Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
> If you're not willing to pay a 20% premium for upgradability/fixability, then you don't _really_ want it. And that's fine!
$799 versus $499 is a 60% premium.
The best case numbers are buying used RAM and SSD for the Framework like Jeff did in the article ($749 total, if you can find the RAM at those prices) and comparing against the non-EDU MacBook Neo at $599. That's still a 25% premium.
Now pretend you can't get the student discount and actually want the extended warranty/applecare and compare the final result.
Now pretend you want to bump up to 16gb of ram so you can run a VM.
> Now pretend you can't get the student discount
Okay it's $599 vs $799 now. 33% premium.
> and actually want the extended warranty/applecare
The Framework warranty is only 1 year, same as the MacBook Neo.
If you add AppleCare+ to the MacBook Neo you could get a 3-year warranty laptop for $739 that performs better than the $799 Framework 12
> Now pretend you want to bump up to 16gb of ram so you can run a VM.
I don't think the students shopping for a MacBook Neo are going to be heavy VM users on their little laptop, but if I do this on their website the price bumps to $1049
$1049 is within $50 of a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and much better CPU, display, build quality, and battery life.
So I still don't see the value, sorry.
But bumping to 16gb ram means buying new hardware, moving over your profile/configuration and then trying to sell your old hardware, losing money on the trade... vs just upgrading the ram.
I'm not saying don't buy a Neo... I'm just saying there are objective reasons why you might not want to... for me, it's that I would prefer to run a Linux distro on whatever I buy. I might just go for a Lenovo IdeaPad and save a little over the Framework and the Neo at that point... they aren't the only two options on the market.