The profits of auto manufacturing are distributed to US stock holders. The same won’t be true for foreign companies. For very large industries, this is a large amount of capital either staying or leaving the US.
Also, it’s unlikely that the low prices could be maintained while also paying US labor and US safety standards. If they can then it means we’ve lost our competitive edge completely in the manufacturing sector. At that point we’d be reliant on foreign companies to operate locally here.
Allocating a large amount of capital to losing/less competitive companies is quite the antithesis of what the USA's capitalism was about. Protecting the big ones comes at the cost of unfair competition to new competitors that could take over them. Tesla is the only auto company from the US who managed it, and in a short amount of time is also falling into the same complacency trap.
Why is it ok nowadays to artificially prop up these companies? It has only led to the stagnation of US auto manufacturers, as it's expected when competition is curtailed.
The same can be seen happening in Germany and its auto manufacturers, they are on the same trend albeit slower, in my opinion they have one last shot to turn it around before being out-competed and requiring the state to continuously protect and sustain them as the USA has done.
I'm extremely unsympathetic to US auto manufacturers. They have fumbled every time they possible could my entire life. They deserved to go under from 2008.
Let companies that actually want to innovate rise from the ashes.
IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - 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.
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.
The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
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.
Apple isn’t this bad, of course, but they’re slowly heading in that direction.
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.
The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder. Start from the bottom and climb up picking up features along the way until you reach the point where you’ve got what you want or you’re not willing to spend more money.
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.
From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.
I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. It’s a great computer, but even on days where I’m doing fuck all but using the web I can pressure that memory easily. I also have a tendency to never reboot until that becomes the fastest way to fix whatever performance bottlenecks I’m running into.
I’m not saying you can’t get away with 8GB of RAM. You can, but I won’t recommend a Mac with only 8GB of RAM to anybody for a few reasons: 1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time. 2) they’ll spend $600 and even if RAM isn’t as much of a bottleneck for them today, with modern web developers and modern web browsers, it will be much sooner rather than later. And everything is a web app now.
For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way nor should it last less than 7 years and still be a kickass experience. Ideally it should last longer. The Neo is great for what it is, but the RAM is the deal killer for me.
macOS will pop up a window that says the system has run out of application memory, asking you to quit applications. I have a friend with, I believe a base M3 Air, who runs into this constantly with nothing but Firefox open.
(Been trying to get them to switch to Safari, but they prefer the Firefox name. I don't think there's anything wrong with Firefox other than it being less native.)
Does Safari use less RAM because it shares some parts with the rest of the OS? (e.g. in the same way Edge probably uses a bit less because half of its components are already idling on the OS)
You could say that. WebKit is in the dyld shared cache, so all of Safari's subprocesses share the same copy of it (and JavaScriptCore, etc.) in memory. But I would say it's more efficient because it integrates better with the platform's QoS primitives. I'm not sure what Firefox does in that regard, other than stuff from other platforms that don't have QoS (such as the throttling of JavaScript APIs like timers). Safari seems better at prioritizing the tabs you have open and backgrounding everything else, letting things go to swap, killing resource hogs, etc.
I have an M2 Air 24GB/1TB that has been such a beast that I haven't touched my 16" Pro in months. I have four browsers running, with a ton of tabs in Brave (daily driver) and I'm sitting at 21/24GB utilization with all sorts of apps running (granted, Docker is not at the moment, but it still doesn't make it sweat). I had ~8 pro laptops in a row going back to the late 2000s, but Apple Silicon has changed how I work. A future 14" OLED that was similarly light might turn my head, but if I had to replace it today I'd just buy another M5 Air with at least this much RAM. [FYI I never installed Chrome after M1 came out. Brave has been rock-solid for over a half-decade now.]
24GB is definitely solid. 16GB is like my minimum recommended for any kind of Mac, but if you can go for more you should go for more. I think 24GB should last a good long while though.
16GB, depending on your use, can be constraining and, sometimes, you need to get creative with complex processes. My colleagues complain about developing with several containers running peripheral services. In similar situations we asked the services teams to provide mocks that answered the same APIs without needing a large memory footprint.
> “1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time”
> “For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way”
In the article, Gruber normally uses a 64GB Mac, expected the 8GB RAM to be a problem and was surprised to find that it wasn’t, and judged the Neo as not being a bad experience in any way.
Gruber has also had it for a week at most by the time he published his review. It’s enough time to run some tests, not enough time to properly review what it will be like to actually live with it. I like the guy, but I also understand the limitations of how he reviews products.
8GB can be limiting on an iPad Pro, which runs a generally more memory efficient branch of Apple’s XNU-based system software and it’s not difficult to get it into a state where it is constantly paging out an app you had in front of you two minute ago if anything you’re doing involves the web at all. A Mac will just swap at that point, but swapping is also slow.
You could get away with 8GB 5 years ago and you still can do it now, but Macs are expected to last longer than that, and starting now with 8GB might become limiting 5 years from now. Here we retire them at about 10 years, or when the last OS they can run is EOL’ed.
Not to be devils's advocate here, but I'd suspect Apple is aiming for a smaller retirement window for this kind of product.
It's basically a Laptop engineered in the iPhone/iPad space of the company, it's only natural for Apple to target a shorter lifecycle.
8GB RAM is maybe the best way to achieve that, many of the MacBook Neo buyers of today will be very compelled to upgrade to a newer (or higher-tier) model in ~3 years from now...
If the Neo would have 16GB of RAM today, it would be harder to justify an upgrade in 3 years from now, when the common entry-tier for laptops is likely still at 16GB...
Over the years since the M1 has launched I’ve cycled through Firefox, Safari, Arc, Zen, Orion and Vivaldi. For the past year my primary browser has been Orion on one M1 Mac, and Firefox has been the main on another M1 work machine for the past 5 years with frequent dips into Chrome on that one, but I don’t leave it sitting in the background when I’m done with it either.
What actually kicked off my browser exploration on the personal was dissatisfaction with Safari’s performance, and 20 tabs or less was enough to make it drag at the time even with disciplined use. I don’t think it had any significant advantages over a Chromium-based browser that particular year except probably battery life but battery life has not been an issue for me these entire 5 years. RAM and swap are something I do end up monitoring more each year (and I’m not in Tahoe yet for either of them), but I’m planning to drive these into the ground before replacing them.
I particularly enjoyed (hated) "... is now the _least RAM browser_ ...".
Reminds me of a childhood friend of mine who always said "it looks very 3D" when he meant "the graphics are good". Pissed me off back then, and apparently still does.
Safari is the highest for 10 tabs but second-lowest for 20? This reads like AI slop, but even if it's not, it's definitely blogspam with no methodology.
in practice, I can have ~infinte tabs in Safari on my M1 MBP. I'll have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs open and I've never seen it stutter once.
It's actually enabling my worst tab-hoarding tendencies. In the Intel days I'd pay a performance price at some point and have to tend to my tabs, but now they just keep propagating....
Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.
It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.
The M1 Air would have blown people’s minds in 2000. 128MB of RAM was luxurious at the time for a laptop. In 2003 I borrowed and bought several sticks for a presentation (senior thesis on 3D presentation software), and got to 1GB in my desktop and felt like I’d broken some law of physics.
Shortly after I had a TiBook (PowerBook G4) that was _only_ 1-inch thick! Compared to 1.75” Dells my coworkers had, it seemed like the future. DVD drive, modem, Ethernet, full sized DVI port, FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, optical audio in and out, gigantic display with a bezel that was unrivaled for years, even among Macs. What a beast!
(I know you meant 2020, but it’s fun to think about the air in 2000).
In the year 2000, a M1 MacBook Air would have been the world's fastest supercomputer (or second fastest if you had the base model with the 7-core GPU).
Impressive, of course; but not quite that impressive.
Only true if all you're running is matmul (supercomputer has general purpose CPUs so more flexible than M1 GPU) - also those flops are probably FP64 in supercomputer ratings and FP32 in M1.
As a smart man I knew used to say, supercomputers are about I/O not raw compute. Those have terabytes of RAM not 8GB.
Your question hits directly at latency vs. throughput distinction. Depends on which you mean by "fast."
Throughput-wise, the supercomputer is competitive because it has a lot of local RAM connected to lots of independent nodes, which, in aggregate, is comparable to modern laptop's RAM throughput (still much more than disk) with a caveat, that you can only leverage the supercomputer bandwidth if your workload is embarrassingly parallel running on all nodes[1]. Latency-wise, old RAM still beats NVMe by two or three orders of magnitude.
[1]: there's another advantage that supercomputer has which is lots more of local SRAM caches. If the workload is parallel and can benefit from cache locality, it blows away the modern microprocessor.
as someone who wasn't around for PowerPC mac times (I was alive but I didn't have internet and only knew apple for iPod and Apple II), did non artist people use FireWire for anything other than synchronizing their first generation iPods? Was it common to have a firewire external drive and were there any other devices that aren't cameras, film scanners or audio interfaces that utilized firewire?
There were FireWire HDDs too. Non-artist people also used FireWire for their DV camcorders for home videos. It wasn't really common because most PCs didn't have Firewire.
It was also used by the PS2 for local multiplayer between multiple consoles. Although Sony eventually removed that port.
I have a 2008 iMac with (I think) 16Gb of RAM which is used for just Firefox. I've been meaning to upgrade it to Linux but that generation didn't boot from USB, need to burn a CD.
All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.
I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.
I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM.
(Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
32GB is starting to feel like a minimum for a common workflow: Dockerized development + git worktree + Claude Code or equivalent for working on multiple branches at once.
Definitely brings our engineers' 24GB MBPs to their knees primarily b/c of the RAM chewed up by those multiple Docker instances.
Will 32GB also start looking paltry soon? It's hard to say. I want to say the realistic upper limit is 3-4 simultaneous worktrees for a given developer (at this point the developer becomes the bottleneck again?) but it's a wild guess that may be hilariously low.
Weird .. I easily run 40 docker containers on an 8GB MacBook just fine!
(Just posting this to show that you have to be very specific when talking about these kind of things. Yeah maybe you need 32GB because you run some large deployment 3 times. Others mayb be totally fine with less if they just develop a basic Python web app. Who knows. The devil is in the details. Omitting them makes the discussion ambiguous and just difficult.)
I've got an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and it runs Ableton and Serato so well I don't actually need a Pro anymore, so Mac may have shot themselves in the foot there.
> I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need
Mac devices have been able to get away with less RAM (and higher priced upgrades) for well over a decade. During the Intel era, they were the first ones to adopt SSDs as the default option while everyone else still installed spinning rust. That alone provides for way faster swap storage to conceal a relative "lack" of RAM.
And when they went for their own fully integrated stacks of soldered RAM and SSD? Then everything went off the rails - close proximity and no sockets means very low latency for both RAM and persistent storage on one side and on the other side it also allows for much higher bandwidth because of much cleaner signals - remember, even at "measly" hundreds of megahertz you're already in the territory requiring precise PCB design.
On top of that, macOS's scheduler seems to be much, much more efficient and outright better in constrained RAM (and CPU) settings to provide the feeling of "the system is still responding" than either Windows or Linux. The only setting where macOS goes into molasses is when you not just run out of RAM but of free disk space as well.
