This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).
After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.
Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.
They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.
Stats software is cross-platform or open-source.
Art programs are cross-platform or open-source.
Office suites are cross-platform or browser-based.
Unless you're specifically trying to learn Windows development, dev tools are cross-platform and open source.
15 years ago, what you describe was probably quite common. Today, it's almost completely disappeared.
Also most "professional" CAD software is Windows-only, which is going to affect a big chunk of engineering majors.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.
People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.
Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.
This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.
akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.
C'mon, man.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Maybe a slightly used one as well.
But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.
I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.
For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.
For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.