I think consumers’ expectations regarding what they can get is coloured by ages-old reddit opinions which have circulated into household knowledge. The answer is so clearly whatever apple is making at the moment yet no other company (except maybe Microsoft with the surface line) can string together direct competition

A fully aluminum shell with air channels drawing air from the base unit through the back of the screen (via convection) seems like a good idea too.

Another interesting design would be "vertical laptops" - like an ipad but with a fold down keyboard/pointer slab to keep it upright. That would be good to get airflow moving up through the screen vertically. There could be space between the screen slab and the processor slab for the air to rise.

That alone is already a $400+ upcharge that apple is currently not leveraging

Since then I have bought countless MacBooks and some other models (I like to refresh every 1-3 years and then my old model typically gets passed along to other family members).

Trying to get students to use your product is a good strategy.

Also, people tend to mix pricing increases with inflation. When I my first iPhone 3G, it cost 500-700 Euro if you were able to get your hands on one without a subscription (remember when iPhones were provider-exclusive?) [1]

An inflation calculator for my country tells that this is 753-1054 in current Euros. The iPhone 17 is now sold here for 839 Euro new. Same ballpark.

[1] https://www.iculture.nl/nieuws/iphone-3g-als-los-toestel-87-...

This is the same company that for years dragged their feet on the iPad Mini because Steve thought you would need "sandpaper to shave down your fingertips".

I definitely agree with your statement -- it's unlikely the price to performance and quality ratio on Macbooks are going to be outperformed soon.

It used to be 1200 bucks or so cheaper than the equivalent macbook (probably saying as much will piss off the "Thinkpads were never cheap weridos but thats fine)

Or it's hit and miss and you need to hope to get the good one. I want a lightweight, non-plastic laptop with good keyboard, solid battery life, and no hinge problems. Apple is consistently delivering it. Good luck finding that outside apple.

What is this trackpad obsession with macbooks? Granted I use mostly a mouse when on my desk but I am mostly a thinkpad user (but I've used dell and hp professionally in the past too) and to me trackpads have been a solved problem for around 2 decades. They work fine. I slide my finger and the pointer move. I use 2 of them and it scrolls, etc.

What is so different on apple trackpads and what do you do with them? whenever I had my hands on a macbook I didn't really felt any significative difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

EDIT: also on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZ75TN5F/

They don't have to pay a margin to so many component vendors in addition to economy of scale gains.

At a lower Neo volumes, they were using already manufactured iPhone Pro chips that were binned due to a bad GPU core, but they reportedly have already blown through that supply.

They also came up with a new process that uses extruded recycled aluminum for the case, which needs much less CNC time to clean up.

Oh no, won’t someone think of the millionaires

I can't vouch on whether it's true, but that's the brand question here in my opinion. If the hinge was crappy and it felt like it was going to break any second and the keyboard was a return to the butterfly and it was slow and so on, because they wanted to make it cheap, then yeah I think that'd hurt their brand overall.

You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right?

You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.

that's cheaper than a Magic Keyboard, depending on the iPad :)

I am rooting for Framework myself.

As long as you're able to quickly feel out the homing bars, you should know where all your keys are. First thing I do on every laptop is turn off keyboard backlighting.

Ram wise, I agree that for light use, with mostly note-taking, writing, and browser use; 8GB shouldn't cause any serious problems. But those of you who know you regularly go over 8GB should really consider something else. There are plenty of used M2 and M3 airs with 16GB out there for reasonable prices. Of course if you're hard-capped at $600, then the Neo is pretty dang nice.

I've used an 8GB M1 mac for react-native iOS dev for over a year back when the M1 first came out.

If I had to look for the cheapest way to build iOS apps, but still on a laptop form factor (aka no mac minis), and I don't use macOS for day-to-day development, I'd do exactly this.

Mac Mini is the best bang for buck at the moment. I have an M1 Air as well, but if I'm away from my desk and doing anything that would push the SOC hard, I remote into my Mini.