If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.
Depends on the course I think.
But 8Gb is more than enough to run a Java 'Hello World' GUI app or even something heavier. Students don't - as a rule - get to deal with millions of lines codebases.
Just tried out a simple Java Swing popup and it uses 6Mb of heap so that's allright then ;). (on my machine it will reserve 160Mb of memory for thread stacks, code caches, buffers and GC but that won't be a problem unless you use it)
In the 90s I also thought that was wasteful (my first PC had 32Mb). Nowadays with Electron apps taking up gigabytes it doesn't seem that bad anymore.
I don't doubt that 8GB is enough for most uses today. But is it closer to "more than enough" or "just barely enough"? Seems unlikely to be the former at a price point this low.
Five years from now, I have no doubt that the processor will still be fine for most uses, but I doubt that 8GB will be. Especially given that some of the most common memory hogs aren't under Apple's control (cough Chrome cough).
A $600 laptop bought new should absolutely still be useful in 5 years. It should be useful longer than 5 years. That people’s standards are so low is a condemnation of the modern computer market.
> "From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong"
Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow.
One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer)
Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!
My M2 has an IDE and a couple active Firefox tabs open and I'm sitting at 30GB RAM usage, with about 5GB more on swap. It's a 32GB machine and I'm constantly opening Activity Monitor to kill Firefox tabs whose memory usage just seems to grow unbounded over time.
Software shouldn't be written this way. I shouldn't have to disable mds-store because it likes to take up 2-3 cores at full throttle when I'm on 10% remaining battery. But it is, and 32GB isn't enough for me to even have a basic computing experience anymore, it seems.
> fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web.
The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.
Many of the apps non-devs use will likely be universal binaries, or adapted from iOS versions. Chrome, Safari, Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Zoom, Claude, Contacts, Notes, Maps, Music, Pages, Numbers, etc. These are apps that run concurrently with no issues on the iPhone Pro 16. I'm not sure why people expect those same apps would cause issues on materially the same hardware because its package includes a hardware keyboard.
(The most RAM you could purchase in an iPhone until late 2024 was 6GB. iPhone 11 had 4 GB of RAM. I have not at any point since approximately iPhone 6 heard anyone complain about the speed of an iPhone Pro for "normal" consumer/not professional media stuff. iPhone 6s was released in late 2015 and had 2GB of RAM.)
Yes, MacOS is a different OS than iOS. But the very same company who built the Neo also make MacOS. They are known to adapt the OS to the hardware they are shipping. I'm willing to bet the experience for the non-dev is similar to the experience of using an iPhone 16 Pro in 2026.
> On iOS if an app remains in the background for over ~30 seconds, it gets killed.
Except 1) that's not entirely true (famously: music, Zoom) and 2) yes, cooperative state management. Users do not know or care that an app is not actually running if it appears that it is still running when they switch back to it. #2 obviously does not work for many dev use cases, but it would not impact my workflow if e.g. ChatGPT or Chrome were suspended when not in the foreground.
> The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.
I have 8GB of RAM in my M2 iPad Pro running iOS (yes, it’s “iOS” despite what Apple’s crack marketing team might call it), and I’ve certainly started to complain. Doing anything with the web, and like one or two other apps is enough to have apps I’m switching between page out like every two or three minutes.
Yes, I think they changed something in the new iOS; they are trying to get people to swap old devices.
I had issues with swapping before, but with the latest iOS, it has become very annoying on an old iPhone with a small amount of RAM (3GB, I think).
Apple fanboys laugh at Android users for many things, but they can use their devices longer even though they might not have the fastest CPU around (8GB+ has been normalized forever in Android world).
At this point the RAM only matters if you've got something that actually needs all that RAM continuously, likes games, virtual machines, or heavyweight user workflows like 4K video editing. For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.
> For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.
You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.
Right, I mean even a fast SSD has an order of magnitude less throughput, and 2-3 orders of magnitude higher latency from RAM. No dispute there. If you are doing random access across 16GB of data and your machine only has 8GB of physical RAM, you're in the pain zone.
OTOH, if you are using multiple RAM-heavy apps that aren't actively hammering that RAM (e.g. an instance of Photoshop that is using 10GB but is just idling or whatever) then MacOS and their stupid fast SSDs handle that pretty seamlessly.
Most use cases are probably somewhere in the middle.
Browser use on the modern web is enough to put you in swap territory early and often on 8GB of RAM. My much more RAM efficient M2 iPad Pro with the non-desktop OS and 8GB of RAM frequently has to page out apps I had open two minutes ago if I’m doing anything with the web and like one or two other applications. This things eventual replacement in like 4 or 5 years is going to need twice or thrice the RAM for me to consider it an upgrade.
> Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD
People always forget that Apple does realtime compression on data that's in RAM allowing more things to fit in RAM; it also effectively increases the bandwidth of the SSD.
> Windows 10+ and Linux also have memory compression, though I don't know how the implementations compare.
A combination of Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) and hardware-accelerated instructions (SIMD/NEON) makes RAM compression on Macs very efficient. Because the storage controller is integrated into the SoC, the bandwidth is high enough that the transition between "Compressed RAM" and "Swap" is very smooth.
And because the CPU and GPU share the same memory, there are no wasted cycles moving data between VRAM and System RAM.
Apple uses WKDM (Wilson-Kaplan Direct Mapping), a specialized, high-speed compression algorithm designed specifically for in-memory data. WKDM is "architecturally aware"—it was built to compress the specific types of data structures found in a computer's RAM, such as pointers, integers, and memory addresses. WKDM treats RAM like a collection of 64-bit integers and pointers; and it's designed to fit entirely in L1/L2 cache [1]. This shipped in MacOS 10.9 Mavericks in 2013.
Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient. The vast majority of Windows and Linux machines don't have unified memory or storage controllers connected to their processors.
Because of this, Apple can often compress a page of memory using fewer CPU cycles than Windows or Linux, which is why M-series Macs can be so aggressive with compression without you ever noticing a "hitch" in the UI.
The fallback algorithm is their LZFSE algorithm, which is like "Zlib-level compression with 2x-3x the speed and efficiency". LZFSE achieves a nearly identical compression ratio but uses Finite State Entropy (FSE) coding, which allows it to decompress data significantly faster while using much less battery power.
LZFSE is optimized for the ARM NEON instruction set to minimize "wake time" for the CPU, making it arguably the more "green" choice for mobile devices [2].
It's safe to say that neither Windows nor Linux has the combination of hardware and software optimizations that Apple has when it comes to RAM compression.
[1]: Compressed Memory compresses the least recently used data residing in memory using the WKDM algorithm, which not only frees up memory but also reduces the amount of swapping going in the background. Not only is this faster than swapping to disk (even to SSDs), but Apple also claims it saves power -- essentially, that compressing data in memory uses less power than writing data to disk without compressing it. -- https://www.osnews.com/story/27121/os-x-109-mavericks/#:~:te...
> Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient.
That doesn't really follow. There are faster and slower compression algorithms no matter what, and 64-bit integers are kind of a waste of memory much of the time.
Also, unified memory has tradeoffs. The GPU improvements are real but it mostly means more pressured on memory, not less.
Very cool, thanks for the detail. This leads me to wonder....why haven't Windows and Linux done any similar optimizations? I assume they do lots of hardware optimizations in all sorts of places, but this seems pretty core.
Nobody forgot anything, and I certainly didn’t. You can tell when you hit swap, and it doesn’t matter what Mac OS X is designed to do, when you hit swap, you hit swap. When you’re hitting swap a lot, you’re hitting swap a lot.
> You can tell when you hit swap, and it doesn’t matter what Mac OS X is designed to do, when you hit swap, you hit swap. When you’re hitting swap a lot, you’re hitting swap a lot.
I have a 16GB M1 Pro machine from 2021 with 200 GB/s memory bandwidth; I can't tell when it's hitting swap, even with tons of browser tabs open, 3 or 4 terminal sessions, and several apps running. I often run two browsers with dozens of tabs open and there's no noticeable lag.
RAM Doubler was a third-party application in the days when a top-of-the-line Mac had 128MB of RAM, with a 40Mhz processor. The level 2 cache was 256 bytes.
That's not in the same universe as hardware compression on a 6-core, 64-bit ARM processor with cores that can run at 4GHz.
> The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder.
That is ultimately what keeps saving Apple from turning into Dell. They want to offer you one model per price point. You'd be hard-pressed to find two iPads, Macs, iPhones with the exact same price. There's always a price difference with Apple, which helps immensely.
The original article doesn't dwell too much on the RAM limitation, but I agee with you that 8 GB is too little
for the near future or even today.
I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026.
Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning some features. Currently, the OS uses much of the available RAM for caching (I've seen "40%" of total OS RAM usage) to make the system faster, whereas 8 GB RAM permits only essential caching.
(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
That's nothing compared to my car! It fires on all cylinders, instead of saving 3 out of 4 cylinders for a day when I will really need the power.
The reality is that nobody outside of HN cares about 8GB vs 16GB of RAM. You can do anything you want or need to do with an 8GB Macbook, including running a million dollar business, or working with anything creative on the highest level. If you are actually doing something which requires 16GB of RAM on a Mac, then you are doing state of the art tech stuff and should be rolling in money already and have no problem spending thousands and thousands on your computer.
>(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.
> Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.
I think it’s as simple as: 8GB is what the iPhones using the A18 Pro had. It’s this thing Apple likes to do where to keep costs down, they use some iPhone part or other SoC/SiP they have laying around as close to its standard configuration as possible with minimal changes.
Their new Studio Displays for example have an A19 Pro and 128GB of NAND. For basically just the firmware. Why? Because that’s the least amount of storage Apple ships with an A19 Pro iPhone, because like the previous Studio Display from 2022 which had an A13 Bionic in there, they probably just shoved an iPhone board in there to handle the logic and I/O.
So in theory, if they update the MacBook Neo next year to an A19 Pro, it should have 12GB of RAM.
Like freeways, it's not clear that increasing the baseline ram for basic laptops is an effective way to mitigate software bloat. Rather it likely creates bloat.
I think the big difference is that if you just want to optimize for some objective, it's usually very clear how to do that from Apple's options, so there's not much research to be done. It can still be challenging to choose what's the best value when it's your own money, but at least you know what you're getting, and the quality hasn't been a concern for years.
>> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.
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.
With respect, I think you're misremembering the product lineup in the 1994/5/6 era.
Back then, Apple had 16 to 32 distinct models[1] of just desktop computer (just the desktops!) with little to distinguish them. In many cases, the exact same internal hardware was shipped in two different boxes as two models aimed at two different customers (LC/Performa/Centris/Quadra/Workgroup Server). For example, the "LC 550" and "Performa 550" were the exact same computer[2] with two different names on the front, meant to be sold to the educational and home markets.
That's extremely confusing for the consumer. You had the same internal hardware being sold for two different price points, and computers with significantly different performance sold at the same price point. You don't want your customer to get analysis paralysis and give up before they purchase.
