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.
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.
Honestly, I have a hard time typing on a new Apple laptop; it doesn't feel right until the keycaps are a bit worn.
This is a daily, albeit minor, annoyance on my MacBook Air too.
MMMMMMM.....I don't know. I think the biggest shortcomings of that laptop were super common keyboard (dustgate), SSD, USB-C port, display, battery, and CPU (popcorning) failure.
Too bad that performance is (still) locked in the walled garden and cannot be used as a small Linux server.
Yup
When we buy them personal laptops (not there yet), it'll be a MacBook Neo (or its successor). I expect that unless they're forced to at work, they'll never touch a Windows computer in their life.
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.
It's really cool that this device is cheap but 8GB of RAM is the elephant in the room. Even non-technical web browsing users will notice the sluggishness coming from that spec.
The moment they upgrade it to the next iPhone processor, it'll get 12GB of RAM, and it will need it.
And the other elephant in the room that John doesn't bring up is the fact that you can definitely find in-warranty MacBook Air options for ~$700 and they'll be much better buys.
You'll get more RAM, keep your Touch ID, better trackpad, better screen, better battery life, better speakers, better mics, I think even a better webcam? Maybe.
That reminds me: the small battery in the Neo means that high screen brightness or more than light usage will more quickly deplete it compared to other Mac systems.
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.
Not as obvious as the author implies. Apple has some docs out, IIRC, explaining how it is implemented. Worth a read...
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.
"I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant."
What this reflects is all those comments and users, myself included, over the years saying "I would get an iPad if only it could run MacOS", and the ensuing discussion to the effect of why Apple won't do it, the chips are just as powerful, etc. A tablet Mac is a lot of people's (both casual and tech) holy grail in portable computing, justified/sensible or not in terms of technology and UI form factor. Gruber's wish is precisely the expression of this not unpopular sentiment. And also the Tahoe iPad OS features is a clue that Apple knows this.
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.
> 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...
iPhone and iPad does not have a hardware indicator light
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.
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,
Edit / Link: https://www.macworld.com/article/2986234/walmart-m1-macbook-...
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
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
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.
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.
Interesting metrics, though I'd add that if you count storage and memory as metrics, it'd be hard to find a worse PC laptop. And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-vivobook-14-wuxga-lapto...
2x the RAM and 2x the storage isn't meaningless to a lot of people.
The PC has a single-core geekbench around 2100 single / 10,000 multicore. The Neo is apparently in the range of 3600 / 9,000 multicore.
No arguments on the Mac's screen being way nicer though. However, the low-end computer market - unlike most of us on HN - has never cared about pixel density, color accuracy, or really any screen specs other than size (Looks like the Asus has the Mac by an inch on that spec).
Bottom line, for a high-end Chromebook replacement (literally everything is done in the cloud, so storage doesn't matter, and only running a browser, so RAM isn't a big deal), as long as it's for someone who will take care of such a delicate device, the Neo is pretty great. For everyone else, it's debatable.
> And certainly not software quality.
This is most definitely only a little true in that Windows has jumped the shark lately with ads and various enshittification, and thus ties with Mac OS. Tahoe is without a doubt the worst Mac OS ever released. It's both poor quality and poorly designed.
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.
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’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.
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.
“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."
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.
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.
Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup:
- Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants)
- Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants)
- Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Essential (with 14 and 15 inch variants)
- Dell Pro (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Plus (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Max (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Max Plus (with 14, 16, and 18 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Max Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
It's maddening trying to sift through the differences at this level. Then when you select a model, there can upwards of 8 different pre-built options to review.
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:
* You need to be very careful. Select alwaysCTO build with the best available display. But even then, Lenovo *removed* the HiDPI display from the X13. The only actual competitor to the MacBook Air is the ThinkPad X13.
* Lenovo added useless camera humps protruding out of the panel. There is a thick bezel and enough space for a much better camera. And for opening the laptop used to be a dent in the (round!) palmrest, nothing protruding.
