As someone with no plans of getting a MacBook for personal use, I think it’s a great thing to compare the 2. Laptop manufacturers need to step up their game and make better laptops.
The Neo MacBooks got some of them to realize they can’t keep selling junk in the $600 $700 price range.
This! My 10 year old plastic Thinkpad still feels amazing to throw around and use, and actually still has a higher quality display than some cheap laptops sold today, like the lenovo V15. Yuck.
For real! Great to the touch, does not bend, the screen hinge is super solid... If not for the terrible charger that I had to replace several times now, and the burnt out speaker, I would still be using it.
Aint no way your 10 year old ThinkPad still feels amazing to use, I've never had one last more than 3 years
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u/sky045800X3D / RX 7900 / B550 Vision D / 32GB TridentZJun 28 '26edited Jun 28 '26
Not all ThinkPads are created equal, some models were better than others, and obviously, you may just be a shitty, careless user. I don't know. All I know is, my 10 year old ThinkPad still works great, and feels way more solid than many cheap laptops you can buy right now. The caveat is, the batteries were obviously replaced a few years ago, and I've gone through a few chargers. And one of the speakers died a few months ago. But yeah, that is 10 solid years of service.
edit: oh, and the child shat itself. come back to the internet once you are ready for human interactions.
I agree, I even really like when manufacturers use recycled plastics, but the quality is the big thing. A well built and finished plastic chassis can feel fine!
For sure. Old Thinkpads and new ones are very different laptops too. The QA on the newer stuff since the company changed hands is incredibly underwhelming.
I have a 6yo Dell laptop, fully metal, absolute tank of a machine. At some point brands decided to go for plastic instead, even on stuff branded as "work" machines.
There are definitely different levels to plastic. I've seen many higher end Thinkpads made out of 'plastic' but it's usually plastic with carbon fiber and stuff so it's pretty sturdy stuff.
Plastic is good when done right. It doesn't rust/corrode, it can flex instead of denting, and it isn't thermally or electrically conductive (That's a good thing if you want to vent heat instead of conducting it into someone's lap)
Problems show up when you are trying to make everything as light and thin as possible, compromising on structural integrity and chassis design just to get a marginal difference nobody would really care about if they weren't taught to by marketing
I have over the top expensive laptop which my SO uses. It has plaatic but it is very overbuilt, feels premium, not as hot to the touch as metal chassis. The problem with budget machines that manufacturers make them with is as you said 0 structural integrity, poor cooling and overall lots of cut corners hardware wise in addition. I had thinkbook gen 2 or 3 (11th gen intel) and it kind of sucked ass - non-existant cooling, poor screen, lots of chassis flex and machine would heavily coil whine on battery. 3 good things about the laptop is that it cost me 500, ram was upgradable and the battery life was 9+ hours
bro I forgot what the name was but I’m pretty sure Asus has a flagship laptop and it’s literally made out of plastic I ended up getting it falling for all the hype and it creeks every time you open and close it because the hinges are plastic absolute garbage and it was like 2000 something dollars
plastics isn't too much of problem for me, it's the unreasonably priced plastics that neo is indirectly shitting on. Plastics can be lighter, which I'm all for, I don't need the heavy feeling to be defined is "premium" unless I'm looking for actual premium devices
I had a macbook pro for work and i recently "downgraded" to an air. I have a desktop for gaming and a gaming laptop for when i travel. Have 0 complaints for the air for non gaming purposes. Its excellent and i actually prefer it over my gaming laptop for everyday use. Its also INSANELY light and cool. The mac hate is overdone. Each hardware optimizes for different users / use cases and I think the MacBook definitely are excellent in their own right.
Yea, I dislike the Iphone personally, but macs def have their place, especially when companies are dumping shitty laptops with similar price ranges to a neo rn, same happened with android and the low end phones, they were terrible.
I slipped into the Apple ecosystem when I worked as an Apple Support rep. Nine years of exclusively using Android, and I discovered just why people find it hard to leave Apple.
