Comment by lateforwork
9 hours ago
This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts.
Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.
The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt...
I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.
I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).
So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).
Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.
Now, if only Asahi was more complete.
I am a longtime Windows user and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that the M4 I am forced to use for work runs the Rust compiler a good bit faster than the big fancy gaming PC I just got with a 9800X3D.
Rust literally compiles ~4x faster on WSL than on the Windows command line, on the same hardware, so try that and see. Also set up the mold or wild linker as well as sccache, although sccache is OS agnostic so you can use it on macOS too. Make sure your code is on the WSL side not on /mnt/c which is the Windows side though, that will kill compilation speed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/CsEy9bLivK
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I'd wager that's more likely due to Windows than the hardware. Like sure the hardware does play a part in that but its not the whole story or even most of it.
My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.
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Try adding your working directory to the exclusions for windows defender, or creating a Dev Drive instead in settings (will create a separate partition, or VHD using ReFS and exclude it from Windows defender). Should give it a bit of a boost.
Apple buries this info but the memory bandwidth on the M series is very high. Doubly and triply so for the Pro & Max variants which are insanely high.
Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.
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That's most likely because windows indexes and scans files rustc produces. My linux machines demolish my iMac in rust compilation.
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You’re running Windows unironically?
This is how opinions differ. IMO plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible, MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).
The metal is more "luxury", though.
> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot
This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon
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YOU GUYS IT HAS A HEADPHONE JACK
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> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).
My body is the heatsink
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> plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible
Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.
I'd go further and suggest that metal is a lousy substance for laptop enclosures.
Plastic is better if done right. I do not know a single manufacturer today which does plastic right.
> I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.
One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.
~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal
Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.
The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.
The same is also true within the Macbook line. The 14" Pro is smaller and nearly 2lbs lighter than the first 13" unibodies. I have my 2009 college laptop on a shelf as a memento and it feels pretty chunky. This hasn't changed much in the M-series though, and the M5 is slightly heavier than the M1.
Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.
My Sony Vaio Z from 2009 or 2010 looks at your Dell in contempt: 13.1" FullHD screen at 314mm x 210mm (we'll pretend the thickness does not matter ;)) and 1.36kg. Vaio TT was even smaller footprint.
But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.
What about something like [1].
1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/
One thing Apple seems to do very well compared to other vendors is make all their hardware available in all markets on release. Companies like Dell, Asus, Lenovo, they have a confusingly large array of models, and they never release the best ones worldwide, or it takes so long to get to New Zealand that I already gave up and bought an Apple computer instead.
I might be a dinosaur but I just can't stand laptops that have touch screen...
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Did you check what Framework offers?
> (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).
Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.
Which Thinkpad do you have? Lenovo have introduced some lines with the name but diminished quality.
For a someone looking to switch from a M-series MacBook to a Thinkpad, which one would you recommend? Preferably not of a diminished quality, so I can daily-drive Ubuntu without missing Apple.
The HP Zbook G1A is what you wanted. It's Strix Halo with up to 128GB of unified RAM and built like a MBP.
> ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop
Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.
I have so many questions.
- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?
- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?
- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?
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The best laptop that I ever had was an Thinkpad T530 back in ~2012 - that chunky brick felt like it was made from recycled soviet tanks.
Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.
Thinkpad build quality depends heavily on the model. The flagship T-series are still tough as nails, generally speaking
They built a reputation on that and silently replaced the plastic with crap abs. Thinkpads have been garbage since 2012. Not specs wise but build quality wise. Spec wise it’s always been a beefy machine.
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ASUS ROG G14 is as close as you're going to get on the x86 side of things or that new chonk of a surface with the Ryzen 395+ and 128gb of ram. both are like $2500+
I have the chonk. 10/10 would chonk again. I miss the 12" MacBook form factor for an email/web/dumb terminal machine, though. Would love something like that with great Linux support. Bonus points for cellular.
What are your use-cases for 128gb of RAM? I find it hard to imagine what you could be doing with that, so it must be interesting :)
Unclear for a laptop, but for a workstation 1tb+ is what you want for any sort data science stuff.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:
- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.
- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.
- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.
Unreal + blender + ide.
Fusion + blender + slicers.
Virt machines / docker + dev env
iOS Android web development
16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro
Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex
My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use
My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.
My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping
I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.
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most people who are into graphics processing e.g video-games, 3d for films/entertainment industry etc need these "PRO-workstation" machines, or doing fluid mechanics
if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient
Running FatLTO on Chrome.