The percentage should be similar. In the old days of Apple pricing, Apple margin is nearly fixed and you could literally work out their BOM by doing reverse calculations. Things changed with Tim Cook but it is still largely similar.

I am surprised that they only do it now, since Mac marketshare growth has stagnated for a long time and it's even hard to grow the iPhone marketshare. Growing the Mac marketshare by making very competitive models is one of the best ways for them to grow and to grow services fees.

I think the problem was Apple management was too obsessed with the iPad, believing they would replace laptops.

They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.

Edit lot -> not

I'm typing this on an old T470P (7700HQ/32GB/2560x1440) that is running my TV - it's uptime is measured in months (usually for a kernel upgrade).

Just a stellar machine but the new ones don't seem to be worth the price.

It is somewhat remarkable that no one has managed to get close to Apple quality by now.

I think the major manufacturers just have too many SKU's with too much differentiation instead of focussing on making 4-5 good SKU's.

the iphone launched at $499

EDIT: hmm.. I guess iphone 1 was $499 or $599 and that required a 2-year AT&T contract. Don't know what the actual price was.

I do know the top iphone 17 pro max is $1,999.

but it does have 2tb of storage, which is amazing in a different way.

> "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," said Dell.

Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?

Hopefully it allows for the macbook air to return to being a ultra light machine, I held an Asus X14 ARM at 900 grams and it felt so much better.

There's also a huge market for the M1 MacBook Air because of the old form factor of being ultra thin even if faking it with bending the shell, the boxed layouts dont fit with MBA to me. Too bad there is no 15 2021 M1.

I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.

My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year

I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.

I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.

Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.

The fact that I'm not carrying a +1k USD machine all the time gives me peace of mind

I got the m4 pro when it first got out, but on restrospect I really should have gotten either:

1. A max spec max + 128GB ram for local models. 2. an air with 15 inch for max comfort.

And I settled in the middle regret land.

And Studio and Mac Mini - which have gotten a lot more popular as of late.

For most people in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone is central and the Neo is another useful (but secondary) companion device. Not unlike the Watch and Airpods.

>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.

Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.

It's more powerful than my $4000 M1 Max until it heat soaks.

How do you explain this $1,000 monitor stand [1]?

Or its iPhone "carry bag" collaboration with ISSEY MIYAKE retailing at $149.95 to $229.95 aka the iPhone Pocket [2]?

1: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/wwdc-2019-craziest-revea...

2: https://www.apple.com/ng/newsroom/2025/11/introducing-iphone...

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch-hermes

Meanwhile Nvidia is happily cresting what, 5 trillion in valuation? It's a weird time to be an Apple shareholder.

And its not Wintel holding them back, Lenovo has their ARM experiment too, and its a bit average.

When the iPhone 4 launched on Verizon in 2011, you could either spend $200 and get locked into a 2-year contract, $300 and get locked into a 1-year contract, or buy the thing outright for $650. Since you didn't get a discount for bringing your own phone to Verizon, it was more cost-effective to get the subsidized phone.

Did the old 11" MacBook Air not teach the Wintel brands anything?

Truly a shocking outcome!

When I finally convinced my father to get a Mac ~2005/2006, he left me a voicemail saying that all he'd done was take it out of the box and he could already tell that it was a good purchase.

There were, if I recall correctly, one or two generations of Dell XPS that came close but they started cheaping out on materials almost immediately after it.

The old-ish ThinkPads were great if you want a rugged laptop, but that's not really because of better build quality, there were just more material.

Apple is also uniquely good at smoothly transitioning users to new tech, e.g. the creation and phase-out of Rosetta 2. It’s hard to imagine a switch to Windows ARM would go over well without a large effort like this.

There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people.

For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc.

With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to <friend>”.

It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features.

I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.

(Obviously, it won't run some heavy duty software as quickly as a fully-specced MacBook Pro would, but it will still run it.)

This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.

Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.