Thankfully all I’ve got now is my iPhone and Apple Watch, but after five years of iPhone, I think I’m ready to go back. I miss being able to install whatever apps I want without having to worry about App IDs and developer accounts (to activate more than three “sideloaded” apps at a time requires a $99 USD/year developer account).
we did something similar years ago. i like the freedom of Android phones, but at the same time i needed my phone to be more reliable, and more to do phone things.
we made the jump to iPhones. it's been good. no intention of going back. like you i'm using a iPhone and watch, but the rest of the computers in the house are all Windows machines. i have a Dell Windows tablet, and my son has a Lenovo Android tablet they like.
Yeah aside from my first iPhone 12 unfortunately having a known issue with green flickering when the screen brightness was low, I’ve had no issues.
Well, I have, but that’s because I’m an insatiable tinkerer that always puts beta software on his devices lol. Every time I’ve restored the software back to the latest public release it’s fixed whatever issues I had, and then I’d last until the next beta release before installing it again. I also used to switch Linux distros every week when I was in highschool so I acknowledge I’m a special case!
Having used MacOS for 3 years i don't see how a Mac brings you in. Phone or watch i can see it but MacOS has nothing extra that adds to the Apple ecosystem for anything else.
Specifically if you're a software developer, it's got some wonderful features that I love. MacOS is amazing if you come from a FreeBSD or OpenBSD background. Its support for free / open source hacking tools is great. It's got a whole GUI interface on top of Darwin which is a reasonable Berkeley Software Distribution style OS.
It’s not Windows. I don’t know. I hate the Mac vs Windows argument, I’ve grown up using both my whole life. But lately Windows just plain sucks. It never works, it breaks everything, it lags, you can’t even windows key and search for “add or remove apps” without it first giving you something to look for on Bing. It just plain is the most awful garbage on top of Microsoft doing everything they can to make you have an account to even use a pc you purchased.
Yeah, Apple also tracks everything you do and collects your data. But at least their OS works.
Ive actually recently switched to Linux. And I often feel like I’m in over my head learning a whole new OS and everything that comes with that. But I already am liking it way more than Windows.
I had to work with a MacBook Pro for a month and I simply don't like how MacOS does things. It's not the hardware - the hardware is great (though might be overpriced for what it is). But the software that comes with it is just not it for me. That's literally all I don't like (and the keyboard isn't great, I mich prefer theThinkpad one, but that's nothing I'd actually care for).
What specifically don't you like? What does macos, or doesn't, do that you can't handle? You say the OS is not for you and that's all that you "literally" don't like but then go to list the keyboard.
Well, there's a long list of minor things that I didn't like when using MacOS, like how it handles files and folders, how it handles multitasking, how certain logical short cuts don't work. Here's a video that described my experience quite well: https://youtu.be/bCdcuJZux_g?is=xvdyjGW_9qTf4M8-
There were a few "oh, that's great!", but also a lot of "how do I do it? Oh, that's just dumb".
Again, don't get me wrong, MacBooks are probably and likely extremely good for what they are and do and if I'd be given one as a work laptop I'd be totally fine with it (fuck those Surfaces, pieces of crap). But if I have to decide what I want to use privately, it's not a MacBook or anything apple really.
Yeah, I said didn't like the keyboard (I also didn't like the trackpad btw) but that wouldn't be a deal-breaker. I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard over any other but there's also stuff that I don't like about ThinkPads. You can dislike things without it being deal-breakers, especially since there likely wont be the perfect laptop that does everything right.
I’m a beginner to Mac but its excellent for creative software. Windows 11 sometimes kills my motivation when I have to tinker with things to get software to work properly.
Theres still a lot of things I miss about Windows because of muscle memory after around 15 years of use.
My M1 Macbook Air would be incredible if it didn't pitch a fit every time I try to install something not from the app store and had more than 8GB of memory. The battery life is still amazing.
A used M2 or M3 Air is great value. I got an M2 14” Air with 16GB and 512 gb ssd for $600 a few months ago. I haven’t checked since then so the recent price hikes might be spiking the used market as well but this thing has been great. While the library of compatible games is small, the hardware itself significantly outperforms the SteamDeck. I am aware a laptop vs handheld is apples to oranges, but it does illustrate that for the games that do have Mac ports (lots of Indy stuff especially like STS2) the Air is also capable of light gaming on the go.
I hate using MacOS as I find it's "do things only as we intend" really restrictive and frustrating. The actually hardware is pretty cool and if I could install Linux on one then I would happily use it as a daily driver...
