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[–] 91 points 8 months ago (19 children)

Not usually an Apple guy, but it's hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)

This is the opposite of "own nothing and be happy" and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.

Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡

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  • [+] 38 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 35 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Affordability and battery life. I am team linux and android normally, but you really cannot beat a MacBook as an SSH terminal or remote development terminal because they are reliable and the battery lasts all day.

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  • [+] -15 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Macs do not respect your privacy. In comparison to windows it's better but they still log and send every application you open to Apple.

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.

    For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)

    If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.

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  • [–] -2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face

    If your mom is going to install facebook, X and instagram to post all personal details and photos away along with all the permissions app requests. I don't think it matters?

    Are you talking about security? What else is Android secretly supplying these apps?

    Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.

    "Let's just giveaway more leeway for corporations, so we can get more accustomed to losing our rights, until we have to jump off the cliff for the lesser evil"

    Apple fanboys were proud they had no ads, Apple put on ads. They said they fight the government, they work with authoritarian governments around the world. They said they care about user privacy, they were funneling notifications to directly to the US government.

    Yea, keep defending these knucklefucks, they're totally not trying to manufacture consent for global surveillance while you're given the illusion of "lesser evil" and losing ownership of devices you bought.

    Downvote away, cult.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Look - I can’t prevent my mom from being on facebook and playing candy crush. Nothing I say or do will make that happen. I can improve the situation by:

    • Introducing alternatives and hope they spread (Chat with your mom on Signal)
    • Reducing data harvesting during ”passive” behaviour (e.g. reduced permissions for apps. Graphene is probably the best here, but good luck getting your mom on that)
    • Reducing data harvesting by the phone vendor (Samsung, Google, Apple). This is primarily done by buying an iPhone, simply due to incentives. (Again, good luck getting your mom on Graphene).

    If I go too hard on my mom, she’ll just buy herself a cheap chinese android without telling me. Is that better?

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  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    That claim seems like it’d be trivial to fact check, and indeed does seem to be false.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    indeed does seem to be false.

    That's from 5 years ago. Let's look what Apple themselves say about that topic:

    Personal Data Apple Collects from You

    Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data

    https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

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  • [–] [S] 105 points 8 months ago (48 children)

    Honestly I'm expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).

    Unless you're buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.

    I don't like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.

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  • [–] 48 points 8 months ago (20 children)

    makes it really good value

    An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.

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  • [–] [S] 40 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor.

    Sure, but a tablet isn't a laptop.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    You can’t really use an iPad as a laptop. The hardware exists and should work, but the software is awful.

    It’s often several seconds to switch to Safari on my iPad Pro with M series chip. We’ve had app switching in computers for 40 years. Why can’t iPad do it?

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.

    So form factor, not hardware internals should be the deciding factor in cost?

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    To a degree, yeah.

    The laptop form factor is engineered with lid and palmrest assemblies, if you’re going to compare the two then you’ll want to add a nice keyboard to that iPad. Apple’s is $270.

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  • [+] -10 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    Apple’s is $270.

    Typical Apple tax, completely unrelated to the few dollars a keyboard costs to make for real.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    You’re not entirely wrong, in that the Apple Tax is real.

    Nonetheless, the quality of the Magic Keyboard is substantially higher than that of a keyboard you can get for “few dollars”

    Ultimately, your assertion was:

    An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.

    An iPad Air with a keyboard that matches the form factor and build quality of a MacBook Neo does not actually cost the same, it costs an additional $270.

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  • [+] -8 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    The MacBook doesn't have a touchscreen. It cancels the keyboard cost out.

    They don't even put touch ID on the entry model.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    Ok but if you want to do actual work on it then these things absolutely do not cancel each other out because you have to spend $270 on a keyboard/trackpad regardless, and now have to use a clunky touchscreen on your 13 inch tablet half the time.

    Yes, the M4 is much faster and it is probably only stupid product segmentation keeping it on the iPad. But the reality is, iOS/iPadOS puts OS-level limits on how much you can even take advantage of that hardware even if there is an iOS app for the thing you want to do

    TLDR: If you really want a MacBook just get a refurbished M1/M2 MacBook and call it a day, bonus points for putting Asahi on it

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  • [–] -4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    you have to spend $270 on a keyboard/trackpad regardless

    That's Apple tax, not manufacturing cost. MacBook replacement keyboards sell for 10 dollars on Aliexpress.

    iOS/iPadOS puts OS-level limits on how much you can even take advantage of that hardware even if there is an iOS app for the thing you want to do

    I'm comparing hardware to hardware, not artificial Apple software restrictions.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I'm comparing hardware to hardware, not artificial Apple software restrictions.

    That's great but hardware doesn't exist in a vacuum. With an ecosystem as locked-down as an iPad's you can't just ignore the software. It's not like you'll ever be able to uninstall it because it's intentionally locked down, unlike a macbook which allows installing apps and even modifying the bootloader to boot into a different OS.

