Christina WarrenThere are obvious deficits to the MacBook Neo — connectivity is a huge one, but I’m just stoked there is a $500 MacBook (assuming you use the student discount, which of course you obviously should) and in fun colors!
Jason Snell@film_girl I just wonder how much connectivity the buyers of a $599 laptop need....
@jsnell I think having only a single USB 3 port sucks, full stop. It’s offensive to me, tbh. The DTK from 6 years ago had better than this. The bandwidth problem here makes even getting a dock a very, very difficult trade-off. Especially when full MacBook Airs with 16GB of RAM have been available (granted not widely for $600, but certainly for $700 more commonly). We can quibble on if the buyer cares, but my point is they shouldn’t have to worry.
Paul Chernoff@film_girl @jsnell The USB port issue is my biggest nit because I can't imagine it saving Apple much money and it is an annoyance to have 2 different USB-C ports. I'm not sure I would remember to use a specific port for charging and attach a monitor to the other. I hope that this decision wasn't made just to differentiate this model from the MBA.
After that I would make the RAM 16GB but I am going to guess economics are really against that these days.
@film_girl @jsnell I agree that the monitor limitation to 4K took me by surprise. I think Apple is leaving money on the table by not offering more monitors, but there is a wide selection of 4K monitors on the market. And don't get me started on a monitor rant.
Oddly the Neo limitations mean that I won't have to argue with the C-Ring about not buying these for my office. And we are still happily using many MBA M1s (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD).
@film_girl @jsnell Definitely not. I’m moving my office slowlly to M4s and M5s.
I am wondering if the 2 deaths of M1 MBAs in my office were truly accidents.