The point of Jobs's simplification is that there is one option for you to pick at a given price point in a given category of tablet/laptop/desktop, and that pricing and capability are clearly aligned. I don't see where Apple has gotten away from that.
I think It makes sense for iPad line up to be this way. Very clear feature segmentation that make sense. Most is directly result of underlying hardware. For consumer it's also very easy:
- decide on size
- go from your budget
- if still too many SKUs go by features
What features? Thunderbolt, Screen, Apple Pencil, Face ID
Alternatively if you know what features you want, start with that.
If you're struggling to choose which iPad you need then you might want an iPad for the sake of having an iPad (in which case get Air).
Yeah, I don't think this lineup is particular crazy:
- 8.3", one tier (mini)
- 11", three tiers (iPad, Air, Pro)
- 13", two tiers (Air, Pro)
Could you spend the same amount of money on a regular 11" iPad with a lot of storage, or an iPad Air with less storage? Sure.
Some people want lots of storage. Other people don't care but want a wide gamut screen, faster processor, and better pen capabilities.
It's nothing like trying to pick a laptop from Dell where you have to spend hours digging around to even figure out what your options are. If someone asked me which iPad to buy we could figure it out in under 5 minutes.
IMO it's telling that the lineup here is bucketized by screen size and not model. Screen size, processor performance, storage, sensors, etc are ambiguous concepts that don't mean much in their own merit. People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"; people think in terms of use cases and cost.
For laptops the buckets are portability and performance. These two will always be at odds, and people will gladly prioritize one over the other; these are the ingredients you need for creating a model lineup. Each model prioritizes something different:
- Affordability, MacBook Neo
- Portability, MacBook Air
- Performance, MacBook Pro
There's people who will be carry this machine everywhere and will gladly sacrifice performance for portability. There's people who will gladly use a laptop as essentially a desktop they can occasionally move if it means maximum power. You even see this in the wider market; there's a clear category of laptops praised by their portability (ultrabooks), and another group praised by their power (gaming laptops).
I don't think there's an equivalent for tablets, since people don't really seem to need them for that much (lol). Apple has been focusing a lot on portability, but the market of people who carry their tablet everywhere isn't really that big, most people use them at home [1]. Digital nomads, students, PMs hopping around meetings: they're on laptops. Same with performance; people who need performance are on laptops.
The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen. A single dimension for improvement doesn't give you the ingredients for creating a model lineup, it gives you the ingredients for a price ladder where more money just gets you a bigger, better screen.
I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone. In that case, I think like the iPhone, the iPad could do with less overlap:
- 8.3", $ (iPad mini, affordable)
- 11", $$ (iPad, standard)
- 13", $$$ (iPad Pro, better in pretty much every way)
And keep the iPad Air in the same space as the iPhone Air, a novelty luxurious product that isn't the fastest nor the most affordable, but showcases premium hardware and what the future could look like.
I think Apple doesn't do this because it hopes to discover what people want through the grid of different screen size, thinness, performance, etc permutations that currently exist, but oh well.
> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"
Disagree, at least coming from a current iPad owner. I’m on an 8 year old 12.9” iPad Pro and if I bought a new iPad today it would be 11” because that’s the size I’d rather have at this point.
So hypothetically it’s between the Regular, Air, and Pro, and I would get the Air because I want the better screen and stylus compatibility but wouldn’t spend $1000 for it.
> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"
I have 12.9" iPad Pro, my priority was thunderbolt and screen size, but mainly screen size (battery life is given on Apple devices).
I also have iPad Mini where my priority was...bigger than the biggest iPhone, smaller than regular iPad.
> The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen.
It's like all-season tires, does not exceed in any particular field. I use my iPad for casual CAD with 3d printing in mind, it works great. I also use it as a bedroom screen on stand by the bed. Can two separate devices do a better job? Yes, but I don't need
> For laptops the buckets are portability and performance.
iPads not bucketed like this because you're not buying iPad for performance.
> I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone
Sure they can. This would lead to less overall sales. Right now 11" buyer have whole 3 feature set selections to choose from. I'd get rid of Pro, but not everyone needs 11" and Air features.
They're suggesting a hypothetical lineup would be cleaner if that weren't the case.
I don't disagree, but Apple seems to treat the Mini as an afterthought side project that gets updated every 3 years or so, compared to the mainline iPad being updated yearly from 2017 to 2022. Then it had a gap until 2025, apparently taking a while to get the slim bezel redesign down to the affordable model.
If the mini were the default affordable entry point they'd need to keep it up to date but they've decided not enough people want a mini for it to be worth that effort.
The goal is different. Jobs wanted to make the product spread simple to understand.
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.
I think you are completely misremembering what the Apple product lineup looked like even with the Steve Jobs cleanup. At its absolute simplest, it contained the iMac, iBook, PowerMac and PowerBook lines. Within each line was a "Good", "Better" and "Best" pre-configured model each being a few hundred different from the other and each of those models was further configurable to add additional storage / memory etc.
That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002 when the 14 inch iBooks, the 17 inch iMacs and the eMacs were introduced, followed by the 12 and 17 inch powerbooks in 2003. By 2005 they had also introduced the Mac Mini. And again most of these had a "good", "better", "best" variant, though in some cases (like the first 17 inch iMacs, the "best" tier was also the next model variant).
Apple's lineup is undeniably more complicated now than it has been in the past, but the simplification was never really about cutting model types down, so much as it was about making distinct model categories that people could easily understand why they would pick one or the other.
I think they still do a relatively good job at retaining that distinction, and I agree that the iPad lineup is probably the most muddled. Though special mention goes to the "Macbook Pro with M4 Pro" branding, which anyone should have caught and thought that maybe they needed a better moniker than "Pro" for the processor variant (and of course also, is the "Pro", the "Max" or the "Ultra" the best?)
> 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.
Don't underestimate how much of a bitch it is to maintain all the separate SKUs. This isn't the old CTO days where you had: 1 chassis, N mainboards for different CPU/GPU combinations, a bunch of SODIMM's of varying capacities, and a couple of different fixed storage drives to toss in.
When any given MBP has 2 CPU/GPU options, multiple memory options, and multiple storage options, with everything being soldered to the board? Honestly, the Neo is the one product in their portable lineup that doesn't cause a massive headache for logistics.
But...even then, Tim Cook is CEO still, and he is a supply chain guy, so you better believe this is top of his list when it comes to their product lineup. You don't increase operational complexity for no reason, because that is where the cost for every product lies for them, it's not just dealing with silicon binning.
> But...even then, Tim Cook is CEO still, and he is a supply chain guy, so you better believe this is top of his list when it comes to their product lineup. You don't increase operational complexity for no reason, because that is where the cost for every product lies for them, it's not just dealing with silicon binning.
Sure... but when looking at sales numbers, HP and Apple are tied by monthly sales volume on Amazon [1], with everyone else being widely behind them. But HP has almost 300 models, Apple much, much less - and Apple can react much, much faster because they almost directly run the production sites and mostly sell themselves, so they can produce an initial run of products and whenever a store or a region runs out of one specific variant, they just tell Foxconn to, say, instead of making a run with black casings they now make a day worth of gray casings, ship that onto a plane and that's it. HP, Dell et al? Their inventory gets distributed by an intricate web of middlemen who all need buffer.
Those kind of pricing ladders are "fine" because at no point do you have to really make a decision. The problem is when it splits and you have a tree where what branch you go down precludes you from options on the other branch you might want.
> 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.
Yes
>Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."
Disagree. The Air offers additional utility and longevity for the price, the Pro offers nothing that 90% of people will ever perceive.
I know a ton of people for whom the $500 would be nothing, but still get an Air rather than a Pro. Obviously, that’s not great data, but I feel like the jump from Air to Pro just doesn’t happen or won’t happen compared to jumps from Neo to Air.
But for any real work, like coding/photo/video you just pick Pro with parameters you want and you are good. For office work you can choose air and for low level students or whatever you can have neo.
You still basically know what you need, without needing to try really hard to understand it.
> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.
Sort of, maybe (not)?
First off there is the "mini", which is basically if you want a small screen / most portability.
After that, the two questions you need to ask are "How much horsepower and storage do you need/want?" (plain vs Air/Pro), and then "How fancy of a screen do you want/need?" (Air vs Pro):
Do I want an iPad Air or Pro? Both seem pretty thin. Why is it called 'Air'. What am I not getting with the Air? When was the last time each product was updated, since I remember a time when different models were updated at different times (and I never updated my internal barometer if this changed)?
Further, I see older versions of the iPhone on display at the apple store. Does this mean I'm potentially browsing an older version of the iPad?
To be fair, there was some overlap in the Jobs apple store days (when the Santa Rosa processor dropped on the MBP and you didn't know if you were getting the older model unless you asked), but it was never this bad. You had the iPad, then the iPad 2. iPhone 4->4S->5. I don't know how the 'Air' slots in between the regular and the Pro, and I don't know if I'm seeing an older model on display. The whole thing is very confusing.
> Do I want an iPad Air or Pro? Both seem pretty thin. What am I not getting with the Air?
Horsepower (M5 vs M4), display ("XDR brightness: 1000 nits max full screen, 1600 nits peak (HDR content only"; "ProMotion technology"), option for more storage (2TB).
> Laptops also now fall into the trope of good/better/best with Neo/Air/Pro.
...until the bestest Ultra launches, as GP pointed out?
(Also Air used to be 'the light one', not the standard/middling one on same spectrum.)
We could say a similar thing with the Dell names above, the point is that it's confusing to work out which you need/want when there's so many, not that they don't fall in some sort of order across a line from mediocre to best.
This is basically the performance of M1 with 8GB ram (with shittier USB/connectivity). I've seen developers who used the 8GB air a few years ago on a project. It would't work for me (even the 24GB air I have is swapping), but I can see this working for students without any problems.
Buying this for a kid would be a no-brainer for me - especially if it was on a discount (and it's not uncommon for Apple stuff to get 10-20% discount drops at retailers). Even the USB 3.0 is enough to power an audio interface - should be good enough to run some basic DAW, a MIDI keyboard, electronic drums etc. Will probably pick it up for my son at some point to motivate him to learn to type.
Apple stopped numbering iPads with their generation so it's pretty messy compared to iPhones. I recently spent some time to decode their entire line-up (all models ever released) and made this comparison table which might clear things up a bit: https://comparisontabl.es/ipads/
It is giving me choice paralysis, last week I made a mental graph of the ones I wanted and went over all node pairs choose 2, now it's down to waiting for a fall M5 Mac mini paired with either: a MacBook Neo, or an iPad Air 13"; both options are very attractive for my intended usage though the latter seems higher risk since I've never used a 13 inch tablet before.
The iPad gives you touch interaction, hand-held operation, a higher quality (albeit smaller) display, and a more resilient operating system (albeit managed).
The Neo gives you a real keyboard, a bigger screen, and unified UX/software support with your desktop computer.
But are you sure you need two devices? Why not just get a MacBook Air (with the same spec as your proposed Mac mini) along with a USB-C dock accessory to connect charging/keyboard/mouse/video with a single cable? Also don't underestimate the value of having a battery in your "desktop" computer. It's a free UPS.