The basic iPhone 17 starts at $799

The 17e is only $599

If anything the iPhone is getting cheaper in real terms, not more expensive

If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.

No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.

The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.

It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.

What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.

People do know how to make things properly the problem is all those people are in China for a laundry list of reasons as long as my arms in a circle

My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.

Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.

It's also why I don't use Linux for a desktop unless I have to. I've had years of debugging weird issues with drivers, editing /etc files, changing X settings and so on.

MacOS isn't perfect. In fact, I think Apple keeps making it worse because they have no real product vision now and it's just a bunch of teams making local changes to justify their own existence. But you can look at MacOS in one of two ways: as a better Windows (by having a UNIX-like core) or as a better Linux (by having a better UI subsystem). Either way it's a win (IMHO).

I'm torn on the Macbook Neo, personally. It really is just a giant iPhone 18 with a keyboard. Plus you can get a Macbook Air at times for $900. That's $200 more than the high-end Neo. Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.

The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all.

The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system.

Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.

I actually think right now is the perfect moment for this!

I suspect that the massively increased cost of memory will limit the amount of memory in most consumer PCs from increasing over the next few years. In turn, this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software.

This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.

What kind of work are you doing where 1.2GB/s isn't enough?

It’s products like this that mean 8GB will remain fine for longer. If every base model had 16GB then sites like linkedin would just add more bullshit to use it. Let’s keep the bar at 8GB please - we’re not really doing anything different than I was doing 20 years ago with much less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561489

"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.

With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.

man, my opinion of Lenovo has tanked in the last decade and I'm only just realizing it now. I always thought of Dell as kinda shitty, but Lenovo had a great thing going that just kinda atrophied in some cases, and actively got worse in others

I too prefer Linux + KDE, overall it has been cause _less_ problems than macOS for me and I like the extra customizability.

The only thing keeping my work computer a mac is that I need to run iOS simulators.

EDIT: i just looked up how many ipads apple shipped in 2025: 60M, so yeah, no shortage of demand in iPads. Most people are consumptioners, though, so that kind of makes sense.

Presumably because the Neo sets a new low price boundary, used M1s Macbook Airs are only a couple of hundred pounds. For a system that is still really competitive.

My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.

Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.

So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.

Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.

For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.

Needless to say my M3 also sucks compared to a very good desktop.

The fan is just obnoxious on top of that.

but that should cause extra wear on the SSD, or is this no longer a concern?

On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.

They have also become more capable and it seems having a more capable phone has really benefited people.

also: by your numbers that means $1,999 in 2026 would have been $3200 in 2007.

I worked at an Apple Store before I got the opportunity to move into the corporate world. I was doing sales and I was super enthusiastic about the products (~2005).

I remember this couple thinking about buying their first Mac. The lady was skeptical and asked if I had a Mac at home. I was so surprised by the question that I blurted out, "Of course!" It was like asking if I breathed oxygen.

They both laughed and she seemed to trust me after that. She saw that I wasn't a used car salesman and they bought whatever it was that we were discussing, probably an iMac.

I always chuckle to myself at how preposterous the question seemed to me at the time. But yeah, a lot of people just show up for the paycheck and have absolutely no buy-in about what their company makes.

* as they get laid off

It's an artifact of geopolitics that Apple and Foxconn and separate legal entities.

For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.

There were millions of other annoying small things in Ubuntu itself as well. I’m sorry to say but as much as I love nix systems Ubuntu wasn’t really for general public - maybe it’s better today, not sure. Heard the story over and over again - that it’s superior, and every time I try it I’m utterly disappointed.

The moment it runs an update all bets are off. It's always audio for me, it breaks in the weirdest ways.

Mac updates are the best in the industry, period.

Close to zero chance of having an issue (unless you're messing with third-party kernel extensions).

It's basically the idea of the pro of 10 years ago but realised flawlessly, and improved upon actually in most ways, for significantly cheaper.