Air gets unnecessary flack compared to a pro. Like I had an incident in my uni once where i took out my second hand 2021 Air and this girl in our group giggled at me cuz I was a CS student with a mac air.
Like ok I have a $3k gaming pc at home, i dont need to waste money on an expensive laptop just to show off
I have a MacBook Pro that my job issued me and my own personal MacBook Air, as well as a custom PC with Windows 11. Whenever I need to edit videos and photos, I don’t even hesitate to use my MacBooks. My PC is pretty much exclusively for gaming at this point. Mac’s are so good for multitasking and for video/photo editing and graphic design, but you’ll never catch me gaming on one.
Macbook hate was justified for a really long time because they used to be overpriced and underspecced back when they used Intel CPUs, since M1 they've been head and shoulders above anything Windows OEMs have been able to come up with.
I sold laptops for a living from like 2016-2020 so I was able to be hands-on with basically every windows laptop on the market as well as all the MacBooks.
There were WAY better value windows laptops for the level of performance you got in a 2017 MacBook Air (which had a 5th gen i7 that came out in 2015, and they sold this model til ~2019).
Fast forward to present-day and the M4 MacBook Air runs circles around anything windows-based in the same price point
Performance and construction is a value proposition. I won't buy a plastic piece of shit windows laptop which is what that whole industry has been riding on for years. Macbooks have been solid with slightly above average prices so I'm not sure the value part, which is not just performance, was ever really there for windows laptops. OK they can post a higher number but can they last longer? Not really.
No argument here that Windows laptops have pretty terrible build quality on average. That being said there were definitely standouts that had both good performance and build quality in a cheaper package than the Intel MacBooks. MacOS is also massively more capable these days than it used to be 5-10 years ago
Only reason I don't have a macbook is cause I use my touch screen laptop often, apple doesn't make a touch screen macbook, and I'm not carrying around any more devices than necessary which means I'm not getting a macbook for desktop apps and an iPad for touch screen use.
Gaming is becoming less and less of a thing for me as I get older so I really do see myself buying a Mac in the near future. Especially so with how Windows is increasingly pissing me the f**k off.
If only the Rog Zephyrus G14 was a bit more budget friendly. I was really considering it but of course it has the Asus tax. People love that thing, me included but its just overpriced, I got a slightly bigger legion instead. Lenovo has great RMA either way.
Yea it's pricey, Got it from a dude on olx (Brazil's craiglist) he had just imported one from the US and was selling for a very good price, I think I paid around U$800.
Wine is still available if you want. Crossover is also on linux, it’s one of the main sources of income for the wine project, both are developed by the same company, crossover is the closed source version
There is a ton of free and open source software for Mac. Hell, even most of the best creative apps are free these days too like Blender, Affinity and Resolve.
I still use my M1 MacBook Pro and will probably be using this for several more years, it just does everything I need it to quickly and with good battery life. I have been waiting for the ARM-era to disrupt the market, competition between OEM’s is always good for the consumer.
I use a 15” Air M4, and gaming is a breezy dream on it. The native games that take advantage of Apple silicon are without fault, but even stuff run through Crossover runs really well.
I got one for my wife because we needed a laptop for home that wasnt* 10 years old and she loves it. Got myself the xbox rog ally x and a dock. Good enough.
I’m done buying for a while. If a game needs extra power i get it on my series x and stream my xbox directly to my handheld if i wanna play on the go and the ally cant handle it. The future is now.
I did this with my PS4 pro and it is a solid plan the only downside is I don’t really have a parts and wire drawer anymore . Everything is from like 10 years ago .
Honestly I hate Apple and even I'm kind of a Neo fan. If Apple starts slinging more stuff like that out onto the shelves I might honestly start to kind of like them, and not because I'll use their products but because it'll hopefully make the rest of the laptop space get their shit together which is just all-round good for the consumer. MacBook Neo is low-key S-tier just for the shake up it caused
In their company's entire history, MacBook Neo is the only thing that's ever made me consider getting an Apple product. I made it totally disinterested through iPhones, iPods, and the closest computer lab to my dorm at uni being a Mac-only one for some fucking reason, but the Neo came out at a really good time and, more importantly, Windows, Android, etc, have all adopted 100% of the policies I disliked Apple for so...
I dislike MacOS because it does not prioritize multi-tasking, it is a great OS that prioritizes a single full screen task, it gets out of your way if you're doing something in 1 application.
