Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
Plastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
High quality for their time. The toilet bowl was very heavy for its screen size, and had minimal volume for battery. The G3 iBook lacked rigidity, and had a tendency to damage the mainboard if picked up from a corner. The G4 iBook had grounding issues, and would occasionally get spicy with two-prong outlets. All three of these issues were directly related to the plastic chassis. All three were great laptops for their day; none would be acceptable in this decade.
There’s nothing wrong with plastic as a material, but there’s a lot wrong with many of the designs of mid-tier laptops that happen to use plastic. The plastic isn’t as much a cause of their problems as it is a signature feature of all hastily assembled corner-cut devices.
It's made of metal and is sturdy. I've taken it on 2 trips (including international), it's all good and still feels like new but to be fair I don't abuse it. For traveling I put it into a regular backpack that has a laptop sleeve, I don't use extra packing.
The track pad is of course not as good as Apple's but it's good enough where it's not in the way and feels ok to use.
The brightness and battery life both fall into the same category of they haven't negatively impacted me in my day to day. For example a few hours of dev work in the park with the sun out hasn't been a problem for both battery life or visibility.
You are right in that I don't value battery life as a top tier feature. ~5 hours of "real work" is enough because if you need extended battery life for doing intensive tasks away from human civilization you can always keep a power bank on hand for extended usage. If you're not out in the middle of no where, access to a power outlet is readily available.
> A much larger laptop with less than half the number of display pixels is not really the same market. And how's that battery life?
Yes, the display isn't as good but the Neo with 512 GB of storage is already $700 and has half the storage of the other laptop. The Neo also has 8 GB of RAM vs 32 GB. Big differences IMO.
Battery life is "good enough" but not great. It really depends on what you're using it for. If you're doing CPU bound tasks a lot, it's not going to last as long. I guess a takeaway is I was never in a situation where I had to change my behaviors because of the battery life. Unless you're planning to be out in the middle of no where without a power bank for an extended period time doing workload intensive tasks it's fine.
Likewise, the display being only 1080p isn't as bad as you would think. I'd be surprised if anyone is running their 13" Neo at 2408 x 1506 at native scaling. That would be 219 PPI. For reference I run a 4k 32" monitor at native 1:1 scaling and that's 138 PPI. It would be bonkers to consider using 219 PPI from a normal viewing distance. Most scaled resolutions with the Neo would be effectively 1080p resolution but with sharper text.
You're not in the market for a netbook-type machine if this is the case.
> but with sharper text.
Text huh? Sounds important.
> Battery life is "good enough" but not great.
So, do you want a lightweight client / light productivity machine with tons of battery life, great text, and a kickass trackpad? Or an affordable workstation replacement? Different markets.
What you’re missing is that the target market for this devices — the casual laptop user — DGAF about memory or storage if it is at the expense of the directly observable user experience.
Few people want or need 32gb of RAM, nor give a shit about what it even means. Most people just want to run MS Word and Google Chrome and maybe TurboTax.
Also Apple are masters of the up-sell. Someone who knows $600 windows laptops are crap might just buy a cheaper Chromebook because crap is crap, but they might spring for another few hundred bucks for something they have confidence is actually pretty nice and has brand Caché.
My M4 Air was $750 on black friday 2025. I bought it after I cracked the screen on my M1 and the cost to repair was half the cost of the much newer computer.
The problem has always been no direct "I want a Mac but Windows" laptop - before the switch to the M1 the best way to get a "Mac quality laptop" that ran windows was to put windows on a Mac.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
Microsoft could probably put Windows on the M series macs if they wanted to. Windows for ARM exists, and Apple very specifically made the bootloader unlockable on the Apple Silicon laptops.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
Microsoft Surface laptops are the closest you can get to a "Mac with Windows" in quality/thought (that I've found) and the ARM CPU not being able to use x86 printer drivers is infuriating.
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.