To do this they had to become an execution machine at huge scale to own and solve every piece that held them back in that pro design, and they did, and it's honestly amazing how it all came together.

We do. But we have to do work also. There is a difference between running a simulation in 10 minutes instead of 1 hour.

There’s just no good low power x86 CPU.

They even get serious security updates even after that period, and you can install linux if you really want to, but it makes no sense to me.

If nothing else, it'd be nice if those iMacs could be reused as external displays, but nope. No display-in on them, so no dice (at least not without a lot of dicking about).

> this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software

Ideally, yes, realistically, no. It is rare that I hear FE devs considering how much memory their apps are using. I really wish RAM use would be a much greater concern, but when I look at programs I normally run, I can tell RAM is not a concern (imagine me giving a dramatic accusing look at Docker Desktop, next-server, ...). RAM use for web pages is often not given much consideration either.

Actually from what I understood, making a small display with modern specs like Apple did on the iPhone mini was MORE expensive because all of modern high-end smartphone display manufacturing is designed for larger, 6+ inch screens.

With 8GB you will have lots of swaps happening. Especially with Safari. That extra SSD is going to make quite a lot of difference. Together with 12GB Memory this would be enough for ~90%+ usage.

In a defense of the latter case - there are many decisive people in the company explicitly demanding the website to be so bloated and overengineered.

A similar directive came out about that same time forcing all managers to use the baseline phones, and limiting the upgraded models to only testing fleets, for about the same reason.

A few months later, they'd realize it wasn't working out, come back, scream at us, and buy something bigger and faster.

I really liked the MSI one I had, but I knew what I was getting into.

I just want a macbook pro, but Linux. I want the performance, thermals, silence, fantastic screen, touchpad, speakers, etc. I refused to give anything up the mac hardware offers, and the PC OEM industry has just chosen, time and time again, to not bother to compete.

Hopefully these new Nvidia laptops will run Linux, that surface ultra is the first time I feel like a laptop on the other side of the fence will finally offer hardware parity.

I haven’t had to look at it for 5 years now. It’s still 200% more powerful than what they need.

As a “power user” Apple’s recent output has been frustrating. But for casual users it’s an unbeatable ecosystem.

This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.

I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.

Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.

[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.

The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.

I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed.

Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.

On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able to upgrade and maintain your laptop sounds elegant. But those people, they never argue that they must be able to change the CPU. Why not? It used to be that upgrading the CPU in a laptop was a common occurence. Why don't they throw a fit that they can't upgrade the CPU?

Because technology caught up with them. CPUs are now soldered on the board, for multiple very good reasons. Coupled with the fact that a good CPU is good enough for a very long time, and no one feels the need to upgrade their CPU on a laptop. Same thing with the math co-processor, no one's arguing to be able to change that!

I'm sure they would understand, if you could show them the equivalent 25 watt x86 part. If you find one at 25 watts or lower, it'll be too slow to really bother with. And if it uses much more power than that, then a fan quickly becomes mandatory. It's easier to excuse having a fan than having a processor that's just dog slow.

Part of this is the windows ARM not being where it needs to be, but part of it is lack of imagination.

At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.

Now we don't really have mass-production netbooks anymore.

I look forward to tinkering and tweaking my home lab but I barely remember my interactions with Mac OS. I like it that way.

It surely beats tinkering with my life.

No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.

> The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully.

This is a really interesting insight! Never would have thought of that.

The M3 Ultra is no slouch. It sits at the top with best processors on both single-core and multi-core x64 processors.

Meanwhile my mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, which is nowhere near an M3 Ultra, feels much snappier using it as a day to day desktop in both Linux and Windows. I think this speaks more to the sluggishness of the macOS experience rather than hardware performance.

But, then I start doing something data/gpu/local LLM intensive and my M3 Max shines.

You'll need MDM, installed anti-virus/anti-malware, and reasonable update policies, as with any endpoint. But have passed multiple years' audits with mostly-macOS fleet.

