GlyphMacbook Neo Hot Take™, take 2. Earlier I was annoyed at tech reviewers who should *really* know better giving a *really* myopic assessment of its gaming potential. Now I'm seeing another bad take on Fedi, which is "all you Apple shills love this stupid thing, but a cheap Linux laptop would work better, don't buy it". I am much more sympathetic to this but it appears to be missing what is interesting about this device and why people are talking about it at all.
What is interesting about the device is not that you *should* buy it—the whole value proposition is that it is a very cheap, but also kinda bad, MacBook—it's that people *will* buy it. A lot. It fills a market gap. The only products that this is positioned against are Chromebooks and iPads; cheap refurb Linux machines are not in the same product category for most potential buyers, and I think the fact that Linux fans do not understand the different categories are endemic to why Linux struggles.
Potential customers for this fall into a few categories, including:
1. Parents who don't know a lot about tech, but whose kids need "a laptop" for school.
2. Kids & young adults who want a macbook to run something like GarageBand but have a very limited budget *and* also don't otherwise know much about tech.
3. Schools.
4. School-like programs, like software dev clubs & summer camps.
These customer types need a low price, but they also need A LOT of *support*. The support is the product here.
Out of all of these I have the most experience with category 4. I have set up labs full of Linux computers on many occasions. I've also done the same for macs. I won't say that macs are universally superior but there are TONS of things about imaging, configuring, provisioning, and authenticating macs that are vastly superior to Linux. If it's to teach a topic that isn't programming or sysadmin, like say graphic design, macOS has huge, huge advantages for legibility to the instructor.
Yes, you could personally get a more powerful computer by getting a refurb 16GB M1 MacBook Air somewhere by bargain hunting. But you will need to hunt; right now on the official refurb store the cheapest MacBook Air is $929. If you're shopping on eBay, now you've got a machine with a ton of wear cycles on the SSD, and dubious amounts of damage.
If you, personally, have the time & energy for that, it *IS* a better choice.
But if you're trying to source a 50-machine bulk order for a CS extracurricular program, with a uniform hardware profile so that students have a consistent experience, then no, you cannot reliably do that by going around to garage sales and rummaging through bargain bins. You cannot afford to repair all of these units (which WILL have a failure rate several times the average for a new machine) yourself. You can't even afford to troubleshoot them and manage the RMA process.
This problem is magnified for institutional buyers, but for folks without a ton of tech experience it's the same. The 1-year manufacturer warranty for new-in-store models is a big deal. The implicit promise of several years of software support is really important. Apple stores run free trainings you can go to. They have a business support program where you can talk to someone about fleet management problems for free. They have 24/7 chat support on the web if you have software issues.
If you think that you can compete with this with a bespoke Linux installation on a few old ThinkPads, you need to figure out a way to provide *all that other stuff* to the people who will be using them. And I wish you would! If you ran a charity campaign to raise money to scale up such an effort for a few local school districts in a particular region, I'd probably donate to it!
But if you have people with zero tech experience in your life, who have a kid who doesn't really know what kind of computer they need… I'm not going to tell you that you should never recommend Linux to such a person. But at the *very least* you cannot be recommending that they go bargain hunting for mystery-meat laptops that will "probably work with Linux". You need to find a company like System76 or Framework that will actually help them out if the dang thing breaks.
Drew Bell