3 ms·

Being limited to 8gb of ram is genuinely the only thing on that list I care about (no backlight and no fast charging are teetering on the edge of me caring, but

Being limited to 8gb of ram is genuinely the only thing on that list I care about (no backlight and no fast charging are teetering on the edge of me caring, but they aren't worth multiple hundreds of dollars) - Apple silicone is so fast now that (at least for my purposes) the performance segmentation between price points is basically meaningless.

kulahan 8mo ago
A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard, it feels insulting not to get it. I cannot believe this is one of the ways they decided to cheap out. I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.
- dsl 8mo ago
  > A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard Useless LEDs that burn battery budget. The thing everyone seems to be missing is this isn't a laptop for you or me. It is to compete with Chromebooks in the educational market, and to have a SKU to sell in developing countries.
  - kulahan 8mo ago
    Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man. As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home). A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.
    - KingMob 8mo ago
      14 seconds? Lights are expensive when to comes to batteries.
      - bongripper 8mo ago
        [dead]
    - estomagordo 8mo ago
      "everyone wants"? I am not even sure I understand the utility. Typing in the dark? For, idk, living in a cave?
    - NikolaNovak 8mo ago
      >> fantastic thing everyone wants I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me. (On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)
    - cardanome 8mo ago
      Why do you need to see your keyboard? Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire. Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.
      - xp84 8mo ago
        You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed. The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.
  - port11 8mo ago
    Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks. Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget. I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.
- 00deadbeef 8mo ago
  > I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself. I think that’s pretty unreasonable when they’re using an iPhone SoC to keep it cheap because they have massive volume. It was only ever available in 8GB and never designed for user upgradable memory because it’s for a phone.
simooooo 8mo ago
It’s basically a web browser machine, that’s fine.

kulahan 8mo ago

A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard, it feels insulting not to get it. I cannot believe this is one of the ways they decided to cheap out. I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.

dsl 8mo ago
> A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard Useless LEDs that burn battery budget. The thing everyone seems to be missing is this isn't a laptop for you or me. It is to compete with Chromebooks in the educational market, and to have a SKU to sell in developing countries.
- kulahan 8mo ago
  Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man. As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home). A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.
  - KingMob 8mo ago
    14 seconds? Lights are expensive when to comes to batteries.
    - bongripper 8mo ago
      [dead]
  - estomagordo 8mo ago
    "everyone wants"? I am not even sure I understand the utility. Typing in the dark? For, idk, living in a cave?
  - NikolaNovak 8mo ago
    >> fantastic thing everyone wants I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me. (On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)
  - cardanome 8mo ago
    Why do you need to see your keyboard? Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire. Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.
    - xp84 8mo ago
      You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed. The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.
- port11 8mo ago
  Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks. Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget. I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.
00deadbeef 8mo ago
> I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself. I think that’s pretty unreasonable when they’re using an iPhone SoC to keep it cheap because they have massive volume. It was only ever available in 8GB and never designed for user upgradable memory because it’s for a phone.

simooooo 8mo ago

It’s basically a web browser machine, that’s fine.