MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.

Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.

So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.

Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.

For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

Presumably because the Neo sets a new low price boundary, used M1s Macbook Airs are only a couple of hundred pounds. For a system that is still really competitive.

The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.

Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.

With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.

I too prefer Linux + KDE, overall it has been cause _less_ problems than macOS for me and I like the extra customizability.

The only thing keeping my work computer a mac is that I need to run iOS simulators.

On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.

Needless to say my M3 also sucks compared to a very good desktop.

Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed.

Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.

Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.

[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.

This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.

I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.

For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.

The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.

The moment it runs an update all bets are off. It's always audio for me, it breaks in the weirdest ways.

Mac updates are the best in the industry, period.

Close to zero chance of having an issue (unless you're messing with third-party kernel extensions).

There were millions of other annoying small things in Ubuntu itself as well. I’m sorry to say but as much as I love nix systems Ubuntu wasn’t really for general public - maybe it’s better today, not sure. Heard the story over and over again - that it’s superior, and every time I try it I’m utterly disappointed.

At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.

They even get serious security updates even after that period, and you can install linux if you really want to, but it makes no sense to me.

If nothing else, it'd be nice if those iMacs could be reused as external displays, but nope. No display-in on them, so no dice (at least not without a lot of dicking about).

I also did dev on Windows, I know the internals pretty well (I even did embedded on CE, writing portable code across CE/95/NT family runtimes).

I still prefer Mac, it's much less likely to randomly break, mainly due to the fact that the hardware the software runs on is extremely predictable. I also like the care about muggle usability that Apple tends to pursue (granted, not perfect, but way better than the other two)

Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.

I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.

I am rooting for Framework myself.

I'm typing this on an old T470P (7700HQ/32GB/2560x1440) that is running my TV - it's uptime is measured in months (usually for a kernel upgrade).

Just a stellar machine but the new ones don't seem to be worth the price.

It is somewhat remarkable that no one has managed to get close to Apple quality by now.

I think the major manufacturers just have too many SKU's with too much differentiation instead of focussing on making 4-5 good SKU's.

On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able to upgrade and maintain your laptop sounds elegant. But those people, they never argue that they must be able to change the CPU. Why not? It used to be that upgrading the CPU in a laptop was a common occurence. Why don't they throw a fit that they can't upgrade the CPU?

Because technology caught up with them. CPUs are now soldered on the board, for multiple very good reasons. Coupled with the fact that a good CPU is good enough for a very long time, and no one feels the need to upgrade their CPU on a laptop. Same thing with the math co-processor, no one's arguing to be able to change that!

I'm sure they would understand, if you could show them the equivalent 25 watt x86 part. If you find one at 25 watts or lower, it'll be too slow to really bother with. And if it uses much more power than that, then a fan quickly becomes mandatory. It's easier to excuse having a fan than having a processor that's just dog slow.

It's basically the idea of the pro of 10 years ago but realised flawlessly, and improved upon actually in most ways, for significantly cheaper.

To do this they had to become an execution machine at huge scale to own and solve every piece that held them back in that pro design, and they did, and it's honestly amazing how it all came together.

We do. But we have to do work also. There is a difference between running a simulation in 10 minutes instead of 1 hour.

Part of this is the windows ARM not being where it needs to be, but part of it is lack of imagination.

There’s just no good low power x86 CPU.

If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.

No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.

The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.

It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.

What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.

Did the old 11" MacBook Air not teach the Wintel brands anything?

Truly a shocking outcome!

When I finally convinced my father to get a Mac ~2005/2006, he left me a voicemail saying that all he'd done was take it out of the box and he could already tell that it was a good purchase.

There were, if I recall correctly, one or two generations of Dell XPS that came close but they started cheaping out on materials almost immediately after it.

The old-ish ThinkPads were great if you want a rugged laptop, but that's not really because of better build quality, there were just more material.

My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.

People do know how to make things properly the problem is all those people are in China for a laundry list of reasons as long as my arms in a circle

It's more powerful than my $4000 M1 Max until it heat soaks.

that's cheaper than a Magic Keyboard, depending on the iPad :)

You know that Steve Jobs has been dead for 15 years, right?

You might want to invent a new axe to grind. At least something from this decade.

the iphone launched at $499

EDIT: hmm.. I guess iphone 1 was $499 or $599 and that required a 2-year AT&T contract. Don't know what the actual price was.

I do know the top iphone 17 pro max is $1,999.

but it does have 2tb of storage, which is amazing in a different way.

EDIT: i just looked up how many ipads apple shipped in 2025: 60M, so yeah, no shortage of demand in iPads. Most people are consumptioners, though, so that kind of makes sense.

The fact that I'm not carrying a +1k USD machine all the time gives me peace of mind

I got the m4 pro when it first got out, but on restrospect I really should have gotten either:

1. A max spec max + 128GB ram for local models. 2. an air with 15 inch for max comfort.

And I settled in the middle regret land.

A similar directive came out about that same time forcing all managers to use the baseline phones, and limiting the upgraded models to only testing fleets, for about the same reason.

In a defense of the latter case - there are many decisive people in the company explicitly demanding the website to be so bloated and overengineered.

> this will create pressure on developers to memory-optimize their software

Ideally, yes, realistically, no. It is rare that I hear FE devs considering how much memory their apps are using. I really wish RAM use would be a much greater concern, but when I look at programs I normally run, I can tell RAM is not a concern (imagine me giving a dramatic accusing look at Docker Desktop, next-server, ...). RAM use for web pages is often not given much consideration either.

Actually from what I understood, making a small display with modern specs like Apple did on the iPhone mini was MORE expensive because all of modern high-end smartphone display manufacturing is designed for larger, 6+ inch screens.

With 8GB you will have lots of swaps happening. Especially with Safari. That extra SSD is going to make quite a lot of difference. Together with 12GB Memory this would be enough for ~90%+ usage.

And Studio and Mac Mini - which have gotten a lot more popular as of late.

For most people in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone is central and the Neo is another useful (but secondary) companion device. Not unlike the Watch and Airpods.

>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.

Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.

How do you explain this $1,000 monitor stand [1]?

Or its iPhone "carry bag" collaboration with ISSEY MIYAKE retailing at $149.95 to $229.95 aka the iPhone Pocket [2]?

1: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/wwdc-2019-craziest-revea...

2: https://www.apple.com/ng/newsroom/2025/11/introducing-iphone...

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch-hermes

Only in selected store and only in US.

My guess is that they were extra cautious in case of a flop just before new CEO was appointed.

To piggyback on your M1 Air comment, if I hadn't spilled a coke on my own M1 2020 2 years ago, I'd still be using it. It's a legendary machine. Logic board repair would've been $700, so it sits on my shelf. I'm thinking of getting a rotary tool and cutting out the aluminum off of its case for some cyberdeck projects.

Joking and sarcasm aside, I was talking about the value proposition. Pound for pound, I don't think the Neo's MSRP pulls its weight compared to the Air. As in performance for $ ratio. And, I am not looking down at people who do buy it, the more of us, the better.