Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
The first thing I do with any new system is immediately wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows/Linux, so bundled shovelware is meaningless to me, and presumably many others.
(Of course it would be even better if they just came with a totally stock install already, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me)
Windows license stored inside BIOS. When you install fresh Windows, it'll get activated automatically.
What's more troublesome is that some laptops require drivers and customizations, so you need to tinker with your fresh Windows by installing carefully selected subset of drivers, so your hardware works and at the same time you don't install the same shovelware. The driver situation for Windows is truly dire. There are drivers from laptop manufacturer (e.g. Lenovo). There are drivers from part manufacturer (e.g. Nvidia). There are drivers that Windows was bundled with. There are drivers that Windows will download automatically and install as part of Windows Update. It's a huge mess and I don't think anybody knows how to navigate that. So there's no reliable recipe to create "stable" Windows from the scratch.
> When you install fresh Windows, it'll get activated automatically.
Same happens with some crapware provided by vendor. You can wipe drive all you want, but ASUS motherboard will ask Windows to automatically install "essential drivers", and to be specific - "Armoury Crate".
You can (partially) blame Microsoft for that. I still don't understand why it's seemingly OK for device manufacturers to distribute such crapware through Windows update. New keyboard? Oops, spyware. Printer on your LAN? Here, let me install these 16 utilities for you. Just give me a driver without any GUI tools. Or at the very least prompt me before installation.
My daily driver is a very basic Linux experience. From my perspective, both PCs and Apple computers come with bundled software that I don’t want. It’s hardly as awful as the experience
you describe but, even so, with Apple it’s the OS so it’s even harder to drop.
I feel quite self conscious saying this. It feels like whataboutism, as well as being potentially contrarian — 100% of my colleagues use and love macOS — but I fell in love with being able to read and edit the source code for my whole computer, and I don’t ever want to relinquish that freedom.
> It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?
macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore. The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
> You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.
Or you could spend $200 more (or $100 more with edu pricing) and get a MacBook Neo which has significantly higher build quality, a much better screen, a great trackpad, and amazing performance.
Seeing how college students throw laptops in backpacks, that extra $100 (edu pricing) could very easily save them money in the long run.
> There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory
Every once in a while I go looking for a Chromebook-level laptop for some extra purpose and I am never impressed by anything. The current selection is all ancient processors, bad screens, creaky build quality. If you must stick to a strict budget then these can work, but I wouldn't call them good.
First impressions can be a very poor judge of build quality. If you pick up a mil-spec laptop it'll feel a lot more like the $200 Chromebook. Yet it'll survive endurance tests that neither the Chromebook nor the Macbook will.
That 'build quality' is a more complicated thing than many Apple fans believe. My good ol' Thinkpad is a bit creaky and frankly was so from the day 1, also it survived years of travels, lots of risky falls, and sticky spills. So I suppose its build quality is high. Also I upgraded its hardware pretty significantly twice. Somehow 'build quality' in Mac-land implies it's a taboo.
>If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?
Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by without.
>macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.
Maybe because computing devices overall are just so good. The gains are to be had in services that are part of the Apple ecosystem, not the OS alone (for the most part).
>The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
In the 2000s, Apple has not cared about competing at Best Buy. That isn't their customer. If anything though, the Neo is more of a foray into that wider market. Anyone with kids lugging home a crappy school-issued Chromebook though took one look at this device and knew this is a device Apple can position into schools -- a market they once dominated and lost. There are lots of markets where this will be a great device, where the customer wants a Mac and not "just" an iPad. In those cases, it isn't the end consumer buying this device, it's an IT manager - who can likely be tempted by that Mac ecosystem and a better grade of device relative to competition.
> Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust.
In some countries Apple is (or was) a status symbol of luxury, but I haven't observed that much in the United States. Macs and iPhones are both mainstream and affordable. AirPods can be bought for $100 on sale. These are commodity items now, not symbols of luxury.
Now, most people go to Apple because they see it as a premium option, not a status symbol or luxury. If you get AirPods or an iPhone you know what you're getting. If you buy those $50 wireless earbuds on Amazon your expectations are lower.
For me, the one feature that sells having an iphone and a Mac laptop to me is copy and paste between the two devices. I spend way more time on my phone than I should, but being able to go from my phone to my laptop and back is what has me in Apple's ecosystem (for now). MacOS and iOS feel like they are buggier than they used to be, (don't get me started on 26) but framing it purely as a luxury and brand identity thing, without looking at usability details like battery life is an oversimplification.
That's interesting because I have the opposite experience. An Android phone or Lenovo laptop I can bring to the street shop and get a 50-200usd repair that would cost upwards of 600 at Apple or just making me get a new device.
I've found that many repair shops acknowledge the existence of two smartphone brands: Apple and Samsung. Bring anything else in and the most you get is a puzzled look.
