware (to a point). There just isn't a whole lot of middle ground.
I dream of the day I can kick windows into the next bin, but this is the one thing that the Neo fails hard on, all other compromises would've made this a great remote dev machine.
my mom might need a 2nd monitor, but probably not. that's who they're chasing.
my crappy business dell work computer can only do one too, but it comes with a docking station to do real multi-monitor
edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.
He was referring to the supply chain. The shock is that Apple was able to build something like this with current component costs.
With a cheaper Windows alternative to the MacBook Neo, your options are inferior battery life with AMD 64, or Windows Arm’s inferior compatibility.
I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does. Not to mention they’ve been using their own chips.
The distinction matters because it changes what the lesson is for the rest of the industry. You don't need a walled garden to compete here. You need to own enough of the stack that you can make aggressive tradeoffs (like shipping 8GB and an A18 Pro) without everything falling apart at the integration boundaries. Microsoft can't do that because they don't make the hardware. Dell and Lenovo can't do that because they don't make the OS. Qualcomm can't do that because they don't control the software ecosystem.
The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.
While this is key it has nothing to do with the walled garden approach, and everything to do with Microsoft's contempt for users of its platforms.
I think a lot of us wish that! I'm struggling to pick either the Neo or the new iPad Air 13", the former for having MacOS, or the latter for light weight and light usage purposes. And come this fall pair whichever choice with an M5 mini at home.
nudge/"help" people to join the party?
trying to ride something around the windows-bullshitization , recent memory-prices etc..