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The manufacturers don't care about display quality, because displays are hard and expensive. Apple has enough volume that they can get a custom panel.

Users on the other hand, they definitely care about display quality more than they care about RAM. The display is the part you look at!

If you're in store and there's a Neo with a crisp 200 PPI screen and a Windows laptop with a cheap screen but more RAM, the vast majority of consumers will choose the laptop with the better display. People make purchasing decisions based on feels and the Neo has great feels.

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On the contrary, displays are commodity components. So much so that motivated enthusiasts have managed to swap better panels into their ThinkPads for a long time. Manufacturers don't prioritize display quality in cheap devices because it doesn't show up on the spec sheet and most customers don't care that much.
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Consumers don't read spec sheets. My mother doesn't even know the difference between RAM and SSD - it's all just "memory" right? But she knows that when she goes to the Apple Store the computers are built to an impressive standard.

Quality speaks for itself, and the way that people buy computers is through their eyes and fingertips, not their heads.

Go to the Apple Store and just observe how people make their buying decisions. They don't just look at the spec sheet, they lift, type on, caress the computers. They want to know how it will feel to own one.

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>And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison.

As an ARM enthusiast who has tried a lot of WinARM, I think at this point I really struggle to believe MS has a single care in the world for improving quality of life for WinARM users. They sure do market it, and the laptops do work most of the time. I've just never had any other computers shit the bed when it comes to graphics drivers like a Qualcomm powered PC. Website with too many video/gifs playing? Screen whites out/all the video boxes go pink and explorer resets. Open up the gif search in Discord? Basically a coin flip chance its going to kill the graphics driver and reset explorer again. I had a Dell Inspiron with the Qualcomm 8CX Gen2 that could reliably be crashed just by quickly scrolling twitter on a video posting heavy day.

I would rather take a Mediatek powered Chromebook any other day until the Neo showed up and started to approach the sub $500 ARM chromebook price point.

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I also am not a huge fan of the 256GB storage, but if someone doesn’t already know what ram is, they really won’t care and won’t notice much. I’m a tech guy. I bought an M1 air with 256GB storage and 8GB RAM. I was able to do development and mobile development fine. I never encountered RAM related slowdowns. I have an iCloud subscription because I don’t want to manage my own NAS. This is a heavier use case than what, say, a normal college student will do with it, and it worked just fine for me. This is by far the best laptop I have seen in this bracket. If I was just heading to college today, and I didn’t have the money for a Pro or Air, I would 100% get this far before a windows laptop.
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