* AMD, Intel and Lenovo fail to ship a fanless X13 and T14. I would happily keep same performance for two years, just getting rid of it.
* Lenovo is drowning us in Yogas, Z13 or whatever Legion.
[1] By the love of god. Don’t order them with Windows! You are putting 80 to 130 euro right into Microsoft’s stock owners. And they will use it to harm Linux. And of course, making Windows even worse. They use it to harm you. Select Linux. Donate the rest (Fasst, GNOME, KDE…) or use it for the better display.
Like sure it’s DOA to you, but in what world does that really matter when it’s going to sell so well?
The latest reviews are showing that's not really the case
Macs have very strong advantages but the software, the OS is absolutely infuriating. There's so many annoyances over regular use. You can remedy some of them with third party software (which should have been just system settings), but not all, and by the way some of these cost money for stupidly basic settings.
Finally and probably most painful, is Apple's constant push to update your software stack and things just stop working, and they expect you to keep chasing their decisions. You can't really build anything for Apple that's meant to last. It's exhausting. Meanwhile Windows can run programs from 30 years ago and Linux has extremely efficient, beautifully implemented software from all eras probably already installed in your Distro.
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
eww
I disagree that the software leaves to be desired
Just an example, I'll take Apple's Office suite (Pages, etc.) over MS Office any day - or LibreOffice.
Proton has a direct counterpart in Crossover (whose components are open source) and has roughly the same compatibility as Linux via Proton. It’s less convenient I grant.
Then you also have the slew of iOS games that can also be played too.
If you’re talking convenience for specifically using Steam, then yes Linux has a lead. If you’re talking pure number of games, I don’t think you can actually quantify that argument.
For the average consumer looking for a $599 MacBook Neo, Mac is the better choice for apps they actually use.
Linux can be used for gaming with a lot of titles, but both Mac and Linux are too far behind Windows or consoles to be considered as gaming machines.
A decade ago, but still relevant: https://beneinstein.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-ap...
That is how I had interpreted "And certainly not software quality" - that the PC not only competes but crushes the Mac.
I know many people who would not care about the differences you have outlined and gladly pay $499 for the Neo.
Combine that with the enormously improved single core performance (which matters more in the real world than sustained load for an entry level notebook), fun colors and 499 price tag for students and I can see the interest.
The screen is good compared to the MBA (only loses P3 colors) but the bummer seems to be ports and the "normal" trackpad.
If Linux would be able to be installed and fully working on this out of the box, then the laptop wouldn't cost 600 dollars. Apple profits from monetizing people tied to its iOS+MacOS ecosystem. If you're not gonna be a MacOS/iOS user, you're worthless to them and they're not gonna sell you a laptop for 600 dollars.
Can I update video drivers in Linux without seeing a console? OS X updates them automatically where it's a non-issue.
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.
I’d give my entire family these ahead of Windows laptops any day.
Now the color options, that's a tragedy.
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.
> 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.
gaming is a different beast, but there are xboxes, ps5s, steam boxen, etc.
This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
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
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 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.
Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing. Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6. Impressive. But what really struck me was comparing the 6S’s GeekBench scores to MacBooks. The A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013. More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly 1.1×) and was only 3 percent slower in multi-core. That was a comparison to the base $1,300 model MacBook with a 1.1 GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor, not the $1,600 model with a 1.2 GHz Core M. But, still — the iPhone 6S outperformed a brand-new $1,300 MacBook, and drew even with a $1,600 model. I called that “astounding”. The writing was clearly on the wall: the future of the Mac seemed destined to move from Intel’s x86 chips to Apple’s own ARM-based chips.
Here we are today, over five years after the debut of Apple’s M-series chips, and we now have the MacBook Neo: a $600 laptop that uses the A18 Pro, literally the same SoC as 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. It was clear right from the start of the Apple Silicon transition that Apple’s M-series chips were vastly superior to x86 — better performance-per-watt, better performance period, the innovative (and still unmatched, five years later) unified memory architecture — but the MacBook Neo proves that Apple’s A-series chips are powerful enough for an excellent consumer MacBook.
