Less expensive: yep
Actually fun colors: yep
Windows is worse than ever: yep
It would have been surprising if this thing wasn’t a hit.
windows went all in on AI, and neglected thier other stuff.
In turn Apple went ‘oh fuck what’s an AI now’ and turned out to be the winners. Who would’ve guessed huh.
What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Their AI ended up being straight ass like Siri so they pivoted to this instead.
AI is a big part of it but the problem is so much deeper.
Windows went all-in on AI including for internal development, despite removing their dedicated QA teams years ago.
That’s the fun part about monopolies: when you have no real competition you just cut costs and degrade the experience for everyone, but it doesn’t matter because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Well yeah, if you sell a “budget” product that is cheaper than your usual premium-priced products, more people tend to buy them.
apple probably wants people to buy the more expensive one eventually.
this is just an ad
IMO most of the the demand is due to Windows 11, not Apple. People are done with Microslop’s crap.
Both Apple and Linux are winning big with the double wamy of Win 11 being complete garbage and Win 10 being murdered.
Apple murders MacOS every ~7 years.
more apple than linux, lay people arnt likely going to switched to something too unfamiliar or complicated, apple dumbed down the os enough although walled its easier to use.
“unfamiliar or complicated”
On macos, how does one snap a window to the left or right of the screen? That’s right, you install a 3rd party application and make sure it autostarts to do basic window management.
Also they re-introduced Vista Aero to the apple ecosystem as Liquid
GlassI’ve seen so many UI anti-patterns since I got my M5 that I think Jobs would be spinning in his fucking grave.
Someone would have been strung up from a pirate flag for the liquid ass foolishness.
more people are asking me what linux distro i would recommend than ever
i know more people who use linux than macos
The average person frankly doesn’t really care as much as you think probably. Anecdotal but people I spoke to who also got it mainly got it for the price. They’d still prefer Windows since it’s what they’re used to but the lower price makes trying something new a lot more palatable.
IMO the average person (and multiple people I know) no longer likes using their computers since W11 was forced down. They’ve heard good things about Apple and are ready for a change.
Most of the stuff “regular people” do on computers these days is either web-based or cross-platform, too. A lot of them are getting the Neo because it’s better than practically every other $600 new laptop in terms of build quality.
The average person is furious the computer just restarts by itself because of an update. You don’t have relatives that use Windows? They have asked me to disable updates because of this
Yes but people mostly just let it do it’s thing. Sure they lament about it, but switching to something unfamiliar is a far more larger leap than most are willing to take. Before the Neo, the cheapest Macbook is still at the same price or higher of a Windows equivalent and those who need a laptop instead of using a phone/tablet typically are people who are using it for work or to game. That’s when they start to worry if the apps they use would work and that plus a thousand+ bucks then starts to become a huge friction to overcome.
Says MacRumors… Who consistently try to pump Apple even when they release trash products…
Apple likely wasn’t thrown off guard at all. And, there are often shortages when new products are released
I used to sell Apple gear…
It’s hilarious how Apple was caught off guard to begin with.
Just going off of the triangle of “cheap-fast-good”, the Neo literally hits all three categories really well.
The majority of standard users only need a web browser nowadays. I’m not sure if it can view/sign PDFs and send print jobs, but I’m sure it can, and all of this covers the 99% use case for a household device.
I’m the tech guy of the family. Linux nerd, GrapheneOS on my phone, blah blah blah. If my mom needed a new laptop I would 100% recommend the Neo and be done with it. No frills, no bullshit. Shit I want to pick one up just to play around with it because it’s CHEAP, even though I dont like Apple’s ecosystem.
I’m not sure how it would fare as a college device(test taking, remote screen sharing, proprietary programs, etc) but even for middle schoolers and high schoolers this should cover most, if not all, bases.
I think Neo goes with a typical Apple premium, so it’s not cheap for what it offers, BUT:
- Many people are ready to pay that premium, maaning other manufacturers need to go way below that mark with a similar hardware, which benefits us, and
- This is closest we’ve seen to a netbook for a while. This is good, we need them back!
netbook
Damn, I haven’t heard that in a long time…and you’re completely right. It is a netbook and we do need more of those in this new world(even though I don’t like what that means(ownership of hardware or lack thereof)).
To be fair I would say the vast majority of Mac users are using their machines purely for browsing, note taking, etc regardless of what model they’re on. Most buy a Mac so they can prop open the lid and show off the Apple logo to everyone else. It’s a status symbol, it’s a flag of conformity.
So the Neo fills that niche without spending an arm and a leg to do so AND you can actually easily repair some things on it. As a netbook it’s perfect.
We got one for my sister in law, and she likes it for college.
She wanted to just use an iPad, but she had to have macOS for the proprietary test tool spyware. It runs on the neo
My college kids do everything through cloud services, so it shouldn’t really matter what their device is.
- One of them has a Mac and is just finishing his first year with no problems, so I would expect a neo to be no different.
- My older kid jumps among an iPad in class, his laptop when necessary, and his gaming rig in his dorm, and has had no issues
On the other hand, my niece has very specific requirements for her major, so there will always be a few specialties
It’s fine for all those use cases. The M1 Air rocks all that 5 years later.
