Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.

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.

I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.

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 thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.

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.

I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.

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.

I’ve faced far more issues with relatives with Macs than when they had Linux.

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.

My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.

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.

Yeah exactly, one of my kids has a Windows PC for gaming and just logging in to the thing is arduous sometimes... Microsoft's account auth system is so bad with its random redirects. Don't even me get me started on the parental controls, it's probably one of the laggiest systems I use.

I know what you mean but you will regret your choices Ehen your wife and doughters forget what a wifi-network is.

I easily guess that it is just that you are used to Mac, so you easily "forget" the common issues that you are usually encountering.

For example, one of the most common example is icloud subtly enabled by default for syncing photo and data, and that will get your mac and iphone stuck in a complicated mess when things get full with the limited free space.

Apple and the NSA must know a lot about you.

Choosing an OS 101 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho...

It used to be,

> Do you fear technology?

> > Yes

> Is your daddy rich?

> > Yes

> MacOS

I guess we can remove the second question now.

I think the clear demonstration of this is how small Apple's motherboard is for the neo (and other M series) compared to everyone else). It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently. If you cap your chips TDP such that it can be cooled passively, you save money on heatsink, fan, vents, power circuitry (e.g. fewer capacitors), battery size, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Other large laptop makers such Dell have some of the same scale advantages (minus in-house silicon) and might be more willing to sacrifice on profit margin.

Chromebooks exist at a lower price point with even less RAM.

Dell has just announced an 8 Gig of RAM version of their XPS laptop and the PR surrounding the launch is pretty funny.

> "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?

They probably know that but don’t want to cannibalize their more expensive products.

It's more like they don't want paradox of choice. Think of how many windows or android products are out there. Frankly I hate thinking about buying them in case I screw up and get it wrong. Apple understands this.

Poor quality comes from the fact we have outsourced manufacturing. Nobody knows how to make things properly. Here in the UK you won't even find competent sheet metal fabricator (except for military or when you have more money than sense, but then whatever you want to sell will be dead in the water because of unaffordability).

Just so you know, the original Ford Maverick started out at just under $2,000 in 1970.

I would happily buy a laptop with medium specs but apple build quality. I don't know if the Neo's build quality is on par with their other laptops but if it is it's probably my next laptop.

My understanding is that Apple has been seeing market share issues at the low end, especially in education. Since everybody has a phone, the "casual" computer market is full of Chromebooks at cheap laptops. Laptops are a tool (again?) instead of a necessity.

It's a smart move. I started using a Mac as a student in 2007 with a cheap Mac Mini and then I was so enthusiastic that I also got the white plastic MacBook, so that I could use Mac at the university.

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-...

Someone who uses a MacBook Neo in School/University probably has a much higher chance of getting a higher-end MacBook later on.

Costco sells an ipad for $299 (and many memberships refund some of this price)

EDIT: also on amazon:

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

It's not so amazing when you realize the Neo is an iPad's innards with a keyboard glued to it. $250 for a keyboard and a hinge.

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 think the craziest thing is that a macbook for $599 that's more powerful than nearly anything they had offered a decade ago (except probably ram amount), and even after adjusting for inflation (which is like 35% from 10 years ago) means the price dropped at least $1500 for a comparable. (People may correct me if I'm wrong)

and an iPhone 17e for $599

> Maybe the idea is shortened timeline to obsolescence means more sales. Not digging on the build quality, but just if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.

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

> if 8GB or RAM will still be fine 5 years from now.

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.

Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seems perfect for a second computer. I could pay premium prices for something better, but honestly: I don’t think I need to.

Seems to be right on time. Hard to justify putting a mobile chip in your laptop until performance has reached a certain threshold.

Every school I know of is deep in the Chromebook pot. These are fairly bad computers, Neo would be a big upgrade. But I suspect it would be years for school systems to even evaluate this.

It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular -

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

> I suspect Apple is going to cannibalize some MBA sales with the Neo ...

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.

It was like this back then with the iPhone 5C too

8GB RAM and no active cooling would be miserable.

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.

you'll hit the RAM limit at some point, and you'd almost certainly want to mod it to alleviate the heat issues that kill sustained performance

It'll throttle itself when it gets hot during compiles and slow down. You can mod it to cool it down so it will run (compile) faster.

According to Dell, 8GB is perfectly fine, even under Windows, since that's what its Neo competitor ships with.

Web applications and websites are more bloated than ever. I think you need more ram not less.

It's more expensive to make a computer tiny. Plus the iPhone's cameras are better, cellular modem, vibration motor, etc.