I think the truth is that Apple’s A-series chips have been capable of credibly powering Macs for a long time. The Apple Silicon developer transition kits, from the summer of 2020, were Mac Mini enclosures running A12Z chips that were originally designed for iPad Pros.1 But I think Apple could have started using A-series chips in Macs even before that. It would have been credible, but with compromises. By waiting until now, the advantages are simply overwhelming. 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.
The original iPhone in 2007 was the most amazing device I’ve ever used. It may well wind up being the most amazing device I ever will use. It was ahead of its time in so many ways. But a desktop-class computer, performance-wise, it was not. Two decades is a long time in the computer industry, and nothing proves that more than Apple’s “phone chips” overtaking Intel’s x86 platform in every measurable metric — they’re faster, cooler, smaller, and perhaps even cost less. And they certainly don’t cost more.
I’ve been testing a citrus-colored $700 MacBook Neo2 — the model with Touch ID and 512 GB storage — since last week. I set it up new, rather than restoring my primary MacOS work setup from an existing Mac, and have used as much built-in software, with as many default settings, as I could bear. I’ve only added third-party software, or changed settings, as I’ve needed to. And I’ve been using it for as much of my work as possible. I expected this to go well, but in fact, the experience has vastly exceeded my expectations. Christ almighty I don’t even have as many complaints about running MacOS 26 Tahoe (which the Neo requires) as I thought I would.
It’s never been a good idea to evaluate the performance of Apple’s computers by tech specs alone. That’s exemplified by the experience of using a Neo. 8 GB of RAM is not a lot. And I love me my RAM — my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM (the most available at the time). But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.
Now, could I run up a few hundred open Safari tabs on this machine, like I do on my MacBook Pro, without feeling the effects? No, probably not. But that’s abnormal. In typical productivity use, the Neo isn’t merely fine — it’s good.
The display is bright and crisp. At 500 maximum nits, the specs say it’s as bright as a MacBook Air. In practice, that feels true. (500 nits also matches the maximum SDR brightness of my personal M1 MacBook Pro.) Sound from the side-firing speakers is very good — loud and clear. I’d say the sound seems too good to be true for a $600 laptop. Battery life is long (and I’ve done almost all my testing while the Neo is unplugged from power). The keyboard feels exactly the same as what I’m used to, except that because the key caps are brand new, it feels even better than the keyboard on my own now-four-years-old MacBook Pro, the most-used key caps on which are now a little slick.
And the trackpad. Let me sing the praises of the MacBook Neo’s trackpad. The Neo’s trackpad exemplifies the Neo as a whole. Rather than sell old components at a lower price — as Apple had been doing, allowing third-party resellers like Walmart to sell the 8 GB M1 MacBook Air from 2020 at sub-$700 prices starting two years ago — the Neo is designed from the ground up to be a low-cost MacBook.
A decade ago, Apple began switching from trackpads with mechanical clicking mechanisms to Magic Trackpads, where clicks are simulated via haptic feedback (in Apple’s parlance, the Taptic Engine). And, with Magic Trackpads, you can use Force Touch — a hard press — to perform special actions. By default, if “Force Touch and haptic feedback” is enabled on a Mac with a Magic Trackpad, a hard Force Touch press will perform a Look Up — e.g., do it on a word in Safari and you’ll get a popover with the Dictionary app’s definition for that word. It’s a shortcut to the “Look Up in Dictionary” command in the contextual menu, which is also available via the keyboard shortcut Control-Command-D to look up whatever text is currently selected, or that the mouse pointer is currently hovering over — standard features that work in all proper Mac apps.
