Apple is moving into Google's territory, cheap Chromebooks. The right move for Google is to aggressively move forward with their desktop OS and launch their line of laptops. The first pixel laptops had the best keyboards and trackpads ever. Google can nail this if they have the right product person. Apple needs some competition and the legacy PC makers won't cut it. Once again, it has to be Apple vs Google, same as Android vs iOS devices.
What’s actually going to happen is the second they start to lose market share or struggle at all, they will cancel everything Chromebook related and give up.
With that said, I think Chromebook’s still hold a competitive advantage for public school contracts. It doesn’t matter that the Neo is pretty cheap and the best value. Contracts are signed based on what’s cheapest, period.
Also, a big blind spot for a lot of HN: this is going to be big in developing Markets. This is within budget for middle class Latin Americans in a way that even the Air isn’t.
I think this is somewhat ignorant the wide variety of legitimately very decent Windows PC laptops available in the exact same $500-700 price range as the MacBook Neo.
Apple isn’t disrupting the industry here. Don’t buy into early influencer review hype. These reviewers don’t actually look at retail store pricing.
Apple is just making a decision to go downmarket and making many of the same compromises as other cheap laptops, and some odd compromises that are unique to Apple’s machine:
No haptic trackpad, no keyboard backlight, no Touch ID on the cheap model, lower-end screen, very small battery, tiny slow charger included, minimal and performance compromised I/O, below-par RAM, worse speakers/microphones, an old nothing-special processor.
This is the exact same stuff that people have complained about for years with cheap laptops.
The fact that the computer is made of aluminum is really a distraction from these facts.
This idea that it’s Google versus Apple all over again is just not true. Windows is the dominant OS in the laptop space by far. Over 900 billion people in the world play PC games on windows, for example.
If you look at Best Buy street pricing, what Apple has pulled off here is not that impressive.
Let’s say you want the top end Neo model at $699. Spend $100 more at Best Buy and you’ll end up with a Yoga 7 machine with double the RAM, double the storage (1TB), 70Whr battery, and a very capable and efficient AMD Ryzen 7 AI 350 chip that has faster multicore and same or faster graphics performance.
You’ll gain user-replaceable SSD, backlit keyboard, convertible OLED touch screen, digital pen support, more and faster USB ports, microSD slot, HDMI port, fast charger in the box, better speakers, WiFi 7, bigger screen in a more popular 14” size…it’s a better buy that will last years longer for only a slight price increase (or, spend less on the Ryzen 5 AI 340 variant ($680) if you’re okay with compromising GPU performance, which most people in this category are, and you’ll still end up with double the RAM of the Neo and 512GB storage at $20 less than Apple’s non-education store price)
- I don't think you're correct about the gulf in single core performance. On battery, the Cinebench 2024 scores (single core) of the Ryzen 7 AI 350 are 97% of the score you get from an M4 MacBook Air. (Cinebench is a lot better than GeekBench, IMO).
- Screen real estate does not equal resolution. Nobody is going to scale their MacBook Neo's smaller 13" screen down to take advantage of those pixels. I.e., if I have a 10 inch 8K screen that’s not really “more screen real estate” than a 27” 4K screen in practice. So the real question is whether the $500-800 user is a pixel hunter and loves smoother text at the expense of other purchase factors. IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling (e.g., 27" 4K monitors look worse in macOS than on Windows, which is why Apple goes with 5K)
- Yoga 7 video playback on battery actually beats the Neo at almost 17 hours.
- Yoga 7 office productivity rundown is very close at 10 hours 54 minutes, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at that coming slightly behind the MacBook Air:
You might prefer a different benchmark, but I am correct in the gulf on geekbench. I just looked at their benchmark results. For what it's worth, Geekbench is a lot better than Cinebench IMO, because it's more "real world".
> IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling
That is not my experience. I have run MacOS on monitors ranging from 43" down to 23", in various resolutions. MacOS looks great to me.
> 2.7 vs 3.1 pounds is insignificant
Well, it's 15% heavier. Whether that's significant is up to the carrier.
That one has a lower pixel density. 162 ppi for the Yoga vs 219 for the Neo. My MacBook Air M3 is 224 and I can't image going much lower, even for OLED. Maybe if I watched more videos.
IMO, macOS' strange scaling exacerbates issues with having PPI at the wrong ratio. macOS looks a lot worse on a 27" 4K monitor versus Windows, and is most ideally displayed at 5K.
I don't think anyone but the pickiest pixel hunters are going to mind the difference, and they'll enjoy the benefits of OLED like vastly improved contrast, HDR capability, and higher peak brightness than the Neo.
In case you need it, this is the next model up with the 350 processor. If you care about graphics performance it has double the cores, and the bigger SSD as I mentioned:
That means a LOT of students who the MacBook Neo appeals to will cross it off their list for the mere fact that they can’t play things like Counter Strike 2/CS:Go on it.
If I was a student today and only had $700 budget for all my equipment I’d probably end up with a previous generation Lenovo LOQ with the RTX 4050 or a current generation Acer Nitro with the RTX 5050. These laptops are thicker and heavier but they get decent battery life on integrated graphics for school work, then when I get back to my dorm I could play popular gaming titles without buying a separate game console.
I’m sure the Neo will sell well and increase Apple’s market share, but this idea that it’s a market-changing disruptive device is an exaggeration. The #1 laptop manufacturer in the world is Lenovo, who sells nearly 3x as many systems as Apple, who is in 4th place.
I think it will actually be quite trivial for manufacturers like Lenovo to respond and make their own similar model.
I would order a Lenovo laptop off X220 form factor (especially keyboard) and build quality on the spot - hell I’d order two since they don’t have a store in every major metro to get them replaced - but Lenovo have made trash since the early 2010s.
I'm not sure how you missed that the user you were responding to was poking a little bit of fun at you claiming that "over 900 BILLION" people play games on Windows.
That aside, it is also a bit funny that the Hacker News crowd's grand indictment of Mac gaming always uses the same examples of first person shooters that gained ascendancy when they were young. Meanwhile a teenager in 2026 is more likely to be upset that they can't play Fortnite on it - and that's besides the fact that many of the games that today's teenagers are excited to play (from Roblox to the Hollow Knight series to Baldur's Gate 3 to the recently released Slay the Spire 2 and more) are available on macOS. But one wouldn't know that from listening to people whose impression of both gaming and Macs is stuck firmly in ~2015.
I think it'd be great if they did that, but Google is pretty willing to cut things that aren't working out, whereas for Apple, they are committed to making and selling laptops
