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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I should have used the word "premium" rather than luxury.
Easily worth the extra money alone.
I had a phase 2 years ago where I tried many cheap Chromebooks. I initially liked the stripped down experience and "value for dollar" hardware.
But ChromeOS UX gaps, bad keyboards, and a litany of other issues wore me down and I gave up on the "second computer" quest.
I look back now and see many of those Chromebooks don't even exist anymore.
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 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.
If you need someone to rave about macOS, you simply need to ask me. Going from Windows to Linux to macOS was like coming home.
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.
Chromebook/N4500 (2021!)/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC, $149 white $179 in grey Windows/N150/4GB RAM/128GB, $219 (first Windows machine)
The first Lenovo is a Chromebook that's $299, and it's got a MediaTek processor from 2022 and is supposedly on a $100 sale.
To not have to deal with Windows (or Linux (speaking as a Linux sysadmin)).
The edu price is $499. Of course that seriously competes with the base iPad ($329 without keyboard).
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
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.
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.