Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.

The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt...

> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961

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.

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.

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.

Maybe "Overall Quality" or "Device Quality" would work better. The point is that my MBP has held up MUCH better over time than my Surface, which is barely able to charge at this point.

Manufacturing tolerance is the term for "how close are they all to being the same shape?" Good tolerances are usually a prerequisite to good build quality, but not always.

For instance, cast iron pans can have poor tolerances (be off by fractions of inches), but, as long as they're not warped, and the metallurgy is solid, they could last centuries, and people would say they have good build quality.

On the other hand, a stainless steel pan that's volumetrically-perfect, but has faulty internal welds on the laminated bottom could fall apart after a few uses due to heat strain snapping the welds. That'd be terrible build quality.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://frame.work/laptop12

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...

    No Longer Receiving Updates

    | Phone   | Released | Updates Ended |
    |---------------|----------|---------------|
    | Pixel 3  | Oct 2018 | Oct 2021    |
    | Pixel 3 XL | Oct 2018 | Oct 2021    |
    | Pixel 3a  | May 2019 | May 2022    |
    | Pixel 3a XL | May 2019 | May 2022    |
    | Pixel 4  | Oct 2019 | Oct 2022    |
    | Pixel 4 XL | Oct 2019 | Oct 2022    |
    | Pixel 4a  | Aug 2020 | Aug 2023    |
    | Pixel 4a (5G) | Nov 2020 | Nov 2023    |
    | Pixel 5  | Oct 2020 | Oct 2023    |
    | Pixel 5a  | Aug 2021 | Aug 2024    |

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.

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 think the Neo will sell extremely well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I worked in higher education at an Ivy Plus university for 14 years, we were able to get discounts. We also had a campus store where we sold and repaired Macs.

I understand that higher ed is quite different from K-12. It also seems like sales reps have much less leeway now than they used to. I have no doubt there's been multiple reorganizations, etc. and things could be completely different now.

It's not just discounts; even if you pay the normal education price, Apple could throw in some extras (software licenses, AppleCare, etc.) to sweeten the deal.

The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.

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.

I just wish the Mac had 16GB of RAM but my tiny Lenovo has 8 and it’s been working OK so far - I haven’t even set up a proper swap partition and it’s running on zram.

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.

Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves

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$.

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

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.

I mean, look at the colors!

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.

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.

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.

They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"

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.

That's clearly subjective. What you will accept from Apple is unacceptable to others as garbage, the same as you dismiss anything from Microsoft.

>Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

And yet Apple just copied Windows Vista with their "glass" monstrosity that is universally hated and has been lambasted widely. Again, you may love that, but that would put you in the minority.

I was deeply into Microsoft products for a while. I got my start coding an indie game for the Xbox, I spent years using Windows Phone and developing an app for the platform, I interned at Microsoft twice and then later worked there as a software engineer for a period.

While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.

My opinion about Microsoft's product culture is not formed lightly.

I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand. It's not just marketing spin, it's real actionable decisions over decades that accrue to brand perception.

You've described every company I've ever worked for. I guarantee that Apple does not work any differently.

>I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand.

You're wrong about this, as evidenced by their "glass" debacle. I mean you didn't respond to my comment about that at all, and it's so glaring obvious how bad and pointless "glass" was. Nobody wanted it, nobody needed it, and it made things objectively worse. That wasn't a display of product design acumen, it clearly exposed Apple's flaws in very public fashion.

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.

Are you trying to give Apple some kind of tech participation trophy? Because that's all you're doing.

>If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.

Sure, Apple is a luxury brand, and so not many people can afford it. Nor should they be spending the ridiculous amount of money Apple normally charges.

>Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.

Reality distortion field still in effect in 2026.

>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.

I don't care about brands as much as you seem to, that much I'm sure about. Your precious Apple could never do you wrong, we get it.

Which means just *one* of the Android flagships - which are a much, much more segmentated market! - sold half as much as the iOS competitor.

