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Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

>I really don't see the market fit for this,

Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? Especially considering you can install linux on it natively.

Other then that, Gemini is the biggest advantage. Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits.

Overall, if you are in Android ecosystem, you don't really even need a cheap laptop anymore, considering things like Samsung Dex exist.

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> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price?

What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?

Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.

Kompanio Ultra Chromebooks are faster and have a touch screen for use as a tablet or developing mobile-friendly apps. No point in a MacBook Air.

> Kompanio Ultra Chromebooks are faster

Lol. There is zero chance the low end mobile phone SoC shipped in those is remotely as fast as a six year old M1. Even flagship SoCs from qualcomm and samsung still do not exceed it's performance yet.

> Lol. There is zero chance the low end mobile phone SoC shipped in those is remotely as fast as a six year old M1.

Go look up some benchmarks, the Kompanio Ultra 910 is very comparable in speed to the Apple M1.

It's not really a "low end mobile phone SoC" - it's a Chromebook-specific chip with Cortex-X925 and Cortex-X4 cores.

Cortex-C1-based SoCs are faster but only available in phones to date, which gives them less thermal room.

Anecdotally, I own both an M1 and a Kompanio Ultra 910 device, and they feel subjectively very similar from a performance standpoint.

You're right. It's faster. It's an M2 class chip.

What the cost of these Kompanio Ultra 910 based chromebooks? like > $800?

$700 MSRP.

> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power

I pre-ordered a Neo on a whim to use as a couch laptop alongside my work laptop and gaming computer. It's so fast. It blows everything out of the water when it comes to interactivity.

Plus the whole build quality, screen, touchpad and speakers are all so much better than the work Latitude. Linux support is lacking, but it's still a full usable Unix.

> Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits

Good point, that could work. Buy this and you get so many years of Gemini for free and such. "Why pay Anthropic $200/month for Claude when you can buy this and get Gemini for free for a few years". OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to make their own devices most likely either to compete.

Having seen how people managed to run Cyberpunk 2077 on the Neo with okayish frame rates I don't think there's a single ARM laptop out there that could deliver that performance on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Surface Pro 11 is slighly more than Neo and runs cyberpunk.

iirc getting Linux to work on Surfaces is messy though?

These things are $250?! Where did you find that info?

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