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Posted by etothet 13 hours ago

The MacBook Neo(daringfireball.net)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/asus-co-ceo-macbook-neo-is-a-shoc...
330 points | 550 commentspage 4
capricio_one 4 hours ago|
I wonder if this will get RISC-V adoption on the roadmap of competitors. We had a thread in the last 24 hours over how slow as molasses it is, but honestly x86 isn’t the way to go. I like that the AMD x64 literature tries to push down on the legacy cruft but some of it is evident in the ISA which is harder to ignore, like default behaviours of registers and other things that are left over for backwards compat and as such everything around it suffers in a thousand broken windows sort of way.

nb I haven’t delved too deep into RISCV but I am under a general impression it did away with all this. My concern is the layers that are added will turn it into a CISCV over time.

rconti 4 hours ago||
> because the key caps are brand new, it feels even better than the keyboard on my own now-four-years-old MacBook Pro, the most-used key caps on which are now a little slick

Honestly, I have a hard time typing on a new Apple laptop; it doesn't feel right until the keycaps are a bit worn.

bob1029 18 hours ago||
Looks like the PC laptop market is going to have to stop being bad on purpose. I hope this causes significant pain for vendors like Dell, Microsoft and Asus.

I don't see any way they can get out of this situation without seriously improving the UX of their products. Windows itself is likely implicated here too.

ryandrake 10 hours ago||
Not Asus, but I have a crappy Lenovo plastic laptop that was around that price range when new, and it's horrible. The hinges have so much resistance that the garbage display panel flexes when you try to open the lid. The junk trackpad is the size of a credit card, and requires some amount of force to actually pick up the fact that your finger is moving on it. The SDCard reader has failed twice (I'm on my third). It's just a piece of garbage and is even then it's about middle of the road when it comes to PC laptop quality. And outside of specific defects, (and this is what's endemic throughout the PC laptop ecosystem) the build quality just subjectively feels like it's barely held together with tape and glue. Like what you'd expect from a toy from an old cracker jack box. These OEMs have been shipping absolute trash for years, and it's about time the industry got a shock.
JSR_FDED 16 hours ago||
What's shocking is that this is a shock to the PC Industry.
etothet 13 hours ago||
“I’ll just say it: I think I’m done with iPads. Why bother when Apple is now making a crackerjack Mac laptop that starts at just $600?”

I’m curious to see this machine in person, but I’d bet the an iPad is still the best large device in Apple’s ecosystem for anything that benefits from viewing in portrait mode.

bell-cot 12 hours ago|
Portrait or landscape - if your use is dominated by looking at the screen and/or situations where it can't set it down (to use the KB), then the iPad is better.

Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.

WillAdams 6 hours ago||
Am I the only person who manually rotates a laptop screen to portrait, then holds it like a book to use thus?
rconti 4 hours ago||
Quite possibly!
nottorp 6 hours ago||
So the force touch stuff has also been available on Apple laptop trackpads?

Damned if i ever noticed, and all my laptops since like 2013 have been Apple.

I knew I had it on one of my previous iPhones but there it was an annoyance because I never knew what was going to happen on a touch.

nerdjon 5 hours ago|
It is also a critical part of watchOS.

I am still sad that they stopped putting it into iPhone, I think the tech is great and the watch really proves what can be done with it when it is a fundamental part of the hardware and the OS can be built around it. But we never had a situation that every compatible iPhone had force touch so everything that could be done with it had to work in other ways.

I think the iPad made that even more complicated since I doubt we would have ever gotten it on a screen that large, if it would have even worked.

As far as it being on the trackpad, it is honestly pretty wild when you realize it. It does an incredible job of faking feeling like it is actually moving. Was similar with the fake home button that some iPhone’s had for a little while.

nottorp 1 hour ago|||
> I am still sad that they stopped putting it into iPhone

Well I'm not, because i only managed to register a force touch when i meant a normal touch :)

losvedir 5 hours ago|||
I remember being totally flummoxed when I was trying to figure out why my trackpad wasn't clicking when the machine was off. I had no idea it wasn't a mechanical lever anymore!
xp84 5 hours ago||
> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality.