"far outsell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The iPhone has a market share of 60% in the US [1]. The leading Android manufacturer Samsung has a market share of 22% in the US.

These numbers are from last year; the iPhone sold like hotcakes in the European 5, the US (of course), Australia, Mainland China and Japan [2].

BTW, the European 5 consists of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Apple by itself globally makes up about 43% of the revenue in the smartphone market [3].

Yes, devices running the Android operating system sell a lot of units; the majority of them are no-frills devices from manufacturers most people have never heard of. Which is fine—having a phone is better than not having one.

But don’t act like Android is some kind of juggernaut; these five markets represent 2.24 billion people and 60% of the world's GDP. Android isn’t the bestselling phone in any of these countries.

# Top Selling Models

    European 5
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 2    | Samsung Galaxy A55 |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 16          |
    | 5    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    
    US
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 15         |
    | 5    | iPhone 14         |
    
    Australia
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 12         |
    | 5    | Samsung Galaxy A35|
    
    Mainland China
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 16          |
    | 4    | Huawei Mate 60 Pro |
    | 5    | Huawei Mate 60     |
    
    Japan
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16          |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 14          |
    | 5    | Google Pixel 8a    |

[2]: "iPhone 16 secures top-selling global smartphone model in competitive holiday period" — https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/technology/iphone-16-secu...

[3]: "iPhone rakes in 3 times the revenue of any rival" — https://www.cultofmac.com/news/iphone-rakes-in-3-times-the-r...

Let me get this straight: you believe the iPhone "is very low ranking in the larger world of Smartphones" even though it's the most popular and best selling smartphone in the five largest economies on the planet.

I posted the 5 top selling smartphones in the European 5, United States, Australia, Japan, and China—out of 25 models listed, 80% (20 out of 25) were iPhones.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. No matter what you believe, the number are the numbers:

- Apple’s iPhone marketshare in the US is 60% vs Samsung’s at 22%

- the iPhone alone brought in $209,586 billion in FY 2025 [1]

- if the iPhone were its own company, it would be #9 on the Fortune 500

- Apple's iPhone revenue is greater than the revenue of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and AMD combined.

[1]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/...

>"Apple’s iPhone marketshare in the US is 60% vs Samsung’s at 22%"

Which iPhone, which Samsung?

And you're cherry-picking the US market only.

Worldwide, Apple's market share sucks. Oh, but I guess the rest of the world doesn't matter to you as long as the numbers make sense in your own head that Apple is somehow "winning".

Apple has never had and never will have the market share that others have - Windows and Android eclipse Apple's 15%-30%. Those are the numbers you're so desperate to avoid acknowledging.

It's a pretty pathetic display of fanboyism, and it's rather boring - this "conversation" is over.

They say reading is fundamental; you might want to practice to get your comprehension up.

I literally provided the top selling smartphones in China, Japan, Australia and a group of 5 countries in the European Union. The iPhone topped the sales charts in all of them.

> Which iPhone, which Samsung?

All of them? The total of all the iPhone models sold in the US was about 3x the total of all the Samsung models sold here. That’s the 60% vs 22% difference I mentioned earlier.

> Those are the numbers you're so desperate to avoid acknowledging.

Nobody disputes Android’s 72% global market share vs Apple’s 27%. You can calm down now. ;-)

To simplify things for you, Android dominates in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. For example, Android has 95%(!) of the market in India, which is ironic since iPhones for the US are made there now.

It goes without saying iPhone does much better in more affluent countries. So does Samsung.

> It's a pretty pathetic display of fanboyism, and it's rather boring - this "conversation" is over.

When someone isn’t doing so well in a debate, they resort to insults and name calling. Sad.

It’s not that your “opinions” are worth responding to on their merits—they’re not.

I’m writing for readers that might come across this thread and learn something they didn’t already know.

Whether you read it or not is irrelevant.