The Neo’s trackpad is mechanical. It actually clicks, even when the machine is powered off.3 Obviously this is a cost-saving measure. But the Neo’s trackpad doesn’t feel cheap in any way. You can click it anywhere you want — top, bottom, middle, corner — and the click feels right. Multi-finger gestures (most commonly, two-finger swipes for scrolling) — just work. Does it feel as nice as a Magic Trackpad? No, probably not. But I keep forgetting there’s anything at all different or special about this trackpad. It just feels normal. That’s unbelievable. The “Force Touch and haptic feedback” option is missing in the Trackpad panel in System Settings, so you might miss that feature if you’re used to it. But for anyone who isn’t used to that Magic Trackpad feature — which includes anyone who’s never used a MacBook before (perhaps the primary audience for the Neo), along with most casual longtime Mac users (which is probably the secondary audience) — it’s hard to say there’s anything they’d even notice that’s different about this trackpad than the one in the MacBook Air, other than the fact that it’s a little bit smaller. But it’s only smaller in a way that feels proportional to the Neo’s slightly smaller footprint compared to the Air. It’s a cheaper trackpad that doesn’t feel at all cheap. Bravo!
You can use this Compare page at Apple’s website (archived, for posterity, as a PDF here) to see the full list of what’s missing or different on the Neo, compared to the current M5 MacBook Air (which now starts at $1,100) and the 5-year-old M1 MacBook Air (so old it still sports the Intel-era wedge shape) that Walmart had been selling for $600–650. Things I’ve noticed, that bothered me, personally:
And, uh, that’s it. That’s the one catch that’s annoyed me over the six days I’ve been using the Neo as my primary computer for work and for reading. Once or twice a day I need to manually bump the display brightness up or down. That’s a crazily short list. One item, and it’s only a mild annoyance.
There are other things missing that I’ve noticed, but that I haven’t minded. The Neo doesn’t have a hardware indicator light for the camera. The indication for “camera in use” is only in the menu bar. There’s a privacy/security implication for this omission. According to Apple, the hardware indicator light for camera-in-use on MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads cannot be circumvented by software. If the camera is on, that light comes on, and no software can disable it. Because the Neo’s only camera-in-use indicator is in the menu bar, that seems obviously possible to circumvent via software. Not a big deal, but worth being aware of.
The Neo’s webcam doesn’t offer Center Stage or Desk View. But personally, I never take advantage of Center Stage or Desk View, so I don’t miss their absence. Your mileage may vary. But the camera is 1080p and to my eyes looks pretty good. And I’d say it looks damn good for a $600 laptop.
The Neo has no notch. Instead, it has a larger black bezel surrounding the entire display than do the MacBook Airs and Pros. I consider this an advantage for the Neo, not a disadvantage. The MacBook notch has not grown on me, and the Neo’s display bezel doesn’t bother me at all.
And there’s the whole thing with the second USB-C port only supporting USB 2 speeds. That stinks. But if Apple could sell a one-port MacBook a decade ago, they can sell one with a shitty second port today. I’ll bet this is one of the things that will be improved in the second generation Neo, but it’s not something that would keep me from recommending this one — or even buying one myself — today. If you know you need multiple higher-speed USB ports (or Thunderbolt), you need a MacBook Air or Pro.
The Neo ships with a measly 20-watt charger in the box — the same rinky-dink charger that comes with iPad Airs. I wish it were 30 watts (which is what came with the M1 MacBook Air), but maybe we’re lucky it comes with a charger at all. The Neo charges faster if you plug it into a more powerful power adapter, in either USB-C port.4 The USB-C cable in the box is white, not color-matched to the Neo, and it’s only 1.5 meters long. MacBook Airs and Pros ship with 2-meter MagSafe cables. Again, though: $600!
The Neo is not a svelte ultralight. It weights 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg) — exactly the same as the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air. The Neo, with a 13.0-inch display, has a smaller footprint than the 13.6-inch Air, but the Air is thinner. I don’t know if this is a catch though. It’s just the normal weight for a smaller-display Mac laptop. The decade-ago MacBook “One”, on the other hand, was a design statement. It weighed just a hair over 2 pounds (0.92 kg), and tapered from 1.35 cm to just 0.35 cm in thickness. The Neo is 1.27 cm thick, and the M5 Air is 1.13 cm. In fact, the extraordinary thinness of the 2015 MacBook might have necessitated the invention of the haptics-only Magic Trackpad. The Magic Trackpad first appeared on that MacBook and the early 2015 MacBook Pros — it was nice-to-have for the MacBook Pros, but might have been the only trackpad that would fit in the front of the MacBook One’s tapered case.
