IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.
You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
> It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
I recently helped a friend picking a new laptop. Just going through the options at the websites of manufacturers was a nightmare. Huge amount of choices, shitty filtering, separated into multiple product lines were I often enough had no idea what separated the lines from each other
Inarguably one of the great things done by apple is the rather easily overseeable models. And no mattter the processing power in the models you get a rather great experience from the haptics, audio and visual in all of them.
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
I've only recently gotten a MacBook after using Linux Pretty much exclusively for over twenty years. And I have to say I'm really surprised how much I like it. For gaming it's all right, but not great. Factorio works but not much else.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
Oh i have a steam deck and am in the process of migrating to linux latest when Win 12 hits. Just some problems with some software like Fusion 360.
I do like Linux alot.
It really is a pity that there’s no working business model around open source maintenance for software like wine. I’m the guy who fixed the wine bug that blocked new iTunes versions, because I like to keep my music in iTunes for easy iPhone sync. I also have Fusion 360 working flawlessly in wine, but the setup process required multiple sessions stepping manually with a debugger to avoid crashes and packaging that as scripts and/or just documenting all the little issues and their fixes and keeping that up to date with fusion updates would be serious work. So nobody is doing it.
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
Just imagine what Apple would do to the market if they also offered a full Linux support, but not Windows... They'd probably own some 70% of Linux market outright and also double its overall size overnight.
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
1996 is not now. This comparision makes little to no sense.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
Windows reputation is declining, so the operating system might be the actual crisis. Linux with modern desktops (e.g. Gnome 3) might fill the gap, but the market is far from broad adoption. Promoting and improving Linux desktop and apps would be a long endeavour, but betting only on Windows which degrades to a cloud and AI advertising surface might be fatal.
My daughter just ordered one of these. She’s a student (not stem) and her ancient 8Gb MacBook Air with an intel processor was still serving well but the battery has become unuseable and her keyboard is becoming flaky.
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
The keyboard issue was probably caused by the battery, which can be replaced, and the keyboard would have likely returned to normal after the battery replacement.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
As someone who buys Asus motherboards when he builds PC's, it hasn't been a shock for me as an owner of a Macbook for the last 18 years.
I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
all of my normal pcs served me well for many many years. They don't get slower naturally, it was windows getting ever more bloated. I put linux on an 8 year old computer and it just flies again
Fully agree. When I have to use Windows from time to time, I’m always surprised by how laggy the cursor feels even on hardware that can do 8K VR just fine.
The legacy PC makers are lucky that Ubuntu doesn’t work on this, or else they’d face even more competition. By now, everyone hates Windows. And I’d wager some people hate it enough to be willing to switch to whatever works and is halfway ad-free.
Windows is such an offensive, defect-ridden pile of shit now that every PC maker should be blaming Microsoft for their inability to compete with the Neo.
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
Was my first thought also when I saw it. I honestly planned to ditch Macbooks before they released M1, but this hardware is just so much better than anything Intel or AMD can offer at least for laptops. For people that are not too demanding I've recommended Airs for a while, but this basically has the potential to destroy the entire midrange PC market. Some people will be reluctant to switch, but I don't think the OS is as important today as it was before. So much happens on the web anyway.
edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.
IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.
You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
> It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
I recently helped a friend picking a new laptop. Just going through the options at the websites of manufacturers was a nightmare. Huge amount of choices, shitty filtering, separated into multiple product lines were I often enough had no idea what separated the lines from each other
Inarguably one of the great things done by apple is the rather easily overseeable models. And no mattter the processing power in the models you get a rather great experience from the haptics, audio and visual in all of them.
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
I've only recently gotten a MacBook after using Linux Pretty much exclusively for over twenty years. And I have to say I'm really surprised how much I like it. For gaming it's all right, but not great. Factorio works but not much else.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
> Factorio works but not much else.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
[0] https://steamdb.info/charts/
Oh i have a steam deck and am in the process of migrating to linux latest when Win 12 hits. Just some problems with some software like Fusion 360. I do like Linux alot.
It really is a pity that there’s no working business model around open source maintenance for software like wine. I’m the guy who fixed the wine bug that blocked new iTunes versions, because I like to keep my music in iTunes for easy iPhone sync. I also have Fusion 360 working flawlessly in wine, but the setup process required multiple sessions stepping manually with a debugger to avoid crashes and packaging that as scripts and/or just documenting all the little issues and their fixes and keeping that up to date with fusion updates would be serious work. So nobody is doing it.