You do have 13" options, though 14" is much wider. If I was going for 13" workstation, I'd go for Asus ProArt PX13 with Ryzen AI Max 395 (if I got that right, there might be a plus somewhere) and 128GiB of RAM. They've got ROG Flow X13 with older hardware or Z13 with same hw as above, but that's a tablet computer instead.
At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.
Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).
> This is a major challenge to Microsoft.
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.
It definitely feels that way. Microsoft has made it clear they don't care about the consumer market anymore. Xbox is dying or already dead, they've done nothing with the game studios they acquired, Windows laptop OEMs still ship plastic 1080p crap targeted at general office workers.
They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.
And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.
Indeed they haven't, Microsoft is only one of the biggest publishers in the world, and regardless of XBox the console, Microsoft Games Studios is doing great.
Probably too late now but maybe they should have spun XBox and the game studios into a separate company.
>That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable
That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.
You must be lucky. They have been well-documented. [1]
The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000098
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Microsoft's build quality is largely equivalent, but the press has already noticed that the value proposition at Microsoft is now lacking.
> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961
It really isn’t. The track pad on surface is terrible compared to Mac. The surface has some weird edges and other spots to get caught on. I’ve seen a few with serious damage from typical daily use. The surface I have is barely hanging together, the charger is extremely finicky and will stop charging randomly. It takes effort to get the charger to “sit” in the slot and make contact.
That said, my surface is pretty old so maybe some of these design flaws have been fixed.
But from my experience, the build quality of the MacBook is in a different league than the surface.
IMO "build quality" is not the right term here. At least to me, "build quality" refers to how evenly examples are made and how close the real world examples adheres to manufacturing blueprints.
If finishes and gaps are tight, all around bodies and across examples, the build quality is GOOD. If every units looked slightly different and some were outright broken straight out of the box, then the build quality is BAD. Even if they were worthy of included in the MoMA collection.
Both Microsoft and Apple(or their paid Chinese outsources) are top notch. Every units looks the same and flats on the bodies are really flat. Industrial design and usability, like sharp corners and fugly aesthetics, are different issues entirely.
telling that this is flagged 1 minute into submission.
Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).
For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).
So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.
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I can't think of another company on the PC side whose consumer line of hardware's build quality hasn't declined to the level of junk.
You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.
The camera on the Surface is nowhere near as good as on my M1 Macbook Air, either. That seems to be a weird blind spot on laptops in general, it's very obviously an afterthought on my personal Dell XPS as well.
> serious damage from typical daily use
Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...
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You get free AI slop and mass-surveillance advertisements in your Start menu. Who would not like that!
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Your Mac "fanboy" nonsense is tiring. The Surface 7 Laptop is an excellent machine, built well, and even gets a good iFixit rating (4 screws and you can replace the battery and M.2)
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This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.
I am in education and speak to others at the (US) national level on a near-daily basis. This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.
- Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit.
- The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.
- For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks. Yes, this is a numbers game. The goal is every student has a device.
- Schools using Chromebooks to log in. If you want reliable Google logins on macOS, you have an additional big spend up front, along with per-seat licensing costs.
- This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.
I saw this today: https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1rk3t...
If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions
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> This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.
Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.
I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.
Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.
Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.
It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".
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Even so I imagine your average person needing something for education would consider both. The Neo may cost more but from my past experience of Apple stuff they will likely be better made.
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If the school is wealthy enough to provide free laptops, then you're right they're going to go for the cheapest option. But if the school expects the parents to provide laptops, then the parents are more likely to choose this.
So what segment does it target in your opinion? The "surface" market is minuscule and compared to the edu market irrelevant, the "vendor lock in" angle with the google logins can easily change over night as it did with microsoft.
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Not having to make a Google login would be a big benefit to me. Google is getting their data early
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somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).
How long do those chrome books last though?
I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.
Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.
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> This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.
I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.
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Not every school is cash limited. Many schools have lots of money to invest in technology.
Some schools will gladly pay more.
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Not to disagree too much with your assessment, one point stands out:
> The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.
We don't actually know this. It does at the level individual student purchasing themselves, but I'd imagine there is a substantial bulk discount for educational establishments. That is not a new trend for Apple, it dates back to the Apple II.
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The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!
My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.
Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.
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The build quality of a $300 Chromebook is laughable.
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This is not competing against Chromebooks, which have very little reach outside of institutions. The Macbook Neo will likely have very widespread appeal for anyone looking for what used to be a netbook.
I'm not sure that's true given that Chromebooks can be had for one third the price.
It could compete well in both. Looks like Apple has a product that competes with Chromebooks on price and competes with Surface on performance at the same time. At least close enough on both counts to create headaches for anyone trying to sell either.