If I had my druthers, Apple would make a new svelte ultralight MacBook. Not instead of the Neo, but in addition to the Neo. Apple’s inconsistent use of the name “Air” makes this complicated, but the MacBook Neo is obviously akin to the iPhone 17e; the MacBook Air is akin to the iPhone 17 (the default model for most people); the MacBook Pros are akin to the iPhone 17 Pros. I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant.
The biggest shortcoming of the decade-ago MacBook “One”, aside from the baffling decision to include just one USB-C port that was also its only means of charging, was the shitty performance of Intel’s Core M chips. Those chips were small enough and low-power enough to fit in the MacBook’s thin and fan-less enclosure, but they were slow as balls. It was a huge compromise for a laptop that carried a somewhat premium price. Today, performance, performance-per-watt, and physical chip size are all solved problems with Apple Silicon. I’d consider paying double the price of the Neo for a MacBook with similar specs (but more RAM and better I/O) that weighed 2.0 pounds or less. I’d buy such a MacBook not to replace my 14-inch MacBook Pro, but to replace my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro as my “carry around the house” secondary computer.5
As it stands, I might buy a Neo for that same purpose, 2.7-pound weight be damned. iPad Pros, encased in Magic Keyboards, are expensive and heavy. So are iPad Airs. My 2018 iPad Pro, in its Magic Keyboard case, weighs 2.36 pounds (1.07 kg). That’s the 11-inch model, with a cramped less-than-standard-size keyboard. I’m much happier with this MacBook Neo than I am doing anything on that iPad. Yes, my iPad is old at this point. But replacing it with a new iPad Pro would require a new Magic Keyboard too. For an iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard, that combination starts at $1,300 for 11-inch, $1,650 for 13-inch. If I switched to iPad Air, the cost would be $870 for 11-inch, $1,120 for 13-inch. The 13-inch iPads, when attached to Magic Keyboards, weigh slightly more than a 2.7-pound 13-inch MacBook Neo. The 11-inch iPads, with keyboards, weigh about 2.3 pounds. Why bother when I find MacOS way more enjoyable and productive? My three-device lifestyle for the last decade has been a MacBook Pro (anchored to a Studio Display at my desk at home, and in my briefcase when travelling); my iPhone; and an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard for use around the rest of the house. This last week testing the MacBook Neo, I haven’t touched my iPad once, and I haven’t once wished this Neo were an iPad. And there were many times when I was very happy that it was a Mac.
And I can buy one, just like this one, for $700. That’s $170 less than an 11-inch iPad Air and Magic Keyboard. And the Neo comes with a full-size keyboard and runs MacOS, not a version of iOS with a limited imitation of MacOS’s windowing UI. I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house. The MacBook Neo is going to be a great first Macintosh for a lot of people switching from PCs. But it’s also going to be a great secondary Mac for a lot of longtime Mac users with expensive desktop setups for their main workstations — like me.
The Neo crystallizes the post-Jony Ive Apple. The MacBook “One” was a design statement, and a much-beloved semi-premium product for a relatively small audience. The Neo is a mass-market device that was conceived of, designed, and engineered to expand the Mac user base to a larger audience. It’s a design statement too, but of a different sort — emphasizing practicality above all else. It’s just a goddamn lovely tool, and fun too.
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? May the MacBook Neo live so long that its name becomes inapt.