It is baffling to me how many backend devs who work with containers all day don't understand that using containers on mac (and windows) requires a full-blown virtual machine. While in linux you just run them.

Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)

Even for home inference, it's hard to recommend a dedicated Mac over a cheap Nvidia server box.

> They are probably the only ones that have the talent, resources, and capital to do that.

Apple invented OpenCL. The problem was their reluctance to work with the rest of the industry, and once CUDA took over it was too late for them to even try.

Really annoying to get a ticket "fix this build script for macos" and it is freaking sed compatibility issues.

edit: to be fair that happened once, but it was annoying

As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).

If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.

Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.

This is the first time I have ever heard Adobe files on Windows.

There were a period of time between 2015 - 2020 that might have been the case. Especially due to poor Intel GPU acceleration on Mac.

Since Apple Silicon, Adobe Apps on Mac has been constantly faster than Windows counterparts. With plenty of examples on Youtube and Reddit when people disocver it. I mean Adobe work best on Mac I thought was given, given the historic ties between the two.

Having said that software lagging in versions/features doesn't mean users are less efficient using the older tool. Are todays office users more efficient in word and excel with the ribbon than they were using office97 a few decades ago? Has it been measured? I know I am still lost whenever I need to find something on the ribbon.

My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.

We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.

Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.

The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.

Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

Nope. They use standard chips without a dedicated controller, because it's all controlled directly on the M-series chip, saving them a bunch of money. Which that, with the Macbook Neo, they absolutely pass the savings down to you.

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?

Even the first one I owned was straightforward

Yet we need computers, not phones.

(Although a lot of their XPSes are shipping defective.)

Chromebooks (typical) strengths are 1. zero maintenance/instant updates 2. 10 years of OS support 3. battery life 4. touchpad 5. value/$ with options at very low price points.

I paid around $150 for my Lenovo ARM Chromebook (came out a few years ago) and got around 14-15 hours of battery life new with no noticeable fans/heat. Has virtually no self-discharge when in deep sleep and boots in <10 seconds after sitting around for 2+ weeks. Even with 4 GB RAM ChromeOS handles very well under memory pressure (with the memory saver tab mode turned on), that I can have multiple windows with dozens of tabs open before things start slowing down.

I use the Linux VM in ChromeOS for light dev work (and disabled Play Store/Android), the touchpad is absolutely fantastic (which isn't unusual on even cheap Chromebooks, Google actually prioritizes driver support for multitouch/palm rejection unlike the cheap Windows crap models), security is rock solid with essentially no risk of malware/viruses/etc and have literally no maintenance/stability issues that waste my time. Chromebooks are by far the best choice if the question is truly "how do I minimize Grandma needing help solving computer problems", even current locked down MacOS has so many more ways it can break/confuse compared to ChromeOS.

This is the fifth or so Chromebook I've owned over the years, having used both the ultra-premium end of the spectrum (original Pixelbook) and the very cheapo end, and this machine is one of my favorite tech purchases overall in the last few years. I'd definitely recommend 8GB of RAM if possible, but for the typical Chromebook casual web browsing use case 4GB is perfectly serviceable (especially on a newer ARM SoC).

A $150 Chromebook is not intended to replace a $3000 Macbook with 64GB of RAM to run a half dozen Docker images, etc so sure, they'll "suck" in that match up, but they are an extremely competitive option on most metrics for the "someone just needs to browse the web and I don't want to be pestered by IT issues" case.

The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.

Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?

It didn't help that those screens weren't particularly good.

This is an excellent point but surely it lampshades that the exact opposite case is true for RAM. How many of apple's laptops become unusable when we know they would be fine for years more with the single addition of increasing the ram? Aside from those ruined by physical damage, it feels to me that this is the way the majority of those devices end their productive life years earlier than they would with a single change.

My opinion regarding RAM is meant to in no way dispute your excellent points about CPU soldering.

Apple is an example of great consumer focus vs tech requests of “but I want to run Kubernetes on my iPad it’s powerful enough”.

