8 ms·
I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo, and if i wanted a non-gaming expensive one i'd get a macbook pro. I really don't see the m
by jerojero 5mo ago
I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo, and if i wanted a non-gaming expensive one i'd get a macbook pro.
I really don't see the market fit for this, I guess the android integration. But my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook". Believe it or not, these things matter a lot, particularly if you're trying to target a young audience.
- troymc 5mo agoI think it's a successor to the Chromebook. In the vast majority of modern K-12 public schools, the school district owns the hardware, not the students.
- pier25 5mo agoThe target is definitely not the K12 education market. It looks more like a premium device which most Chromebooks are not.
- troymc 5mo agoOn second thought, I think it's not for K12 after all.
- jerlam 5mo agoEverything on this page suggests it's not for education. Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?
- 30minAdayHN 5mo agoI recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.
- jeffbee 5mo agoWhy would an organization want to move from a centrally managed fleet to an unmanaged fleet?
- elliotec 5mo agoYou can still centrally manage Macs? Look at every tech company.
- tty46 5mo agoYeah, but can schools do what even tech companies struggle with/cobble together here?
- robotresearcher 5mo agohttps://www.apple.com/education/k12/deploy-and-manage/ https://www.apple.com/education/k12/deploy-and-manage/
- bjt 5mo agoMacs are very popular in schools today for teachers and staff. Switching to Macbook Neos for students would actually simplify their support burden. I'm not sure they'd be cost justified though. Source: My wife works IT for our school district.
- faust201 5mo agoReddit r/k12sysadmin disagrees. Sure, as always there will some that will switch to Apple. Why not. Some even have MS.
- outside1234 5mo agoIs the value of the Chromebook in education that it is 1) cheap or 2) doesn't do anything except have a browser? If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.
- kbelder 5mo agoA Chromebook is far cheaper than a neo. It could be less then a third the price, and that makes a big difference when you're buying a thousand of them.
- superfrank 5mo agoUnless they're cheap, it's not going to sell well for K-12. I used to work for an ed-tech company that was specifically focused on software for chromebooks and in talking with customers the biggest selling point of chromebooks for schools what their price. The school issued devices get absolutely beat to shit and they just expect a certain number to be decommissioned at the end of the year. Most schools are looking to buy the cheapest thing that does the job and the small group that have the money to actually buy premium devices are going to gravitate toward Apple products. If Google is selling these for less then $500 then maybe there's a place for them, but like we saw it with the Pixelbook, there just isn't really demand for an $1000 chromebook
- abrowne 5mo agoI don't think these are Chromebook successors. This is supposed to be a premium line according to the "Android Show" video. But I suspect future Chromebooks will use this OS eventually.
- jerojero 5mo agoPretty sure when they talked about "very high build quality" and such they're saying this is not a replacement to the cheap chromebooks (which I think the macbook neo is eating anyway) but a higher price point.
- troymc 5mo agoYes, you are probably right.
- plutomeetsyou 5mo agosupposedly macbook pro's M-series are quite adept for gamers these days.
- dhosek 5mo agoBut the gaming software market is very heavily biased towards delivering for Windows on Intel. That said, I’m not a gamer so what do I know?
- theshrike79 5mo agoLinux gaming is getting a definite boost from Windows 11 being a shitshow. And pracically _nobody_ does native Linux games, they're all just running Windows games through Proton, and faster. So fast actually that Proton is Microsoft's performance target :D
- zerocrates 5mo agoI encounter a few native Linux games from time to time on Steam, mostly indies and other smaller games. There was a time there was a medium-sized push for this, Steam was pushing it, lots of Humble and GOG stuff came out with Linux versions... But yeah, Proton is so good now that I don't think there's much impetus to port. Test on Deck/Steam Machine/Proton, sure, but not so much port. Steam Play also handles runtime container stuff for native Linux games so that can be pretty good and stable itself, but I've definitely had situations where switching over to the Windows version via Proton is a better result than the native Linux one.
- bigyabai 5mo agoI'd like to meet the person that supposed this to you, and ask them what games they play.
- jorvi 5mo agoThe M1 Ultra got 70% of the frames of an RTX 3090 on Tomb Raider[0], so I suppose they're right. Performance-per-watt monsters. And Apple GPUs have only gotten better. [0]https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-rtx-3090-benchmark.webp https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-rtx-3090-ben...