When I wrote last week that the MacBook Neo is the first product from Apple with an A-series chip sporting more than one USB port — addressing complaints that the Neo’s second USB-C port only supports USB 2.0 speeds — a few readers pointed to the Apple Silicon developer transition kits. Those machines had two USB-C 3.1 ports, two USB-A 3.0 ports, and an HDMI port. But Apple didn’t sell those as a product — developers borrowed them from Apple, and Apple wanted them back soon after the first actual Apple Silicon Macs shipped. If Apple had sold them, they would have cost more than $600. Those extra I/O ports involved significant engineering outside the A12Z SoC. ↩︎
The Neo’s citrus is a beguiling colorway. Everyone I’ve shown it to likes it. But is it a green-ish yellow, or a yellow-ish green? In daylight, it looks more like a green-ish yellow. But at nighttime, it looks more like a yellow-ish green. By default, the MacOS accent color in System Settings → Appearance defaults to a color that matches the Neo’s hardware — a fun trick Apple has been using for decades. For citrus, that special accent color looks more green than yellow to me. ↩︎︎
The haptic “clicks” with a Magic Trackpad are so convincingly real that it feels really weird when you try to click the trackpad on a powered-off MacBook Air or Pro, or a standalone Magic Trackpad that’s turned off, and ... nothing happens. Not even the slightest hint of a click. Just totally inert. It’s gross, like poking a dead pet. ↩︎︎
My favorite power adapter is this $55 two-port 65-watt “slim” charger from Nomad. It’s small, lightweight, and the lay-flat design helps it stay connected to loose wall outlets in hotels and public spaces like airports and coffee shops. Nomad also sells a smaller 40-watt model with only one port, and a larger 100-watt model. But to me the 65-watt model hits the sweet spot. The link above goes to Nomad’s website; here’s a make-me-rich affiliate link to it at Amazon. ↩︎︎
One advantage to the 2.7-pound Neo compared to the decade-ago 2.0-pound MacBook “One” — you can lift the lid on the Neo with one hand and it just opens. With the old MacBook, the base was so light that the whole thing tended to lift when you just wanted to open the display. ↩︎︎
Personally I agree with the parent's comment. I used to buy Macs, but nowadays Apple alienates me. I'm one of the millions that don't buy a Mac because the hardware is gimped by arbitrary software limitations. Unless Apple changes that stance, I'm a lost customer. Cupertino has the market share statistics, they know where to find me.
And if Time Machine kicks in, there goes any form of performance since Apple can't seem to figure out what a 'background task' is.
As an ARM enthusiast who has tried a lot of WinARM, I think at this point I really struggle to believe MS has a single care in the world for improving quality of life for WinARM users. They sure do market it, and the laptops do work most of the time. I've just never had any other computers shit the bed when it comes to graphics drivers like a Qualcomm powered PC. Website with too many video/gifs playing? Screen whites out/all the video boxes go pink and explorer resets. Open up the gif search in Discord? Basically a coin flip chance its going to kill the graphics driver and reset explorer again. I had a Dell Inspiron with the Qualcomm 8CX Gen2 that could reliably be crashed just by quickly scrolling twitter on a video posting heavy day.
I would rather take a Mediatek powered Chromebook any other day until the Neo showed up and started to approach the sub $500 ARM chromebook price point.
RK3399 6-core ARM v8, Mali-T864 GPU, 1.9lb aluminum body, 10" IPS multitouch display, USB-C, compact chicklet-style keyboard -- or since it's a 2-in-1, flip it around and use your own portable ergo/ortholinear. coreboot/libreboot support...
Bring out a refresh, Asus.
https://www.asus.com/us/laptops/for-home/chromebook/asus-chr...
System 76 already has Pop!_OS. Lenovo.com/linux will redirect you to a list of linux compatible lenovo laptops that's a mile long.
Ofc a huge chunk of that is in companies but I'm fairly sure there are at least two windows 11 machines per one mac in consumer segment as well.
Windows has more drivers for more things, but if Linux has drivers (e.g. you buy a Laptop with Linux support) then driver management is massively easier.
I spent god knows how many hours getting the windows drivers for my last self built gaming PC working. Linux I just installed and was done. In reality the Windows experience was also a lot worse than having to drop to the console occasionally. It definitely required more in depth knowledge, even if everything was UI driven...
