Comment by wlesieutre
16 hours ago
> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port.
You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around
It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
Both 10Gb/s and 8GB RAM limit come from iPhone 16 Pro chip limitations used in Neo. Next year's should have 12GB of RAM.
If they can maintain the same price tag for A19 based Macbook Neo with 12GB of RAM, I genuinely do not know how other companies can compete.
I’m waiting for the first A chip designed after the Neo decision - it’ll be interesting to see what they do knowing it’ll end up in a laptop. The obvious thing is “fixing” the USB problem.
They compete by not being a Mac.
It’s a bizarre take.
It’s not functionally useless, it supports a mouse, keyboard, printer or even an iPhone (non pro) perfectly fine at full speed. It also probably has enough speed for the average cheap terrible quality USB drive that the buyer of a $600 PC might have.
This is a Silicon Valley tech geek take not a real world one.
The assortment of cheap USB sticks I have do not surpass 400mbit/sec. Not even the ones labeled USB3.0 or High Speed.
That is good enough speed for plenty of use cases.
"genuinely" is an AI tell now as well as doing things in physical world that don't make sense like walking to the car wash to wash your car if it's close, or maybe not using USB ports in the way they were designed...
Yeah, but that USB 3 port has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It 's also the only video out port making decent dongles a necessity. On a $600 PC it's not uncommon to have USB A (at 3.0 speeds), HDMI in addition to USB C and maybe even Ethernet.
>making decent dongles a necessity
I used a macbook air all throughout school, I never once owned a dongle or even plugged the thing in to an external monitor. My requirements were something that could run photoshop/illustrator and chrome. If I ever transfered something over USB it was a 300kb docx file or something else that would have copied instantly at 2.0 speeds.
I think there's a huge problem of tech enthusiasts projecting their own requirements on to a device that is designed for a very different person, and then declaring it unfit for use. Apple prioritized things that actually matter to students like battery life, lightness, price, and hinges that don't snap after the first year. Rather than tons of super fast IO and 32gb ram.
I went to school too. Sometimes at school we would do presentations using a projector connected by HDMI, maybe you could get away with the room computer but that only had USB A ports being some ancient desktop. Sometimes we did group projects and rather than huddle around one tiny 13" or 15" laptop screen we used one of the big ass TVs in the rentable group study rooms.
It's not tons of super fast IO. It's pretty basic IO.
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This cheap laptop is not for people with external displays. Almost everyone buying this would have no desire for an external display, they wouldn’t even feel this as a limitation.
If you want a separate display or super fast data transfers, more usb ports or more than 8MB of RAM buy one of the more expensive laptops.
> On a $600 PC
Yes, but it is uncommon for a $600 PC to have a beautiful screen, great trackpad, metal case, and top notch build quality. Also, the neo performs really really well.
A multi-port USB-C hub is about ten dollars on Amazon. If a Neo owner really needs additional ports they're a few bucks. For a vast majority of Neo owners the lack of ports is a non-issue and for the others that occasionally need the extra ports they're cheap.
I doubt there's many Neo buyers that really needed multiple Thunderbolt ports but decided to pick up the $600 entry level machine instead.
Sometimes on HN while this is technically correct I wonder if Mac users will truly notice. This is probably a limitation of the A19 chip. Many people just see the price tag and buy.
Yep. For me it was a perfect gift to replace moms 10+ year old Intel based MacBook Air.
USB 2.0 speeds are still fine for 99% of my USB transfer needs.
I agree that for the actual target market, 10Gb/s is probably not the thing that will make the machine feel limited
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The computer pops up a warning if you plug a fast device into the slow port, which is a lot more informative for the average user than a tiny label that most users wouldn’t even read.
Labels would be nice, I guess, but their absence is hardly a dealbreaker.
Windows has been showing popup USB speed warnings since at least Windows XP.... so 25 years?
Let's not use this cope to mislead anyone into thinking this is a unique Mac innovation (it isn't) that trumps this abomination of human factors (it doesn't).
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You get a message on screen that you should be using the other port.
But yes, labeling should have been better. One of the USPs of MacBooks is that all USB ports are the same. Unlike other computers where you have to look where you are plugging it in. The Neo breaks that tradition.
That was definitely not the case on one of the macbooks I had, which wouldn't charge properly on the right side if recall. Maybe one of the last Intel macbook pros?
Do you think those same users know the difference between usb3, usb4, and thunderbolt (or even that all three exist)? More over, do you think they know how to tell cables apart for the three?
$150 netbooks solved this by labeling the ports "SS" or using blue USB-A inserts, but those are matters inferior PC users have to deal with.
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Apple should show users an alert when they plug a USB-3 device into the USB-2 port because they are visually identical
Oh wait https://i.imgur.com/7HWgxZ1.png
I don't know the details of Apple's silicon designs, but I assume the USB port bandwidth is because this is using the chip from iPhone 16 Pro, a phone which of course had a single USB-3 port. They've done what they can with it to hit the price point.
The alternative was to not include a second USB port for charging, in which case people would be bitching about it not being able to use peripherals while charging like the last time they made a single port laptop.
This is why standardising in USB c the connector was a mistake.