I never understood why they didn't use the Apple "UI". Where Apple presents fewer models (say N models), and when you select one, each is configurable for screen size/RAM/CPU/whatever (say K picks), yielding N*K possibilities, many Windows laptop sellers present a list of N*K SKUs where you need to triple check what the difference between SKU A and B.
My guess is that some cell in an excel sheet says that some customers bought certain models in the past and no manager at Dell has enough weight or enough courage to question that and rule to NOT release a certain model.
They're meant to replace vostro/latitude/precision - enterprise machines. I suspect that Dell expectes shoppers to either look at enterprise or consumer, not both.
Every time I've considered an alternative to my Mac laptop I'm confronted by this much choice (and that of other manufacturers) and I also have to deal with unknown and varying performance of keyboard, display and trackpad.
One thing PC manufacturers seem to prioritise and focus on is tech specs + performance and interface is tacked on (or at least the interface designers departments in their companies aren't leading the design), when by and large most consumers of their machines focus on the interface and whether the CPU is of a certain level is likely secondary to the experience.
Anyway, I keep on going back to apple every 7 years (as that's how long they typically last) simply because I can't handle the choice or the uncertainty, but I'd love to bust out and get a linux using machine next.
I used a work provided thinkpad in 2000 and I really liked it at the time. And I've been dabbling with linux every since then. But only switched my main desktop OS to linux last year (from Windows 11). So my last upgrade cycle linux wasn't really on the cards (for me).
The one thing that makes it harder for me to go the way of the think pad is the lack of models on display anywhere in Australia. For a 7 year commitment I really don't want any uncertainty about the feel of the machine. Lenovo do have plenty of ideapads available at retail and some thinkpads, but not the higher tier.
To be fair, the English language is the real victim here.
While “essential” cleanly maps to “can’t go without” - it doesn’t map to “bare minimum”.
For instance, let’s assume you’re surviving in the wilderness and you need to start a fire. Your fire starting kit is obviously essential, but it could also be included in a “Camper Value Pack” - but those things don’t have anything to do with each other. The kit is essential, and it was obtained in a value pack. This message brought to you by Mr. Obvious.
Hotel branding might be worse. Marriott has 30+ brands, each supposedly with its own identity but I can’t really see how having that many makes sense. Should I stay at the Fairfield or the AC or the Four Points or the Aloft or the Moxy or the CitizenM … how about just the Marriott?
I had a series of two XPS laptops in my last corporate job, finishing two years ago. My uncle has also had one of them that passed on to me when he died.
I can't speak for the other series you mention, but the XPS series is complete garbage and should be avoided at all costs. Three for three laptops, all in theory well specced, that were all horribly flawed in various ways (WiFi flakiness, constant driver issues, crappy trackpads, mediocre keyboards), does not speak well of that model line.
That Dell Pro Max Plus (that I legit thought might be a joke) is a big horkin laptop for ~$6k+. 3cm thick, nearly 3kg, and you can do wireframes on it, wow! A full HD screen with 500 nits brightness. What a piece of shit product comparatively speaking. I imagine someone would buy it for a niche specific engineering purpose that can only be practical on Intel Windows, but damn.
I really don't think it would fair better than a less costly M4/M5 Pro, and would probably be just an awful experience to use daily.
I use the non-Plus version as my work machine (not by choice).
It's massive and heavy and feels less snappy than my personal X1 Nano after all the corporate malware uses up most of the CPU and RAM.
The screen resolution is also shockingly bad (my 13 inch X1 Nano has a higher res than this 16 inch beast).
That being said, it's nice having 64gb of RAM, a fast CPU and an Nvidia card (we build stuff that runs on CUDA). Build times are quick and I can run some of our more demanding test suites without RAM filling up and slowing everything down.
> That being said, it's nice having 64gb of RAM, a fast CPU and an Nvidia card (we build stuff that runs on CUDA). Build times are quick and I can run some of our more demanding test suites without RAM filling up and slowing everything down.
No question there, more RAM and a specifically CUDA capable card make sense. At a big corp gig I did years ago, they issued me this atrocious HP thing they must have bought in bulk. I really tried to be optimistic, since it was just a tool and I was otherwise grateful for the work, and I'm sure the ram and CPU situation was fine, but for my use it only actively detracted from my ability to get things done. It pretty much had to be docked at all times, the screen had one viewing angle, Windows was functionally detrimental for my workflow (frontend web at that time), and the battery life was just sad.
ThinkPads have always seemed a bit better, even their more chonkier versions.
Yes, it will also have 5 mins of battery life when unplugged and have a power adapter the size of a shoe box. I tried a similar machine from Lenovo at work and quickly returned it.
My laptop is always either plugged into a dock at work, or plugged into a dock or just a power supply at home. I feel like there's an untapped market for 'same laptop, but slightly cheaper because there's no battery in it at all'.
Like you say most windows laptops have such garbage battery life already that it's not practical to use them unplugged.
Not the same - I still want to be able to just use and carry round the one thing without needing a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc at every single location, but I basically never need to use it somewhere where there isn't a wall socket available.
It seems ridiculous on the surface, since you'd think you'd just buy a desktop or something, but with a laptop with no battery, and hypothetically better everything else, it would eliminate the need for a bunch of other peripherals
Kind of an interesting idea. Only the portability but none of the mobile computing capability.
It does kind of seem like, outside a few select models, the PC market just gets the laptop part of laptops so so wrong. Bad touchpads, bad screens, no battery life, unpleasant industrial design usually, crammed with crapware and other bullshit. I hand it to the few companies that do try harder to remedy these.
Eh, I want some battery, it's nice when you need to move rooms or someone kicks the power cable out. Even 15 minutes would be enough for a chonkster machine like this.
The thing is, I think there's probably a niche for a workstation laptop like that, but this doesn't really check the right boxes.
For all that extra bulk it ought to be extremely robust and repairable, have the best specs possible, and be equipped with the kind of killer cooling system that a thin chassis can't deliver. Then the tradeoffs might make sense.
I really really don't understand why the f** they thought it was a good idea to do away with the Latitude and Precision lines, as at least I had some idea of what the intended purpose of the device was and what to roughly expect.
My first laptop was xps 13 released in 2016, I think. I am still using it with linux installed. It’s a solid laptop. Good display, good port selection, good keyboard, even trackpad is not bad. It survived my long graduate degrees and survived covid when I was using it full time (mostly ssh though). I swapped the battery two times and battery life is not bad with minimal linux setup. What’s surprising the most to me is that it was just 900 usd.
The best part is how they don't have medium range laptops with 17-18 inch screens even though MANY offices where people work with spreadsheets use laptops...
The last time (2005) I was faced with this issue and had to buy a Dell laptop. There were also Windows license issues to consider. I was going to be doing unattended installations and the Windows licensing required the original purchase be a particular SKU or I would need to buy second Windows licenses to install over a network.
This naming is great compared to their traditional naming. I immediately know that I need a pro max premium if I want the one that compiles stuff fast and is heavy and has the fans running full speed all the time and only technically works unplugged, like my current Dell work laptop (guessing).
When I worked for the government, we had a requirement to get a certification for every model of device Dell had on our contract. This excluded consumer devices. They had >350 SKUs, with probably millions of configurations.
Apple a decade ago had like 10. Now probably 20-30 Mac configurations, and even those probably share alot of components.
I expressed that poorly. I mean the internal components.
The MacBook Neo has 2 configuations. The MacBook Pro has several, but the SOC funnels those configurations into a few paths and segments the market. You can't get a "base" MacBook Pro with 128GB of ram or a large SSD. Dell will sell whatever the components allow you to do, usually only limited by the hardware.
They forgot to add Dell Pro Max Premium Plus to complete the word salad, what a missed opportunity.
If the Dell product naming team is reading here I have a couple marketing buzzword suggestions: add “elite”, “ultra”, “platinum” or “diamond” to the mix please. Doesn’t “Dell Pro Max Elite Platinum Premium Plus” sound so much more marketable?
It's kind of hilarious that they copied the Apple model of arbitrary superlative suffixes without realizing that each should signify some specific and obvious model option(s).
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.
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.
The first thing I do with any new system is immediately wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows/Linux, so bundled shovelware is meaningless to me, and presumably many others.
(Of course it would be even better if they just came with a totally stock install already, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me)
Windows license stored inside BIOS. When you install fresh Windows, it'll get activated automatically.
What's more troublesome is that some laptops require drivers and customizations, so you need to tinker with your fresh Windows by installing carefully selected subset of drivers, so your hardware works and at the same time you don't install the same shovelware. The driver situation for Windows is truly dire. There are drivers from laptop manufacturer (e.g. Lenovo). There are drivers from part manufacturer (e.g. Nvidia). There are drivers that Windows was bundled with. There are drivers that Windows will download automatically and install as part of Windows Update. It's a huge mess and I don't think anybody knows how to navigate that. So there's no reliable recipe to create "stable" Windows from the scratch.
> When you install fresh Windows, it'll get activated automatically.
Same happens with some crapware provided by vendor. You can wipe drive all you want, but ASUS motherboard will ask Windows to automatically install "essential drivers", and to be specific - "Armoury Crate".
You can (partially) blame Microsoft for that. I still don't understand why it's seemingly OK for device manufacturers to distribute such crapware through Windows update. New keyboard? Oops, spyware. Printer on your LAN? Here, let me install these 16 utilities for you. Just give me a driver without any GUI tools. Or at the very least prompt me before installation.
My daily driver is a very basic Linux experience. From my perspective, both PCs and Apple computers come with bundled software that I don’t want. It’s hardly as awful as the experience
you describe but, even so, with Apple it’s the OS so it’s even harder to drop.
I feel quite self conscious saying this. It feels like whataboutism, as well as being potentially contrarian — 100% of my colleagues use and love macOS — but I fell in love with being able to read and edit the source code for my whole computer, and I don’t ever want to relinquish that freedom.
> It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
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.
> You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.
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.
First impressions can be a very poor judge of build quality. If you pick up a mil-spec laptop it'll feel a lot more like the $200 Chromebook. Yet it'll survive endurance tests that neither the Chromebook nor the Macbook will.
That 'build quality' is a more complicated thing than many Apple fans believe. My good ol' Thinkpad is a bit creaky and frankly was so from the day 1, also it survived years of travels, lots of risky falls, and sticky spills. So I suppose its build quality is high. Also I upgraded its hardware pretty significantly twice. Somehow 'build quality' in Mac-land implies it's a taboo.
>If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?
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.
> Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust.
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.
For me, the one feature that sells having an iphone and a Mac laptop to me is copy and paste between the two devices. I spend way more time on my phone than I should, but being able to go from my phone to my laptop and back is what has me in Apple's ecosystem (for now). MacOS and iOS feel like they are buggier than they used to be, (don't get me started on 26) but framing it purely as a luxury and brand identity thing, without looking at usability details like battery life is an oversimplification.
That's interesting because I have the opposite experience. An Android phone or Lenovo laptop I can bring to the street shop and get a 50-200usd repair that would cost upwards of 600 at Apple or just making me get a new device.