Mister Gates, is that you ?
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...
Knocking it for having a tablet processor means you haven't actually been paying attention to Apple's in-house processor development.
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.
A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen.
I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.
> MacBook Neo review: Apple puts every $600 Windows PC to shame
https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/macbook-neo-revie...
PS: I wrote this on my Macbook Air.
FoxTrot comic from 2002:
* https://archive.is/https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/...
<cough> xattr...
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.
If you ask me, for a comparable price range, the ThinkPad still is a much better pick than the MacBook Neo: that thing has no IO and not even enough RAM for nowadays light web browsing.
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.
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.
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.
Users on the other hand, they definitely care about display quality more than they care about RAM. The display is the part you look at!
If you're in store and there's a Neo with a crisp 200 PPI screen and a Windows laptop with a cheap screen but more RAM, the vast majority of consumers will choose the laptop with the better display. People make purchasing decisions based on feels and the Neo has great feels.
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 am still sad that they stopped putting it into iPhone, I think the tech is great and the watch really proves what can be done with it when it is a fundamental part of the hardware and the OS can be built around it. But we never had a situation that every compatible iPhone had force touch so everything that could be done with it had to work in other ways.
I think the iPad made that even more complicated since I doubt we would have ever gotten it on a screen that large, if it would have even worked.
As far as it being on the trackpad, it is honestly pretty wild when you realize it. It does an incredible job of faking feeling like it is actually moving. Was similar with the fake home button that some iPhone’s had for a little while.
Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.
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.
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.
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.
The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.
Now there’s the MacBook Neo and a rumoured new MacBook Ultra in the pipeline. The easy days of “pick standard or pro, select a display size, select RAM & storage” are starting to fade.
It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?
macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore. The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
What triggers you so much about someone prefering a different electronic device that you need to insult them?
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.
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.
If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.
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).
Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
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.
So it was a failure in implementation.
But nice for Apple. Millions of replacement on the Neo 16GB release next year I guess.
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.
At some point the XPS 13 dev edition was the almost perfect laptop. Then they ruined it with the following generations of it.
My big problem with it is that the battery got swollen a few years ago, pushing out the bottom panel, and the device is way our of warranty to get it replaced. I'm waiting to find time to get that replaced.
The Neo is either easy to recommend or rather easy to not recommend. It has a fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web. Others… disagree. Either way, it might entice some schools and school districts assuming they can volume discounts where 8GB is probably enough and it fills the spot in the Walmart part of the sales channel previously occupied by an 8GB RAM M1 MacBook Air Apple hadn’t sold itself in years.
I had a phase 2 years ago where I tried many cheap Chromebooks. I initially liked the stripped down experience and "value for dollar" hardware.
But ChromeOS UX gaps, bad keyboards, and a litany of other issues wore me down and I gave up on the "second computer" quest.
I look back now and see many of those Chromebooks don't even exist anymore.
Again, the trackpad will suck and the screen will be a dim, binned display panel, etc. If that works for you, fine, but that's not the conversation. The conversation everyone else is having is that your plastic $400 laptop with the bargain-bin components isn't the equivalent of $MACBOOK, no matter what the spec sheet says.
Chromebook/N4500 (2021!)/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC, $149 white $179 in grey Windows/N150/4GB RAM/128GB, $219 (first Windows machine)
The first Lenovo is a Chromebook that's $299, and it's got a MediaTek processor from 2022 and is supposedly on a $100 sale.
The edu price is $499. Of course that seriously competes with the base iPad ($329 without keyboard).
I own one. It lives long enough not to get bothered by charging.
One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence.
Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.
Or you could spend $200 more (or $100 more with edu pricing) and get a MacBook Neo which has significantly higher build quality, a much better screen, a great trackpad, and amazing performance.
Seeing how college students throw laptops in backpacks, that extra $100 (edu pricing) could very easily save them money in the long run.
