Wonder how long it'll take before some enthusiast manages to rip the 36Wh battery out of the Macbook Neo and cram a 50+Wh battery in there to give it insane battery life.
100% apple only stuck a 36Wh battery in there to make the battery life "not too good". If the engineers were allowed to, they could probably make the Neo's battery life stupidly long
@quad Honestly, I wonder how long before they just replace chromebooks ...
@Dozer I'm more excited for the other direction.

Features like a metal chassis and high-res bright screen were mostly reserved for $1000+ laptops.

Just by existing on the market, the Macbook Neo will force other manufacturers to give us those kinds of features for $400 less as well.

@quad True, I'm not REALLY a fan of Apple, but this Neo ? .. That is a gamechanger and hopefully a change in the "all laptops must be superpowerful or just not work!"-world we live in now

Will be interesting to see how it actually performs in "daily use for most people"

@Dozer I ordered one to see how much of a train wreck it is. I own a 2019 16" Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM.

That thing running a fresh Tahoe install uses 8.5GB while on the desktop doing absolutely nothing. And it's got a dGPU so it doesn't even need to share the memory.

The Neo having only 8GB, and needing to share those 8GB with an integrated GPU sounds like a disaster. It'll be under insane memory pressure constantly unless they specifically tweak macOS for the machine.

But hey I'm here for it, as long as the Neo isn't a flop (and let's be honest it probably won't be, it'll at least handle basic schoolwork, and as long as it does that it's going to sell like crazy) then the aftermath will hopefully give a heavy body blow to both Chromebooks and Windows PCs, forcing them to up their game.
@Dozer Also I've kept a single Macbook around just because I like trying out all platforms. My current one will be EOL soon as Tahoe is the last release which supports it.

So a Macbook for as cheap as possible, even if barely functional was exactly the kind of device I needed, heh
@quad so it's basically a big iphone with a battery bank and a keyboard, man apple sure knows their stuff
@xian Yeah, binned iPhone 16 Pro chip with one less GPU core. We don't know yet but they haven't even implied that it'll charge faster than 20W lmao.

Modern phones are so overpowered anyways that laptops should've done this ages ago, the only reason they haven't is because all design around Windows, which is absolute garbage.

I have a Pinebook Pro lying around somewhere, just stick an RK3588 in a device like that with a decent heatsink and put non-shit software on it, voila.

ARM Windows is shit because Windows
ARM Linux is shit because every vendor sucks at proper support, and by the time the community makes it so you no longer need sketchy kernels, u-boots and GPU drivers, the chip is too outdated to compete.