    Edit: Forgot to mention the fact even for people that might not care about that, iOS will automatically kill any app that uses more than a certain amount of RAM (I think it was 4GB? I don't remember the exact number) so in a lot of scenarios you can't even take advantage of the hardware in an iPad because of the locked down software

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    What something should be priced at is what the market is willing to pay for it. People are definitely willing to pay more for a MacBook than an iPad. Also there are similar spec’ed Chromebooks on the market that cost around the same price and people buy them. The Neo is competing with Chromebook.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.

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  • [–] -4 points 8 months ago

    Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook

    One has a keyboard (cheap components), the other has a touchscreen. The cost cancel each other out.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    In addition to being more locked down, you'd also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    It’s an iPhone 16 with a MacBook shell

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    I mean if by shell you mean KVM then yes.

    It’s a pretty good price for those peripherals plus the low end phone though

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I wouldn’t consider it low end, early benchmarks put it in the range of M1 which surpasses Intels N-Series.

    IMO it’s the perfect typewriter/frontline worker machine when personal computing is getting more expensive by the day

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Yeah sorry I was thinking more of the other specs than the chip itself. As you say, a pretty good little A chip, I suspect the first real go to market one given M comparisons. Perfect as you say for heavy keyboard users.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn't great, but it's not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn't so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Honestly, it might be a wakeup call for laptop vendors, or it might just put a lot of them out of business. This is not a good economy for them to suddenly have to compete with Apple on value...

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  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I'm genuinely amazed that it hasn't fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS' memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn't feasible.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.

    Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi's memory management wasn't as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).

    For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.

    Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it's still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn't surprise me given Apple's laptop history

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    They were talking about memory not storage

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.

    8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.

    Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.

    It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    That is so true, and can't be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn't even a great deal, though I was fine with it.

    Now the budget market is...pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It's GRIM out there.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    No, 8gb of RAM (obviously older DDR but still) and 256gb or storage.

    Of course the CPU and other older components will be less powerful, but like... What do we use computers for now that we didn't in 2017? AI? Oh nooooo, what will I ever do without local AI... It all works the same, at a pretty decent speed running Bazzite (cause I wanted to see how it ran games. It topped out at Skyrim Special Edition running at 15fps, did good at fallout New Vegas though).

    I got a bargain, but say you can only get it now for double what I paid. That's 1/6 the price. Why pay 600% more for a computer that's not even that much better?

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    this MacBook is going to have 10x the battery life of your used laptop, and weigh less.

    plus, it's brand new so it has a warranty and doesn't require people to spend time searching for a good deal.

    this is an excellent product launch at a good price and it is gonna sell like hotcakes

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?

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  • [–] -4 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Do those things warrant 6x the price? Or, in reality, 12x the price? Let's be real here, the exact hardware specs down to material aside, is it?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Just to be clear in regard to your original comment:

    600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.

    You expect manufacturers to sell laptops for fifty bucks?

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago*

    I expect people to be able to obtain a laptop for 50 or 100 bucks, which they apparently can. Manufacturers should have to reckon with that fairly, or lose business.

    I want to destroy new device culture.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    This is basically Apple's version of a Chromebook. It's an iPhone in the shape of a laptop.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Considering Windows has become a complete dumpster fire recently, this $600 laptop could be a really appealing option for some if they're mostly browsing the web.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago

    It'd make for a great student laptop, reminds me of the old polycarbonate MacBooks actually. They did cut corners a lot, but retained all the niceties you'd expect from a MacBook.

    And they finally added some colour; could've have gone with more vibrant colours IMO but it's better than nothing.

    I gotta say, I do like fuzzy wombats as well^^

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    There's no reason for the average person to ever buy another windows device

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn't.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    That doesnt mean the average person can just use Linux, you cant even buy a laptop with Linux from a standard store that people typically look for laptops in (like Amazon or best buy). If you have to convince people to go to a separate website, manually enter their card details, and pay a shipping fee of $116 along with import fees (yes this is a bit more specific to Tuxedo but my point stands). Regardless of which Linux brand you buy it typically takes 3-5 weeks for shipping. Meanwhile across the board the base price of Linux laptops are always higher than Windows devices (some OEMs like Lenovo hide this by giving a $100 discount but when you consider that Linux is generally only an option for custom orders the total cost is still higher than a non custom standard windows laptop).

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there's no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there's still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.

    Kind of a weird example to say that people won't online shop too. That's far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    There are quite a few listings for Linux computers on amazon now, granted most of them are in the premium range, >here is one in the mid range of prices with comparable specs to the new macbook

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    The amount is so insignificant that when filtering by OS it doesn't even show up

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    That's just because amazon doesn't tag it correctly, there were easily 5 models when you just had Linux as a search term. And I also disagree that variety is necessary for laptop listings to be considered viable, it's not like non technical people are even looking at specs anyway.

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