[2001zhaozhao]

I think Apple's cost efficiency advantages are really compounding now and it'll get increasingly hard for competitors to catch up. Everything they put in the product is either in-house or benefit from their scale and negotiating power.

In the MacBook Neo's case, everything from the in-house chipset and scale (for stuff like aluminum body) and the more RAM-efficient software is working in its favor. I'd bet that a different laptop manufacturer will struggle to make a profit at all if they made a $599 Neo-equivalent product with lower scale, having to pay for chips and Windows licenses, and having to put in 12GB of RAM instead of 8 to get a similar user experience.

[adgjlsfhk1]

I think the clear demonstration of this is how small Apple's motherboard is for the neo (and other M series) compared to everyone else). It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently. If you cap your chips TDP such that it can be cooled passively, you save money on heatsink, fan, vents, power circuitry (e.g. fewer capacitors), battery size, etc.

[philistine]

You are so right, and I blame some of the thinking on this very website. People are adamant that they need to upgrade the RAM, change the storage, and replace the battery on their laptops. Adamant. All that means that you need a separate memory controller, a separate this and that. It adds up, and PC makers are forced to put in a fan.

On its face, it doesn't sound stupid at all. The thinking that you need to be able to upgrade and maintain your laptop sounds elegant. But those people, they never argue that they must be able to change the CPU. Why not? It used to be that upgrading the CPU in a laptop was a common occurence. Why don't they throw a fit that they can't upgrade the CPU?

Because technology caught up with them. CPUs are now soldered on the board, for multiple very good reasons. Coupled with the fact that a good CPU is good enough for a very long time, and no one feels the need to upgrade their CPU on a laptop. Same thing with the math co-processor, no one's arguing to be able to change that!

[pryce]

> Because technology caught up with them..... a good CPU is good enough for a very long time

This is an excellent point but surely it lampshades that the exact opposite case is true for RAM. How many of apple's laptops become unusable when we know they would be fine for years more with the single addition of increasing the ram? Aside from those ruined by physical damage, it feels to me that this is the way the majority of those devices end their productive life years earlier than they would with a single change.

My opinion regarding RAM is meant to in no way dispute your excellent points about CPU soldering.

[philistine]

You're right that more RAM would help when RAM is already low. But a good amount of RAM is good enough for a long time. But Apple solders its RAM directly on the chipset nowadays. Again, not because they're preventing you from upgrading; because that's the way they decided to achieve the performance they want without having to over-engineer their logic boards.

[HatchedLake721]

It’s not this websites thinking, it’s every tech person’s thinking.

Apple is an example of great consumer focus vs tech requests of “but I want to run Kubernetes on my iPad it’s powerful enough”.

That’s thanks to Steve Jobs. iPhone was a #1 smartphone for a decade without ever mentioning the RAM or CPU MHz in the announcements or marketing material. Even if there was less RAM or worse specs than the Snapdragon at the time, iPhone was still faster and sold more.

This philosophy is still at the core of Apple.

I wish more companies worked this way, but I don’t know anyone even close.

[MYEUHD]

> Even if there was less RAM or worse specs than the Snapdragon at the time, iPhone was still faster and sold more.

iPhone had worse display for a _very_ long time.

The Galaxy S1 had an OLED display. It took Apple 7 years to introduce that technology in their premium lineup, and 10 years to introduce it to their regular lineup.

[alsetmusic]

> The Galaxy S1 had an OLED display.

A quick web search told me that this was introduced in 2010 (could be Google AI lying, I didn't look further). If that's accurate, there's really no comparison. A better screen on an OS that was catching up at the time… I'm not really sure when Android became a good competitor, but I don't think it was quite there in 2010.

I remember trying out Android tablets at a store ~2017. They were all trash. I couldn't believe it. I don't know where they are now, but IMO both the iPhone and the iPad shipped with high quality 1.0 software, despite deficiencies like a lack of copy/paste on iPhone 1.0.