Apple has the distinction of the iPhone being what everybody thinks of when they hear the word "smartphone". Everybody is familiar with it. That little xylophone jingle that serves as the iPhone's default ringtone plays in every detective show my wife watches on streaming, and everybody knows instantly what it means. That sort of ubiquity has network effects that you're not going to get with a Motorola, Sony Xperia, or even a Pixel. I've had to turn to Aliexpress to score a decent protective cover for my Pixel.
Just the guarantee of being able to walk into a physical location and talk to a real person and have their full attention for a while when something goes wrong is worth all the other bullshit.
You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.
Again, the trackpad will suck and the screen will be a dim, binned display panel, etc. If that works for you, fine, but that's not the conversation. The conversation everyone else is having is that your plastic $400 laptop with the bargain-bin components isn't the equivalent of $MACBOOK, no matter what the spec sheet says.
I have a relatively recent expensive gaming laptop from Asus for the occasional LAN party with friends. I hate it and it’s a huge piece of shit. Windows 11 is necessary for anti-cheat shenanigans. Apple could change the Mac OS wallpaper to a permanent photo of a turd and it would still be better than Windows 11. Also the trackpad and keyboard suck.
FYI, the very recently released Marathon with the BattleEye rootkit works fine on a maximally trimmed down Windows 10 LTSC, which is what I'm running on my PC (personal console).
Windows 10 LTSC is not available outside of volume licencing.
That you pirate an OS they refuse to sell to you to get a better experience is your choice, but it's unrealistic to suggest that it's a solution for the average person.
I don't rave about macOS any more because I've been here for decades and, barring the occasional fight with Windows when I want to play something, I've largely forgotten how awful all the other options are[1].
I've gone "OS blind", I guess, and now macOS, for me, is the "bare minimum of competence" - hence I won't rave about it (but I absolutely will moan about the stupid things it does[2].)
[1] I spent decades using various Unix GUIs (on Suns, SGIs, Linux, OpenBSD for a while); I have absolutely zero desire to explore them again.
[2] My current favourite is being able to notice when it's about to flip into "red battery, plug me in" mode because, for whatever godforsaken reason, the load average will rocket up into the 400s and everything turns to sludge for a couple of minutes. Oh how I laugh every time.
> macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.
There are levels to this. Sure, recent versions of macOS have some issues, no doubt. Part of the reason Mac users complain about relatively minor issues is because Apple has set the UI/UX bar so high.
But even in its current state, macOS is still leaps and bounds better than Windows. When I worked with customers using Windows and dealing the usual Windows issues, I realized most of them had no idea that computing didn’t have to be so bad, due to the Stockholm Syndrome that Windows users experience--they think all computers are the same.
The battery on my Macbook Pro, that I've owned since 2013, has finally gave out and I am looking for a new laptop. I considered buying an entry-level Air or a used Pro (<$1000 budget), but then Neo came out. I am now considering just getting the Neo. All I need is internet browsing, some very light coding maybe.
But if there are $200-300 Chromebooks just as good, I want to know. What are they?
I guess the market will speak for itself. I absolutely see the macOS percentage shoot to the sky, it's already almost 50% in the United States, with this, it will gravitate to 75%+ with significant penetration in Europe.
Microsoft is also helping by making Windows an absolute dump of an OS.
$300 to thread the eye of a needle through a field of dogshit, that can only run Google Chrome, or $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software that doesn't use garbage collection.
macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating systems out of the box
> $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software
A vast library? With 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage you're not going to be running much, nor storing many files created by that library of software. Also, the only well-designed truly native software I have on my Mac, which I use daily, I can count on one hand. The vast majority of the apps most people use outside of "Pro" video and image editing, are in a browser, or are Electron apps that are exactly the same on a Mac as they are on a Chromebook.
And those "media" people using Premiere or Final Cut would never buy a computer that maxes out at 512GB SSD.
This is a pretty Chromebook substitute, which is cool, but it's obvious Apple doesn't want it to compete with the rest of their computers which start at $1,099.
8GB was a sad amount of RAM back then, and it's still a sad amount now. Ditto for the storage. I'm not complaining about the CPU at all, it's fine. I use an M1 daily, and for work just an M1 Pro and both are fine.
I know there's a RAM shortage. But if RAM didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have stopped shipping 8GB configurations in the rest of their line. Starving these of RAM and storage is the way they've chosen to protect their fat margins of the MacBook Air. Which is fine. I just think these are best recommended only with a giant asterisk that they're for web tasks only, exactly like a Chromebook.
It was sad but usable (and arguably is usable now, even me with all my crap is around 14 GB not counting cache, etc).
But then again I remember when 128 MB of RAM was simply unheard of largess; so huge that using much of it for anything but a RAM disk was hard to do (of course, I also had that problem back in the DOS era with 8MB).
Please don't call people chuckleheads while licking a boot of a single corporation.
C'mon, you can make a better counter-argument than that. People can prefer what they like as far as I'm concerned, but poorly-thought arguments and narrative-supporting go straight to the "chucklehead" bin. Perhaps you can do a better job describing how a $300 plastic laptop is superior to a MacBook Neo than OP did, I'm willing to listen.
But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.