This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11 https://www.theverge.com/news/897834/microsoft-windows-11-qu...
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/microsoft-keeps-insi...
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
The competition at this price point is weak.
Those weren't leftover stock or sale prices - Apple was producing the M1 MBA specifically for the $700 price point at third-party retailers.
Wait until retailers start discounting the Neo.
Is it though?
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
> It weighs the same as a MBP
A much larger laptop with less than half the number of display pixels is not really the same market. And how's that battery life?
Yes, the display isn't as good but the Neo with 512 GB of storage is already $700 and has half the storage of the other laptop. The Neo also has 8 GB of RAM vs 32 GB. Big differences IMO.
Battery life is "good enough" but not great. It really depends on what you're using it for. If you're doing CPU bound tasks a lot, it's not going to last as long. I guess a takeaway is I was never in a situation where I had to change my behaviors because of the battery life. Unless you're planning to be out in the middle of no where without a power bank for an extended period time doing workload intensive tasks it's fine.
Likewise, the display being only 1080p isn't as bad as you would think. I'd be surprised if anyone is running their 13" Neo at 2408 x 1506 at native scaling. That would be 219 PPI. For reference I run a 4k 32" monitor at native 1:1 scaling and that's 138 PPI. It would be bonkers to consider using 219 PPI from a normal viewing distance. Most scaled resolutions with the Neo would be effectively 1080p resolution but with sharper text.
You're not in the market for a netbook-type machine if this is the case.
> but with sharper text.
Text huh? Sounds important.
> Battery life is "good enough" but not great.
So, do you want a lightweight client / light productivity machine with tons of battery life, great text, and a kickass trackpad? Or an affordable workstation replacement? Different markets.
Few people want or need 32gb of RAM, nor give a shit about what it even means. Most people just want to run MS Word and Google Chrome and maybe TurboTax.
If you want to spend ~$600-700, the laptop I mentioned fits the bill for casual use, a development workstation, media editing and casual gaming at a directly comparable price to the Neo. I replied initially because you wrote nothing good exists in the $600-700 range.
It’s for somebody who goes to the store, puts their hands on the keyboard, uses the touchpad, looks at the screen, and feels the chassis, and then makes their decision. This is how regular people purchase these commodity items. Most people have no clue what the difference between storage and memory is. They just want to know: will it run [software]? That’s all the specs they need to know. Maybe the battery life as well
If you haven’t already go put your hands on one of these at the store. There’s no $600 laptop that feels like it.
We might live in different areas of the world. Every person I know who isn't into tech has never walked into a store by themselves and bought a laptop based on feel or a hunch.
They always get a recommendation from someone who is into tech, either for a specific model to buy online or someone to go with in real life at a store to help them make a purchase.
I don't blame them either, I wouldn't make a big purchase with no information and trust the sales floor to give high quality personalized advice.
Fit and finish (not being made of creaky plastic) Display brightness & colour representation Battery life Trackpad Keyboard
For a portable these are just as important as “the numbers”for most people and definitely more noticeable. Perhaps not the case for you though!
The track pad is of course not as good as Apple's but it's good enough where it's not in the way and feels ok to use.
The brightness and battery life both fall into the same category of they haven't negatively impacted me in my day to day. For example a few hours of dev work in the park with the sun out hasn't been a problem for both battery life or visibility.
You are right in that I don't value battery life as a top tier feature. ~5 hours of "real work" is enough because if you need extended battery life for doing intensive tasks away from human civilization you can always keep a power bank on hand for extended usage. If you're not out in the middle of no where, access to a power outlet is readily available.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
Otherwise, decent.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
I hope Apple eats into their market share hard.
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
To get this record you need to have a long time were your costumers were buying something else from you (like Phones) and have a lot available inventory in a lot of places in the first week combined with a great media coverage. 3 things that Apple has an advantage in.
As @ibero above points out it is more important for apple to tap into the vast demographic of relatively young iPhone/iPad customers - the older Mac customers are buying different machines.
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
for Apple to focus on fixing things in macOS again (as opposed to just backporting stuff from their other lines) Mac would need to grow by a lot.