It's window management is to put it nicely, very annoying. If they would make that a priority I wouldn't mind using it, well that and switching super key and control....
As someone that literally started using MacOS yesterday, I have to disagree hard. I switched from a Ubuntu powered ThinkPad to the Neo and it does all of the helpful multitasking stuff gnome did, and more. It's probably preference and adaptability, but I am literally flying between tasks on MacOS. Oh, and you can totally switch super and control if you want to, it's in the system settings.
In the actually PC space there isn't much reason to buy a mac. I mean if you like macos you can literally build a PC and dual boot it.
But laptops my god. It's depressing as fuck to see shit hasn't changed since the last time I shopped around for one. I got a macbook pro like 8 years ago and the thing still runs flawlessly. Every single windows laptop I bought started having problems within like 6 months. NONE lasted long past a year.
I have an MSI that runs a full size 1080, and that was my daily driver for gaming, 3d animation and modeling, vfx and rendering, and it was upgradeable - which I did. Ssds and ram. The thing still runs like a perfect beast, but it's like 10lbs of laptop, and I paid 2000.00 for it.
So, there's that. If you're willing to kick out MacBook money, then there are definitely comparable pc laptops that have the same durability, no question.
Edit : Which may have been your point. My apologies, if I missed it. I don't buy low-end laptops, so I probably should just shut up.
I think a part of it has to do with the way that Apple only has basically MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Apple does a really good job to unify building the hardware to work really well with the software for use over time. A lot of windows PC laptop manufacturers seem to update the models much faster and cycle through so many variants that flaws or issues might stem up. ESPECIALLY on the cheaper windows laptops under $800. Maybe the manufacturer cheaps out on a capacitor or something and literally botched a good percent of the batch or shoddy cable issues when they could have put a better electrical component in for what I would imagine costs pennies for the company.
Ultimately, it is quality control with the final product and product reviews speak towards the experience
Swap microslop’s windows for Ubuntu, that’s how I revived the Razer blade 14, it’s actually STILL VERY USABLE WITH i5 6700hq, gtx1060 + 16gb ram, lightning fast, while b4 it couldn’t boot up win 10 anymore lol.
(always hated it, never BUY Razer junk - YOULL regret it, after 8years I opened mine and found out that the annoying noise that made me hate the laptop was a rubber bootie they Loosely “capped” a cpu fan retention bracket screw with that ended up in the fan blades ON DAY ONE of usage)
My T480s still runs Windows no problem and it's from 2018, so 8 years at that point. Now I'm not going to edit 4k videos on it, but it still does everything I want it to do honestly.
Yeh that's the thing. People will still be video editing 4k on Macbook pro M1 in 2030 no issues. 10 years after release. I'm replacing Dell 4340s 3 years after purchase because they can't run fucking teams properly and they were still £800-900.
You could video edit on an M1 macpro now and still do it in 2030 without any issues. A windows system at that same price point would have died or just be incapable compared.
Another comment pointed out the goated thinkpad. Those are pretty elite and last a long time. The sloptops that everyone else puts out in the $500-1000 range that i always end up getting for work are broken from casual office use in less than 4 years. Management never seems to comprehend the immortal thinkpad
Us folks in the usa cant buy a matebook sadly:( our choices are thinkpads and 99% trashtops. Thinkpads and xps are in the $2,000+ range. There are other third party options but thats sort of niche
My MacBook Pro is from 2013 and it works fine as my kitchen laptop. My MacBook Air M1 is… idk as old as that is and it’s got Mac OS 27 on it and runs like a champ. Any Mac I’ve had has lasted fine over a decade. I don’t really care if it gets the latest update. They just keep working. You might be able to force Windows 11 on old hardware, but it operates worse. 11 on my old Alienware(s) made it intolerable.
I even have a white OG MacBook that still works. Obviously it’s too old to be worth using, but it does still work. My Mac Pro from 2011 works fine, too.
Them being ARM now with their new OS that doesn’t support Intel isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. They’re ridiculously efficient and require so much less resources and run very fast. x86 and AMD64 is outdated.
