I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).
So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).
Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.
Now, if only Asahi was more complete.
My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.
The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.
Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.
The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.
The metal is more "luxury", though.
This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon
I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...
https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...
Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink
Anyway, the author claims:
you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before.
Does toasty mean extremely hot?
The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle.
Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees?
You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could.
Everything’s a trade off.
My body is the heatsink
Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.
One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.
~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal
Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.
The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.
Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.
But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.
1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/
My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.
When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.
It's awesome!
Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.
Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.
- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?
- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?
- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?
I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.
Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.
(Hey, Eric!)
Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.
- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.
- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.
- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.
Fusion + blender + slicers.
Virt machines / docker + dev env
iOS Android web development
16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro
Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex
My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use
My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.
My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping
I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.
I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.
if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient
At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.
Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.
They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.
And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.
That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.
The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).
Linux powers the entire world. Billions if not tens of billions of devices. It doesn't "break all the time like a kit car". I switched my wife's desktop from Ubuntu to Debian about a year ago and I haven't heard a single complain. Not a single crash. She hardly reboots her computer. The thing is just rock solid and it needs to be: she works from home and she spends 8 hours+ on her (Linux) computer.
> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.
That said, my surface is pretty old so maybe some of these design flaws have been fixed.
But from my experience, the build quality of the MacBook is in a different league than the surface.
If finishes and gaps are tight, all around bodies and across examples, the build quality is GOOD. If every units looked slightly different and some were outright broken straight out of the box, then the build quality is BAD. Even if they were worthy of included in the MoMA collection.
Both Microsoft and Apple(or their paid Chinese outsources) are top notch. Every units looks the same and flats on the bodies are really flat. Industrial design and usability, like sharp corners and fugly aesthetics, are different issues entirely.
Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).
For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).
So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.
You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.
Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...
It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable. *Edit: This was covered under warranty, thankfully
This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.
I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.
I can run Windows on a USB stick form-factor if I want to. Or dozens of tablet sizes from various vendors. And every kind of laptop imaginable, with all kinds of features. And everything else up to massive rack-mount server hardware. But sure, if a Macbook is all you need, then go for it.
- Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit.
- The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.
- For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks. Yes, this is a numbers game. The goal is every student has a device.
- Schools using Chromebooks to log in. If you want reliable Google logins on macOS, you have an additional big spend up front, along with per-seat licensing costs.
- This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.
If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions
There wasn't actually THAT much going on and we mostly just sat in his office and chatted, but when he did have to deal with something, it was absurd the vandalism that happened. One kid had unplugged a mouse and managed to jam the plug into the floppy drive. The IT guy was like "It takes talent to be this much of a piece of shit" as he had to disassemble the case to get it out.
When it comes to issuing laptops to public school students, I'm torn. On one hand, people need computer skills, but on the other, I just don't think many students can be trusted with a piece of equipment costing hundreds of dollars. Hell, how many people can't even own a personal cell phone without somehow shattering the screen in just a few months?
[0] I had created a two-page slide deck with a black background and white text, then filled both slides with the same text that made it look like a DOS prompt and that Windows had been deleted. It had a C:\> prompt, and on one slide, there was an underscore after the prompt. I then made the slide show auto-play and loop, making the underscore blink, which made it look like an actual prompt. Keep in mind, these were Macs. There was no "C" drive, and certainly no Windows. A teacher insisted I broke the computer, despite showing that pressing any key ended the show, took me to the Principal's office, who gave me my punishment. My first time talking to the IT guy, he was like "you did what now?" and I showed him, and he thought it was funny as hell. Honestly, my "punishment" ended up being pretty fun. That was all 25 years ago. I wish I remembered his name so I could look him up.
If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).
Somehow while spending the most per capita of any nation on the planet, American schools are in a perpetual budget crunch. It's about getting internet access not whether the trackpad is good. You think a chromepad is crappy - have you ever tried to do something in Blackboard?
> If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care
They won't be. Pizza sauce is considered a vegetable.
An aside: Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves? I believe they shouldn't.