At this point the Macbook Neo is in competition with Chromebooks, Microsoft and the third party market for older Macbook Airs with M1s
It needs a touch screen for elementary schools kids. Fine for older kids.
We started using computers with keyboards in class in grade 2-3.
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wow. are elementary school kids using chromebooks? my kids is in pre-K this year. i dont know about the elementary school chromebook thing.
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It might be aimed at Chromebooks, but it’s also a low-end Surface killer.
The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.
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I think the 2 laptops you mentioned are targeting different markets.
The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)
The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.
8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps
At this point I think few people really will care about that spec difference.
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
> The accumulated brand trust of Apple
This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).
You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.
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In laptop keyboards, UI refactorings, or Siri?
Where is exactly the premium quality?
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MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.
I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.
Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.
I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine
Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.
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Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.
Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.
If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
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I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...
> Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM.
They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"
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Is it hard for you to imagine that people who'll buy the Neo don't care about specs at all?
I mean, look at the colors!
The surface laptop is a competitor to the MacBook Air, the cheaper Surface Laptop Go was the low cost attempt from MS.
Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.
"good laptops" yes. But I haven't seen a "great" one in a very long time. The Windows market is asleep at the wheel and a copilot button is not going to resuscitate it.
I think the Surface is as close to great as you can get. I'm not saying that I know the whole market of laptops, you probably know better. But the Surface is pretty good, which is weird because it seems like Microsoft isn't really focusing on it or even backing away from it.
I agree with the parent, that Macbooks are way ahead in terms of usability, polish and charm for a laptop. And the performance is outright stellar.
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.
I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.
The Surface is garbage. My last work-issued one caught fire.
I've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.
I think the problem is that Microsoft's hardware quality is super inconsistent. We had a ton of employees using Surface laptops and tablets at my previous company, particularly sales and support. The company stopped buying them after a few years because the first year failure rate was almost 15%. However, the folks that had the good ones often kept them for 5 years or more.
woah, how did it catch on fire? I want to hear this.
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I think you're undervaluing touchscreen capability, which even the cheapest laptops offer now. Kids and non-tech folks have come to expect it by default.
Now that Apple is attempting to compete in this space, they'll have to pitch these folks on what macOS without touch capability offers over Windows with touch capability.
Maybe it will still sell well enough, maybe people aren't that stuck on touchscreens.
The ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
the surface laptop has an excellent screen (2880x1920 i believe), and the macbook neo is lower resolution than apple's made in years, however.
Not true.
13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)
15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)
See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)
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The Neo’s display is 219 pixels per inch, which is virtually the same as the Air’s 224 ppi.
What about color quality? I've used high resolution laptops with shitty washed out colors, but one thing I've always appreciated about Apple's displays is their vibrance.
too late to edit: i was thinking surface pro (the detachable keyboard) not surface laptop with attached keyboard and weirdly low res screens, compared to the surface pro series.
I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad
Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves
> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts
200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.
Not if you move windows between screens with different scaling, or launch apps that don't support the scaling stuff out of the box, or launch apps via X11 forwarding in WSL.
All of this works much worse on macOS: Scaling sucks, as it's integer-upscaled rendering + fractional downscaling in a shader. Windows can't span screens either.
On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.
This is really well put.
It's interesting, for years I have been trying to make my iPad a nice, slim laptop I could bring with me everywhere for lighter/coding specific tasks. I've gone through several keyboards trying to make this work. It never has.
Now with this laptop, I can do exactly this, while being cheaper than what I've been attempting to do with an iPad.
I have the Lenovo X1 and I'm very happy with it, though obviously that's in a pretty different price category than the Yoga, Surface, or Macbook Neo.
On the other hand, more money doesn't always mean better computer. I had a Dell XPS 9570 at a previous gig that had a lot of issues: coil whine, bad camera placement, terrible thermals, etc.
Not just Microsoft. Dell and HP must be having emergency meetings right about now...
Their challenge is, how do we halve the price and yet deliver twice the quality? I think they are going to realize they can't. Some of them will leave the market.
Dell has 50% more market share than Apple and HP 2x Apple's market share in the PC space. I doubt they'll be exiting the market because Apple launched a cheap laptop with 8gb of ram and using USB 2.0 ports. Most corporations are still tied to Windows apps and the MS ecosystem in general.
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I'll just chime in to say that not everyone cares about the features you mentioned that much. Keyboard, touchpad, looks are the last things I think about when comparing laptops. Not to lessen your preferences, just to point out that there's a variety of viewpoints.