Compact density is expensive, cellular is expensive, and the iPhone has to pass all-day battery and pocket bending tests. (Edit: also being dropped on gravel)

I'm sure that they have a fatter margin on the the iPhone, but the iPhone does cost quite a bit more to manufacture. Cellular itself is probably $50 or so. The iPad has more material, so you may perceive you're getting more "device per the money" but the cost of those materials is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing the additional components.

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.

Enough idiots buy $1000 phones, so $599 is cheap.

Have you considered Asahi Linux?

Too late now, but if it's within a week you can usually get the Apple store to take it back.

Since most of the R&D are done on the iPhone side, Neo's margin is actually quite good. The R&D for M5 and M5 Pro etc have to be amortised by Air and MacBook Pro.

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.

Apple's advantage is that they design a large share of their own parts, and their partners build them at a very high volume since they are used in more than one product line.

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.

Lower margin, but higher volume. Plus a subset of the buyers will subscribe to Apple Music, buy apps from the App Store, etc.

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.

I wonder if they're losing money on the actual units to get more people into the ecosystem?

All the PC manufactures are rallying to make a comparable Neo at the price point, it's been making waves in tech media for the last 2 weeks.

Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped.

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.

I don't think it'll dilute the brand at all. The neo still feels like a premium product. Other laptop OEMs are now starting to come out with their competitors, and they are putting 1080p crap display panels on them like they always do. A $599 laptop with a 1080p screen from Dell is going to feel like a cheap piece of junk next to a Neo.

I haven't had the chance to touch one yet. But the reviews seem to suggest the hardware doesn't "feel" cheap in the way a lot of low priced computers can.

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.

They make the best-selling phone model in the world. Best-selling smart watch, etc. Apple is not a luxury brand.

It's not Lamborghini, but Lotus had the $40,000 Elise a while ago. I don't remember how it worked out in the end, but a lot of people were excited about them at the time.

Edit lot -> not

> I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...

Oh no, won’t someone think of the millionaires

Sure it's not upgradable but you're completely wrong about repairability, unless you're talking about micro component repair ala Louis Rossmann, which as a whole is going the way of the Dodo.

> So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand.

Clearly it's doing above their expectations, and they had precise data in the form of their test selling the M1 Macbook Air at $599 (occasionally $499) since 2024. It's too bad you weren't at Apple so they could've avoided this mistake!

> It was also a very low initial production volume to begin with. So doubling isn't because it is doing above everyone's expectations, it is because Apple underestimated the demand. That is also ignoring the summer back to school season.

Doesn't that mean precisely that the sales are above Apple's expectations which is everyone in all that matters here.

What do you use the USB-A for? I mean, I get it, I still have flash drives with the A-style connector. Is there some other critical item that you use on the regular (and is awkward with the little adapters)?

> Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it

Or you could just google it to see how extrapolating here was not a good move.

Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.

Can't say how long the keyboard will last since it's only been out for a few months, but I expect a long time as these are their new (now old) magic keyboards.

As for replacement, the keyboard is comes out as a module, so it just takes about 10-15 minutes of disassembling and putting a new keyboard in. Macbook Neo is one of Apple's best repairable laptops.

Personally I prefer having a smaller screen on my laptop, because I can plug it into a monitor when I need a large screen but it makes it more portable.

Still miss the 11" MacBook Air, what a great form factor.

> no USB-A

Also no RS-232 and Parallel. How do people expect to do real work if they can't connect their dot matrix printers directly?

Wait, it doesn't even have a faxmodem either! What if I need to do real work like sending and receiving faxes?

If its not happening on 3-part carbonless continuous paper its not work. This laptop is definitely not usable for real work.

I guess all these buyers must be idiots.

I'm pretty price insensitive myself. That said, I have an M1 air, and if someone gave me a brand-new air today, I wouldn't switch, because the M1 feels as good as new, and the hassle of switching machines simply isn't worth it.

No doubt a new Neo is faster than my M1 air. So I just can't really imagine how the Neo is 3x the 'value' of a brand-new Air, when I don't value the performance of the M4/M5 (?) Air above the hassle of swapping machines.

Is there any purpose for a backlit keyboard for someone who can type?

Nothing will ever be cheep enough. “599 is dangerously close to 1100”? It’s 1100 is nearly double! I bought the neo for my daughter to use in HS and it’s perfect. Fast, great build and great battery life. Ill be buying a second one for my son, and paying just a bit more for both than the one air you mentioned. You should just buy a chromebook and save the 100-200$ for a plastic laptop.

It's not designed for your circles or for people where paying 40% more is a choice. Many products make no "sense" when you can hand wave the price away.

I could make a counterpoint: it's too cheap.

It will cannibalize the market for better apple products. Mac pro is already gone.

Sort of how $1.99 apps, then $0.99 apps drove the app price to free. Now apps are supported by advertising or trick subscriptions and the good/honest apps are pretty much gone. (except I do like and respect anything from omnigroup)