The more and less cynical explanations (and both play a role, IMO):
(1) Because individuals in those roles have closer relationships to the people that set the salaries than do individual teachers, and
(2) Because otherwise people with experience in education would continue as teachers and not seek roles as superintendents or other administrators (or seek the advanced degrees sought for those roles whose only financial payoff is greater competitiveness for those higher paying roles.)
A couple reasons:
1. Because usually, superintendents and the administration are responsible and accountable for a lot more moving parts than teachers are. Aside from the many kids each teacher teachers, which leads us to point #2.
2. There is a lot more supply of teachers than demand. If a teacher doesn't like their objectively meager pay, they can quit. There are 10 applicants lined up waiting to take their position.
> I believe they shouldn't.
This is generally handled at your city level. Organize your like-minded constituents to lobby the board?
This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.
The metal construction is what prompted me to switch over to macbook pro's back in the day. The plastic dell laptops i used to use couldn't handle the abuse that it took during all of the travel i was doing at the time (cases kept cracking). I switched to a pro and was rewarded later with it surviving a 5 foot fall from a car rental counter. It bent part of the corner, but the screen was still in tact and it continued to work well enough to get me through the trip. I suspect the plastic alternative would have been toast.
Having kids today and seeing how rough they are with their toys, I'm not confident that a plastic laptop would survive them long.
And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.
My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.
Very often they aren't (the school devices are in-school resources that aren't given to the kids any more than their desks are) and anything the kids have out of school is bought by the parents (and even if they are given the computers by the school, usually the replacement costs is on the parents if there is damage). But, either way, grade school kids are, on average, irresponsible as a matter of cognitive development (its a big part of why children are treated differently than adults legally.)
> school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.
A school district that can be described as having a “penal system” is, ipso facto, dysfunctional.
What happens when a kid's laptop is broken, regardless of the reason, and the family is unable to afford to repair it? Are we going to run into a similar situation that we had when kids couldn't pay for school lunch? Do teachers write "pay for a new laptop" in sharpie on the kid's arm for the parent?
A child's educational environment is a lot more chaotic, violent, and uncontrolled compared to an office environment. If you're issuing my child a $600 laptop and making me responsible for any damages, guess what's going to be kept at home in a secure location?
Making a child responsible for securing a laptop in an insecure environment isn't accountability, it's just a form of imprisonment.
The screenshot in that Reddit post more or less looks like ours. Schools generally repair these, if they have the technicians. And everyone is cannibalizing parts out of last generation models. It's like a Jawa shop.
> Apple can only compete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.
I've never seen, nor heard of Apple providing competitive prices, even in quantities of ~10,000 units. They haven't even gotten close and they've largely given up on the idea of Macs as a standard K12 school device. ~$250 iPads are still strong in low primary grades and special education, though.
I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.
It does exist, it just requires the iPad to be managed via MDM, which most schools would have (and should implement if they don't have it). JamF, Mosyle, Business Essentials, InTune and probably any other MDM can put an iPad into shared iPad mode with multiple profiles.
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
Younger students on the other hand, Chromebooks remain the way to go. Most of the time, kids'll win in a race between their destructive tendencies and crappy hardware giving out.
100% agreed. My statements weren't meant to indicate the Neo wasn't viable. They were meant to state that the Neo isn't going to replace Chromebooks in schools (as far as being District-purchased).
> The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards.
Build quality has been steadily improving over the years. It's all still budget (target ~$290), but is more and more durable with each new generation.
Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.
I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.
Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.
Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.
It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".
Citation? I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts. Heck, there's someone in this very discussion saying the same with actual prices paid in their comment showing real first hand experience and yet you come in here with a hand wavy unsupported claim that Apple gives breaks for bulk buys.
As an example, my kids try to do school work on one of the house Macs, but there's too many roadblocks so they just use their Chromebooks.
I used to buy my kids Chromebooks for school, but, since the pandemic, the school issues them, so I haven't bought any since.
> Apple stuff they will likely be better made
It depends on what you mean. Apple uses higher quality parts and is more sleek.