Apple is having their Windows ME moment.
It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's all about the software they would say. The chickens have come home to roost.
I wonder if someone got a raise for that.
These have been in the OS for so long I can't even remember when they were added.
You shouldn't have to cope with one to get the other.
The concept is great, and I would love to ditch OrbStack for it. (OrbStack is slick. But their everything-shares-one-kernel-and-they-don’t-give-privileged-access model falls apart as soon as you try to do anything that doesn’t fit in their not-amazing sandbox. Even user namespaces don’t appear to work.) But, other than the actual core mostly working, Apple Containers was a buggy mess, and it was the only thing that made me frequently reboot the whole machine.
People weren't that mad about the butterfly keyboard or the 16" Macbook Pro that idled near it's junction temp. That doesn't mean they were good products, it means that the majority of Apple customers fail to evaluate the products they're buying based on quality.
"Just avoid holding it that way." - Steven Jobs
Edit: Apple turns 50 this year
> Apple Announces New Mac Sales Record Following MacBook Neo Launch
Maybe it's not the cheap hardware? I don't know?
But when you put the following assertions out there:
>Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created
and
>It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses
with the market data being what it is.
I guess I'm just saying those statements definitely go under the old Abe Lincoln admonition that at times "Both may be, but one MUST be, wrong."
Someone hasn't been around for very long in the Apple era, not even counting things before NexT took over.
To say Tahoe is the worst only reveals how few of the releases of MacOS X the poster actually used.
What is everyone seeing that I'm not? I like Tahoe/iOS26, I haven't noticed regressions with it.
macOS is much better than any alternative and Tahoe and iOS 26 seem perfectly fine?
I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
I don't hate Tahoe myself, but I don't particularly love it, either. I can still get done what I need to do with an OS, but along with a bunch of other paper cuts in recent macOS versions (looking at you, System Settings) on top of Liquid Glass, I can see why folks are upset.
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is even worse in this regard.
I only need Apple ecosystem integrations, Docker, a bunch of CLI tools, Homebrew, and VSCode with Claude.
As someone who lived through the early days of Windows, macOS Tahoe and Windows ME aren’t in the same universe.
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's meaningful that a product line that's 41 years old had its best launch for customers new to the platform. That's unprecedented in the computer industry.
I think this may actually be the first real Halo product they have that will do this for Mac, because it is a Mac.
2) They will generate more profits than the hardware itself. You're not counting services and ecosystem. Now you got a new matching iPhone to go with your Neo, and an iWatch, an iPad, an iPencil...
People have been asking for iPhone SE to come back for what feels like decades, maybe they will do that next.
The headline hints at a causation that I don't think exists.
But on the other hand, this is kind of the culmination of them owning their hardware stack. They can avoid the commoditization race to the bottom since they are the exclusive owners of a significant amount of their hardware vertical, From chips to enclosure. Perhaps that will let them retain the margins that were previously driven by a consumer base that prized prestige over price.
While my intuition is that this may be the last big cash grab that Apple squeezes out of their premium image, they did have a massive hit back in the day with the original iMac (the CRT based one). They've defined "cheap and premium" categories before.
Tim Cook, as CEO of a public company, is incentivized to deliver shareholder value.
Entering this market with a good product does just that.
Beyond that, this is an entry point for people to use Apple products. It can be bridge to get this consumer to buy more premium hardware and software later on.
They are creating countless customers for life.
Microsoft's malevolent stewardship of Windows has handed the market to them on the proverbial silver platter. It's only reasonable for Cook to take advantage of their generosity.
Depends on your money situation. For some people, spending 600 bucks on a laptop is a lot, even in the US
I still haven't found any concrete evidence but I think the Key travel on Neo is at least 1-2mm higher than Air and Pro. And back to the good old MacBook Pro Early 2015 era keyboard.
If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
What you’re asking for is an Air.
The design of Air and Neo is completely different. Air is non-repairable, worst keyboard, zero bezels. The Neo is easy enough to fix I dont even need to look at the manual.
What advantage does the Neo’s keyboard have have over the keyboard that’s identical in all other modern Macs?
More Key Travel distance.