> 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…

I fly sufficiently that this is well worth it. The fact that it doubles as a mobile computer in the hotel room is just icing on the cake.

So subway ? Maybe not, but don’t pretend they don’t have their own niche…

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.

Where is the Apple from "I am a PC, I am a Mac"?

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.

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.

I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.

All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.

Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.

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.

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)

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

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.

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

On my machines the limiting factor is not CPU, but memory and GPU speed. Low RAM and slow GPUs prevent me from running local AI models. These things will only get bigger over time. I wouldn’t expect a developer machine to still be useful 5 years from now with less than 16 or 32GB.

Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.

I think this April they should announce one with a beige shell, a rainbow logo, and a brown keyboard (with BELL on top of tge G) ;-).

Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.

What exactly is your point?

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.

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

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.

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

[1]: https://github.com/apple/container

Just run MacOS.

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.

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]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255353

The notification is hardware based; the manufacturer of a USB keyboard or mouse won’t matter.

If you plug a hard drive into the slow USB port, macOS will let you know.

There have been thousands of different USB devices plugged into Macs since they adopted it in 1998; I doubt there’s going to be problems now.

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.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/CsEy9bLivK

The one thing I can say with my macbook as someone who's switched from a decade of windows, is that stuff tends to just work, minus window swithcing.

You shouldn't have to go through all these extra steps just to squeeze out the same performance you would get by just installing [Other OS].

At some point I realized I was spending hours at a time trying to 'fix' Windows and decided to give Mac a try right around the time that Apple Silicon came out. It was a night and day difference.

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.

All that said, you cannot disable the architecture, i.e. bypass the file system filter code.

I stopped using Windows just as these were added so now I'm curious if there's any actual performance benefit to using the.

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.

Windows is also slow enough at forking, that clang has "in-process CC1" mode because of it.

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.

But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.

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.

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?

Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.

(Hey, Eric!)

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.

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).

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.

I'm assuming your not doing much in those apps.

Fusion is not free cad and is a hog.

So is kicad.

The language server for many things I work on sits at 28gb per copy.. I work for twitch, our code base is not small for the website. Moving all engineers to min spec 48gb.

I'll do stuff all day prototyping data analysis approaches that will fill ram with a pandas cross join.

I put my4 into thermal shutdown 2x in the last month and hard locked it due to swap use 3 times in the last month. I keep records so I can talk with IT about or dev machine specs. Apparently you can't run 30 concurrent yarn builds on a 3gb codebase... Who knew.

This isn't a works on my box competition I'm glad your workloads are that small, you can be a lot more efficient than me. I'm also lucky I bought all this ram before it became absurdly expensive.

It doesn't negate that I'm constantly over 64gb and that I'm super happy I have 128+ on my machines.

- 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.

if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient

I've been looking at building a high memory workstation recently but the RAM prices are just prohibitive. Best option atm for 1tb+ seems to be to go back a couple gen and buy DDR4, you can get 1tb at under $5/gb right now. But obviously you're giving up some performance in the process.

Thinkpads don't show off their build materials like Apple does. I've had several over the years, variously made of magnesium alloy and carbon fibre.

Screen bending is not a great metric of 'decent build'. My Thinkpads have suffered people stepping on them, being dropped etc, and I think the lid flexibility is partly why it has survived all this time - they often use carbon fibre on the back of the screen.

Maybe ROG Flow 13 ? It's more like hybrid laptop, and geared toward "gaming"(because it's usually the gamer market that demand high performance), but nothing prevents you to use it as business machine.

It's also top of the line asus laptop, so i expect decent build 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!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBX5WH9b4M4

> 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.

What have they produced recently? I found a few lists online and looked at Wikipedia, and their big hits are all > 10-15 years old (or sequels/re-releases). Many of those are decade-old acquisitions of franchises that were ancient at acquisition.

Revenue, or forward revenue? Their most recent quarterly games revenue was down 9% YoY. XBox console sales (leading indicator) are down 32%: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/xbox/microsofts-gam...