- whodidntante 5mo agoChromebook users. I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same. I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS. I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.
- eoidwojcisjc 5mo ago> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS. To each their own, but this is absolute insanity.
- array_key_first 5mo agoChromeOS is a very competent, fast, and easy-to-use operating system. For my family, it's basically perfect. It's virtually unbreakable and anyone can pick it up quickly. Windows is a hot mess and frankly I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of gamers. For the technically competent, there's nothing to gain on Windows, and it will just get in the way. For the those less technically inclined, Windows means complexity and viruses. Also most Windows laptops suck major ass. MacOS is better, especially if you have an iPhone. But even MacOS is a bit too complex for the less technically inclined. If you have an android phone, then a chromebook is 100% the way to go for those people. Also, chromebooks get crazy software support these days, on par with macbooks.
- kelnos 5mo ago> ChromeOS is a very competent, fast, and easy-to-use operating system. It also locks you into the cloud services of an advertising company that loves harvesting your data to help find new ways to sell you things.
- noprocrasted 5mo agoThat’s no better than Windows (without a lot of effort and a constant game of cat and mouse only achievable by technical users). At least Google’s cloud services tend to actually be good, if you made peace with the tracking and privacy concerns.
- wvenable 5mo agoI thought Microsoft had the market cornered on terrible product naming but "Googlebook" is extremely awful. My suggestion, if they really want to go this route, is to shorten it to "gBook".
- Zigurd 5mo agoThe first thing that came to mind is "What about all that gobbledygook in your Google-dee-book?"
- nerdsniper 5mo agoI'm imagining poultry running around clucking: "gBook! gBook! gBAWK!"
- zorked 5mo agoI am old enough to remember that iPad was supposed to be a product-line-dooming bad name.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Thaxll 5mo agoMacBook neo is not expensive but it's not cheap.
- coffeebeqn 5mo agoJust the build quality on MacBooks compared to your random PC laptop piece of plastic that falls apart within a few years would make me very picky. I have a random “corporate” Lenovo and everything physical in it is way way worse than in my work MacBook
- FuriouslyAdrift 5mo agoIt's $600. In this market that's practically free.
- cj 5mo agoGoogle Pixelbook from years ago was $999 IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if Googlebook is more expensive than Neo.
- jhickok 5mo agoI wanted to like the Pixelbook, but it had a lot of limitations, ChromeOS being the major one. I recall that people were able to run Linux on them, but no idea what that experience was like.
- swat535 5mo agoWhich machines on the market beats it at the price?
- beemboy 5mo agoGembook or Geminote would've been cooler. But no one asked me unfortunately.
- quantumleaper 5mo agoGoogle MegaPixel!
- thevillagechief 5mo agoGooglebook Pixel? Or PixelBook running GooglebookOS?
- halapro 5mo agoGooBook? Sounds obvious to me. Or just Bookgle. Lap Goog. aiPad. OogleNote. Infinite possibilities.
- ActorNightly 5mo ago>I really don't see the market fit for this, Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? Especially considering you can install linux on it natively. Other then that, Gemini is the biggest advantage. Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits. Overall, if you are in Android ecosystem, you don't really even need a cheap laptop anymore, considering things like Samsung Dex exist.
- drcongo 5mo agoThese things are $250?! Where did you find that info?
- jasonvorhe 5mo agoHaving seen how people managed to run Cyberpunk 2077 on the Neo with okayish frame rates I don't think there's a single ARM laptop out there that could deliver that performance on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong though.
- ActorNightly 5mo agoSurface Pro 11 is slighly more than Neo and runs cyberpunk.
- jasonvorhe 5mo agoiirc getting Linux to work on Surfaces is messy though?
- Shekelphile 5mo ago> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo? Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.
- pants2 5mo agoYou might be surprised how good cloud gaming has gotten. I play AAA games at max settings on my MacBook Pro through GeForce Now, and with fiber internet it's nearly indistinguishable from native.
- sputknick 5mo agoYou have my attention. I assume this would also work well on a worse laptop (since the processing is done in the cloud)?
- throwaway219450 5mo agoYes, it's just streaming a video to you. The main limit is your connection speed if you're not near a datacenter as you're limited by ping, so controls can be laggy. You can try it out for free though, which will give you an idea of how good your link is.
