- I bought a Neo to "replace" an M3 MacBook Air "travel/out of the house/outside" laptop. Are there drawbacks? Most certainly, but it feels like something special, and I enjoy the slightly smaller form factor. The main drawback is perhaps the most surprising, the screen, which is really good at 500 nits, draws a disproportionate amount of energy compared to the rest of the system, so you get about 3.5 hours in bright sunlight / maximum brightness.
As the only IT person in an 80 person unit, I can say the Neo trounces Dell Latitudes in a lot of ways, those have awful 250 nit screens out of the box, and they are nearly $1,200!
by gradstudent
5 subcomments
- Weighing up a Neo vs Framework 12 for my kids. The Neo is nicer, but I'll probably get the Framework even though it's more expensive. Apple products seem to have a fixed shelf life; a certain number of years of support and then the machine is slowly incompatible with apps that have since moved on to newer versions of macOS. Meanwhile Framework supports Linux and is still providing hardware/software upgrade paths for their old machines.
- It's a shame most companies don't do weird and interesting variants anymore. I suppose it's hard to do when you need mass market appeal.
Especially in regards to cars, often getting a bargain is about finding the cars with faults you personally don't care about but most people do, or versions not many are interested in.
Unfortunately the way speculators have inflated the used market means the rare (because no-one wanted it) versions are priced on their rarity not their utility.
- Apple has been doing this for ages. The base tier one always gets the fun colors while the pro models get silver, grey, and maybe some muted blue.
Not sure why they make the cheaper models cooler than the top tier ones. Maybe it's just too expensive to stock multiple colors of every product. The Neo has minimal customization options for specs so making it colorful is cheaper.
- in my car circles the 968 was seen as a total pos that was really just sort of trying to compete with the RX-7 and Fairlady, do a worse job at being a good sports car than them, and push the brand into further cheapened territory towards the every-person for the sake of financial incentive while inflating the cost of their premium offering, the 911.
1:1 example, but i'm not sure those were the points being made here.
by KaiserPro
3 subcomments
- The thing that keeps me questioning is the "its using binned parts" dialogue. I'm sure _some_ parts might be discards from the iphone 16, but the volume they had at launch to me suggests that not the story. I've read somewhere that they made/budgeted for 5 million laptops shipped this quarter/half. but if they are made from binned CPUs, that suggests at least 4-7% yeild loss for the original iphone CPU.
Bear in mind thats this 4-7% loss only counts dies that have just one broken CPU unit. There are many other failure modes as well. That just seems very very high.
I've also not really seen any official channels that support this assertion, even apple insider seems sceptical that this is true: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/04/07/incredible-macboo...
With my logic hat on, Apple contracts chip manufacturing, so I would have assumed that rejects and failed parts would be recycled at source. I would imagine that apple only pay for parts that pass QC. So I suspect that actually these chips are either leftovers (at best) or specifically manufactured using the old tooling.
- While I am back to my Surface Laptop 7 after a few weeks with the Neo because the latter wasn't good enough for my usage, I agree it's the coolest Mac right now, the colors are great! I don't really understand why Apple keeps its "more serious" devices mostly color-less, it's a shame.
by voidUpdate
1 subcomments
- I'm surprised "mobile phone specs with laptop form factor" isn't a larger product base. Modern smartphones seem capable enough to run a lot of "normal" software, obviously not super heavy ones like after effects or something, but for lighter tasks (web browsing etc), it seems like a good market
- > Cut back to Porsche in 1992, and you’ll see a similar story playing out in a very different industry. Back then, Porsche was not in the fantastic position it is in today. Its model lineup was aging.
Perhaps picking Porsche for this analogy wasn't necessarily the best choice: https://investorrelations.porsche.com/en/financial-informati...
So much for "fantastic position it is in today"...
by paulmooreparks
0 subcomment
- I'm thinking about buying a Neo for two reasons: my laptop is only ever used to RDP into my home Windows workstation, which is where I do all my serious work; and because I need to have a Mac to test some software I'm writing (Tela, find it on my GitHub) that has to be multi-platform. The battery life is also a plus for remote work, but that's about it. I don't want to spend four digits where three will do.
- Excellent move by Apple to distract people from the declining software with shiny colours and low price.
- Resonates. Reminds me of old Thinkpads. Cheap sometimes means accessible, simple, minimal, functional.
by dude250711
0 subcomment
- They had defective chips to get rid of.
- I am so tired of everything electronic only coming in black and maybe gray.
I like colors!
So it's nice to see apple finally bringing a bit of color back.
by readthenotes1
1 subcomments
- "Back then, Porsche was not in the fantastic position it is in today. Its model lineup was aging. "
Kinda hard to take this article seriously...
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2026/company/porsche-deliver...
- [flagged]
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