Chromebooks are more durable, take more abuse, are very repairable, and parts are cheap and plentiful. These are keys to schools. We're at a point where schools cycle out old models and either keep a bunch around, or strip parts from them, because some parts are interchangeable between generations.
- Low end consumer
- College students
- People who have a desktop computer, but want a cheap portable for on-the-go.
> The "surface" market is minuscule
Probably so, but then again, I see a lot of Surface devices out and about and they are fairly popular with non-teacher education staff. While they aren't competing with Chromebooks or Apple on volume, I'd bet they're doing well.
I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.
Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.
An iPhone Pro is 3 times more expensive than an average Android phone too. If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.
The hardware lasts but they usually stop getting software updates after a few years, especially if they're not high-end models.
Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/02/apple-releases-ios-16-7...
How usable is an 8-year-old iPhone as a primary phone though? I agree that having 8 years of support is a good thing, but at that point the hardware is so degraded that it's not suitable for its original purpose anymore. At that point I'd rather have android just so I can root it and install Linux. Then again, with improvements to phones slowing down in recent years, this is becoming increasingly untrue.
Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.
Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.
I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.
It was great, very simple to use but still had all the features you needed.
They were acquired by Apple who then promptly killed the product.
Some schools will gladly pay more.
It should also be noted that Washington state schools are still generally heavily Microsoft and Windows, despite Google's dominance.
> The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.
We don't actually know this. It does at the level individual student purchasing themselves, but I'd imagine there is a substantial bulk discount for educational establishments. That is not a new trend for Apple, it dates back to the Apple II.
We do because this is historically the norm. Schools pay roughly the same as the "college student" pricing, aside from the occasional deals they toss us.
My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.
Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.
Another school uses iPads with keyboards for the same purpose, so I'm not sure where the school market is for these. Maybe only older kids, but a lot of edu-tech is expecting some kind of touch/pen input.
The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.
The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)
The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.
8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).
You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.
"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs
Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...
Android has the majority share because "Android" is anything from a $100 piece of junk to a $1200 phone. If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.
Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.
If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.
> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.
I could go on, and on...
That version of the Magic Mouse is also over 10 years old…
Where is exactly the premium quality?
Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.
Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.
Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.
Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.
I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.
Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.
I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine
What are modern operating systems and applications doing?
I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular
Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.
I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.
If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.
I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.
Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?
And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.
Images, complicated CSS, JavaScript ads, they can all use lots of memory!
That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.
Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.
I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.
I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.
Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?
Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.
I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.
I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.
I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.
I can use a build server when I want one, but that's not always appropriate. Local builds are useful.
Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.
They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"
I mean, look at the colors!
Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.
I think the Surface is as close to great as you can get. I'm not saying that I know the whole market of laptops, you probably know better. But the Surface is pretty good, which is weird because it seems like Microsoft isn't really focusing on it or even backing away from it.
I agree with the parent, that Macbooks are way ahead in terms of usability, polish and charm for a laptop. And the performance is outright stellar.
I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.
I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.
I've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.
So I unplugged it, at which point I noticed the smoke was increasing. So we doused it in CO2 (maybe N2, idk, some cheap gas we had lying around for the wetlab), pried the computer part off of the base, and then IT handled sending it back to M$.
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)
15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)
See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)
Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves
200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.
On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.
It's interesting, for years I have been trying to make my iPad a nice, slim laptop I could bring with me everywhere for lighter/coding specific tasks. I've gone through several keyboards trying to make this work. It never has.
Now with this laptop, I can do exactly this, while being cheaper than what I've been attempting to do with an iPad.
On the other hand, more money doesn't always mean better computer. I had a Dell XPS 9570 at a previous gig that had a lot of issues: coil whine, bad camera placement, terrible thermals, etc.
Now that Apple is attempting to compete in this space, they'll have to pitch these folks on what macOS without touch capability offers over Windows with touch capability.
Maybe it will still sell well enough, maybe people aren't that stuck on touchscreens.
A nitpick: there are two USB ports, one of them is a 10GB/s USB 3 port.