- nomel 5mo agoI use boosteroid, which is just steam on cloud. ~4k @ 120Hz for $12/month. No HDR though (they recently removed it). Such a stupid good deal compared to the price of a gaming PC, that I can't really complain. So many data centers with GPU sitting around...
- reverius42 5mo agoNot just sitting around, available for rent at hourly rates that will add up to a lot more than $12/month if you actually use them! I'm surprised they can offer this service at $12/month with presumably unlimited usage.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoI know people in general hated it, but I found Stadia to be quite good. I'm not too upset because Google paid me back full purchase price, but it's almost a shame that they managed to mess up cloud gaming that badly.
- paxys 5mo agoThere's an entire world outside of Silicon Valley and the Apple ecosystem. Apple has a ~9% PC market share. Who is buying the other 91% if there is no demand?
- jerojero 5mo agoI can tell you they're not going to be buying "googlebooks" plus, Apple has never until this year offered an actual low-price machine. Of course their market size is going to be smaller when you're leaving out the sub $1000 dollar market.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoI would rather buy this shit than anything Apple. Of course, there are more than 2 options for laptops. Thankfully those two shit companies didn't get to round up that market yet.
- andriy_koval 5mo ago> I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo 8GB of RAM for MacOS is a concern. ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient..
- Jeremy1026 5mo ago> ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient Based on? Chrome tabs taking up gigs of RAM would make me think ChromeOS isn't going to be very light on memory.
- andriy_koval 5mo agoYou can control chrome tabs, e.g. autosuspend, close them, etc, you can't control MacOS RAM footprint.
- NDlurker 5mo agoGooglebook sounds funny now, but so did iPad when it was announced.
- retired 5mo agoI still remember the Maxipad jokes.
- SchemaLoad 5mo agoThe Googlebook name won't stick around for that long. It'll be like the Nexus and Pixel C, around for 1-3 revisions, canned, then brought back a few years later.
- NDlurker 5mo agoThey should bring back the Nexus line. It's more fitting nowadays.
- serf 5mo ago>but my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook" i'd hate for my computing choice to lack fashion forward qualities -- I wouldn't want to be embarrassed at Gate A-13 with my new Apple perched on my lap proudly while waiting for the next question from my adoring fans. I hope they appreciate the new color! real talk : my favorite excuse for using an Apple product throughout my life is the tried and true "my company stuck me with it and I hate this piece of shit.", so I find it kinda fascinating that they're such cult objects -- and to be fair I am sure i'd say exactly the same thing if I was ever stuck in a company stupid enough to try to make me be productive on a fancy chromebook, too.
- jlarocco 5mo agoIt's sad that the M5 Apple chips don't support Linux better. I'm in the market for a laptop, and I'd buy a MBP in a heartbeat if I could wipe it and put Debian on it. My 2013 MBP was going strong with Debian until the battery started puffing up last year, and I finally had to recycle it. I get it, I know I'm not their market, but it still pains me because it was a great laptop.
- Danox 5mo agoWhat is more sad is that no one in the Linux world has taken the bull by the horn like those three former Apple engineers who got a license from Arm to design Arm chips why hasn’t anyone taken the leap in the Linux world to make that happen for Linux OS? In short, that isn’t Apples job it’s been 35 years for someone in Linux land to step up to the plate.
- jlarocco 5mo agoI don't know what you're trying to say with "making that happen for Linux" and "that isn't Apple's job". I didn't imply anybody needed to do anything. The point I was making is that I like Apple's hardware but won't buy it if I have to run their garbage software. When (if) somebody gets Linux working on them then I'll buy another MBP. In the meantime my money goes to Lenovo.
- kulahan 5mo agoWhy anyone would view a non-upgradeable phone slapped into a laptop case with minimal computing capability for the price would ever consider a Neo is beyond me. At that point, get a damn tablet. It’s literally the same thing but, like, designed with intent rather than a bunch of scrap pieces. Seriously, what’s the draw? The 8 gigs of ram? The 200 gigs of storage? The major lack of ports?
- wohoef 5mo agoYou get 90% of the MacBook experience for half the price. Most users only need this 90%.
- kulahan 5mo agoYou get 40% of the macbook experience for half the price buddy. Absolutely nobody buys macbooks thinking they'll be worthless in 3 years like they do with other laptops. This is Apple stepping down to a garbage tier, and ignoring the roots that made them popular. lol, 90% for half the price. What insane cope.
