Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.
replyInstead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.
It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.
replyThat being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.
replyI really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e
I do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that.
replyAlthough this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
The A18 Pro chip has 8B of ram and no option to change it.
reply1: Education market
2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products
replyApple has always ignored cannibalism because they would rather cannibalize their own products than have someone else do it.
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