[no_wizard]

I’m not shocked in the slightest. Great price point for younger folks to buy or be given as a gift, the build quality is good for what it is and it is snappy for most uses.

It’s many years too late IMO but I suppose the economics only made sense once they controlled their own chipset. I imagine doing this in the intel days would have been a far worse choice

[OskarS]

Not even young people: I have a very expensive MacBook Pro M5 i got from work, but my personal laptop is old and needs replacing. I’m a well-paid senior software developer and could afford any computer I wanted. But the MacBook Neo is a top contender even for me. I mostly need something for like editing documents, hobby coding and watching YouTube videos. It runs Codex or Gemini-CLI fine. For the price point, it seems perfect for a second computer. I could pay premium prices for something better, but honestly: I don’t think I need to.

[hadlock]

The fact that everything bolts together inside like a ThinkPad and there's no glue means it's highly repairable. I've been looking at getting one as well, they're almost too good, I'm worried apple will revert to gluing things together as they're user repairable, which means they ought to last nearly forever. I've been eyeballing one as well, I would prefer the higher end air or pro but being able to take the whole thing apart with a single screwdriver is very appealing.

[800xl]

Agree. I could afford "better" but the Neo suits my needs perfectly and I don't like expensive laptops that are prone to damage and theft. Dollar for dollar it is the best computer I've ever bought.

[nyadesu]

I second this, MacBook Neo is a good balance between a cheap and more than good enough machine that you can carry in your backpack everywhere

The fact that I'm not carrying a +1k USD machine all the time gives me peace of mind

[Aperocky]

Hell, I have a personal macbook m4 pro and I still wanted one.

I got the m4 pro when it first got out, but on restrospect I really should have gotten either:

1. A max spec max + 128GB ram for local models. 2. an air with 15 inch for max comfort.

And I settled in the middle regret land.

[whazor]

With remote virtual machines running Codex, your Mac is only rendering terminals.

[fastball]

Seems to be right on time. Hard to justify putting a mobile chip in your laptop until performance has reached a certain threshold.

[benoau]

It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

[microtonal]

I had one, but even for those days it had a mediocre screen, mediocre keyboard, mediocre CPU, and mediocre slow storage. The MacBook Neo has none of that.

[Telaneo]

I have one. They were never fit for purpose for anything beyond reading email, watching 360p Youtube (back then, not so much now), and browsing very basic sites. I guess maybe Flash games were also on the table. The Celerons and Atoms in those machines were comparable to Pentium IIIs. There's a reason the Netbook was a fad. Most people discovered they didn't enjoy using them, while they not long after discovered that they did enjoy using these fancy new smartphone thingies.

[lowbloodsugar]

Hilarious comparison. I bought one. Unusable garbage. Tiny screen. Unusably slow. 8 second battery. Awful keyboard.

[benoau]

...and yet this sparked a revolution called netbooks that took over a full 20% of the laptop market at their peak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

[doubled112]

They sold well. In my experience working at Staples at that time, small and cheap beat any other consideration for many customers. Hard to argue with a $99 PC.

A few months later, they'd realize it wasn't working out, come back, scream at us, and buy something bigger and faster.

I really liked the MSI one I had, but I knew what I was getting into.

[vel0city]

Yes, a ton of people bought them. Then they took them home and used them. Then they bought something else.

Now we don't really have mass-production netbooks anymore.

[regularfry]

Part of that was incidental factors. The 701 happened partly because of a glut of cheap, standardised screens designed for that first generation of in-car dashboard sat-nav systems.

It didn't help that those screens weren't particularly good.

[fragmede]

Even Apple made an 11" laptop in that era!

[lowbloodsugar]

I mean, I did buy one =)

[baal80spam]

You must be joking. I had Eee PC, and it was terrible.

[brianwawok]

Every school I know of is deep in the Chromebook pot. These are fairly bad computers, Neo would be a big upgrade. But I suspect it would be years for school systems to even evaluate this.

[PaulHoule]

It's no accident that they are bad computers. They aren't "fit for purpose" unless they are too weak to play Krunker.

[thewebguyd]

Kids also destroy them every year. They need to be bad, and the absolute cheap pieces of crap possible because kids will throw them against walls and destroy them on purpose.

"Can it run google classroom, can we lock it down, and is it $300 or less" are the only things that matter.

[geodel]

Not related to this discussion. But kids destroying school computers wantonly is expected? Is there no cost associated for destroying property on students or their parents?

[thewebguyd]

Yes, its expected. As for recovery, depends on the school district. Early on during COVID, it was basically a free for all because, well, if you didn't have one you wouldn't be participating in school remotely, and for some families they wouldn't be able to afford a replacement, best to just give the kids a new one.

Some districts (including my local one where I live) are now charging a "tech fee" but given these devices are still mandatory to participate, they don't withhold if they can't collect from the parents, which collection still remains a problem.

Another district near me does a keep your own device program, each student is issued a chromebook and it becomes theirs after they graduate, which seemed to have helped a little bit knowing they have to use that same device for 4 years and it becomes their own after.

edit My own solution would be just make sure the devices can't leave the classroom. Letting kids take them home is a huge part of the problem, but schools are now totally reliant on assignments being done digitally instead of just sending kids home with a textbook and worksheets.

[LgWoodenBadger]

I think the "keep it after 4 years" program is to eliminate a huge disposal/recycling cost from the schools. A 4 year old ChromeBook is effectively worthless, and can't (shouldn't) just be thrown in the garbage.

What better way to save than to push that cost out to your students' families, all while selling it as a positive?