"and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400"

Pardon?

You have a point. They're not similar. OTOH, people do compare them. I think Apple realizes this and the Macbook Neo is a brilliant move.

It doesn't cost $1000 to get into the MacBook experience anymore, so drastically more people will be buying them for their kids and more families will have MacOS as their default.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It would be a brilliant move if it wasn't castrated with 8 GB, even my netbook from 2009 got upgraded to 16 GB during its lifetime, which ended in 2024.

A netbook from 2009, already had the capability to get RAM sticks up to 16 GB in total, go figure!

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anakaine an hour ago | parent | next [-]

And they needed it.

An 8gb macbook air is sufficient for browsing, writing, and viewing. These machines are aimed at low end users / high school / cheap college machines.

	▲	pjmlp 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Outside US those demographics will be buying cheaper PC laptops under 500 euro, with higher RAM. Open a couple of Electron crap apps, and the 8 GB are gone.

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kingkawn an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it a side effect of spiking ram prices and trying to meet their momentary price point?

	▲	pjmlp 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It is a hard limit of using a phone SOC, it has what it has.

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bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the long run, I think we'll see more iPad-only families. The home computer is practically non-existent outside gaming niches or work-issued machines. We've had $700-800 Macbook Air models on sale for years now, same for the Mac Mini - little has changed. As cutesy as the shared computer ideal is, I see most people gravitating towards their phones and away from general purpose computing.

	▲	Fire-Dragon-DoL an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The problem is work is done mostly on computers though. Will it evolve to be all on tablets? It's possible, but will make workers slower
	▲	soco 39 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I thought the tablet space is pretty much dead? I don't see many on the shelves at the local hardware store (which I walk by mostly of curiosity). It seems all laptops, with a sizeable share of foldable - and even these are way more present than tablets. So no, I think the tablet train has long left (exception being the standing workers in some areas).