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Apple's $599 MacBook Neo Sold Out Through April Amid Surging Demand

22 points by mgh2 6mo ago

orionblastar 6mo ago
I think it replaces the Mac Mini and competes with the Chromebook. $499 for students.
- linguae 6mo ago
  I just ordered a base model Mac Mini a few days ago. The Mac Mini and the MacBook Neo serves different niches. They cost the same for students, teachers, and professors. The MacBook Neo is more portable, but the Mac Mini offers more processing cores and more RAM (16GB instead of 8GB), and it has an M4 processor instead of an A18.
  - musicale 6mo ago
    They're both landmark products and local maxima in terms of Mac laptop/desktop capability per dollar.
paulpauper 6mo ago
8gb of ram far too little. My 5-year-old old laptop that I still use came with 16gb, so you're buying obsolete tech already.
- musicale 6mo ago
  I think the people who buy the MacBook Neo don't care. MacBook Air has double the RAM but is nearly double (>1.8x) the price. Flash storage and memory compression mean that you can do pretty well running a single app at a time.
- javchz 6mo ago
  I think it’s too little for this day and age as well, but in Apple’s defense, their RAM compression on ARM works amazingly well and performs similarly to 12GB on Windows. With that said, I hate that you can’t upgrade the RAM or storage. I hope that at least one side effect of this is that developers will have a business case for performance improvement dev time, as those machines will become a juicy target, similar to video game consoles that may not have the best specs but are consistent and have a large number of units in the market.
- tim333 6mo ago
  I've got the 8GB M1 Air. It works fine for me memory wise. In some ways the Neo looks better than the Air for things I have had problems with in that it looks easier to replace bits - my battery and speakers are both kind of knackered.
__patchbit__ 6mo ago
To work around the rounded upper corner display that don't work well with the Stickies app, the preference settings for window gap margins is needed. Four sharp corners for the actual display and no notch are winning moves.

22 points by mgh2 6mo ago

orionblastar 6mo ago

I think it replaces the Mac Mini and competes with the Chromebook. $499 for students.

linguae 6mo ago
I just ordered a base model Mac Mini a few days ago. The Mac Mini and the MacBook Neo serves different niches. They cost the same for students, teachers, and professors. The MacBook Neo is more portable, but the Mac Mini offers more processing cores and more RAM (16GB instead of 8GB), and it has an M4 processor instead of an A18.
- musicale 6mo ago
  They're both landmark products and local maxima in terms of Mac laptop/desktop capability per dollar.

paulpauper 6mo ago

8gb of ram far too little. My 5-year-old old laptop that I still use came with 16gb, so you're buying obsolete tech already.

musicale 6mo ago
I think the people who buy the MacBook Neo don't care. MacBook Air has double the RAM but is nearly double (>1.8x) the price. Flash storage and memory compression mean that you can do pretty well running a single app at a time.
javchz 6mo ago
I think it’s too little for this day and age as well, but in Apple’s defense, their RAM compression on ARM works amazingly well and performs similarly to 12GB on Windows. With that said, I hate that you can’t upgrade the RAM or storage. I hope that at least one side effect of this is that developers will have a business case for performance improvement dev time, as those machines will become a juicy target, similar to video game consoles that may not have the best specs but are consistent and have a large number of units in the market.
tim333 6mo ago
I've got the 8GB M1 Air. It works fine for me memory wise. In some ways the Neo looks better than the Air for things I have had problems with in that it looks easier to replace bits - my battery and speakers are both kind of knackered.

__patchbit__ 6mo ago

To work around the rounded upper corner display that don't work well with the Stickies app, the preference settings for window gap margins is needed. Four sharp corners for the actual display and no notch are winning moves.