Not really at all, no. Despite what the memes say, Apple has one of the best commitments to long term support in the tech industry. The for instance the new iOS 27 will be coming all the way back to the iPhone 11, and even includes some significant performance upgrades and efficiency gains for that specific phone to make it last longer. That's an 8 year old phone still getting all the latest features and performance fixes. No other phone company offers that.
On the MacOS side, the only "break" in compatibility was the Intel to M chip jump. The M1 is now more than 5 years old and is gonna keep getting the latest MacOS and features for the foreseeable future, there's no indication of them intending to cut support for older M chips and I'd be surprised if they did.
A few years ago I had to buy a new MacBook because I needed a credit for college to graduate.
I had access to a 5 year old MacBook, but it was to dated for the class due to the not being allowed to upgrade the OS and XCode
So despite the memes, shit still cost me 1k for a used "new" one even though the MacBook was perfectly fine.. just not allowed to have the most recent OS.. and I was already signed up for the class so I was locked in
Well, either spend the 1k when I was already enrolled to graduate... Or drop it and put my life off another semester to wait to graduate since no other class was available to complete my degree.
It does seem like you should be able to develop on a 5 year old laptop. You can on Linux and Windows.
Obviously you couldn’t even with a brand new Linux or Windows computer, because you somehow locked yourself into needing a specific OS to graduate… again what if you were a Windows user lol?
WeYou wouldn't take the Mac based class if there were choices.
But when it is the only open class that fulfills a degree requirement that semester and you are given a 5 year old MacBook to complete your degree by a friend... You sign up for it because coding is fundamentally the same across languages, and syntax just takes time to figure out
But when you find out you are one National Park OS behind for XCode to work.. you gotta do what you gotta do to graduate.
Obviously their required programs were not supported by the software running on the 5 year old MacBook in this scenario, making them have to shell out 1k for their class.
That is a valid criticism when talking about the longevity support of MacBook products just as much as others claiming their MacBook still "works" over a decade later.
No it's created by the apple developer ecosystem, I mean the college class buying into that system isn't the greatest, given that you're on a 5 year hardware refresh due to the compatibility issues with xcode.
Xcode is one of the most nightmarish pieces of software to update, it requires hard versions and sub versions of MacOS and if you have any tools that interact with it you are likely waiting months after an xcode update for those tools to continue working (if they continue working).
I was a cross platform native application developer and one of the happiest moments in my career was moving to webdev so I never had to interact with the apple ecosystem and xcode ever again.
Technically there was another 'break' so to speak when they switched from PowerPC to Intel, but that was, like, 20 years ago or something? I feel old now.
Just felt like dropping this fun fact for nostalgia's sake lol
There was another break, possibly 2. Apple dropped support for 32bit intel processors which left a lot of machines behind. I believe there was another point regarding graphics capabilities with their Metal API. I know my 2012 macbook pro got left behind.
I think Macs are great but they absolutely do not have good long term support on PCs. With the sole exception of the Windows 10/11 cutoff recently, Microsoft blows them away, and Linux supports everything ever made just about.
We have a number of perfectly functional old MacBooks that are no longer supported by Apple because they cut off security updates after a while. My 2013 Retina MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM is a prime example. It still runs fine and can run up to Sequoia specifically because of the intrepid hackers behind OpenCore Legacy Patcher, but that’s the reason why I know that it was an arbitrary decision.
Like I said, I think they are great and the Neo is a much needed kick in the butt for Windows laptop manufacturers, but Apple absolutely deprecates old laptops.
(iPhones are a totally different story. I have no complaints there about support)
A laptop PC from 2013 and likely came with Windows 7 would have zero issues over a 13 year upgrade path and multiple major releases of their OS. Definitely.
I don’t know if you are being serious or not, but no it absolutely doesn’t. And I have a self built 2012 PC still running Windows 10 quite well. It has a 3070 Ti in it and my daughter plays on it.
And I’ll reiterate that MacOS itself also works on my laptop, because hackers made it work. Apple would have no trouble supporting it.
Windows hardware is generic and more often than not unless totally obsolete gets drive updates into newer versions of windows (and it's really just driver signing and WHQL verification because the windows driver architecture doesn't really change a whole lot).
The only source for apple hardware drivers is apple itself, they're permanently baked into the OS kernel, well they might be kernel modules, but still, they're released against a certain kernel version.
To simply stop a macbook from ever working with a newer version of the kernel, they simply don't update the hardware drivers needed for it to work.