> There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory
Every once in a while I go looking for a Chromebook-level laptop for some extra purpose and I am never impressed by anything. The current selection is all ancient processors, bad screens, creaky build quality. If you must stick to a strict budget then these can work, but I wouldn't call them good.
Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by without.
>macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.
Maybe because computing devices overall are just so good. The gains are to be had in services that are part of the Apple ecosystem, not the OS alone (for the most part).
>The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
In the 2000s, Apple has not cared about competing at Best Buy. That isn't their customer. If anything though, the Neo is more of a foray into that wider market. Anyone with kids lugging home a crappy school-issued Chromebook though took one look at this device and knew this is a device Apple can position into schools -- a market they once dominated and lost. There are lots of markets where this will be a great device, where the customer wants a Mac and not "just" an iPad. In those cases, it isn't the end consumer buying this device, it's an IT manager - who can likely be tempted by that Mac ecosystem and a better grade of device relative to competition.
macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating systems out of the box
C'mon, you can make a better counter-argument than that. People can prefer what they like as far as I'm concerned, but poorly-thought arguments and narrative-supporting go straight to the "chucklehead" bin. Perhaps you can do a better job describing how a $300 plastic laptop is superior to a MacBook Neo than OP did, I'm willing to listen.
I was stuck once in a cabin in the woods with an old Android phone. I’m glad it still worked, and that people curating software experiences for it had more empathy — and more business sense — than this comment displays.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-apple-studio-displa...
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.
Looks nicer. For a time, or if taken care of.
We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.
I would argue that things have changed significantly since then.
Wore off eight years ago. Can we guess?
Apple's current method is a pricing ladder, make it simple to spend $200+ more than you planned.
MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better. Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."
Every product lineup is designed that way. It gets you thinking "eh, what's an extra $200" and slowly moves you up until you land at the highest tier.
Now that everything is using the same silicon, it costs Apple very little to maintain all these variants (that are mostly binning), so there's little reason not to.
Oh gosh that's just depressing.
Today, Apple to me signals idiot. This was not always the case.
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.
As a glorified terminal? Sure.
> Did you even bother to watch the video for responsiveness before commenting?
I did, now what?
> Also it was a couple years after the transition to arm t
Hello, we are talking about Neo with the same 8GB.
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.
In some countries Apple is (or was) a status symbol of luxury, but I haven't observed that much in the United States. Macs and iPhones are both mainstream and affordable. AirPods can be bought for $100 on sale. These are commodity items now, not symbols of luxury.
Now, most people go to Apple because they see it as a premium option, not a status symbol or luxury. If you get AirPods or an iPhone you know what you're getting. If you buy those $50 wireless earbuds on Amazon your expectations are lower.
A vast library? With 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage you're not going to be running much, nor storing many files created by that library of software. Also, the only well-designed truly native software I have on my Mac, which I use daily, I can count on one hand. The vast majority of the apps most people use outside of "Pro" video and image editing, are in a browser, or are Electron apps that are exactly the same on a Mac as they are on a Chromebook.
And those "media" people using Premiere or Final Cut would never buy a computer that maxes out at 512GB SSD.
This is a pretty Chromebook substitute, which is cool, but it's obvious Apple doesn't want it to compete with the rest of their computers which start at $1,099.
macOS has plenty of it's own OS adverts.
What in the video is remotely glorified terminal like? What terminal are you using that gives you local 4K editing capabilities and the ability to run locally run Lightroom for 50MP files?
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.
Apple was not a bastion of quality in the 90's. They couldn't modernize the Mac OS, and that continued with little more than window dressing over what was released in the 80's. The Mac line up was a horrible mess of barely different models that needed a Ph.D to figure out what was different. The company was bleeding money and seriously close to bankruptcy.
The Apple of the mid 90's wishes it could release something like Tahoe.
Even IF the processor and RAM combined with Windows and bloatware is faster, you know they're going to have to cut corners on things like keyboard, trackpad, monitor, battery, webcams, heatsinks, etc.
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.
