Charlie StrossMar 22

Meanwhile, a thought about the Macbook Neo:

The Neo uses an A18 Pro SOC, the 2024 iPhone Pro cpu—the iPhone 17 Pro runs on the A19 Pro. (The Neo soaks up their stockpile of high-end phone rejects.)

Apple's about to ramp up for the 2026 iPhones, which will release in September on the A20Pro.

Phones outsell laptops by a huge margin so I think the current Neo will be quietly replaced by an A19 Pro model in September, to use up the reject stockpile once as iPhone 17 sales tapers off.

/1

Show threadCharlie StrossMar 22

Implication: if you want a Macbook Neo this year, maybe wait until September—unless you expect the coming supply chain shock to hit Apple, too. Which is not impossible if TSMC can't meet their chip delivery dates.

If that happens, prices will shoot up and scarcity economics will take over, so buy now and be prepared to run it for the next decade.

/2

Show threadGraydonMar 22

@cstross Taiwan is dependent on natural gas for electrical generation. Reports vary about their stockpile, but I haven't seen anything that suggests they might have more than 20 days. And like the rest of East Asia they're supplied from the Persian Gulf.

All by itself, that hit on Qatar's LNG facilities makes me think Apple will not escape the supply shock.

The other part of this is that no one who isn't Apple wants to see "it's a phone" laptops. Other parties may encourage the Neo to fail.

Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦Mar 22

@graydon @cstross oh, Apple is super fucked, make zero mistake there. They do not make any of their own parts no matter how much they claim otherwise. For example, that soldered on memory isn't DRAM, it's HBM bonded to the die. They don't make HBM or have solid contracts, and are fighting the grift for those parts and backend. Storage, same story. They're screwed.

Neo itself, that's a separate discussion. (Hi. I am very much the expert there.) It's not a good idea for many reasons.

Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦Mar 22
@graydon @cstross viewing the Neo as anything OTHER than an attempt to compete in the extreme down-market x86 space is wrong. That's where Apple priced it. They want to fight the $599-799 x86 laptops. Literally the Walmart and BestBuy space. NOT the Chromebook/Arm space.
And the foundation for this idiocy is line-go-up. There is no growth space left. So they have to try and take market share. And customers in the $599-799 space can't *afford* to migrate their entire life to Apple's ecosystem.
Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦Mar 22
@graydon @cstross similarly, customers aren't nearly as stupid as Apple thinks they are or treats them as. They can read the spec sheet and understand that $599 HP might not be great, but it still gives more cores, double the RAM, double the storage, and lets the kid play Forkknife. And the salespeople will point that out too. So the only people buying it are Apple customers going cheaper than their Macbook.
Oops, margins go poof.
Show threadGareth 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿Mar 22

@rootwyrm @graydon @cstross
Don’t forget, it’s 100 dollarpounds cheaper for education, and it’s more repairable. I think Apple are banking on schools replacing fleets of crappy Chromebooks with these.

Can you honestly say that after 3 years of MacOS you’d consider switching to Windows, if you don’t play a lot of games or need certain Windows-only applications?

I’ve been a Windows user all my life and an IT professional for half of it (3.11 to date) and I can honestly say that if it wasn’t required at work, I would be happy never using Windows again. I certainly don’t have it on any personal devices.

My £800 16GB RAM HP work machine is dogshit slow just to get to the desktop and load OneDrive. We’re talking minutes. It’s less than 40 seconds on my Air.

If my mother breaks her (hand-me-down) M1 Air, she’d be more than happy with a Neo.

Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦Mar 22
@gareth @graydon @cstross yeah, which is the same shit they tried before that didn't work and nearly bankrupted the company. Twice.
And schools don't have $499-699 per student laptop. They're lucky to have any money at all. Plus you'd have to migrate all the Windows-based Windows-centric education software both front-end and back-end (e.g. teachers) which is a HUGE expense and requires THOSE vendors to cooperate (good luck, lol!)
Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦
@gareth @graydon @cstross the repairability is also a very dumb move because we already know that low margin/loss leader devices DEPEND on 1) high margin service add-ons and lots of them (OR) loading them up with paid shitware 2) REFRESHING UNITS FREQUENTLY. Those cheap laptops are DESIGNED to break because they depend on selling a new one every 12-24 months. It's why you quickly go from $700-1500 to $2.7k+. Making a long-life laptop profitable means that laptop has to be fairly expensive.
Mar 22 at 3:39pmWeb
Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦Mar 22
@gareth @graydon @cstross IBM ThinkPads are the perfect example. Outside of the high-end models, they targeted a roughly 3.5 year design life with fairly high fault rates. Because these were machines sold to corporations with a service contract (where the margin lived) that got refreshed on a schedule (~3 years average.) An X60 was an expense, not an investment like a T60p.