Comment by zemvpferreira
9 hours ago
A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
> Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
In September I picked up a laptop for $575.
Its specs are 15.6" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores, 16 threads) CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, Radeon 680M iGPU that can allocate 8 GB of GPU memory, 1 TB SSD with a backlight keyboard. Weighs about 3.5 pounds and has (5) USB ports plus HDMI port. It comes with a 2 year warranty as well.
Running Arch Linux on it with niri and it's really nice for what it is.
There are decent laptops out there at affordable prices.
Depends what you consider luxury feeling. It's so stripped down.
Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:
TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.
Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.
You are comparing it to other Apple laptops but you should be comparing with its competition at a $600 price point. The aluminum enclosure, touchpad, battery life, display, and performance are all best in class (or near enough) at this price point.
It is still miles ahead of plastic garbage other vendors sell.
People miss that point. An entry level Windows laptop is an upper and complete garbage. You get the ick within seconds of using it. This thing will sell like crazy. No longer is Apple an expensive brand!
It's $600, unless you're a school.
Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.
I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).
In the United States (population of 340 million):
* 86 million (27%) are under 21 and most of those are students. * Those people have parents, assume 2 parents per 2 children = 86 million parents (27%)
That means 55% of the US population is eligible for the cheaper rate before you even account for people getting secondary degrees, educators, and yes - the schools themselves.
Or a student, or a family member of a student.
Also these days Apple actually allows sales and discounts at retailers. I bet this will be on sale for $499 at Amazon or BestBuy before the end of the year.
Or a student, or a teacher. Individuals get edu pricing too...
EDIT: With education discount, in Canada, it's good price: $679 for base, $849 for Touch ID + 512 SSD.
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$799 in Canada for the base model & $999 for the one with touchID & 512 GB ssd.
Looks like both models only come with 8gb ram.
You can't kill Chromebook with hardware. Apple needs software if they want more share of that market.
What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.
https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/workspace-for-education/e...
this, basically
You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.
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Google account login
That's exactly why they will kill Chromebook. Better software ecosystem.
That's great if they intend to, but it would be more convincing if there was any sign of them working on the software at all.
Can you say more about what software? (I'm sure the Neo runs Chrome perfectly fine)
https://chromeos.google/products/device-management/
Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.
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