Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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> I’ve been tempted to buy one and do “real dev work” on it just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine.

But... you can do the same exercise with a $350 windows thing. Everyone knows you can do "real dev work" on it, because "real dev work" isn't a performance case anymore, hasn't been for like a decade now, and anyone who says otherwise is just a snob wanting an excuse to expense a $4k designer fashion accessory.

IMHO the important questions to answer are business side: will this displace sales of $350 windows machines or not, and (critically) will it displace sales of $1.3k Airs?

HN always wants to talk about the technical stuff, but the technical stuff here isn't really interesting. The MacBook Neo is indeed the best laptop you can get for $6-700.

But that's a weird price point in the market right now, as it underperforms the $1k "business laptops" (to avoid cannibalizing Air sales) and sits well above the "value laptop" price range.

No, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine. No way such a setup is suitable for anything beyond browsing a tab or two and connecting to servers using SSH.

And, the whole shittiness of the experience will even distract you attempting real work: the horrible touchpad, the bad screen, the forced windows updates when you trying to start the machine to do something urgent, ads in Windows, the lack of proper programmability of Windows (unless you use WSL).... Add the fact that the toy is likely to break in a year or two. These issue exist on far more expensive Windows machines, how much more a $350 machine.

Leaving Windows machines and OS behind for more than a decade has been a continuing breath of fresh air. I have several issues with the Apple devices and macOS (as I have with Linux too), but on the whole they are far better than Windows. The only good thing about Windows that I miss on Macs is the file explorer and window management, not sure why Apple stubbornly refuses to copy those.

A lot of $350-ish Windows machines also don’t have SSDs but instead eMMC storage, which is dog slow and will make modern SSD-mandatory Windows feel even more awful to use.

If Windows/Linux/x86 is non-negotiable and that’s your budget, I would never in a million years recommend anything brand new. This is when you go pick up a $350 used midrange ThinkPad on eBay. It won’t outperform a Neo in terms of CPU and battery life but I guarantee it’ll be a better experience than the garbage routinely sold at this price point.

> No, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine.

Sigh. I mean, even absent the obvious answers[1], that's just wrong anyway. You're being a snob. Want to run WSL? Run WSL. Want to run vscode natively? Ditto. Put it on a cheap TV and run your graphical layout and 3D modelling work. I mean, obviously it does all that stuff. OBVIOUSLY, because that stuff is all cheap and easy.

All the complaining you're doing is about preference, not capability. You're being a snob. Which is hardly weird, we're all snobs about something.

But snobs aren't going to buy the Neo either. Again, the business question here is whether the $350 junk users can be convinced to be snobs for $600.

[1] "Put Linux on it", "All of your stuff is in the cloud anyway", "It's still a thousand times faster than the machine on which I did my best work", etc...

You mean that machine from 30 years ago that was running 30 year old software that has nothing in common with today’s development? And how well does Linux run on 4GB?

So weird to see this kind of flaming more than a decade after it got stale and silly. I mean, yeah, kinda: a 64MB K6-300 was pretty great!

But as to the 4G quip, that's showing some ignorance of where the market is. The value segment is filled with devices like this: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Stream-BrightView-N4120-Graphics/d...

That's a 16G windows box which will happily run multiple VMs for whatever your deployment environment is, something the Neo is actually going to struggle with. The Jasper Lake CPU is indeed awfully slow, but again for routine "dev" tasks that's just not a limit.

You would obviously refuse out of taste, but if you were actually forced to use this machine to do your job... you absolutely could.

But this has no real SSD. Back to external SSD like on Apple devices?

Of course you can. You can do real work on an $80 Amazon Fire. Yes, some things will be potentially impossible or frustrating but that's also true of the MacBook Neo, just a bit higher of a bar. A lot of this also depends on your definition of "real work".

$350 USD can get you a decent laptop with a SSD, 16GB RAM and something like an Intel N100 or N95. And they pretty comparable to a decent Intel Skylake CPU which are still pretty usable.

https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Keyboard-Fi...

https://www.amazon.com/AOC-Computer-Processor-Laptops-Window...

Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and less storage and costs more and has less ports. Besides ray traced games what can the Neo do that the others can't? They'll take longer but they'll get there.

And if you're willing to go used? That $350 goes a lot further.

> Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and less storage and costs more and has less ports.

8GB on Apple Silicon is far better than 16 GB on Wintel, and I don't event trust the quality of 16GB of RAM on a bottom of the barrel Windows machine.

Would you prefer a machine that is still good 7 years from now with less ports, or one with more ports that you have to replace in 2 years? Yes it is more expensive now, but over 7 years it is an absolute bargain.

16 GB physical RAM is just better. Apple isn't magic. Gimme a break. Both devices have SSDs for fast swapping and have RAM compression. You can't spin up a VM that has 8GB RAM on the Neo, you can't load a large spreadsheet or do a decently sized digital painting. I could maybe buy a claim that 8GB is better on Mac than 8GB on Windows.

Why would you have to replace it in 2 years? How do we know Apple will even be offering updates to Neo in 7 years? Will 8GB still be usable in 7 years really? 8GB is barely on the fence already.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple drops the Neo from software support in less than 7 years.

The ThinkBook 14 Gen 6 at Costco for $380 has a single thread passmark score of 2800. The laptop I use to develop most of my SaaS products, with IDEs and claude open etc, has a score of 2000. I run Linux, but win10 iot runs fine on it too.

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