- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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I would be kinda impressed that Apple is finally offering something that’s good value, but 8GB of RAM? ehhhhhh. It’s probably still a decent-ish deal, I don’t really know how good a phone SoC would handle anything more than light tasks, though.
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.
The A18 Pro seems to be better than the M1 only at single core performance
Honestly I’m expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).
Unless you’re buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.
I don’t like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.
It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn’t surprise me given Apple’s laptop history
They were talking about memory not storage
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we’re pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi’s memory management wasn’t as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).
For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
I seriously doubt many people using this will be doing much video editing with 40 tabs open. Your expectations are unrealistic for the type of user who will be buying these.
Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.
Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.
It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.
This is a step backwards from M1 in terms of cores, core speed and bus speed. This is not going to feel like an m1 base even.
We’ll see when the reviews hit. It’d be pretty dumb for it to be worse than an M1 when older airs get discounted down to similar prices.
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
makes it really good value
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor.
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
So form factor, not hardware internals should be the deciding factor in cost?
To a degree, yeah.
The laptop form factor is engineered with lid and palmrest assemblies, if you’re going to compare the two then you’ll want to add a nice keyboard to that iPad. Apple’s is $270.
Apple’s is $270.
Typical Apple tax, completely unrelated to the few dollars a keyboard costs to make for real.
You’re not entirely wrong, in that the Apple Tax is real.
Nonetheless, the quality of the Magic Keyboard is substantially higher than that of a keyboard you can get for “few dollars”
Ultimately, your assertion was:
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air with a keyboard that matches the form factor and build quality of a MacBook Neo does not actually cost the same, it costs an additional $270.
The MacBook doesn’t have a touchscreen. It cancels the keyboard cost out.
They don’t even put touch ID on the entry model.
What something should be priced at is what the market is willing to pay for it. People are definitely willing to pay more for a MacBook than an iPad. Also there are similar spec’ed Chromebooks on the market that cost around the same price and people buy them. The Neo is competing with Chromebook.
You can’t really use an iPad as a laptop. The hardware exists and should work, but the software is awful.
It’s often several seconds to switch to Safari on my iPad Pro with M series chip. We’ve had app switching in computers for 40 years. Why can’t iPad do it?
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook
One has a keyboard (cheap components), the other has a touchscreen. The cost cancel each other out.
Better specs sure, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
In addition to being more locked down, you’d also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?
It’s an iPhone 16 with a MacBook shell
I mean if by shell you mean KVM then yes.
It’s a pretty good price for those peripherals plus the low end phone though
I wouldn’t consider it low end, early benchmarks put it in the range of M1 which surpasses Intels N-Series.
IMO it’s the perfect typewriter/frontline worker machine when personal computing is getting more expensive by the day
Yeah sorry I was thinking more of the other specs than the chip itself. As you say, a pretty good little A chip, I suspect the first real go to market one given M comparisons. Perfect as you say for heavy keyboard users.
Agree. Probably best notebook for students and also for smaller companies, if you’re not relying on high end hardware.
I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!
No, 8gb of RAM (obviously older DDR but still) and 256gb or storage.
Of course the CPU and other older components will be less powerful, but like… What do we use computers for now that we didn’t in 2017? AI? Oh nooooo, what will I ever do without local AI… It all works the same, at a pretty decent speed running Bazzite (cause I wanted to see how it ran games. It topped out at Skyrim Special Edition running at 15fps, did good at fallout New Vegas though).
I got a bargain, but say you can only get it now for double what I paid. That’s 1/6 the price. Why pay 600% more for a computer that’s not even that much better?
this MacBook is going to have 10x the battery life of your used laptop, and weigh less.
plus, it’s brand new so it has a warranty and doesn’t require people to spend time searching for a good deal.
this is an excellent product launch at a good price and it is gonna sell like hotcakes
Mine has a replaceable battery, in theory I can buy whatever quality level of battery I want :3
Again, 1200% the price.
You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?
Do those things warrant 6x the price? Or, in reality, 12x the price? Let’s be real here, the exact hardware specs down to material aside, is it?
Just to be clear in regard to your original comment:
600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You expect manufacturers to sell laptops for fifty bucks?
I expect people to be able to obtain a laptop for 50 or 100 bucks, which they apparently can. Manufacturers should have to reckon with that fairly, or lose business.
I want to destroy new device culture.
That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.
Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It’s GRIM out there.
Honestly, it might be a wakeup call for laptop vendors, or it might just put a lot of them out of business. This is not a good economy for them to suddenly have to compete with Apple on value…
They should have done so from the beginning. If they vanish because they waited too long to compete, so be it.
8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn’t great, but it’s not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn’t so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.
Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.
Reasonably priced Mac.
Phone CPU. Similar priced iPads come with a much better CPU.
Counterpoint: Phone CPUs can rival yesterday’s desktops.
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
If you honestly think these justify the crap CPU, you’re absolutely out of touch with reality.
Please enlighten me then, if you don’t mind. Are there some good benchmarks out there that show the Inadequacies of the A18 chip?