I've found that many repair shops acknowledge the existence of two smartphone brands: Apple and Samsung. Bring anything else in and the most you get is a puzzled look.
Apple has the distinction of the iPhone being what everybody thinks of when they hear the word "smartphone". Everybody is familiar with it. That little xylophone jingle that serves as the iPhone's default ringtone plays in every detective show my wife watches on streaming, and everybody knows instantly what it means. That sort of ubiquity has network effects that you're not going to get with a Motorola, Sony Xperia, or even a Pixel. I've had to turn to Aliexpress to score a decent protective cover for my Pixel.
Just the guarantee of being able to walk into a physical location and talk to a real person and have their full attention for a while when something goes wrong is worth all the other bullshit.
You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.
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.
I have a relatively recent expensive gaming laptop from Asus for the occasional LAN party with friends. I hate it and it’s a huge piece of shit. Windows 11 is necessary for anti-cheat shenanigans. Apple could change the Mac OS wallpaper to a permanent photo of a turd and it would still be better than Windows 11. Also the trackpad and keyboard suck.
FYI, the very recently released Marathon with the BattleEye rootkit works fine on a maximally trimmed down Windows 10 LTSC, which is what I'm running on my PC (personal console).
Windows 10 LTSC is not available outside of volume licencing.
That you pirate an OS they refuse to sell to you to get a better experience is your choice, but it's unrealistic to suggest that it's a solution for the average person.
I don't rave about macOS any more because I've been here for decades and, barring the occasional fight with Windows when I want to play something, I've largely forgotten how awful all the other options are[1].
I've gone "OS blind", I guess, and now macOS, for me, is the "bare minimum of competence" - hence I won't rave about it (but I absolutely will moan about the stupid things it does[2].)
[1] I spent decades using various Unix GUIs (on Suns, SGIs, Linux, OpenBSD for a while); I have absolutely zero desire to explore them again.
[2] My current favourite is being able to notice when it's about to flip into "red battery, plug me in" mode because, for whatever godforsaken reason, the load average will rocket up into the 400s and everything turns to sludge for a couple of minutes. Oh how I laugh every time.
> macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.
There are levels to this. Sure, recent versions of macOS have some issues, no doubt. Part of the reason Mac users complain about relatively minor issues is because Apple has set the UI/UX bar so high.
But even in its current state, macOS is still leaps and bounds better than Windows. When I worked with customers using Windows and dealing the usual Windows issues, I realized most of them had no idea that computing didn’t have to be so bad, due to the Stockholm Syndrome that Windows users experience--they think all computers are the same.
The battery on my Macbook Pro, that I've owned since 2013, has finally gave out and I am looking for a new laptop. I considered buying an entry-level Air or a used Pro (<$1000 budget), but then Neo came out. I am now considering just getting the Neo. All I need is internet browsing, some very light coding maybe.
But if there are $200-300 Chromebooks just as good, I want to know. What are they?
I guess the market will speak for itself. I absolutely see the macOS percentage shoot to the sky, it's already almost 50% in the United States, with this, it will gravitate to 75%+ with significant penetration in Europe.
Microsoft is also helping by making Windows an absolute dump of an OS.
$300 to thread the eye of a needle through a field of dogshit, that can only run Google Chrome, or $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software that doesn't use garbage collection.
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
> $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software
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.
8GB was a sad amount of RAM back then, and it's still a sad amount now. Ditto for the storage. I'm not complaining about the CPU at all, it's fine. I use an M1 daily, and for work just an M1 Pro and both are fine.
I know there's a RAM shortage. But if RAM didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have stopped shipping 8GB configurations in the rest of their line. Starving these of RAM and storage is the way they've chosen to protect their fat margins of the MacBook Air. Which is fine. I just think these are best recommended only with a giant asterisk that they're for web tasks only, exactly like a Chromebook.
It was sad but usable (and arguably is usable now, even me with all my crap is around 14 GB not counting cache, etc).
But then again I remember when 128 MB of RAM was simply unheard of largess; so huge that using much of it for anything but a RAM disk was hard to do (of course, I also had that problem back in the DOS era with 8MB).
Please don't call people chuckleheads while licking a boot of a single corporation.
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.
The last competitor remaining is Lenovo with the ThinkPads and pre-installed Linux [1].
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.
They still have huge advantages (keyboard, maintenance manual, replacement parts, Linux compatibility, much more ports in case of the X14 and T14). Apples keyboards are nowadays “acceptable” but not even comparable to a good ThinkPad keyboard.
[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.
Lenovo's website is a disaster. Not only do they appear to have 100 sku's but on a 27" 5K Apple Studio Display I can see four laptops in the grid[1], which are actually cut off with their prices below the fold. Every single grid item has a "Katapult" lease to own offer, a "My Lenovo Rewards" offer (who the fuck is collecting rewards points from Lenovo, and what customer prioritizes the rewards they might earn over literally every other piece of information about the laptop?). There are 30 copies of the "®" symbol on the page. It's honestly a lesson in how not to design an e-commerce site.
I know Lenovo has their issues, but out of all the non-Apple laptop companies, they are by far the best out there. And to their credit, they do try to listen to customer feedback.
Also, AFAIK, Lenovo still has their ThinkPad designs developed by a design think-tank lab in Japan that they own (and IBM still has a bit of influence here as well) so I know Lenovo still gives somewhat of a damn in trying to develop a solid laptop.
Only the T and X series benefit from the Japanese design studios though and have the build quality to match. The E and L series are indistinguishable from a myriad of bargain bin business laptops, including Lenovo's own ideapads.
Even just within the Thinkpad lineup, their website is a mess. Let's even restrict ourselves to just T series Thinkpads.
First, the page looks like it misrenders with garish, inverse-color boxes breaking the apparent margin of the page. Then we get to the models:
* ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (14" Snapdragon) Laptop
* ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 (16" Intel) Laptop
* ThinkPad T1g Gen 8 (16" Intel) Laptop
* ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 (14" AMD) Laptop
* ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 (14" Intel) Laptop
… that's just the first row. There are 17 items shown. Mostly it's just a poor presentation: there's ~3-4 actual lines, and the rest of what's show is combinatorical complexity of the various ways you can customize them. It's a crapshoot of a presentation.
The builds themselves seem worse now than they have before: they're overall more expensive for what you're getting vs. a few years ago. E.g., the GPU is … gone? They're all iGPUs now. They include a "45%NTSC" screen by default, which is something I've never heard of, and I thought sRGB was the literal bottom of the barrel, but I guess we can go deeper. The warranty is pathetic, but so too is Apple's.
You are right, you can get them without Windows now.
> It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
At computex two years ago, Sensel had a couple demo ThinkPads with their trackpad on it. It felt very good, not glass but haptic, I would be very happy with it.
Didn't see them last year at computex and never found that Lenovo model again, not sure what happened with it, at the booth they said they had a partnership. I was hoping they'd link up with framework and make a module for them.
The early aluminum MacBook systems used a hinged trackpad. The "click" was a physical button under the trackpad, and you couldn't click on the top of the trackpad (because the hinge was on that side).
The MacBook Neo is a return to physical clicking, but they're using some sort of new mechanism which allows clicking anywhere.
Not really, not exactly. The older “clicky” MacBook trackpads couldn’t quite be “clicked” anywhere. They were levered at the top of the trackpad, so if you tried to click on the very top edge then they wouldn’t really click. Anywhere else, it felt fine, but maybe the top inch didn’t feel good. Not really a problem in normal use cause most people don’t try to click on the very top edge, but perhaps this new trackpad fixes that (I haven’t tested one myself). The current gen haptic ones have the same exact click feeling no matter where you press, of course.
That’s because PC manufacturers compete on spec sheets and how much does the trackpad suck isn’t one of the numbers on the spec sheet so they don’t care.
I used to use track points before moving on to Mac. After I tried moving back to Thinkpad I couldn't stomach the track point anymore , it's just too imprecise and I think it's because we use way higher resolutions nowadays with many more densely packed UI elements to click on.
You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem. It's much more comfortable to use it side-by-side with your keyboard, most of the time I'm reaching for the Trackpoint if my hands are on home row.
If I use one of my Macs then I have to resort to hacks to get a decent OS. A crappy trackpad is ~10-20x less annoying than a hostile OEM, at least for my non-bus-based work.
In any case, my response was to cromka's comment and our shared dissatisfaction with Asahi.
I don't think you need a Mac to get a decent trackpad. You need one maybe to have a great one.
That is the main difference to me. I hate crappy trackpads but the ones on my 2 thinkpads are good enough for the nomad/mobile use. That doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer the one on a Mac but I wouldn't want to suffer a hostile, OS and lack of repairability just to get a better trackpad.
tbqh I think one can survive with a merely decent trackpad on a bus or at meetings.
I've dual run Macbooks and Thinkpads for a while and the Thinkpad trackpad really isn't that bad (the trackpoint getting randomly stuck in a non-neutral position is a common thing I've experienced though)
The nicest thing for the Macbook for me in practice (disclaimer: I don't do fancy things on the trackpad) is the size. It "feels" fancier but the thinkpad plastic works totally fine for me.
I think some Mac users overindex on the quality of like... $400 Acer laptops from 2008 or whatever as their metric for "cheap Windows laptop".
Software stuff is still garbage but lots of machines have just straightforwardly decent hardware. Apple hardware is _very very good_ but it's not like the bad old days of "I actually cannot use this trackpad" in windows land. As much
Yeah, for a while my favorite laptop was the Surface Book 2. Decent specs, does what I want it to. Then Microsoft started going through "Marketing Driven Development" for Windows and its just been downhill for my experience with that laptop. It's not just the marketing trash, the OS has gotten noticeably slow despite me keeping it pretty vanilla. It's downright insulting. As for my desktops, I just smoosh over Windows and install Linux over now, I don't care about anything on Windows enough to keep it. I can play all my games on Linux just fine. I can do all my dev stuff on Linux too.
lol i just posted about how I was also scorned by MS/Surface Book 2.
What a potentially amazing device. I hated that if you were playing a game or doing many video encodes, the charger (100w?) could not provide enough power -- so your battery drained. And make sure you don't let your base drain completely after being stored for a while -- the main computer won't be able to recognize it to even charge it again. And these were all known faults with no solution for the consumer other than to "buy the newer model." And you could never disable the damn windows update nag screens entirely. And you knew that you'd lose functionality if you upgraded something.
I had a Surface Book 2 WITHOUT the base i.e. just the screen. Best tablet I've ever had. 15" and yet thinner (then) and lighter than an iPad Pro which still doesn't come bigger than 13".
Two useful accessories I had were 'surface connector to USBC' adapter (to mitigat the small battery) and a ring mouse. Scrolling on touchscreen for Windows has been as good as MacBook haptic trackpads, certainly better than most Windows oem trackpads.
There was brief moment in time where Panay was poised with the Surface Book and Surface Studio (just wish they made a monitor version of the studio) to give Apple a run for their money. But they replaced the Surface Book with Surface Laptop studio, devolved the OS with ads and AI and now I'm mainly only on the Mac...
an underrated reason for the decline in windows is that it went from a core product focus to being crowded out. I wouldn't be surprised if azure, sharepoint, office 365, devices, GH/Linkedin, bing/copilot, etc are all more important to msft leadership than windows.