Other companies were shipping devices with lackluster software for a good amount of time. Android became a real smartphone OS a long time ago. I assume it's reasonable on tablets today. But there was a period of time where it was a pretty terrible regardless of hardware specs. Kinda like the iPad now.

[HatchedLake721]

You make my point

[cogman10]

What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.

It's not the upgradable ram, cpu, or storage which is eat into the power consumption budget. Instead, it's the interface and the standard that can become dated. Apple gets to choose all the voltages and interfaces for each generation which allows for a tightly coupled integration with their firmware and hardware all around. A PC user is stuck with the likes of ACPI and UEFI coordinating everything. And of course, they have to play with the current DDR standard of the time which may not give the power profile they want.

However, the benefit of the PC route is that there is really no EOL for the hardware/firmware support. A 20 year old computer can run an operating system with the 7.2 linux kernel perfectly fine. Your IPad from that era is a brick. You can't do anything with it. But your laptop from that era? You can slap in a brand new SSD and it'll accept it and boot up just fine. (The one caveat is you'll be SOL if you have an nvidia device).

[Marsymars]

> What I'm adamant about being able to upgrade is my software. The big problem with the apple ecosystem is that, while they've been pretty good about it, you are still at their mercy to receive regular software and operating system updates. Once apple is done with your hardware, that's it, you own an insecure brick.

The insecure bricks hold their value weirdly well though, so if you care about the software limits, you can just sell at the end of the term to someone who doesn't, and it makes up for you not being able to keep the hardware longer yourself. Like I just sold off a low-spec 2012 macbook and 2013 iPad Air for a combined $140.

[oneplane]

What are you even talking about. Every M1 Mac and earlier runs Linux. Even all the way back to PowerPC.

Granted, the M1 and up are not 100% covered yet (driver-wise), but they aren't EOL either. And if they were, Linux would still run anyway. Take a 20 year old Mac and you'll run Linux just fine. 10 year old Mac, Linux still runs fine. Take an M1 and it's a joy to use with Linux. Taken an M2 and it will boot and you can be pretty sure it will run very well long before it's EOL too. And even if it's EOL, it's not going to prevent you from running Linux later.

As for the PC example: definitely EOL problems there. Try getting your EDK2-based UEFI stack patched on an old computer. At some point you won't be getting certificate updates and if you either forget to install a local override or if the vendor didn't add it, you're SOL, especially on laptops where you can't disable secure boot.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Counterpoint: storage and ports should be upgradable. Ram and CPU both last forever, but drives die and ports wear out.

[Telaneo]

> It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently.

I'm sure they would understand, if you could show them the equivalent 25 watt x86 part. If you find one at 25 watts or lower, it'll be too slow to really bother with. And if it uses much more power than that, then a fan quickly becomes mandatory. It's easier to excuse having a fan than having a processor that's just dog slow.

[naikrovek]

There are 15W intel CPUs and .. they suck. Idle, windows and corporate “stuff” will put that at 75% utilization with no input from the user other than simply logging on. And the fan starts about 30s in and never stops. It’s embarrassing for intel.

[Telaneo]

And it's not much better on the AMD side! Like, the closest thing they have is the APU they put in the Steam Deck, which has a fan! I'm sure it would be a bit better if you put that thing in an aluminum body, so the heat can dissipate better, but after you've installed Windows on it, forget it.

I can kind of imagine a world where a suitably low-power Intel or AMD chip can exist; they've got good engineers and can probably do it if they put their minds to it, but that chip will be next to useless without a Windows that won't throw out half the chip's potential before you've even started a program.

[naikrovek]

I have a Windows ARM pc at work (in a drawer) and it is much better on power.

The problem is that they shrank the battery so windows has the same 2hr battery life. Dumbest decision ever, Dell. Dumbest decision ever.

[mywittyname]

I think they understand, but they are also building machines that need to run Windows + pre-installed bloatware without being so obviously bogged down no the sales floor that no one buys them.