Market share? The top N companies from this list have $197B in annual revenue. MS Studios is toward the top of the list, but they only have 12% market share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...

Distribution and marketing? I wouldn't even know how to buy one of their games. I have a Linux gaming PC, a Mac, a switch, an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and a XBone. We spend a few hundred dollars a year on video games, but I haven't seen anything suggesting any MS studio products work on any of our hardware, or are available on any distribution channels that reach any of our devices. Maybe they're on iPad, iPhone or Android? I haven't checked because we don't use those for gaming.

I don't think we're that strange for having zero windows machines. It's down to ~ 30% of web browser market share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Windows is at ~ 95% of steam market share, so I guess that's one bright point for MS studios. However, many game developers release on Steam and console, so it doesn't imply that 95% of those other studios' customers could run a MS studio game.

Customer retention? The last time I plugged the XBone in, I spent 45 minutes screwing with bugs in the account password dialog, finally logged in, and then walked away. I unplugged it for good after the updates completed. In contrast, I spent less time than that installing Linux + Steam on my most recent PC. I guess they dropped support for XBox One at some point? I started having problems with it five years ago. I don't remember a big compatibility-break launch since I purchased it, so I'd expect it to be able to turn on + connect to their servers, or at least run the games it's already downloaded + installed.

I do own one MS game that still works: A copy of Minecraft. It took over 8 hours to figure out how to get it stop constantly asking my kids for my master MS account password. That did convince me to actually wipe all data from my Microsoft account, so I guess it was a win.

You focus too much on XBox when I haven't mentioned it at all.

There is XBox the console, XBox the online store for PC games, XBox the streaming platform, XBox the studios that are first party to the console.

Then there are the other studios acquired via Bathesda, ABK, or directly.

Finally all roots down under Microsot Gaming Studios as publisher.

Among the hardcore fans, they usually only see Xbox as the console.

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).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000098

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.

Just as you can uncheck a box in settings to turn off Apple Intelligence.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't want Windows users to have the same level of control.

From what I've seen of Win 11 in VMs, it doesn't seem compatible with the phrase "decent laptop".

Of course, they start at > $2000.

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!)

Weekend project.

What features matter to you?

That being said, I have a really specific use-case I have to fill right now: I travel all the time for work, and my work laptop already takes up a good amount of space, so I need something small and easy to use when I travel

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.

For the most part, non-ancient renderers (3D but also to a large degree 2D renderers), do not care about physical pixels, and when they do, they care the same amount no matter what the DPI is.

Raster data has a fixed number of pixels, but is generally not meant to be displayed at a specific DPI. There are some rare applications where that might be true, and those are designed to work with a specific display of a given size and number of pixels.

It's especially older applications (like from the 90s and 00s) that work in units of physical pixels, where lines are drawn at "1 pixel width" or something like that. That was ok in an age where targetted displays were all in the range of 70-100 DPI. But that's not true anymore, today the range is more like 100 to 250 or 300 DPI.

One way to "fix" these older applications to work with higher DPIs, is to just scale them up by 2 -- each pixel written by the app results in 2x2 pixels set on the HiDpi screen. Of course, a "200%" display i.e. a display with 192 DPI should be a good display to do exactly that, but you can just as well use a 160 DPI or a 220 DPI screen and do the same thing.

It's true that a modern OS run with a "scaling" setting of 150% generally scales up older applications using some heuristics. Important thing to notice here is that the old application never considered the DPI value itself. It's up to the OS (or a renderer) how it's doing scaling. It could do the 2x2 thing, or it could do the 1.5x thing but increase font sizes internally, to get sharp pixel-blitted fonts when it has control over typesetting. And yeah, some things can come out blurry if the app sends final raster data to the OS, and the OS just does the 1.5x blur thing. But remember, this is an unhappy situation just for old applications, and only where the OS receives raster data from the App, instead of drawing commands. Everything else is up to the OS (old apps) or the app itself (newer, DPI-aware apps).