I put Linux on an old Surface tablet. Works better than Windows on the same device. The only thing that isn't working under Linux is the camera. Built in extra privacy as a bonus!
I have thought about it, and I guess you bring up a good point, if I absolutely want a webcam, I guess I can plug in one... Maybe the camera "not working" is a hidden bonus for me.
I recently helped a friend picking a new laptop. Just going through the options at the websites of manufacturers was a nightmare. Huge amount of choices, shitty filtering, separated into multiple product lines were I often enough had no idea what separated the lines from each other
15 years ago this comment would have been a troll.
Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
Cute, and while I will agree that Apple hardware is generally superior or at least an excellent value, and OS X is miles beyond Windows in usability, I can't in good conscience recommend a Mac on principle.
They impose obsessive control over their walled garden, constant pressure to use Apple ecosystem products, and they are staunchly opposed to interoperability regardless of it being an obviously anti-consumer tactical moat.
Buying a Mac in spite of such anti-consumer behavior reminds me of voting for a bad person because you like their policies.
but to make a binary for it? You do. Even if it's not-for-profit. Why do you think web interfaces are so popular for OSS, a lot easier for the code to be JIT'd and run in a browser than pay a $99 vig for something you did in 10 days to speed up a process for yourself etc.
I compile and run utilities on my Mac all the time, and I've never spent a penny on dev tools or unlocks.
Yes, there's a fee to get access to the App Store, but almost nobody on the Mac uses the App Store... the fee is mainly for putting stuff on iOS (and likely watchOS, tvOS).
The fee also gets you the absolute latest Xcode, but go back one version, and it's entirely free.
On Mac, you can install brew, and use it to install gcc, clang, qemu, whatever utilities you want.
You used to need the developer fee to put stuff on your iOS device at all, but these days you can put stuff on your personal devices without a fee, but the binary expires in a week... enough to learn and debug, but not ideal for a personal tool. That's about the only annoyance where the fee comes up... long term deployment to iOS.
> you can put stuff on your personal devices without a fee, but the binary expires in a week... enough to learn and debug, but not ideal for a personal tool
This sounds like dystopian cyberpunk written in the 80s
You're sort-of right, I think, because you do need an Apple account to sign in to the Mac App Store to get current Xcode in the first place - but the $99 is entirely optional!
For distributing your program without the fee, you'll probably moan about the hoops that people have to jump through to run your stuff: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40616/mac - and I can't say I love this myself, but people can run your stuff, and no fee necessary.
(I've got a couple of (somewhat niche) FOSS things for macOS, and I build the releases using GitHub Actions with whatever default stuff the thing uses, then make up DMGs that people can download from the GitHub releases page. I added a bit in the documentation about visiting the security dialog if you're blocked - and that seems to have been sufficient.)
As opposed to Microsoft, the good guys right now? I don’t see how incessant privacy violations, selling your data, and general shovelware behavior of Windows 11 is better. In many ways, it’s much worse in my view.
Linux isn't a real choice for 99.9% of the population. If you're advising someone else on buying a laptop in an authority sense, rather than a colleague sense... telling someone to buy a Linux laptop (or, buy a laptop and put Linux on it), is a recipe for being tech support for them forever.
What “walled garden” burdens a Mac user? And what interoperability are you looking for? There is nothing proprietary about Thunderbolt, USB C, Bluetooth etc
> voting for a bad person because you like their policies.
These days, you're lucky if you get to pick from "Bad", "Very Bad", and "Worst".
(BTW, does Mr. Bad look like he'll competently implement and honestly administer his policies? 'Cause without those, "good" policies ain't worth squat):
They did end up getting a Macbook. I wouldn't have suggested it, because I don't want to make people switch operating systems if they themselves don't want to. But they threw it into the mix, so I did include it in the list of suggestions
> taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
And don't forget significantly shortening the usable battery life.
Windows 11 and the crapware it typically ships with are all very hard on battery life, and sleep support is unreliable so you can often find significant battery drain even when the machine is supposed to be sleeping.
For me it means that if I'm having to use a Windows laptop (and quite literally thank god that hasn't been true for 2 years now) then I've got to have the power supply and cables with me at all times, and I've got to be somewhere I have a realistic chance of plugging in just in case the worst has happened.
This is my advice anyone asks me about a laptop. The specs don't matter (at least if you're asking me, it means you don't know computers and will mostly just use a web browser, and therefore nearly any specs on the market will be fine) and the things that do matter are just never on a spec sheet -- keyboard, trackpad, speaker, screen quality. Some stuff won't be discovered until years later: for instance I had an Acer laptop in 2007 which was designed with insufficient cooling, and cooked its thermal paste in about a year or two. Once it was cooked, you couldn't play games or do anything intensive without rebooting the machine. I hadn't thought to research that issue since I figured cooling was a solved problem. But, I'm sure Acer saved a few dollars per unit. (and of course, the screen, trackpad, speaker (yes, singular!) and keyboard were all awful as well.)
I bought my last Acer around 2010 (Aspire 4820TG I think, good machine). Their notebooks were always on the cheaper side, where its price just sat right with the offered value. Cooling issues were always present and weren't a big problem as long as the machine was maintainable. Unfortunately maintainability in notebooks (and electronics in general) all changed around 2015-ish and from there on it was used ThinkPads only for me.
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - 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.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
I had high hopes for Surface as well, but the pricing is ridiculous. The Surface Laptop 7 is more expensive than a MacBook Air, with the added benefit of having worse battery life and performance. Pricing hasn't come down in almost 2 years either. Availability is almost 0, I've never seen one in real life.
I had a Microsoft surface book 2. The provided charger could not provide enough power to the device when it was under heavy load and there was no higher charger option either. That shit should be illegal. And if the battery for the base/GPU died? You can't use the computer w the gpu even with a charger attached. The device itself could have been a dream and something i could have seen Apple doing : a touchscreen monitor that was also a computer and could be detached from the keyboard/gpu.
For a couple of days I had a Surface Book 1 before returning it. The keyboard was really good but otherwise just a terrible device and experience.
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.
I still have a Surface Book 1 that I occasionaly use and I never encountered any of those issues. I even used it for some sketching and there was no lag or spurious touching from the pen. In fact, sketching was why I was "drawn" to it (heheh), largely influenced by this review: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2015/11/16/surface-bo...
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.
As much as I like the performance and the power consumption of the current apple lineaup, the problems is I can not install Linux on the Neo. I can beraly install it on the M1, M2, and M3. And not everything works. If I could install Linux and have everything working, I will buy a Macbook (not a Neo) right away.
Linux will always be a second class citizen on Apple hardware. I have the M1 and have tried Linux a few times at different stages of maturity. As it is right now, it's still a far cry from the experience of a Linux on x86 hardware, and specifically Thinkpads. Bottom line is, even though I really like my laptop, I do NOT like Mac OS (and with every update I like it _less_) and will probably go back to a thinkpad for my next laptop. It's a big shame.
A used ThinkPad with way more than 8 GiB of RAM can cost way less than $600. I picked two up for $300 each. You're not gonna run frontier open-source models on it but it's a very nice dumb machine for basic tasks, or even the archaic practice of programming by hand.
> IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models -
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.
> 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.
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.
And unless you looked it up, you'd never noticed the difference (save comparing the two side-by-side). Whereas the cheap laptop requires one to know the difference so you can get the right driver, or other jackery because your WiFi card was a mid-year change. It reminds of me of mid-year production changes on cars, where VINs XXX-YYY need part number ZZZ, but VINs AAA-BBB need part number CCC.
Creating SKUs to avoid price matching is still just having one product coming out of the factory. It's just extra space in a database somewhere, so it costs nothing. The PC makers do have to create new physical products for each of those SKUs though. So it's apples and oranges here
> Creating SKUs to avoid price matching is still just having one product coming out of the factory. It's just extra space in a database somewhere, so it costs nothing.
They also have to label the products. But yes, it costs almost nothing to the manufacturer, but the effect on the consumer is large.
Also, for flatscreen monitors, I think differences go further than model numbers. It’s things like number of inputs, number of outputs, max power delivery, color of the frame, etc.
Washing machines and the others don't have a company like Apple that is so differentiated that customers love their products so much they get to own something like 80% of the profits of the biggest personal computing market.
Inarguably one of the great things done by apple is the rather easily overseeable models. And no mattter the processing power in the models you get a rather great experience from the haptics, audio and visual in all of them.
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
I've only recently gotten a MacBook after using Linux Pretty much exclusively for over twenty years. And I have to say I'm really surprised how much I like it. For gaming it's all right, but not great. Factorio works but not much else.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
Should've clarified: not much else from my collection of favorite games. And that's because of the limited GPU power of the M2 Air, not strictly because the game wouldn't start.
Oh i have a steam deck and am in the process of migrating to linux latest when Win 12 hits. Just some problems with some software like Fusion 360.
I do like Linux alot.
It really is a pity that there’s no working business model around open source maintenance for software like wine. I’m the guy who fixed the wine bug that blocked new iTunes versions, because I like to keep my music in iTunes for easy iPhone sync. I also have Fusion 360 working flawlessly in wine, but the setup process required multiple sessions stepping manually with a debugger to avoid crashes and packaging that as scripts and/or just documenting all the little issues and their fixes and keeping that up to date with fusion updates would be serious work. So nobody is doing it.
CrossOver sells WINE and WINE consulting; I've been a happy customer on and off for about 20 years. If you're bothered by open source WINE i'd say give them a shot. In my experience it's worth the $70 or whatever to get a well-paved GUI path and support.
I’m a happy CrossOver customer myself. But they don’t have enough resources to keep all major Windows apps working well. Which, to me, indicates that the business model of selling support only to those who are willing to pay, while letting everyone use the results for free, isn’t such a great business model.
At the same time with effort they can run a surprising amount of games. Heroic Launcher makes it a bit easier to wrangle the game dev toolkit (riding off the back of work from the whisky dev before they quit dev work from all the complaining users).
I had Cyberpunk 2077 running on a M1 Macbook Air almost two years before the MacPort came at a very playable 30fps (900p Medium settings). Although I did have to use thermal pads to heatsink it to my metal laptop stand and added a slow spinning fan for good measure.
It's not perfect, but I've also spent a lot of time only buying games with no road blocks to running on Mac/Linux.
After growing up in eastern Europe it's still wild to see young Americans stupidly demand less choice and more monopolies in their market.
Like seriously, having laptop choice is causing you crippling issues? Is other people having a laptop to choose based on preference causing you distress when you go to Apple store?
I don’t think you fully understood their argument.
The problem is not that other manufacturers offer choices – the problem is that for a typical consumer it’s IMPOSSIBLE to really understand which computer in the lineup is appropriate for their needs. It seems most of them are focused on B2B sales.
Of course, if you are a gamer or a nerd like myself, you don’t mind spending a week finding the perfect computer. But that’s an exception.