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
Just imagine what Apple would do to the market if they also offered a full Linux support, but not Windows... They'd probably own some 70% of Linux market outright and also double its overall size overnight.
Don't need to imagine, it did not take off, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
1996 is not now. This comparision makes little to no sense.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
Indeed, Apple from 1996 would not released Tahoe, most likely.
We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.
> difficult installation process and the significant performance costs
So it was a failure in implementation.
And the Apple that delivered Tahoe will do better?
All they would need is to provide complete DTB's and some drivers, no need to write a new OS from scratch.
If apple came out with their own linux distro, with open drivers and a mainline kernel... A girl can dream!
This path is already taken and it didn't sell Apple hardware in masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
MkLinux was first released in 1996, and discontinued in 2002.
I would argue that things have changed significantly since then.
Yeah liquid glass suckss
Windows reputation is declining, so the operating system might be the actual crisis. Linux with modern desktops (e.g. Gnome 3) might fill the gap, but the market is far from broad adoption. Promoting and improving Linux desktop and apps would be a long endeavour, but betting only on Windows which degrades to a cloud and AI advertising surface might be fatal.
Maybe other manufacturers will actually stop making crappy hardware that feels like its taped together?
More importantly, they need to find an alternative to Windows. A $10,000 computer wouldn't fix that dogshit.
There's really nothing in between. If ChromeOS would have been an alternative, maybe more Chromebooks would have been sold.
It comes down to Microsoft not doubling down on "let's make Windows as annoying as possible" (with ads, with telemetry that can't be turned off).
Depends what you want to do. ChromeOS is pretty great at certain things.
My daughter just ordered one of these. She’s a student (not stem) and her ancient 8Gb MacBook Air with an intel processor was still serving well but the battery has become unuseable and her keyboard is becoming flaky.
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
The keyboard issue was probably caused by the battery, which can be replaced, and the keyboard would have likely returned to normal after the battery replacement.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
Interesting I will look at replacing the battery if that’s a possibility. Thanks!
Except that it is an "apple" device, it is just a crappy laptop. You should have avoided the Vibe and bought her a decent one.
I don't think you actually tried it.
As someone who buys Asus motherboards when he builds PC's, it hasn't been a shock for me as an owner of a Macbook for the last 18 years.
I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
all of my normal pcs served me well for many many years. They don't get slower naturally, it was windows getting ever more bloated. I put linux on an 8 year old computer and it just flies again
Fully agree. When I have to use Windows from time to time, I’m always surprised by how laggy the cursor feels even on hardware that can do 8K VR just fine.
The legacy PC makers are lucky that Ubuntu doesn’t work on this, or else they’d face even more competition. By now, everyone hates Windows. And I’d wager some people hate it enough to be willing to switch to whatever works and is halfway ad-free.
Windows is such an offensive, defect-ridden pile of shit now that every PC maker should be blaming Microsoft for their inability to compete with the Neo.
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
Dell has been pushing Linux for like 20 years? I don't remember which distro, probably fedora or ubuntu...
They have a very limited set of choices. I would have bought more if you were not too limited in term of choice in their inventory.
At some point the XPS 13 dev edition was the almost perfect laptop. Then they ruined it with the following generations of it.
It's an option for maybe 2 SKUs... hardly pushing anything.
What's shocking is that this is a shock to the PC Industry.
He wasn't referring to the build quality which is about average, or the ipad level performance.
He was referring to the supply chain. The shock is that Apple was able to build something like this with current component costs.
“Average” build quality? All the reviews I’ve seen rage about the build quality of the Neo
Planning beyond the next quarter? That’s a rare level of foresight for most.
Was my first thought also when I saw it. I honestly planned to ditch Macbooks before they released M1, but this hardware is just so much better than anything Intel or AMD can offer at least for laptops. For people that are not too demanding I've recommended Airs for a while, but this basically has the potential to destroy the entire midrange PC market. Some people will be reluctant to switch, but I don't think the OS is as important today as it was before. So much happens on the web anyway.
edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.
[dead]
maybe Apple is "subsidizing" this ?
nudge/"help" people to join the party?
trying to ride something around the windows-bullshitization , recent memory-prices etc..