For newer applications, e.g. on Windows, the scaling value influences nothing but the DPI value (e.g. 150% or 144 DPI) reported to the application, everything else is up to the app.

I don't see much of this issue anymore, on my 27" 4K screen, set to 175% scaling. It's logical that if you want to do arbitrary scaling or zooming, and want to keep all distance ratios perfectly intact, you will experience some ugliness from antialiasing (less and less noticeable as you go to ~4K and beyond). That will be so regardless of scaling, even when it's set to 100%.

So if it ought to look good, software simply needs to be written more flexibly! 1px in CSS doesn't mean 1 physical pixel but it is a (quite arbitrary) physical distance, defined as 1/96th of an inch. It's all up to the app and the software stack deciding line widths and how they will actually come out on a screen in terms of pixels lit. They should _respect_ the scaling setting (like 150%) but they also are in full control, in principle, to make it look good.

<hr> lines come out are perfectly fine on my screen (175% 4K) with Firefox and Chrome.

1.5px width lines will come out quite bad with 100% scaling, but will look perfect with 150% scaling obviously.

Notice that vector fonts generally look better if you have a reasonably high-dpi display. But on average, it doesn't matter if you test font sizes of 20pt or 21pt or 17pt or whatever. Why is that? Because font rasterizers already snap to pixels. They properly quantice geometric objects. They don't make arbitrary stubborn choices like "it must be exactly 1/96th of a virtual inch wide" but they are a little flexible to fight antialiasing.

And the more higher DPI monitors there are, the less software will be making stubborn choices.

https://flutterawesome.com/sharp-looking-flutter-application...

https://tanalin.com/en/articles/integer-scaling/

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 …

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.

Strong disagree on this one - there are some great laptops available, they just aren't "macbook clones". I have an Asus Rog Strix that I love. Lenovo have great ones, Dell, even HP is back in the game somewhat.

I use a macbook professionally, but still don't like the keyboard very much. The display is good, but my Asus display is better. Aluminum is pretty, but I don't like the feel of it on my wrists.

Making MacBooks thinner and thinner creates diminishing returns when it comes to the keyboard. The "butterfly" design isn't very sturdy and on both my previous MacBook Pros several of the keys stopped working after a few years and had to be repaired.

What are you doing that needs that much memory?

(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)

I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly

Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.

Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb of free memory.

I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.

Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.

/s but I suppose I've developed a work flow that adapts to the RAM I've always had. I've seen people with zillions of tabs and I do wonder if it's really that much more productive than the occasional HTTP request to reopen one. I find leaving things open as a form of bookmarking clouds my mental space too much.

I do intend to have beastly RAM on my new desktop so who knows, maybe I'll be like you in a year.

Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.

How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.

It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.

I don't see too many students running Teams.

You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.

Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.

Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.

I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)

I always have to point out government services should not be designed to be efficient, but fair and universal. After they are fair and universal, THEN you can make them efficient, just as long as you don’t break fairness and universality.

and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.

Then try again on my friend personal M1 MB, it was night and day.

Honestly, these days compiling feels like really lightweight work in terms of memory compared to so much else.

Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.

Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?

I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.

“Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”

Like the ipad pro 10.5 does not support later ios version, while the less powerful but newer base ipad does.

So, there is chance the M1 MBA stop receiving update before the MB Neo

This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).

Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.

2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.

2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.

We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.

I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".

With builds running on big build servers.

Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.

The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.

That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.

macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.

We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.

Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.

It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.

However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010041415903.html

Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.

Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.

Why would you want an iPad?

The Neo can run iPad apps and it's small enough that it can be used in most situations where you'd typically use a tablet (bed, couch, etc).

Homework for things like algebra and later calculus definitely is interesting to do on an iPad, as the ratio of time spent thinking:writing is high while you're learning.