Also: install xcode, then
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"or something like that, and stretch macOS a little. I bet if they refresh the model with 12 GB of RAM running emulation and virtualization will be hot.
I wish using their os wasn’t so painful coming from linux
Like, why is bash ancient? (3.2 vs 5)
Why is there no package manager (brew doesn’t count, just as npm doesn’t count as a legitimate package manager)
Why are the utils like ls and friends flag-order-sensitive (you can
ls -lah .but notls . -lah)Why do I have 40 network devices with cryptic names?
I got a fully loaded M5 at work and I don’t want it. I just have a linux vm for doing work on it.
Like, why is bash ancient? (3.2 vs 5)
To avoid GPLv3, zsh is the new default.
Why is there no package manager
Mac App store is the official one, can also install brew, macports, pkgsrc, or nix. Or use language/runtime specific ones like npm, pip, cargo, go.
Why are the utils like ls and friends flag-order-sensitive
They avoid GNU versions of utilities, for similar licencing fears as avoiding modern bash. That said
ls . -lahis unhinged, I don’t know any other unix derived ls that supports that.Why do I have 40 network devices with cryptic names?
Yeah they got some weirdo Apple stuff
None of these are good reasons for it to be like this.
even if not the neo, for college, they will just pay for the one that can do all those things. windows is too unfamiliar for most people.
I just now noticed that the wallpaper in that image says MAC.
I preffered not knowing this
I can’t figure out why the M and the A share a line, but the A and the C don’t…?
YES, exactly! Make it either both share one or none of them.
I walked into a Best Buy last fall just to kind of browse the computers on offer. The sales rep recommended a laptop (Asus, I think) with 16gb of RAM, saying he actually even got his aunt one of the same model he was recommending to me.
That’s insane. What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
spoiler
Rhetorical question, the answers are: mega-reliance on webviews, every mid-level PM having to ship “features” to justify their position and to climb the corporate ladder, and every UI designer getting the brain-sickness that’s rounded-corners and animations everywhere, while some VP of product insisting on more ads and user-tracking. Add “agentic” aka slop coding to cap a decade of learn-2-code bootcamp 2nd-rate programmers who vigorously studied Cracking the Coding Interview without properly understanding the fundamentals… and voila!
That’s the splendid thing about the Neo. Apple is saying ok, we know it’s only 8GB of RAM, but through the service life of the laptop we can ensure that that will give you a good desktop experience.
What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
Uhhhh 16GB RAM should be the bare minimum, what are you on about?
Why? Were we incapable of using computers 10-14 years ago when 2-8gb were standard? 16 gigabyte computer to log into email, instagram, and facebook. Give me a break.
LOL are you serious?
I dunno about you but I’m not running a 10+ year old OS, nor 10+ year old software. You may not have noticed but times have changed…
Yeah, now every “desktop app” is a shitty website that bundles its own copy of chromium. Progress!
2016: most people just do some web browsing, videos, and documents.
2026: most people just do some web browsing, videos, and documentsBut I like your take. You’re right. Software should linearly get bloated and slower as a function based on time.
LOL web browsing and videos are both very different than they were 10 years ago, for the aforementioned reasons. I didn’t say anything about what “should” happen, this is just reality.
My 20-service docker stack runs OK on 2GB machine.
Apple has been optimizing macOS for underpowered machines for a long time.
Testing a bunch of linux distros on old intel macbooks has shown me that apple is really good with resource management on their vertically integrated hardware, even with greedy daemons like identityserverd or whatever it is, trolling through your drive cataloguing faces in your photos all the time, and the relentless indexing system, and telemetry.
Most models work smoothly most of the time, even the little 11" Air with 4GB, doing standard basic user stuff, and the 2020 1.1 GHz i3 Air is somehow usable on macOS 15, basically current.
Testing a bunch of linux distros on old intel macbooks has shown me that apple is really good with resource management on their vertically integrated hardware, even with greedy daemons like identityserverd or whatever it is, trolling through your drive cataloguing faces in your photos all the time, and the relentless indexing system, and telemetry.
It’s really amazing to me how little power MacOS uses in normal use, compared to running Linux on the same machine. The Asahi Linux project also has documented a ton of interesting bits of hardware that MacOS makes use of, pretty seamlessly, that they’ve gotta figure out.
mediaanalysisd loves to go brrr. They certainly handle close-to-OOM situations more nicely than most Linux distros with their growable swap
thinking 16GB is excessive
What AI does to a mfer.
That seams off. Everyone says Apple is so great at reading the room.
Stock price go up?
Has line ever not gone up?
He should at least send Microsoft flowers
I think this move will actually hurt Apple in the long run - budget conscious users will switch to the cheaper computers, and it lessens the value of a brand most people only purchase for its status symbol.
Highly doubt this is what will happen. If anything, this is a gateway to the Apple ecosystem for high school students and college students.
hmm… didn’t think about that perspective. Seems accurate.
Also, many high schools let their students keep their laptops after school.