- jwrallie 5mo agoHave you ever touched a Neo? It does not feel like scrap pieces. That is the magic. A phone has great battery life and standby power management. What’s the problem with running a different OS on it if it works just fine? Different stuff for different folks I guess. At work all files are on the cloud, I have a NAS and a computer I can remote into for development. A Neo is just perfect to make all of that mobile. As for tablets, I’d only recommend one if you need a stylus for drawing or a smaller form factor. I think that is the market where the Neo is competing, that is where you have a point.
- kulahan 5mo agoI have, yeah. It's an absolutely shit experience. Terrible materials, terrible internals, terrible experience. Have YOU touched one? They couldn't even be assed to make the logo shiny because it's such a departure from Apple quality lol. If you're going to astroturf for Apple, at least make it somewhat believable. Nobody would have these opinions if they weren't dented from birth or hired by Apple. Neo definitely isn't competing in the professional art region. Absolutely nobody wants an underpowered laptop to make their art experience miserable. They'll either buy a purpose-built ipad or they'll get a wacom tablet. What a crazy strange opinion to have when you clearly do NOT do any art on computers!
- hirvi74 5mo ago> I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo I would recommend the same. I absolutely love my Neo. It's such a nice machine for the price.
- archagon 5mo agoWhat, you mean you don’t want to sound like a turkey when describing your computer to others?
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoAt this point, if you want a laptop, get a mac and be done with it. Until other manufacturer step up their game, there will be years and years.
- rstuart4133 5mo agoApple was given a free run by Intel's fab issues. I'm hoping Panther Lake laptops together with Dell's CAMM2 will make Linux on amd64 highly competitive with Linux on the M-series, so maybe months and months - not years and years.
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoIt's not just about the CPU and battery life. They sold MacBook well even when they where thermal throttling, had poor battery life and poor performance. MacBook right now just combine everything, other laptop they might get a good CPU but the screen and the keyboard are trash, other you will have a great trackpad but that's all, nothing else.
- diegof79 5mo agoI'm a happy Apple ecosystem user. However, there are many more Windows and Android users worldwide. I think that the appeal of this product is that the Wintel monopoly of years ago is dying. If the Googlebook is well executed (as the Apple M1 line was), it can be an option for Android users who wish to move away from Windows but are not knowledgeable enough to use Linux. I think the only problem here is Google's track record of abandoning product ideas. A new product like this requires multiple iterations to get it right, but if Google abandons it as soon as the results are not what was expected, it will not have the time to mature in areas like gaming or app support.
- SchemaLoad 5mo agoDoes this thing run Android? There don't seem to be any details in this post.
- charlieyu1 5mo agoGot a cheap Acer Win11 machine for like $500 last year. I don’t think they even know what the low-end market is like, it is all about getting the most RAM/storage while everything else is reasonable and cheap enough. In which it is really hard to make a profit there because the price is the most important thing
- philistine 5mo agoCrossover has allowed me to 100% Spider-Man Remastered on a base M5 MacBook Pro. Gaming is not out of reach.
- Razengan 5mo agoThe Neo is amazing as an "AI thin client" the Googlebook seems to be trying to be. > I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook" A "GBook"? "Goog"? "Gook"? "Glook"? "Boogle"?
- dinkumthinkum 5mo agoSo, I'm not usually one to point these out but one of those words is considered pretty offensive by some and I am assuming that was not your intention.
- Razengan 5mo agoThe spelling maybe, but not if pronounced as "book"
- dinkumthinkum 5mo agoIs this reply even real?
- elxr 5mo agoGooglebook is cringe? It's just the name of the company, calm down. They used to have something called the pixelbook, which is the most generic name you can possible have. Neither of these names are unarguably better than the other. If this ends up being great for developing android apps, and running them on the desktop, plus having 15+ hour battery life, it could be interesting. Knowing google, it probably won't though.
- andruby 5mo agoYou're not the target audience. My parents, in-laws and the schools are the target audience. A reasonably large chunk of the world use a computer for "googling" information and sending/receiving emails. For them, opening "the internet" means clicking the Google logo (Chrome). This device could be perfect for them.
- carlosjobim 5mo agoThere's people who hate Apple and won't buy a Mac no matter what. They're a sustainable market segment to compete for. Google isn't competing with Apple for customers, but with Acer, Asus, HP, etc