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Comment by RZelaya | Hacker News Reader

Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.

I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.

My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year

I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

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The price thing is really true.

My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.

Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.

So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.

Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.

For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

> The price thing is really true.

No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.

Agreed. For programming , Linux > Mac, but Mac > Windows.

Using both Linux (at home) and Mac (at work), the differences are small for development. But my dev stack is basically just Neovim & CLI tools.

That said, I’ll never work on Windows. 15ish years ago I did some .net work. C# was a fun language but development on windows is a special kind of torture.

Anything in particular that your Linux experience adds over what is available on macOS?

For anyone else for whom the context clues were not enough, 1 lakh NR = 100,000INR

> The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully.

This is a really interesting insight! Never would have thought of that.

It hurts, but I'll pay a premium for worse hardware that will run Linux. But for others in my family Macbooks are just far better value by a wide margin than Windows laptops. Vertical integration really wins these days.

This seems to be key. People must want Windows or Linux so badly they will pay 25-30% for a thinkpad with a track pad that is almost as good. Don't these manufacturers sell more machines than Apple and could benefit from better economies of scale. Maybe the scale is just at the low end and the iPhone subsidizes premium Mac hardware.

I have yet to read about someone who priced out something "as good" as the MacBook Air in terms of component quality and efficiency. What would the price premium be... over 50%?

Either way it costs money to avoid macOS at the higher end but not much when you’re spending thousands of US dollars.

> People must want Windows or Linux so badly they will pay 25-30% for a thinkpad

Yup, I got Thinkpad X9, the idea being "Air 15 but with Windows". It does the job. I still think Air 15 is better (and cheaper), but the software compatibility and not needing to switch platforms outweighs that.

I love my 15 Air (M2). I’m curious how the Air 15 is better in a way that may or may not be available as an upgrade in the X9 or some other option.

Better SoC, no spinning fans. Also the screen won't die after 2 years of light mode usage.

The remaining stuff... I'd say Lenovo has caught up for the most part.

Yeah, I'm waiting for the panther lake (or similar) ones to become mainstream and I'll get a higher end laptop with those next. The latest framework once they open their parts marketplace in india is my first choice for now.

I've been wondering for a while, how much of macos can you strip out and still run a VM with something like linux in it?

Ideally passing through as much of the hardware as possible, and booting right into that config. Running it natively is ideal, but projects like Asahi are forced to play catch up porting another OS to new devices.

Probably as good as that can get is something like WSL. Microsoft put a lot into that but still not the same as just using Linux. I wish Apple / MS would do the opposite and build their OS on top of Linux but of course that will never happen.

There was another article, I think it was the Dell making a MacBook Neo competitor, but it came up about second hand Macs not costing a lot now either.

Presumably because the Neo sets a new low price boundary, used M1s Macbook Airs are only a couple of hundred pounds. For a system that is still really competitive.

I bought my parents a M1 iMac in 2021. Connected a drive to it for Time Machine. Set up an admin account and wrote its password on a sticky note. Set up auto update. Gave a 5 minute instruction.

I haven’t had to look at it for 5 years now. It’s still 200% more powerful than what they need.

As a “power user” Apple’s recent output has been frustrating. But for casual users it’s an unbeatable ecosystem.

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