But pure notetaking where the thinking:writing ratio is very low? I'd much prefer to type than write on a screen.

Plus on macOS you can easily use note taking apps with the Wacom touchpad that then digitize the text to make it searchable.

If digital version is important, there are probably some scanning apps.

Like a hard sudoku puzzle is fine, you typically write one symbol every few minutes.

But for notetaking where its a symbol every second, yes to me its terrible.

I am clearly not the target audience for the iPad. Being restricted to apps and what they allow you to do while asking for money at every corner is not my cup of tea.

The exception was when people were taking orgo or a diagram heavy class. For that semester not everyone would have a tablet and some people would have pens and pencils. Or writing classes that still required a handwritten essay for the final exam

I don’t know anyone who uses any other tablet besides an iPad, they’ve basically conquered the market.

On the other hand, I've seen more professors — especially in the humanities, but also upper div CS — start banning devices in lecture partially or altogether. Complete distraction (scrolling Instagram, etc.) during lecture is extremely prevalent, and they keep citing noticeable improvements in engagement after banning devices. This also coincides with a shift back to less take-home assignments and more exam-style assessment since they want greater assurance people aren't completely offloading their cognition to LLMs.

The OneNote app sync is quick enough that I could type lecture notes on the laptop, and then quickly switch to the same document on my iPad to sketch out a diagram. It was overkill for sure, but very useful

I just wish they'd let us run MacOS on iPads.

In theory yes, but in reality barely any developer (at least the mainstream ones) make their app available on MacOS, and nobody enjoys interacting with a touch-screen optimized app with mouse/trackpad

The rest of the most use apps are front end for services where the app is free. There are very very few one time app purchases on iOS where pirating would make sense

TIL: iPhone backups on computers stopped including full ipa’s back in 2017…

Reading whole books on a laptop tends to produce a ton of neck strain.

When reading in bed I use a stand to hold my Kindle at the best position. I would need a much heavier stand to be able to do that with my iPad.

iPads/Kindles are better because they're smaller and lighter so you can position them with far greater flexibility.

It's smaller, it's lighter, it's by definition just way more flexible to use ergonomically. You can position it in lots of ways you can't position a larger 13" horizontal laptop.

iPads are better when you need to be constantly highlighting and making notes, like for school. And for PDF's you need to be panning and zooming.

At this point, there are more people taking notes on an iPad + Apple Pencil than on physical notebooks in my lectures

Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.

iPad + voice, this seems like my new lifestyle choice and it looks like it’s going to work out too.

I think human beings need to move away from sitting at the typewriter like it’s 1930. We’re more than this.

blink code to codeserver

https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

In undergrad my iPad was far and away my favorite note-taking device. Digital pen-and-"paper" beats laptop for 99% of note taking.

He’s off to university in Fall ‘26, and I’m waffling between getting him an Air and keeping his current iPad, or getting a neo and new iPad. Probably go the former because of the long term cost effectiveness of the Air.

To this day it's the only Apple product I've ever owned, and it was worth every penny. I'm sure there are other good tablets for writing now, but at the time there was nothing else even close.

I don't know MacOS, but comming from Linux customizability was mostly okay. Obviously there was also some getting used to. The desktop environment has decent window management and support for virtual desktops which I use heavily.

I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.

The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.

Where I am, our primary schools require iPads, the kids want iPhones (and mabye tend to inherit their parents old phones), and now there's a lightweight laptop for high school cheaper and faster and better screen (and I'm hoping with a more robust build) than the slightly-more-expensive 13" windows laptops I've been buying them.

The parents will later buy them a macbook air or whatever when they go to college.

I think Apple could be onto a winner here, in terms of long-term MacOS uptake.

  - USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
  - USB 2.0 480 Mbps

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...

I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a future product with 2x USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support on the next generation, A19 Pro or A20 Pro maybe, if the product has enough success.

No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.

I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...

It will definitely be used to justify spending $300-1500 more for a better laptop.