Indeed, it’s a simple matter to figure out what you want if you’re buying a Mac. Laptop vs desktop. For desktop: integrated screen or not, for laptop, screen size, weight, then pick your processor, memory and storage and it’s done. There aren’t confusingly named and positioned overlapping models that it’s unclear what you’re gaining or losing for each one.
The apple pricing ladder is all about the confusingly named overlap.
The Air with more ram costs just a bit less than the pro non-pro. But then maybe you want the pro pro? Or do you need the pro max? Oh, and the ultra will come later but not for laptops. Also it will then be a smaller number M but ultra.
Oh, and the iPad air is, of course, heavier than the pro because "air".
I fully understood their argument and found out how ignorant it is by just looking at a huge list of all MacBook models on sale in local Apple Store which isn't all that different from an Asus or Dell list.
The posters are ignorant of how much they internalized Apple complexity and then uses that to crap on products they don't even know.
The problem is not that there is choice, it's that the choices don't make sense and overlap in weird ways. Apple presents a lineup that can be described as "good, better, best" while Windows OEMs have 20 models, all overlapping where one has a hinge that snaps in a year, the other has a defective trackpad, the other is the same thing as a another model but designed and manufactured in another country. You'd have to become fully invested in learning the companies products to understand which one you actually need and what the flaws of each model is.
It's like a restaurant that has a 30 page menu, where many of the options are bad, or cooked from stale frozen food from the back of the shelf. Fewer good options are better than numerous poor ones.
After growing up in the USSR but living in the US, the young Americans are correct. The number of choices are an illusion, most paths lead you down the same shit. People don't have the time or energy to dig deep into every option for every purchase.
The issue isn't choices but meaningless choices. Most PC manufactures have tons of SKUs that are functionally identical but offered in different sales channels.
A dozen SKUs to describe the same hardware isn't real choice. It's the illusion of choice so a sales rep can offer a "deal" the buyer can't meaningfully compare to other SKUs. They're all machines out of an ODM's catalog with the "manufacture" logo pasted on.
The more choice then the more procrastination occurs for buyers so they don't actually buy. Apple has made the Neo a two minute decision and you are not playing Russian Roulette with the specs as you know you'll get a uniform quality product, just one has double the storage than the other. Simple. Straightforward. Decisive.
In addition to your research categories - is the fan going to sound like a jet engine when just opening slack? Is the case going to wobble and creak after a few weeks? Is it going to tank performance when unplugged? And if not - is battery life going to be a concern?
In low price brackets those awful barrel jack charger ports that get loose at record speeds still appear too, which isn’t something people necessarily think about but will end up dragging down the user experience.
To what extent is there still a “consumer PC industry?” You mention Dell; for like a decade I think I’ve only ever seen Dells that were company-issued.
My sense is that consumers spend most of their tech money on phones, tablets, headphones, watches, services. People who really want a laptop get a Mac or Chromebook. Gamers buy / build PCs, for gaming. Linux geeks buy Linux machines for Linuxing.
I’m not saying no one buys PC laptops at consumer retail. I guess I’m just wondering how big that market is anymore after consumer discretionary spending on tech has been hollowed out by the above list.
(I’m sure most people reading this have purchased a laptop. I think the HN audience is a tech outlier compared to most consumers.)
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
Yes!! It's awful. I'm a long time Mac user and my wife needs a Windows laptop because of a specific software. I've tried three times to pick a computer for her, but I always give up after 10min and postpone the task...
In my opinion PC industry is also cooked because of fans. I simply cannot use any recent PC laptop, because the moment you do something it engages fans in the most obnoxious way.
Every time someone turns on their PC laptop next to me, my ears feel assaulted.
My Mac does engage fans from time to time, but I never notice the noise.
How little attention cooling gets in the laptop industry outside of expensive gaming laptops is crazy. I have a ThinkPad that gets huffy when I plug it into a 2560x1440 external display while otherwise idle (yes, under Linux too) which shouldn’t even be possible.
Even the Intel MBP laptops had fans firing up the afterburners to keep the Intel CPU cool when monitors were plugged in. Intel CPUs of the past were just massive heating elements.
This is how I ended up with my first MacBook in >10 years. I'd been a Thinkpad (T series) guy in the early days, the tried a MacBook in 2015... couldn't get used to it and used a Chromebook for the next 8 years. Needed to buy a new laptop in 2023 and ... the entire Windows laptop industry turned me off. Yes, something like System76 is an option, and so is installing Linux on a Windows OEM machine, but then you still have to deal with the hardware. Apple isn't perfect, but MacBooks are consistent and reliable, with minimal telemetry and no advertising or upselling. That's enough for me.
> too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?"
I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
I run both PC's and Mac devices in our house, we use what fills the job. Recommending PC laptops for family members feels like a total crapshoot though. Every time, I do all I can to find the right device for their needs and there are just so many trade-offs. Maybe I get all the right specs, ensure it doesn't thermal throttle, keyboard/trackpad are A-OK... but the webcam is trash. Ooof... now Mom is complaining about how no one can see her properly at bridge club call.
I brought up how the Neo might do to the PC industry what the Air did to Ultrabooks back in the day. The amount of hate I got on YouTube/Verge with copy-paste, "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" was expected, but also disappointing. There is clearly a market segment happy to continue to put up with the mess that Dell/Lenovo are selling (anything but a Mac).
Wild how tribal we are to our corporate computer overlords.
The era where something like Framework with its fully customizable, repairable, modular laptops becomes the standard can't come soon enough.
For the time being, I'll let Apple/PC continue to duke it out. Hope some competition helps in the long run. :shrug:
> I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
Yep.
I'm a long-time ThinkPad user, but I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from the ThinkPad E series or ThinkPad L series or ThinkPad X series, and their website certainly isn't going to tell me. I keep on buying T series because I'm honestly afraid of trying anything else.
To say nothing of Lenovo's non-ThinkPad laptop brands, including Ideapad, Legion, Yoga, ThinkBook (!), and LOQ.
I really don't know what laptop to recommend to a friend. One friend showed me specs for an Asus they found at Best Buy, and it looked okay, so I said "It's probably fine." Turns out it was shoddily made and overpriced: they had to sent it back not once but twice because the wifi and then the camera didn't work out of the box, then a few months later the hinge broke.
I am not a Mac fan, but it's easy to recommend them because you at least know they are universally well-built machines.
> I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from ...
My personal rundown and how they get assigned:
E - Educational / Lower office personnel spec
L - Office personnel you hate spec, but don't offer the E because they might complain.
T - Give this to all the technicians because they can't take care of anything and it will survive typically.
P - Give this to the engineers who believe having an RTX gpu will actually help them so that they are happy, and to the CAD operators who actually need it.
X - Smaller/Ultrabooks before the term got started, now somewhat a blurry line because T series have gotten lighter/thinner. But the X1 Carbon sure is a great way to spend a ton of money for a light laptop when a T-series would suffice.
Personally I stick to older used X series (currently x250) because I just enjoy a small laptop and they are dirt cheap now.
It weighs like 2.4 kg, and the weight is unbalanced.
The USB-C charge only works at 20V, nothing less.
While charging it overheats and spins up the fans.
It came with a TN screen with terrible viewing angles, that could not be used in a brightly lit room. I didn't use the laptop for two months while I waited for a replacement screen from aliexpress.
Keyboard is much thinner, the trackpoint drifts easily.
Camera quality is worse, somehow it cannot handle sun-lit scenes. Microphone and speakers are similar to the T14.
It stopped receiving firmware updates after two years.
It uses about 0.5 W while suspended, so its tiny 48 Wh battery typically doesn't last the weekend with the lid closed.
The motherboard has design issues, a missing protection diode in the headphone jack microphone input ended up frying the CPU due to a ground loop. Meanwhile the T14 has eaten the same ground loop and even a 48V passive PoE in an accident and dealt with it by rebooting. A T450 from 2015 is still running.
Neo and Air are quite simple when looking at it from the bottom up. Air is the "nice" Neo for basically $500 more. Backlit keyboard, MagSafe, Thunderbolt 4, M5, way faster SSD speeds, double the RAM, larger display, Force Touch trackpad.
> "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!"
And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of.
The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry.
If you aren't a gamer, there is zero reason at this point to consider any other laptop besides a macbook. Apple now has one for every price point. This neo is going to destroy the consumer PC space. Dell, HP, Acer are probably sweating right now.
They're not sweating at all; they'll do what they always do. They'll release a new model to compete in time for Christmas 2026. They'll call it the ASUS Nuevo X856G-L or the Acer Nova 9500X or the Alienware Morpheus ZS and that will be it. They won't even consolidate their line at the 600$ price point; just one more model, bro!
Their sales will continue tapering off and they'll do what they always do; reduce investments, fire some designers and engineers, keep old models out even longer, and move out of Apple's way by selling even more 380$ laptops for 400$ while Apple siphons even more profits by selling a 400$ laptop at 600$.
Running Windows in 2026 is either a mistake, or a sad necessity. Fortunately, unless you need The Right Kind of Excel, you can choose either Linux on a PC (best, IMO), or a Mac.
Apple is great at marketing to consumers. The other big players, I have to assume, are more focused on B2B where the threshold for UX acceptability is lower.
The only ads I ever hear from them are on economics podcasts ostensibly aimed at business owners. For "Copilot+ AI PCs" no less, whatever that means. They're chasing a target audience of approximately 3 people in the world that are improbably held back from achieving their wildest AI dreams by not having a commodity laptop with an NPU.
People may not remember that Apple once had a product lineup like this (before SJ returned) with tons of different model numbers nobody could tell apart.
> Remember Apple in the late '90s? The tech giant was facing significant struggles until Steve Jobs returned and pinpointed the crux: a lack of innovation and focus. Jobs took bold steps to streamline Apple’s bloated product line. He cut down on the excessive range of choices, simplifying the product lineup to focus on quality and innovation. Jobs famously asked his team, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?" When he didn’t get a simple answer, he decided to reduce the number of Apple products by 70%. This move included cancelling projects like the Newton digital assistant and focusing on just four key products: the iMac, iBook, Power Macintosh G3, and PowerBook G3.
> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
Don't forget, one is going to be the "Business" version and the other identical one is going to be the "Consumer" version. God help whoever buys a "business" category laptop for personal use. The world will come to an end!
Or, in actuality, the Dell business model will be designed for repairability. I tend to always advise friends who want Windows/Linux laptops to buy from the business lines, especially if a 1- or 2- year refurb will work.
Is the laptop market even choosy or discerning? Very few people I know would actually understand specs. Especially when you step outside people who majored in fields that require some programming. I assume they must buy laptops, if they still even buy laptops, based on things like yearly sales periods at retailers, since you do see a surprising amount of square footage reserved for laptops to sit open on tables (not just apple's) in places like best buy, costco, target, etc. So there must be buyers. Maybe their comparison only goes as far as whatever bullet points Costco highlights on the price tag I suspect, in a "bigger number is better for the price" sort of way vs understanding a persons own compute needs.
The consumer laptop industry has been dying for a while now IMO. The average person doesn't need a computer. They have a smartphone, and if they need a bit more screen then they have a tablet. If you're a power user or gamer a desktop is preferable.
The Neo is targeting the cheap laptop market for those people that DO need it. Again, another totally pointless comment by somebody who sounds clueless.