That’s thanks to Steve Jobs. iPhone was a #1 smartphone for a decade without ever mentioning the RAM or CPU MHz in the announcements or marketing material. Even if there was less RAM or worse specs than the Snapdragon at the time, iPhone was still faster and sold more.

This philosophy is still at the core of Apple.

I wish more companies worked this way, but I don’t know anyone even close.

It's not the upgradable ram, cpu, or storage which is eat into the power consumption budget. Instead, it's the interface and the standard that can become dated. Apple gets to choose all the voltages and interfaces for each generation which allows for a tightly coupled integration with their firmware and hardware all around. A PC user is stuck with the likes of ACPI and UEFI coordinating everything. And of course, they have to play with the current DDR standard of the time which may not give the power profile they want.

However, the benefit of the PC route is that there is really no EOL for the hardware/firmware support. A 20 year old computer can run an operating system with the 7.2 linux kernel perfectly fine. Your IPad from that era is a brick. You can't do anything with it. But your laptop from that era? You can slap in a brand new SSD and it'll accept it and boot up just fine. (The one caveat is you'll be SOL if you have an nvidia device).

I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.

We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.

EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.

Some districts (including my local one where I live) are now charging a "tech fee" but given these devices are still mandatory to participate, they don't withhold if they can't collect from the parents, which collection still remains a problem.

Another district near me does a keep your own device program, each student is issued a chromebook and it becomes theirs after they graduate, which seemed to have helped a little bit knowing they have to use that same device for 4 years and it becomes their own after.

edit My own solution would be just make sure the devices can't leave the classroom. Letting kids take them home is a huge part of the problem, but schools are now totally reliant on assignments being done digitally instead of just sending kids home with a textbook and worksheets.

When you switch between browser and Word etc, there is a lag, you can see screen being redrawn etc.

Yes, it "does the job". But experience is abysmal.

We use basic AV and monitoring, as required for carrying insurance.

We don't have any desktops.

Our comparisons are done regularly to show the difference to new employees and to ensure that we aren't biased in what we report for budgeting.

If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.

If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.

Aside from that, almost always a new PC - almost! When times haven't been so good, I've had spot upgrades.

All of the above is just a question of running the numbers and minimising for cost, I'm sure.

I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.

My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).

What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.

Ideally passing through as much of the hardware as possible, and booting right into that config. Running it natively is ideal, but projects like Asahi are forced to play catch up porting another OS to new devices.

Is this the new “just compile it from source”?

I have yet to read about someone who priced out something "as good" as the MacBook Air in terms of component quality and efficiency. What would the price premium be... over 50%?

Either way it costs money to avoid macOS at the higher end but not much when you’re spending thousands of US dollars.

But that's my point: first-gen M1 Air is still available and costs 600 USD.

NVIDIA hampers their GPUs with un-unified graphics memory, while the M series can use everything the computer has (well, you need to save 4GB or so). It also works on airplanes and in hotel rooms, a cheap NVIDIA server box with 64GB of RAM (what my M3 Max laptop has)....how cheap is that?

But yes, macOS is a Unix, not a Linux.

Put any kind of security software on the Mac and remove the bloat from Windows (normal for enterprises), and the Windows machines are faster.

You can blame the security software if you like, but you have to have it to carry insurance. And you have to have it to make a fair comparison anyway.

It's obvious that they will be faster. They come with a free video card at the same price point as the Macs that don't.

Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.

My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.

But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.

Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.

The insecure bricks hold their value weirdly well though, so if you care about the software limits, you can just sell at the end of the term to someone who doesn't, and it makes up for you not being able to keep the hardware longer yourself. Like I just sold off a low-spec 2012 macbook and 2013 iPad Air for a combined $140.

Granted, the M1 and up are not 100% covered yet (driver-wise), but they aren't EOL either. And if they were, Linux would still run anyway. Take a 20 year old Mac and you'll run Linux just fine. 10 year old Mac, Linux still runs fine. Take an M1 and it's a joy to use with Linux. Taken an M2 and it will boot and you can be pretty sure it will run very well long before it's EOL too. And even if it's EOL, it's not going to prevent you from running Linux later.