To make a different point, a regular consumer does not care about tech specs. They want a laptop that can browse the web, stream Netflix, and maybe open a Word doc. They will be more sensitive to hardware problems in my opinion. A janky touchpad is going to be annoying no matter what computer task you're doing. A wobbly keyboard will be the same. To me an average consumer is more interested in the "feel" of the computer rather than what it can do.
What features do matter to you?
Last time I was shopping for a laptop, I needed battery life, low glare, high screen brightness, rugedness was a plus. Cheapness is a good proxy for rugedness. Being able to upgrade/repair components is generally something I value highly too. Something that's made to be maintained, meaning opened, disassembled (and reassembled!), feels good to me.
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Sometimes I wish I could just use any laptop and Remote Desktop into my gaming rig which is awesome. Then I can have whatever form factor laptop I want, but the problem is I think the latency still sucks (maybe not?) on stuff like Parsec even locally.
The latency is acceptable. I host a remote gaming rig accessed through Parsec, the extra encoding/decoding latency is minimal. Distance has the largest effect, I found that over roughly 1,000 km my total latency is about 30 ms, perfectly playable for all but the most competitive FPS.
Nah locally is fine, if you have a good 6ghz coverage, but that means a hotspot in every second room
I don’t have WiFi 6E, just 6 (5ghz). If the input latency is imperceptible for productivity work, and the resolution matches my laptop resolution without pixelation, then why the heck am I not streaming my powerhouse main pc?
Weekend project.
> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts
I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only nerds use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.
I think macOS applications feel like they have mostly updated to use the native resolution, so arbitrary scaling works great now. My comparative experience with a new Windows laptop is how I remember macOS felt when they first made high density screens many years ago: lots of render bugs all over, and every program has to be re-opened when I plug in an external screen to be usable at the new resolution
Most macOS applications now support rendering at 1x and 2x. And arbitrary scaling is done by the OS not by apps.
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I agree. I read this and immediately thought to myself: The gloves are off.
The price point, the capability, the only thing stopping Apple at this point is the MDM stuff integrating it with other identity providers but its ahead of where it used to be.
The MDM stuff is there now, and platform SSO works pretty well, at least with Entra and Okta (the only two I have experience with). Both JamF and InTune support it, I'm sure all the other MDMs do as well.
The only time macs can be a bit of a headache is if you are still using all on-prem AD & group policy and trying to force them into that environment via joining the mac to AD.
Microsoft is forcing everyone onto Azure AD or whatever so that should fix that.
Last time I dealt with Apple MDM was integrating it with on-prem AD and it was a pain. I know it’s better now because last few “gigs” have used it and it’s been pretty seamless with Microsoft Authenticator for Teams. (Ugh!)
The Surface has 16GB of RAM vs 8GB on the Neo (Windows definitely eats RAM though so maybe that's par).
> I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible.
Can we talk about laptops that you can’t carry by the edge where your palm rests because it flexes the frame and registers it as a mouse down event …
> The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones.
Possibly, but I would wait for reviews to make that call. The hardware is slower than other MacBooks; memory may be slower, too, and other hardware may be slightly worse in quality.
“hardware is slower” single core is significantly faster than the M2 Ultra chip. And when you're browsing the web, single core is all that matters.
Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.
For a casual computer at home, I'd get one. Everything I do is practically web based anyway.
PC to me is always best as a itx minitower form factor.
That Surface has 16GB RAM though.
> Your new MacBook Neo. Just the way you want it[sic]. 13-inch MacBook Neo in Indigo A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine Apple Intelligence Footnote ※
8 GB unified memory is brand-new e-waste today. macOS 26 makes it even worse.
> 8 GB unified memory is brand-new e-waste today. macOS 26 makes it even worse.
One reason Apple can get away with 8 GB of RAM is their SoC does realtime compression of data in RAM and they use high bandwidth memory; the A19 Pro RAM bandwidth is 60 GB/s. This enables them to treat the SSD like an L3 cache.
It's nearly 5 years since the M1 was released; I suspect Apple has gotten really good with their RAM > compression > SSD system since then.
I'm going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here until proven otherwise. I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience as it would cause a lot of reputational harm.
> I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience
I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!
I don't know what apps you run, but I'm typing this from an M2 Mac with 8 GB, running Tahoe. Performance is fine. It's always been fine.
The Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise
It has an unusual keyboard. Function should come before form [1]. This unconventional design makes it harder for touch typists to locate keys by feel.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function
Doesn't the surface have a touch screen?
I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.
In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.
I have a Yoga, I use the stylus more than I type.
Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.
100%
All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.