"you're plugging it wrong" will become the new version of the classic "You're holding it wrong"
And while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port. [1]
What features matter to you?
Weekend project.
I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only nerds use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.
The price point, the capability, the only thing stopping Apple at this point is the MDM stuff integrating it with other identity providers but its ahead of where it used to be.
The only time macs can be a bit of a headache is if you are still using all on-prem AD & group policy and trying to force them into that environment via joining the mac to AD.
Last time I dealt with Apple MDM was integrating it with on-prem AD and it was a pain. I know it’s better now because last few “gigs” have used it and it’s been pretty seamless with Microsoft Authenticator for Teams. (Ugh!)
Can we talk about laptops that you can’t carry by the edge where your palm rests because it flexes the frame and registers it as a mouse down event …
Possibly, but I would wait for reviews to make that call. The hardware is slower than other MacBooks; memory may be slower, too, and other hardware may be slightly worse in quality.
> Your new MacBook Neo. Just the way you want it[sic]. 13-inch MacBook Neo in Indigo A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine Apple Intelligence Footnote ※
8GB unified memory
256GB SSD storage
U.S. English Magic Keyboard with Lock Key
20W USB‑C Power Adapter
Two USB-C ports, 3.5 mm headphone jack
Support for one external display
One reason Apple can get away with 8 GB of RAM is their SoC does realtime compression of data in RAM and they use high bandwidth memory; the A19 Pro RAM bandwidth is 60 GB/s. This enables them to treat the SSD like an L3 cache.
It's nearly 5 years since the M1 was released; I suspect Apple has gotten really good with their RAM > compression > SSD system since then.
I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!
I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.
Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.
All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.
No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5
Chromium often avoids this by rendering 1px borders as hairlines that snap to a single device pixel, even when a CSS pixel corresponds to 1.5 device pixels at 150% scaling. This keeps lines crisp, but it also means the border remains about one device pixel thick, making it appear slightly thinner relative to the surrounding content.
For some people such artifacts are not noticeable for others they are.
https://patrickbrosset.com/articles/2024-06-21-invasion-of-t...
https://flutterawesome.com/sharp-looking-flutter-application...
Thinkpads.
Or in general any business laptop, like HP Elitebook or Dell Presicion.
But they are not cheap at all haha
If you want performace get a desktop!
Or a MacBook, which is part OP's point. Apple is delivering quality at price points that Windows OEMs aren't (which is sort of the opposite of the phone world).
Only P-series are workstations.
I meant for build quality.
And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.
Macbook Neo is also 219ppi vs Surface Laptop at 178ppi. We’ll see about performance, but i’d expect the macbook to be on par or better.
It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.
And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.
If your MacBook has a glowing apple, you might be running Snow Leopard. You need to upgrade like now.
Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.
How do you recycle your old parts?
Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.
The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.
Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.
20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.
15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.
10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.
if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks
What exactly is your point?
Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.
With a distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything basically "just works", and you have much more freedom with how you setup your computer. Plus, while Apple is generally better about not bloaring their OS with bothersome corporate BS ("log into your Windows account! Sign up for OneDrive! AI in your email!") then Microsoft, they're not exactly perfect.
I don't know why the downvotes, maybe someone can chime in if there is more to surface laptop? because i am using one laptop, and much prefer to use windows on M4 macbook pro instead.
From my personal experience, Widows users in general don’t mind Windows, but, definitely, nobody I have ever met finds it more desirable than macOS.
Part of it historically was a sort of Visual Studio induced Stockholm Syndrome, where for a long time if you were doing C++ work that was the only sane way to go.
There are some companies that even filter potential employees on this basis.
When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, it wasn’t clear that was going to work. Being able to boot into Windows was sort of an insurance policy that’s no longer necessary.
Just run MacOS.
To be honest if Apple wanted to they could work with valve to make gaming on Mac a reality
To some degree it should already be possible with wine + dxvk + moltenvk
Also the era when companies were trying to “kill” each other’s devices is no longer a thing.
They all get the reality it’s a multi device world and they need to work within it.
Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices
Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases