Honestly same, I’ve got a 16gb Macbook Air m2 I bought new a few months ago, and frankly, even if m4 is the first tier to fully kick out 8gb, I’m glad that the Neo means this focus on lower resource use will continue.

What I do suspect though is once all the Neo stock is depleted, they’ll either discontinue the whole line or make a new one with some stockpiled a19 chips, but I’m not sure which one… I guess we’ll have to wait and see!

you’re right, and I’d personally pick from a one, but realisticaly, if someone only just needs a laptop and doesn’t really know what to get, where to get it, why to get that specific one, etc, then I don’t think they’d even know second hand sellers can be reputable in the first place.

My mother for instance, she bought an Acer Aspire Go for around $550 AUD from one of our large consumer electronics stores (not sure but I think it was Officeworks),so she can do all her important stuff on, think appointments, setting up debit cards, tracking orders, etc. She didn’t want anything used or refurbished, since her view of such is that, if she bought one used or refurbished, it’ll be barely held together, half broken, probably someone bit part of the corner off, and so on.

if I were her, I would’ve just gotten a cheap refurb Thinkpad, but seeming that its at least somewhat common for non-tech literate people to think it’s scary to get into the second hand market, most would simply rather choose large consumer electronics store chains. Maybe this issue is just because of the tangibility, where you can walk into a store and physically hold the laptops and assess them, rather than the online only nature of the second hand market, unless there is a rare physical store for refurb and used tech.

the reason I said the price was low is simply because IT IS for what you’re getting, especially where I live. This Macbook Neo starts at $900 AUD, and after checking local retailers like Officeworks, JB HI-FI and Centrecom, and from what I’ve found, the laptops at that same or similar price tag are usually worse performing, plastic built laptops with worse displays. Sure, some come with 16gb of shared SODIMM memory, but a majority come with 8gb. Around a third of them are Chromebooks, the rest are windows laptops. Most come with core i3 or i5 or Ryzen 3, 5 or 7.

For the Macbook Neo, which you can preorder from these retailers for around that 900 bucks, you get a rigid aluminium build, a solid high PPI screen, 8gb of unified LPDDR5X memory, a better SoC than the competition, guaranteed OS support for around 7 years, strict OS memory compression and management, and some pleasant colours compared to the drab grey and uncreative black colours.

RAM is never the only factor when choosing to buy a laptop, its all the other factors as well, those of which people miss and happen to get a laptop where the hinge breaks a year after, or the shared memory puts limits on their workflow and forces the CPU to work more copying data between two pools, or the display has shitty viewing angles that make it hard to look at, or an short accidental drop renders the machine inoperable, or even overuse of the ports cause them to fail, but they’re soldered on and render that function of the device useless.

There are so many reasons to bag Apple, but you gotta hand it to them, they know how to standardise and have demonstrated that their devices are designed to weather being used well. And sure, you can definitely buy something a lot cheaper with a hell of a lot more ports, but its likely these ports in the Neo will be modular, since all ports are modular in the Airs, Pros, Mac Minis and Mac Studios.

that’s pretty awesome that your store repurposed old tech with a solid reason to do so, and frankly people constantly bag old tech for being old, even though most of the time it can still fulfill most of what they need, and I’m saying that as I type this on the aforementioned 10 year old laptop, a laptop of which I bought off a friend for $10 AUD because he got a new one because it felt shit using this one, mainly since it was on an old windows 10 install with a ton of bloat.

What my point was in the previous comment was not that you should avoid modularity, other brands or used tech, rather I was stating that people in these threads are constantly overblowing the point of 8gb of unified memory being the only tier, since most of us game, design, self host or do other things which can be quite demanding, but web browsing, document editing and the many other use cases for this Macbook Neo would barely phase it, just like how the machine I’m typing this on right now is cool to the touch and hasn’t stuttered at all since boot around 2 hours ago.

and shit, If I needed a laptop right now and had to buy new, if there was an option a little more expensive for something with slightly worse build quality and performance, so I can have modularity, I’d snap that up, but these days its damn difficult to beat apple in the new tech market. The Mac Mini was probably the first stupidly affordable Apple machine, then the MacBook Air (which now sorta lost its edge since apple just price gated it by making 512gb storage minimum,) and now this Macbook Neo, all happening through a RAM shortage where consumers are benefiting from Apple’s excessively long hardware contracts, mainly for the LPDDR5X chips.

I haven’t read up a huge lot on the benchmarks of it, but from what I’ve heard I think that’s right.

On the ram front, I’ve heard it’s just a limitation of the a18 pro chipset, not Apple being stingy, as that chipset can only support up to 8gb of ram total.

Also, apparently the a18 pro is similar to the m1 in terms of performance, which the base m1 beat out the core i9 9880H, which was the processor of the most powerful MacBook Pro pre-Apple silicon, so the a18 pro would likely be able to do a lot more than light browsing and document editing, although the limiting factor is unfortunately the 8gb of ram that just can’t be expanded.

For the target audiences, people just buying a low cost laptop for browsing as well as students, it’s unlikely the common person wouldn’t go directly to Apple to get the newest product. There will definitely be some who opt to get older second hand tech instead, but the vast majority would rather get something they have assurance is brand new and in fully working condition.

Personally, if I needed a laptop, I’d weigh my options both in first party offerings as well as the second hand market, and I’d probably come to the conclusion to just buy two broken laptops and combine them, but it’s rare to find someone who’s willing to splice two computers together for university or high school they’re going to in a month or so, and even if it’s more common, it’s still rare to find someone willing to dive head first into the second hand market when they don’t know how to check for fake listings, horrible deals and genuine bargains, which is why most opt for buying directly from manufacturers or from consumer electronics stores.

I don’t get the complaining about the amount of ram, this is intended for students and other people with less demanding workflows. If it doesn’t fit your specific workflow, it’s fine, it’s just not for you, it’s just like people hating on Chromebooks because you can’t play ray traced cyberpunk on it or edit 4K video without stuttering.

There’s also the fact that macOS memory management is simplified due to having a singular memory pool between all processors, as well as the aggressive memory compression.

And those of you saying “8gb isn’t even enough for web browsing”, how? I’m using a decade old ex-school laptop on a daily basis, with 4gb of soldered DDR4 and a celeron n4100, I have I’d say around 30 tabs open at once and switch probably a couple hundred times in a period of around 5 hours, fully sustaining an interior design course with only a few very rare stutters.

There’s also the fact I’ve heard from many base model MacBook Air m1 users that it barely ever hitches, one of those is my sister, her workflow is heavy image editing, video editing and other design work, she has not had a single issue with it, and that’s with the bloated adobe suite.

And people misunderstand the reasons Apple solders their memory, sure it’s firstly to lock the consumer into a specific tier, but it’s also so their unified memory architecture can work as flawlessly as possible. You can’t add SODIMMs or LPCAMM modules to a MacBook, just like how you cant either with a strix halo APU just like Framework demonstrated, inconsistent signal integrity causes enough issues that it isn’t commercially viable.

Sure, I’d love Apple to make modular memory a thing for their Macs, but quite frankly, I doubt they can even achieve it without any compromises. There’s also the fact that I’d love if Apple could’ve put 16gb of unified memory into the MacBook neo with no raise in price, but realistically, the chipset design they chose, the a18 pro, only supports up to 8gb, and quite frankly they would never achieve a better price today while also designing it to handle a dozen memory tiers, as either they’d need to choose an M series chipset or design a dozen different types of A series packages with some future chipset that doesn’t exist right now, defeating the purpose of having a low price. The low price isn’t just due to the external design choices, it’s also because they chose to only build a single package, an 8gb a18 pro, which would reduce costs overall for the model as manufacturing can just scale, not increase in complexity.

I don’t mind if you downvote, it’s just a bunch of gripes I have with the overall reaction about this frankly pretty awesome new product offering, even if I don’t really like Apple a whole lot.

deleted by creator

Both. Both is good.

Ultra mega hyperfixating on one very specific piece of technology for days on end, then burning out lmao

We should all explore more, not stay stuck in a bubble of 6 or so megacorp websites that take most of the worlds traffic.

The internet is distributed, with billions of websites that are all unique.

Even if it’s difficult to find new websites to look at, then choose a different internet medium such as dark net browsers such as tor and i2p to explore the more privacy respecting web, or on the lighter side, go for geminispace or gopher browsers like Lagrange to explore the un-corporatised early internet style web.

It’s hard to explore when you don’t know where to look.

The algorithms in these social media services don’t care about you actually wanting to watch the video or see the content in general, instead they hyperfixate on if you took 0.02 seconds longer before scrolling to the next one compared to the previous scrolls, to determine what should be shown.

For example, if your interests are exclusively in random gadgets and trinkets for example, but then it shows you a video of an onlyfans promotion, you may accidentally pause in confusion, then scroll, unknowingly triggering the algorithm to keep showing you onlyfans promotions despite you not wanting that.

And it’s the same if it’s offensive or triggering, the algorithm decides to keep showing you such content so it can stun you into staying in the app longer.

This is why I’ve decided to outsource my social media use to lemmy and geminispace BBS boards, because sure instagram can be enjoyable a lot of the time, but if you use it excessively, it’s damaging.

Also, pro tip: if you don’t use Insta for a month or so, it decides to show you the best content possible to try getting you hooked again, but once you get to a video which isn’t awfully enjoyable, close it and forget about it for another month. Mileage may vary but it works for me somehow, even if I’m likely to be AuDHD

Soooo, the metaverse paid plots? I swear, every company with even an inkling of a 3d environment now just wants to “build” and sell worthless plots as if it’s real land, and literally nobody who uses these actually fucking asked.

Didn’t think I’d cross digital necromancy off my bingo card!

And the classic “I just took it out of my bag and it was like that”

I’m fine with it as a whole, but what grinds my gears about it is how everybody has to ask “who’s your valentine?” every year, as though they’re forced to at gunpoint.

Sure, when I eventually get into a relationship, I’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day because it’s actually a really nice premise (apart from the consumerism of course), but currently, I really don’t care to celebrate it, I’m just starting uni currently and id rather focus on that lol.

The funny thing is that I’m actively making Spotify lose money for me, I use ad blockers on desktop which entirely bypass the ads and I close the iOS app when I hear an ad (they won’t count it as an ad watched until you see the whole thing, which I never)

Yeah I fully agree. Even worse, millions of students being given crappy Chromebooks really built a culture of despising the entire platform, which spread elsewhere. It’s just like iPhone users writing off android phones because “they’re cheap trash,” when all they’ve looked at are supermarket prepaids.

And yeah, high quality Chromebooks are prevalent too, it’s just you need to know where to look. I’ve personally been quite interested in the Lenovo Chromebook plus 14, since it’s really a good look into how, despite the unsavoury reputation of the Chromebook brand, it is actually a really nice arm based laptop with MacBook like build quality, great screen, and has incredible battery life, although I do hate how arm Chromebooks are completely locked to google firmware without a proper way to run anything else on it.

What is actually deplorable though is the fact some companies still sell 16gb eMMC Chromebooks, which isn’t even enough for simple school tasks that aren’t exclusively browser based. I’d say 32gb eMMC is a much easier pill to swallow since you can actually store at least something without having updates be its slow agonising death

Absolutely depends on the use case.

Are they buying a new computer to be a jack-of-all-trades? Simple, they should get either a windows computer or a Mac that suits their needs, depending on what they’re comfortable with and what gets you a better price to quality ratio.

Are they on an old computer of specs that are good enough for today? I’d say either windows or Linux, depending on what software they’ll need to use.

Are they on an old computer of not the best specs? Either Linux or (trigger warning) chromeOS flex, since both can certainly revive an old computer, and this again depends on what they’ll need to use but also what UX they want.

Are they buying something new for a simple workflow? I’d say a Chromebook, sure many of them are shit, but frankly, if all you need is web browsing and maybe some android and Linux apps through the VM containers, it’s actually alright, even despite it being google based vendor lock-in. They also have a decade of support as standard iirc, and if it has issues, the reset functionality is actually incredibly easy.

Bare in mind, all of these have downsides and upsides, different visibility to the general, non tech savvy public, and different hardware, software, compatibility, etc.