Followed by the IT-nerd of the family always complaining to them.

Again, I think it's a minor nit realistically, but people are going to harp on it.

> 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]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.

This seems to be a recent phenomenon. A lot of electronic music production uses the Macintosh and Logic/Ableton workflow, to say nothing about how many of the best DSPs were Apple-exclusive until about a decade ago. I don't really think music production, at least in the EDM and hip-hop world, got popular on the PC until the rise of Fruity Loops and FL Studio, but that's available on the Mac now too.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/

I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s

But they don't. And won't.

USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).

You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.

With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.

I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.

Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.

Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.

This is as far from the mainstream as you can possibly get.

Come September it will have been a decade since Apple dropped the headphone port - the world has moved on

Do an experiment. Jump in a pool with both your iPhone and your MacBook and see which one works when you get out.

Which you said aren't being made anymore. Which is factually untrue. The best bit is, they're still being made! And there's plenty of people who are still buying them!

Why? Because a $170 pair of closed-backs sounds infinitely better than the $550 Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra nonsense.

FiiO FT1 32Ω being a prime example, if you are looking for closed back suggestions :^)

Sennheiser HD 660S2

Audeze MM-100

Meze 109 Pro

Focal Hadenys

Focal Azurys

Sennheiser HD 505

HiFiMAN Arya Stealth

Audeze LCD-5

> I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s

I am saying that not all adoration of the analog headphone jack is baseless. And we shouldn't universally move on.

If you are that concerned about price, I’m sure you can get a $20 Tracphone from somewhere with an analog jack.

its investment into next generation of loyal apple users, they more likely be selling it at loss.

I'd like to run the external display plus an external SSD at USB 3 speeds, so I'd be waiting for experience reports on whether the one port can handle both without constraining the filesystem transfer speeds.

At least we should both be happy that it exists, no matter where it is placed! This is a big improvement over the macbook 12 with just one port. This was too low even when using a dock.

$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch ID

Honestly pretty fantastic product and price.

This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)

Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.

As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.

Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.

Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.

The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.

Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.

I don't think an apple watch would help there?

You can authorize via Apple Watch everything you can authorize via Touch ID. You get the notification on the Watch, and you need to press the button twice to auth.

I don't remember if it works every time, or only when MacBook is closed and connected to external display/keyboard.

A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!

The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.

I’m not sure they do. They love their AI chip, but that might be where the live ends.

This is the A18 Pro, specifically, which should have a faster GPU than the M1?

I can imagine schools buying them for their students and then taking them after the semester is over and then giving to next but also reselling it at a very nice value if they might want the next line of product at a decent price.

Also this not only applies to school but normal people who buy the Macbook Neo too

And even after that, yes, children are absolutely hard on their tablets I agree but they operate and the resale value of those could be decent aside from a very few IMO. There is a way to create a culture of preservation or atleast steer things that way but yeah I agree it can be hard.

IMO that form factor was perfect for a small, low end laptop, it just needed a more power efficient chip, and a screen with smaller bezels.

Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm

  - Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
  - Width: 30 vs 29.75
  - Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
  - Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23

But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).

Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.

If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.

EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.

It's two things that explain the optics vs reality are surprising.

One is bezels, they're quite large on the 11 inch.

Two is rounding, the 11 inch actually undersells things as it's 11.6 inches, the Neo is exactly 13 inch. So it's not 2 inches but 'just' 1.4 inches bigger, and with its thick bezels it bridges that 1.4 inch gap mostly.

While the 13 inch MBA is actually 13.6 inches.

In other words, the MBA has a 5% bigger screen than the Neo, despite being marketed both as '13 inch macbooks'.

5% doesn't sound like much, but it's the diagonal, meaning the height/width also scale by 5%, and the surface area therefore scales by 1.05^2 i.e. the screen of the '13' inch MBA is actually more like 10% bigger than the 13 inch Neo.

I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.

They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.

It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!

I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.