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I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen. The only time I touch the screen is when I take a screenshot using the Snipping Tool and want to circle something.
So you do use it.
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> which means you have subtle display artifacts.
No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5
At 150% scaling, one logical pixel maps to 1.5 physical pixels. When a 1px grid line is drawn, the renderer cannot light exactly 1.5 pixels, so it distributes the color across adjacent pixels using anti-aliasing. Depending on where the line falls relative to device-pixel boundaries, one pixel may be fully colored and the next partially colored, or vice versa. This shifts the perceived center of the line slightly. In a repeating grid, these fractional shifts accumulate, making the gaps between lines appear uneven or "vibrating."
Chromium often avoids this by rendering 1px borders as hairlines that snap to a single device pixel, even when a CSS pixel corresponds to 1.5 device pixels at 150% scaling. This keeps lines crisp, but it also means the border remains about one device pixel thick, making it appear slightly thinner relative to the surrounding content.
For some people such artifacts are not noticeable for others they are.
Here are some links that explain the issue:
https://patrickbrosset.com/articles/2024-06-21-invasion-of-t...
https://flutterawesome.com/sharp-looking-flutter-application...
https://tanalin.com/en/articles/integer-scaling/
>Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world
Thinkpads.
Or in general any business laptop, like HP Elitebook or Dell Presicion.
But they are not cheap at all haha
If you want performace get a desktop!
> If you want performace get a desktop!
Or a MacBook, which is part OP's point. Apple is delivering quality at price points that Windows OEMs aren't (which is sort of the opposite of the phone world).
8gb of ram is not performance.
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A decked out Mac mini is actually a beast for its size
Thinkpads are tanks, but most of the time you’d be perfectly well served by a BMW series 3.
Ts-series are nice and slim. X1 too.
Only P-series are workstations.
I meant for build quality.
The experience I have had with Thinkpads, both current-gen and old during my childhood, did not warm me up to the line. They are not particularly better in feel, thermals and screen quality against its cheaper alternatives including those from Lenovo themselves. The only good thing was its keyboard, but then most Lenovo laptops in general have good keyboards. Its popular acclaim is weird to me.
Not really, because Surface isn't what most folks buying PCs get.
And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.
Surface Laptop is 1099€ vs 699€ for the Macbook Neo in Germany.
Macbook Neo is also 219ppi vs Surface Laptop at 178ppi. We’ll see about performance, but i’d expect the macbook to be on par or better.
Except most Germans don't buy Surface Laptops, and there are much cheaper options with 8 GB, naturally they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.
It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.
And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.
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MSFT up 1.84% today..
all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.
I don't know why the downvotes, maybe someone can chime in if there is more to surface laptop? because i am using one laptop, and much prefer to use windows on M4 macbook pro instead.
I’m not sure that many people want Windows badly enough they would get an Apple device and remove the original OS so they could run Windows.
From my personal experience, Widows users in general don’t mind Windows, but, definitely, nobody I have ever met finds it more desirable than macOS.
The games industry remains a hotbed of people that vehemently hate Apple, even those that have never touched a Mac.
Part of it historically was a sort of Visual Studio induced Stockholm Syndrome, where for a long time if you were doing C++ work that was the only sane way to go.
There are some companies that even filter potential employees on this basis.
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Don't have to remove anything. This used to be possible on Macs with bootcamp as they called it.
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Oh man I'd pay premium for a sleek device like this that CAN'T run Windows or Mac OS. Just a mere thought of being able to run pure Linux on that sweet sweet apple silicon with full driver support makes my juices flowing.
FYI: Apple added support for Linux containers to macOS Tahoe [1].
[1]: https://github.com/apple/container
There will never be an Apple Silicon device without the ability to run an Apple OS.
Just run MacOS.
wine already runs on Mac so really they would just need something like dxvk to have a package similar to proton
To be honest if Apple wanted to they could work with valve to make gaming on Mac a reality
To some degree it should already be possible with wine + dxvk + moltenvk
I believe you’re being downvoted because your logic is from 20+ years ago when Windows compatibility was important.
Also the era when companies were trying to “kill” each other’s devices is no longer a thing.
They all get the reality it’s a multi device world and they need to work within it.
I assume you’re downvoted because Microsoft has to want that.
Who cares about Windows anymore?
Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices
Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases
Google Docs might handle 50% of people who use Office, but I doubt if it handles 25% of Office use cases. Few use every feature of Office but someone uses every feature of Office and all those power user cases that are different can’t be handled by Google Docs. Or even Web Office.
many people do. i work for Microsoft and don't have option to use mac os
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