Please enlighten me then, if you don’t mind. Are there some good benchmarks out there that show the Inadequacies of the A18 chip?
I found several after only 30 seconds of googling, including Apple fans’ favorite benchmark: Geekbench multicore where the A18 is about 40% slower.
Isn’t it about 40% cheaper than the M4 CPU macbook ?
Isn’t it about 40% cheaper than the M4 CPU macbook ?
It’s 100% the same price as another portable M4 computer sold by Apple
But only run iPadOS, so they’re a glorified paperweight.
Regardless, I’m never buying another mac unless I can run asahi linux on it. Apple has progressively destroyed MacOS for the last 15 years, and will continue to do so. Most of Apples software design decisions are anti-consumer and monopolistic, and should be straight up illegal. Apple owns your device; not you.
It has comparable performance to laptop CPUs in its price bracket while being significantly more power efficient.
A18 Pro? Intel? Neither CPU is used in the MacBook Neo nor the 599 iPad.
A18 Pro? Intel? Neither CPU is used in the MacBook Neo nor the 599 iPad.
Did you read the post?
Did you read the post?
You replied to my post and I compared Apple hardware to Apple hardware.
They seem to just really hate Apple.
I’ve been running an M1 for years now. So tired of the argument that Mac is underpowered. No, it’s not a video editing/compiling/gaming powerhouse, but it more than makes up for it with an 8+ hour battery life, best-in-class display, and silent running, going on 5 years now.
It still handles everything I throw at it just fine. If I need to bust out the compute power, Mac just isn’t the right rig for it. But that doesn’t make them useless.
Looks interesting. I’d love to get one for my parents that insist on having a laptop for the keyboard, but they’re so afraid of learning anything new that it isn’t worth the hassle.
Something I’m still curious about: can these new ARM Apple devices run arbitrary software? Or do you have to install things via the App Store only?
Could Apple someday decide that you’re not allowed to install whatever software you want and only install their approved software?
A renewed interest in competing with Chromebooks?
Can’t complain. My kids need to use something beyond my 8 year old Surface.
This is the “let’s get the budget computer crowd using iCloud services” solution.
They can afford to sell at a loss if needed, because the onboard storage is just low enough to make NOT subscribing to cloud services painful after 6-8 months.
Exactly. Most of Apples software design decisions since the iPhone are anti-consumer and monopolistic, and should be straight up illegal.
Apple owns your device; not you.
a sane light in the replies
finally someone gets it
The MacBook 5C.
The Neo yellow color is awful. The 5C colors were fun because the plastic material made them look good.
If it had more memory I’d be on board. 8GB is fucking rough.
Honestly if it forces software to be leaner going down the line, I’m ok with memory crunches (it won’t, but I’m just thinking out loud).
I have a 13 year old MBP with twice as much RAM. It came with the same amount.
this laptop running Asahi would be a great entry level machine
ICYMI, the Neo is an even better deal at $499 with education pricing.
This right here. Everyone in this thread is looking for MBP use cases or a Linux PC or a second daily driver from a device that is CLEARLY designed to take foothold in the classroom. The $499 price point goes even lower for volume EDU sales. The company is not going to explicitly position this as a classroom device - it’s inherent through its spec limitations and even its packaging.
Now it’s a matter of how delicately they promote it with third party learning management tools, Google Classroom, Canvas, etc, or MDMs.
Does it run Linux?
/s or not
Probably not, at least not yet. The Asahi Linux project for Linux on Macs seems to only support the first few M chips to varying degrees. It’d be amazing if they got it working though!
I think it would be good for the industry. Windows had a stronghold in this price bracket and a competition is never bad especially considering how MS is pushing AI into W11.
So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.
Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!
Thanks to the amazing people over at Asahi Linux, you can on MacBooks too!
On some Mac books. With limitations.
It’s an amazing project, but outsiders might overestimate it’s status if you say it that way.
This one will not even boot in a long time.
There’s no reason for the average person to ever buy another windows device
Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn’t.
That doesnt mean the average person can just use Linux, you cant even buy a laptop with Linux from a standard store that people typically look for laptops in (like Amazon or best buy). If you have to convince people to go to a separate website, manually enter their card details, and pay a shipping fee of $116 along with import fees (yes this is a bit more specific to Tuxedo but my point stands). Regardless of which Linux brand you buy it typically takes 3-5 weeks for shipping. Meanwhile across the board the base price of Linux laptops are always higher than Windows devices (some OEMs like Lenovo hide this by giving a $100 discount but when you consider that Linux is generally only an option for custom orders the total cost is still higher than a non custom standard windows laptop).
There are quite a few listings for Linux computers on amazon now, granted most of them are in the premium range, >here is one in the mid range of prices with comparable specs to the new macbook
The amount is so insignificant that when filtering by OS it doesn’t even show up
That’s just because amazon doesn’t tag it correctly, there were easily 5 models when you just had Linux as a search term. And I also disagree that variety is necessary for laptop listings to be considered viable, it’s not like non technical people are even looking at specs anyway.
Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there’s no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there’s still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.
Kind of a weird example to say that people won’t online shop too. That’s far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.