Casual users prefer using their smartphone instead of their laptop, because the smart phone unlocks instantly and is ready to go. Meanwhile, a PC laptop takes a few minutes to boot up, then when Windows has loaded it will hog all CPU and memory and all the internet bandwidth to download and install updates, while blasting the fans.
The user will make a pathetic attempt to open the web browser to do the hotel or flight or event reservation they wanted to do. Or open a document in Word. Everything is extremely slow because of the update running.
When the user has finished her task, she will close down the computer. Windows will cancel the update which was in progress, so that the user can have that same joyful laptop experience next month when she needs to use it again.
Is it any wonder that people prefer doing things on their smart phones, even with the tiny displays and no keyboards?
This is how the majority of consumers experience using a laptop. Then they try a Mac, where you just open the lid and go. If people knew this, then the consumer PC laptop market would die in three months.
The secret is to buy a used ThinkPad on eBay. I have two of them. I think the ridiculous MSRP for them combined is $7000 and I paid $1600 in total for a p series and an x1 carbon (3 years old, but essentially new).
These neos are for college and high school students.
Who is going to do that except a nerd looking for a specific type of laptop? Buying two of them for the price of 3+ Neos at EDU discount. You are so off in the weeds with your comment that I had to point it out.
For me right now, there are a bunch of Strix Halo unified memory laptops offering 64 to 128GB of unified memory that are the current best value. This will probably spill into next generation (Strix Medusa IIRC).
They're just very versatile and performant, and they're usually very good value. As a big plus you can run very decent models locally.
Framework are among my current top choices. Hearing good things about the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7a as well, and HP rather surprisingly. But there are a bunch of Ryzen AI Max+ 395 based laptops supporting up to 128GB of unified memory, and it looks like you can hardly go wrong with these.
A very important point is the RAM and flash shortage. With their humongous volumes, Apple is certainly a member of the happy few with preferential contracts with guaranteed volumes and prices. No other PC maker can remotely compete with Apple on volumes, and now they'll get their already thin margins crushed even more.
In the past Apple had constantly sold high-margin products and grabbed 70 to 80% of the whole industry's margins. Now they're coming for the rest !
Ann then try to buy a nice linux compatible laptop. The research period climbs to days. It's ridiculous.
I don't even really mind spending 1500 (well , I do, but if that's what it takes) but 'just buy apple' doesn't work when you want a linux laptop, with apple trying to sabotage running linux on their hardware at every opportunity.
Exactly. PC manufacturers have so many SKUs and are changing so many things from one model to another that their brand doesn't mean anything anymore. Buying a Dell, HP, Lenovo or Asus branded laptop doesn't say anything meaningful about what you're actually going to get. Unlike Apple (or Framework) where the brand still means something.
Porsche is about BTO and customization. If you want a Porsche, go to a dealer and have them walk you through building the one you want. Or become knowledgeable in all the options and find a used one with 85% of what you want.
I'd really love it if the manufacturers would just say what wireless chipset they use in a given model but the unfortunate truth is even they don't always know for a given run
The SKU proliferation is truly awful. I honestly had to use Claude to understand the current landscape for daily driver Windows laptops when I finally needed to replace my old one.
too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
Same for Apple, especially as you can't upgrade them so if you get a 8gig Nano, you have a 8gig Nano, That's a different SKU than a 16gig Nano. And if you get 16gig Nano with 256gig storage, that's a different SKU than a 16gig Nano with 512gig of storage.
Apple has 48 SKUs at their stores, not included adding in color and custom configurations
The more SKUs you have, the more digital shelf space you get on a shopping website. When your sole differentiating factor from your competitors is that your laptop has an "HP" logo on it and theirs has a "Dell" logo on it, your only effective strategy is to try to make sure fewer laptops with "Dell" logos on them show up above the fold in Amazon search results by creating lots of distinct SKUs to try to eat up as many of the slots on that first page of search results as possible.
Apple doesn't have to exist in that type of competitive environment. If you want a Mac, you're either getting it right from store.apple.com; or you're searching for Macs specifically -- in both cases, Apple owns all of the shopping screen real estate.
>IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - 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.
Existential crisis?
This kind of nonsense has existed for the entire history of the laptop market.
One of the major reasons Apple is a trillion dollar company is they don't sell dozens of versions of their product. When it was a mystery which Dell laptop was the good one (or insert any other brand) you just picked the size of Apple that you wanted and it would be the good one.
The last Dell laptop I bought I really liked... except for the terrible battery life and the fact that the structure was so poor that if you held it at the corner it would force reboot because the circuit board flexed to much and shorted or unplugged something.
The CPU model naming is silly, but definitely not as bad as laptop naming or monitor naming. Intel and AMD at least pick a structured naming scheme and stick with it for two or three years, and almost all of the OEMs tell you which processor you're getting so you can comparison shop between brands.
AFAIK Fith Amendment only protects against self-incrimination, you absolutely can be subpoenaed to testify against someone else and failing to produce truthful testimony is a crime.
VMWare is far easier solution for normal enterprises than K8s. K8s more suited for having many small VMs that can be quickly deleted and recreated i.e modern microservice architecture. vSphere & friends is more targeted for running very large database, oriented application that need high uptime and are very long lived. VMWare can live migrate a running OS between physical hosts so that you can have continuous uptime. VMWare works with any OS so it's especially used by any Microsoft based orgs which the majority of hospitals, schools, government offices are.
If you are deploying enterprise apps from the 1990-2000s you use vSphere, if you are building your own SaaS product then you use K8s.
Comparing a companies current valuation to it's all-time or 52-week high isn't really useful. NVDIA is down ~14% from it's ATH but 25x it's initial market cap; it's certainly returned value to it's investors.
What matters more is change relative to it's market cap at IPO. And yes this is significantly worse for newer companies. There is a clear trend showing the 2010-2022 tech IPO market pushed valuations pre-IPO to insane levels such that post-IPO growth was limited or even negative meaning retail investors never had an opportunity to hold equity.
Sure but AFAIK FedNow is not going to hold funds or authority to payback or revert "fraudulent" transactions?
If I lend out $X dollars but my client says the loan was accessed fraudulently then who pays for this loss? The bank, the payment processor (FedNow/Visa), the customer, or the vendor?
These are called ACH return codes and are similar to disputes on credit card.
Liability is on the receiving or the originator institution. But in practice, it depends on the contract with the “processor”. Many Pay By Bank “processors” offer a guarantee model to cover these returns. Otherwise, liability is typically on the merchant.
However, Nacha is beginning to iterate on their return codes to better fit the e-commerce use case and clearly define liability.
The bank usually handles initiating reversals, not the payment processor. Though FedNow may not have the API to facilitate them easily, not sure on that.
The actual lender for a CC is not Visa, it's the associated bank that's backing the CC. So the redistribution of wealth is occurring on the banks books not Visa's.
The ideal solution for this is the LVT is split between each level of government and it's parent. Each level receives tax revenue based on the market value after it's own zoning and all other restrictions apply. But each level must pay it's parent government based on the land value without any of local zoning or restrictions imposed.
For example, Aspen Colorado can certainly just ban all new construction outright and collect taxes accordingly. But it would owe the state Colorado tax revenue based on the theoretical land value of Aspen's total land.
This preserves local control as much as possible but forces communities to fairly compensate the rest of the country should they choose to purposely under utilize their land. E.g if SF doesn't build more housing then Austin now has to build more, etc.
At the same time, since the Federal gov owns 90% of Nevada, Nevada as a state wouldn't be forced to make up the tax revenue for that land since all of its rules and restrictions come from a parent government (Federal/BLM rules).
> The ideal solution for this is the LVT is split between each level of government and it's parent. Each level receives tax revenue based on the market value after it's own zoning and all other restrictions apply. But each level must pay it's parent government based on the land value without any of local zoning or restrictions imposed.
Sounds interesting, but I wonder how you would get at those values?
Also, you would probably also want to extend what you say to include both locally enforced restrictions but also locally provided amenities.
But how do you decide who gets to benefit from eg having the Google campus next door? Or having a famous artist live in your community?
> For example, Aspen Colorado can certainly just ban all new construction outright and collect taxes accordingly. But it would owe the state Colorado tax revenue based on the theoretical land value of Aspen's total land.
> This preserves local control as much as possible but forces communities to fairly compensate the rest of the country should they choose to purposely under utilize their land. E.g if SF doesn't build more housing then Austin now has to build more, etc.
That seems much more convoluted and prone to abuses than just letting Aspen collect its land value tax and keeping the whole thing, but also having that level of government pay for most things by itself.
Have a look at Switzerland: their system minimises vertical transfers, ie every level of government mostly only spends what it earns (in taxes).
(They do have some horizontal transfers between richer and poorer regions of the country, or richer and poorer people. But not much between eg Cantons and the federal level.)
Agree it isn't practical to block everything while still allowing software engineers to do their job. An online regex tester is super useful or could be a big risk is an employee uses it incorrectly.
But it is helpful to block certain things that are just too common outside of work so people just don't think twice. Things like ChatGPT, Grammerly, Pastebin, etc. should be manually blocked.
Another interesting approach I learned from the Director of IT at Intercom (Emanuele Sparvoli): They pay for a single seat in each of the typical "Shadow IT" SaaS apps. Then they block within the SaaS app the ability to sign up with email/password coming from their domain.
It's pretty drastic since you literally pay for a seat in a tool you don't want to use. But it stops anybody from quickly signing up and instead will guide them to the IT team. They then have the chance to explain what the official alternatives are.
What's important is that the employee's understand the reason why certain apps are not allowed - whether that's cost, security or something else.
> Some of these high county-level percentages stem from high populations of immigrants, whose first language is not English. The PIAAC only assesses English literacy, though its background questionnaire is given in English and Spanish.
If you look at the map (and read the article), it's fairly obvious that they are NOT adjusting for non-English first language speakers. This is partly on purpose since it's those demographics that need the most assistance and funding to learn English. However, it's really disappointing that this data is used to make statements and titles regarding people's "literacy" or reading comprehension when it's specifically testing a single language.
It’s a study done by the US Dept of Education. I don’t think it’s bad or even unusual that it tests English (and some Spanish) only. The implication is it is testing useful literacy in the US. After all, being literate in Tagalog isn’t a useful thing in the US, so why call someone who is literate in Tagalog only literate for the US?
I’m not certain this is as big an effect as you might imagine.
I’m an immigrant in Portugal, I have been here five years - and I am far more literate in Portuguese than a good many of the people I encounter here, who are born and bred Portuguese. Sure, they speak better than me, of course, and it took me a while to realise that many of them could barely read or write - but the educational system in rural Portugal did not, and seemingly still does not, produce people with anything above bare-bones literacy.
This isn’t a judgment - purely an observation that literacy is something that translates across language barriers for the literate quite readily, and poor education results in poor literacy - not being foreign.
Also, it’s unlikely that the low prices could be maintained while also paying US labor and US safety standards. If they can then it means we’ve lost our competitive edge completely in the manufacturing sector. At that point we’d be reliant on foreign companies to operate locally here.
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