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bdbdbdb 60 minutes 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
lm28469 20 minutes 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
GeekyBear 3 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.
> 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.
akagr 38 minutes 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.
lukevp 1 hours ago [-]
What better options?
bdbdbdb 1 hours ago [-]
*Gb not Mb
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
All these PC can't compete reviews are based on US prices, outside it is ridiculous expensive for a 8 GB laptop.
keyle 2 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.
pjmlp 4 minutes ago [-]
PC work just fine with 16 GB, that is coping with Apple limitations.
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.
shrubble 3 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.
exidy 15 minutes 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.
musicale 3 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.
pupppet 2 hours ago [-]
Microsoft will respond to this by furiously adding more garbage to Windows.
bdbdbdb 48 minutes 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
theshrike79 2 hours ago [-]
"We need to put Copilot into more places!" - Satya Nadella most likely
frankacter 3 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 2 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 1 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 20 minutes 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.
JSR_FDED 13 minutes ago [-]
> It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks
The latest reviews are showing that's not really the case
apimade 2 hours ago [-]
Total cost of ownership.
I’d give my entire family these ahead of Windows laptops any day.
hulitu 2 hours ago [-]
> Total cost of ownership.
Mister Gates, is that you ?
atoav 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed, which is why a $600 price point on a "budget laptop" targeting users running a web browser seems quite over priced.
atoav 33 minutes 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.
sockaddr 3 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 3 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.
lemonish97 3 hours ago [-]
Stopped reading after I read "Bright, pretty LCD display" and "Cute colors" under the pros.
3 hours ago [-]
NoPicklez 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you shouldn't have stopped there given the rest of the article provides enough detail to justify that it is a bright, pretty LCD display and why.
robin_reala 3 hours ago [-]
They sound like pros to me in that market segment.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not the target market since I require Linux compatibility but I realize that is not a necessity in the market.
The form factor is the defining characteristic, because that informs how people use it. The CPU does not.
Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.
“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.
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 ?
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.
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...