Tech bros are lying to you about the MacBook Neo | Hacker News Reader

Tech bros are lying to you about the MacBook Neo

macworld.com

4 pointsbaal80spam8 comments

I agree that the lack of backlight keyboard and touch ID isn't a serious limitation but 8 GB of ram would be probably be hardly usable, especially on tahoe.

For the target audience, they’d be none the wiser. If you’re even thinking about ram it’s not for you.

But won't it be slow and provide a bad experience?

I use an Air M2 8GB, and memory becomes an issues when I have Chrome with hundreds of tabs, a docker runner, an IDE, and several other apps like keynote all open. Add Claude and the machine is suffering! My guess is that 8GB should be fine for most users, but design students for example may stumble upon issues if they use a lot of big apps concurrently.

> For one, any M2 or M3 Air is likely to be refurbished, and any M4 you find will be several hundred dollars more than the Neo.

Refurbished by Apple devices tend to be really good deals, not sure why this is being knocked. It's also better for the environment

Nothing against the MacBook Neo, but this reads like an advertisement.

> It’s all lies.

> And now tech influencers are recommending buying one [M2 MacBook Air] four years later because they don’t want to admit that the MacBook Neo got everything right.

This whole article feels like a thinly veiled ad, or at least extreme fanboyism. It lacks objectivity. It’s a good machine for the price, but no, it did not “get everything right”, and no, not everybody making any criticism or comparison is “lying to you”.

It’s a fine computer. “Tech Bros” say stupid things about low-cost Windows computers too.

If I had a complaint about the Neo, it’s the screen aspect ratio. The smaller the screen, the closer you need to be 3:2. Open a Google doc on a school-issue Chromebook. It’s laughable how little space is available for the actual content on those junk 16:9 screens. This Neo is 16:10. Better, but not a whole lot. A 13” iPad in landscape mode is ~4:3 and an 11” iPad is ~3:2. It’s not like Apple didn’t know, and it’s not like Apple didn’t have access to displays that are better suited to a small machine.

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