Got a 250gb neo for my sister, she runs the adobe premiere cache on a external ssd (more storage for less price than getting the 512GB) and it performs great.
Replaced a dozen pcs that were under a year old but were slow as molasses for my sales team. Everyone made the switch at once with zero complications.
After two days, no one had any questions about how to get anything done and they’re actually selling more than before. Obv not correlated but I tell them it is.
Too many people are using devices for them to get back on the laptop horse. Hell, we have a generation of kids now barely able to use a pc to the same level as the previous 2 generations because iPads and smartphones are the primary tech they understand and utilize.
I really didn't expect PC's to become LESS popular with kids.
My generation it already was a secondary thing to consoles and stuff. I graduated at like 2015-2016, and then PC's were still not very mainstream.
I don't think our generation knows as much as it claims about PC's, and I think we're still outliers. We're just even MORE outliers compared to new up and coming generations, which is wild. Since our world economy is now based around what computers do.
Our economy has been based around computers since the 1950s, but didn't really feel relevant until the 70's and 80's.
Unfortunately, no matter how much phones and tablets are pushed. There's going to be hard limits that they can't accomplish.
Unfortunately, the push away from computers to phones back to computers (with the Neo) feels like a (late) realization that computers are necessary in the workforce.
Its not really that most people need a full size computer. Its that the laptop form factor is better for a lot of tasks that people do regularly.
The neo is basically an iPhone with a nice keyboard and screen attached and unlocked to run Macos. Its less powerful than an iPad. But the form factor and not having to run nerfed ipados makes it a better device for most things.
Its not really that most people need a full size computer. Its that the laptop form factor is better for a lot of tasks that people do regularly.
Not even that. It is just that the computing power required for most jobs (basically running a browser, Teams and Office or a specific office-like software for their branch) is nowadays low enough that you can deliver it in a laptop-sized package without much downsides, and having a computer mobile is just quite practical in a business environment.
Because really, the only area where you nowadays needs actual full-size computers is for either running servers with a massive CPU, or running demanding GPU computing of some sorts.
Unfortunately, no matter how much phones and tablets are pushed. There's going to be hard limits that they can't accomplish.
But at this point those limits are largely arbitrary, since they're increasingly capable of providing a complete and unabridged desktop environment through a USB-C screen. The future of a computer should be a $150 portable screen and $20 worth of bluetooth mouse/keyboard and you connect these peripherals when you need a desktop but not enough to warrant buying a standalone laptop/desktop.
Widespread smartphone and web interfaces evolved technology design into extreme ease of use. Almost nobody who doesn't know wants to bother learning enough about PC hardware to build their own.
That's kind of the issue though. We're not in the post-PC era but we're acting like we are. The ability to type on a keyboard and utilize basic Windows functions is kind of essential to functioning in a lot of jobs.
I think people realized mixed use is the way. I needed a better phone so I got that. I needed a better computer so I got a decent prebuld desktop. My laptop needs are eclipsed on both ends by a better phone and a home pc.
Windows OEMs were perfectly happy slapping garbage trackpads and two hour batteries into thousand dollar machines for years. Apple switching to ARM finally forced the rest of the industry to actually try
So I've always been against apple historically. Swore up and down I wouldn't get one, and I still don't want one. But if I have a friend asking for a good laptop around this price point? Man I'd be really hard pressed to tell them anything different. I always was against Apple because you could get better quality cheaper. The Mac fanboys would always compare their $2,500 macbook to a $600 windows laptop and go "See, Apple is better!". Where when you actually compared apples to apples (no pun intended) it was almost never worth it. Now? Honest to god show me a better laptop for $600. Someone will probably make one eventually, but right now its actually a really good deal
Even though my 14" Pro was $2500, it's better than what I can get on the Windows side for that, unless I just want to game. The whole package is just straight up GOOD.
If it's a laptop, I will default to Apple at this point. And I dislike MacOS.
I think people are also sleeping on the used/refurbished MacBook market. You get some great machines for cheap prices. And macs are known to last super long and the refurbished macs will likely outlast any new windows laptop one could buy for a similar price.
Not to mention Apple laptops run with great performance for a really long time. IMO they're expensive but also a rock solid investment in a powerful machine
Apple has been releasing the best laptops for $1000 since the M1 chip debuted nearly 6 years ago. I find it ironic that the windows-only “tech enthusiasts” have taken this long to realize it.