As for the PC example: definitely EOL problems there. Try getting your EDK2-based UEFI stack patched on an old computer. At some point you won't be getting certificate updates and if you either forget to install a local override or if the vendor didn't add it, you're SOL, especially on laptops where you can't disable secure boot.

That said, I’ll never work on Windows. 15ish years ago I did some .net work. C# was a fun language but development on windows is a special kind of torture.

What better way to save than to push that cost out to your students' families, all while selling it as a positive?

iPhone had worse display for a _very_ long time.

The Galaxy S1 had an OLED display. It took Apple 7 years to introduce that technology in their premium lineup, and 10 years to introduce it to their regular lineup.

I can kind of imagine a world where a suitably low-power Intel or AMD chip can exist; they've got good engineers and can probably do it if they put their minds to it, but that chip will be next to useless without a Windows that won't throw out half the chip's potential before you've even started a program.

They don't last more than a couple of years before they start becoming painfully slow, even after being reimaged.

Whereas my 10+ year old laptops and desktops are as fast as the day I bought or assembled them.

Agents in this case are just accelerators.

Yup, I got Thinkpad X9, the idea being "Air 15 but with Windows". It does the job. I still think Air 15 is better (and cheaper), but the software compatibility and not needing to switch platforms outweighs that.

This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.

A quick web search told me that this was introduced in 2010 (could be Google AI lying, I didn't look further). If that's accurate, there's really no comparison. A better screen on an OS that was catching up at the time… I'm not really sure when Android became a good competitor, but I don't think it was quite there in 2010.

I remember trying out Android tablets at a store ~2017. They were all trash. I couldn't believe it. I don't know where they are now, but IMO both the iPhone and the iPad shipped with high quality 1.0 software, despite deficiencies like a lack of copy/paste on iPhone 1.0.

Other companies were shipping devices with lackluster software for a good amount of time. Android became a real smartphone OS a long time ago. I assume it's reasonable on tablets today. But there was a period of time where it was a pretty terrible regardless of hardware specs. Kinda like the iPad now.

The problem is that they shrank the battery so windows has the same 2hr battery life. Dumbest decision ever, Dell. Dumbest decision ever.

Your experience is valid, I don't doubt that, but you can't just toss a mac into a windows optimized environment and expect it to work, you have to take that extra bit of time to do things differently.

Either way, sounds like you made the right choice then for your own org, but for the vast majority of companies introducing macs generally aren't a loss and tend to have a higher ROI.

Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.

This year, I wanted to run an experiment that was extremely low stakes. I had CC ssh into a VPS and do everything for me. It worked.

Did it have any security gaps? I don't know, I didn't audit. It didn't matter. It was a personal project that had no personal data to risk and the project lasted ~1month (I'd actually audit if I was keeping it). I saw no signs that my server became a bot, fwiw.

I've had agents figure out git repos that were interesting to me but not worth putting in effort on my own. Not things I depend on, just things that I otherwise wouldn't have tested. It's too bad the subsidized pricing is coming to an end. There's a lot that I wouldn't have bothered doing myself that was cheap to have an agent do that won't be worth it again. I'll try out a fraction of the stuff by hand like before and that's fine, but it was a fun ~six months.

I'm going to run your recommendations through some research tomorrow. It would be so cool if we can get local file sharing to work, even Mac to Mac would be amazing.

We have directories with 30k+ large images and video content that we need to share. Macs can't open them.

I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.

Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?

The remaining stuff... I'd say Lenovo has caught up for the most part.

Not sure what you're referring to. 5-10% of different is exactly what I meant by "matching". The real-life battery numbers also don't support your statement, as tested by e.g. notebookcheck.com

And, again, the actual context is Wildcat Lake here, an step down from Panther Lake.