Interesting metrics, though I'd add that if you count storage and memory as metrics, it'd be hard to find a worse PC laptop. And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison.

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-vivobook-14-wuxga-lapto...

2x the RAM and 2x the storage isn't meaningless to a lot of people.

The PC has a single-core geekbench around 2100 single / 10,000 multicore. The Neo is apparently in the range of 3600 / 9,000 multicore.

No arguments on the Mac's screen being way nicer though. However, the low-end computer market - unlike most of us on HN - has never cared about pixel density, color accuracy, or really any screen specs other than size (Looks like the Asus has the Mac by an inch on that spec).

Bottom line, for a high-end Chromebook replacement (literally everything is done in the cloud, so storage doesn't matter, and only running a browser, so RAM isn't a big deal), as long as it's for someone who will take care of such a delicate device, the Neo is pretty great. For everyone else, it's debatable.

> And certainly not software quality.

This is most definitely only a little true in that Windows has jumped the shark lately with ads and various enshittification, and thus ties with Mac OS. Tahoe is without a doubt the worst Mac OS ever released. It's both poor quality and poorly designed.

zarzavat 5 hours ago||
The manufacturers don't care about display quality, because displays are hard and expensive. Apple has enough volume that they can get a custom panel.

Users on the other hand, they definitely care about display quality more than they care about RAM. The display is the part you look at!

If you're in store and there's a Neo with a crisp 200 PPI screen and a Windows laptop with a cheap screen but more RAM, the vast majority of consumers will choose the laptop with the better display. People make purchasing decisions based on feels and the Neo has great feels.

fsh 5 hours ago||
On the contrary, displays are commodity components. So much so that motivated enthusiasts have managed to swap better panels into their ThinkPads for a long time. Manufacturers don't prioritize display quality in cheap devices because it doesn't show up on the spec sheet and most customers don't care that much.
zarzavat 3 hours ago||
Consumers don't read spec sheets. My mother doesn't even know the difference between RAM and SSD - it's all just "memory" right? But she knows that when she goes to the Apple Store the computers are built to an impressive standard.

Quality speaks for itself, and the way that people buy computers is through their eyes and fingertips, not their heads.

Go to the Apple Store and just observe how people make their buying decisions. They don't just look at the spec sheet, they lift, type on, caress the computers. They want to know how it will feel to own one.

officeplant 4 hours ago|||
>And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison.

As an ARM enthusiast who has tried a lot of WinARM, I think at this point I really struggle to believe MS has a single care in the world for improving quality of life for WinARM users. They sure do market it, and the laptops do work most of the time. I've just never had any other computers shit the bed when it comes to graphics drivers like a Qualcomm powered PC. Website with too many video/gifs playing? Screen whites out/all the video boxes go pink and explorer resets. Open up the gif search in Discord? Basically a coin flip chance its going to kill the graphics driver and reset explorer again. I had a Dell Inspiron with the Qualcomm 8CX Gen2 that could reliably be crashed just by quickly scrolling twitter on a video posting heavy day.

I would rather take a Mediatek powered Chromebook any other day until the Neo showed up and started to approach the sub $500 ARM chromebook price point.

DauntingPear7 5 hours ago||
I also am not a huge fan of the 256GB storage, but if someone doesn’t already know what ram is, they really won’t care and won’t notice much. I’m a tech guy. I bought an M1 air with 256GB storage and 8GB RAM. I was able to do development and mobile development fine. I never encountered RAM related slowdowns. I have an iCloud subscription because I don’t want to manage my own NAS. This is a heavier use case than what, say, a normal college student will do with it, and it worked just fine for me. This is by far the best laptop I have seen in this bracket. If I was just heading to college today, and I didn’t have the money for a Pro or Air, I would 100% get this far before a windows laptop.
voy707 4 hours ago||
RIP Microslop
rurban 19 hours ago|
I've used an MacAir with 8GB ram starting at 700€ for years, writing and testing compilers. This was until the macOS and butterfly keyboard desasters, which made me go back to 450€ ThinkPad Ryzen laptops with Fedora, upgraded to 64GB RAM.

My wife is using a fancy new air for 2500€, which is way better. But I still think of the good old MacAir times, they'll try to bring up again.

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