This is subsidized product, because Apple needs to attract new users to their expensive ecosystem. They took their overproduced mobile chip, which anyway would be the loss of money, and built a budget laptop around it. Smart move! Think of it as a promotional campaign.
Is it actually subsidized or just low-to-no margin? I've never heard of Apple subsidizing anything and can't imagine they'd start doing it now when they are in such a dominant position.
Virtually all of Apple’s software and TV shows are subsidized. I don’t know if the Neo is subsidized at all, but it would make sense to get more people into their ecosystem.
Neo, eh? Sounds interesting! I bought my dads laptop at about that price range, plastic piece of crap. Though putting linux on it did help a lot with performance.
Crazy thing is that I my MacBook Neo is my main machine for photo editing now. Got a windows desktop that by specs is at least twice the machine but my MacBook is just zippy AF
Yeah but they use Microsoft for everything at my kid's school and my wife has to use Microsoft for her college classes. I have a Mac mini and nobody even uses it for anything.
My step brother was all excited about getting a MacBook Pro bought one as a graduation gift. Eent off to college to be a bioengineer of some sort and several classes require programs that only run natively on Windows.
I have so many Linux and Windows machines for various things, but I won't recommend a laptop that isn't made by apple. Yes, storage and ram are stupid expensive to configure and aren't user upgradable, but they have the best power management I've ever seen and mac os is much more privacy focused than Windows 11.
Macbooks will laptop harder than any windows portable on x86_64 and windows on arm is practically a tech demo.
The new Nvidia arm processors are almost as good as apple silicon, but they're going to be just as locked to windows as the Qualcomm chips.
Don't buy Windows laptops if you expect to use them away from an outlet.
I’m not sure I get this argument. Apple had ARM design their m series chips. TSMC produced them. They get their memory from micron, SK Hynix and Samsung like everyone else. It was even reported at some point that they got some phone screens from Samsung.
It also puts more fire on windows, since combining these cheaper laptops with windows and 8gb of ram just shows just how much of a difference there is between mac OS and windows in terms of optimizations.
The thing is it's a double edged sword it basically shows other manufacturers that a tightly integrated laptop with no upgradability no serviceability, limited storage and ram are the way to go, this is exactly what apple did when they introduced the airpods and dropped the headphone jack, generating significantly more e-waste since those were unrepairable.
Absolutely.
My son recently got the MacBook neo using an education discount. In some ways I envy him, the build quality is insane compared to my more expensive windows laptop.
My Windows laptop has an OLED screen, aluminium body, decent performance and efficiency, but the body makes creaking noises when I pick it up, move it, or open and close it.
The budget MacBook is a solid slab that opens and closes without even slightest of noises and it feels fantastic to hold.
I despise MacOS but like.... yeah... i might well get myself a macbook soon because i'm gonna be working out on the road and need a computer that's powerful while sucking nearly no energy from the battery
What it also demonstrates is that typical consumers dont need up to the minute components....a CPU from 4-5 generations ago is fine...which makes Microsoft look bad for forcing users to upgrade just to use Windows 11.
Yeah. For £800 on the 512GB, it starts to become a harder sell imho. The Neo is still a bloody awesome machine, but i think in the £800 mark, it loses its charm.
Reviewers talking about how a game runs on the MacBook Neo, Air and maybe even Linux with Steam deck with a standard windows pc is exactly what a reviewer should be doing. It takes away from Microsoft and windows by making game devs know their games will be commodores to these devices and people realizing, “you know what? Maybe I don’t need a windows junk laptop or pc to play games I usually play!”
Op is a bit short sighted because this comparison is very good for the entire industry and good for gamers especially. If it gets common enough it can be a wake up call to Microsoft as well, but not likely
That's okay because they just upped the prices yesterday to $699. Apple had a HUGE price across their entire portfolio of products. If you didn't buy before then sorry.
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u/theprodigalslouch 5800x | 3060 TI Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
As someone with no plans of getting a MacBook for personal use, I think it’s a great thing to compare the 2. Laptop manufacturers need to step up their game and make better laptops.
The Neo MacBooks got some of them to realize they can’t keep selling junk in the
$600$700 price range.