[hypercube33]

Microsoft was considered the competitor and they lack in house phone dev which the neo is built on, no chip of their own etc. Everyone else is stuck with whatever the market gives them for CPU/GPU and probably less buying power on SSD and Ram. Then we have the operating system that has its own minimum requirements to work smoothly and for windows I don't really think 8gb total system memory is going to cut it.

[davnicwil]

I agree and I think the most concrete demonstration of this for me is actually the current air.

It's basically the idea of the pro of 10 years ago but realised flawlessly, and improved upon actually in most ways, for significantly cheaper.

To do this they had to become an execution machine at huge scale to own and solve every piece that held them back in that pro design, and they did, and it's honestly amazing how it all came together.

[hulitu]

> It really seems like the PC makers don't understand the benefits of low power chips sufficiently

We do. But we have to do work also. There is a difference between running a simulation in 10 minutes instead of 1 hour.

[bombcar]

The phone makers aren’t making phones that are laptops. Apple is.

Part of this is the windows ARM not being where it needs to be, but part of it is lack of imagination.

[hulitu]

> The phone makers aren’t making phones that are laptops. Apple is.

Yet we need computers, not phones.

[frollogaston]

They make passively cooled Windows laptops too, but doing that with Intel or AMD means having something very slow.

[trvz]

They did a smaller one with an Intel CPU in the 2015 Macbook.

There’s just no good low power x86 CPU.

[lxas]

You’re right, and it really comes down to the years and years of production buildup and engineering experience that Apple has with its SoCs. It seems almost impossible for other laptop manufacturers, who still rely on sourcing CPUs from Intel and AMD, to be able to compete. Chip design isn’t even an ability that most if not all other laptop companies currently have.

Apple is also uniquely good at smoothly transitioning users to new tech, e.g. the creation and phase-out of Rosetta 2. It’s hard to imagine a switch to Windows ARM would go over well without a large effort like this.

[SonOfKyuss]

It will be interesting to see what happens. Other large laptop makers such Dell have some of the same scale advantages (minus in-house silicon) and might be more willing to sacrifice on profit margin.

[Jyaif]

Dell is screwed by the software and never made the investment in a good touchpad.

[rationalist]

The touchpad on the new XPS 14 seems to be extremely good.

(Although a lot of their XPSes are shipping defective.)

[shepherdjerred]

Dell had the best touchpads aside from Microsoft and Apple

[fragmede]

Chromebooks exist at a lower price point with even less RAM.

[babypuncher]

and they suck

[toraway]

No, that's just OS war tribalism talking. I regularly use a M1 Macbook, Lenovo Ideapad 14 Pro with Windows 11, and an ARM Lenovo IP Slim 3 Chromebook. Each have their strengths and weakness at different price points.

Chromebooks (typical) strengths are 1. zero maintenance/instant updates 2. 10 years of OS support 3. battery life 4. touchpad 5. value/$ with options at very low price points.

I paid around $150 for my Lenovo ARM Chromebook (came out a few years ago) and got around 14-15 hours of battery life new with no noticeable fans/heat. Has virtually no self-discharge when in deep sleep and boots in <10 seconds after sitting around for 2+ weeks. Even with 4 GB RAM ChromeOS handles very well under memory pressure (with the memory saver tab mode turned on), that I can have multiple windows with dozens of tabs open before things start slowing down.

I use the Linux VM in ChromeOS for light dev work (and disabled Play Store/Android), the touchpad is absolutely fantastic (which isn't unusual on even cheap Chromebooks, Google actually prioritizes driver support for multitouch/palm rejection unlike the cheap Windows crap models), security is rock solid with essentially no risk of malware/viruses/etc and have literally no maintenance/stability issues that waste my time. Chromebooks are by far the best choice if the question is truly "how do I minimize Grandma needing help solving computer problems", even current locked down MacOS has so many more ways it can break/confuse compared to ChromeOS.

This is the fifth or so Chromebook I've owned over the years, having used both the ultra-premium end of the spectrum (original Pixelbook) and the very cheapo end, and this machine is one of my favorite tech purchases overall in the last few years. I'd definitely recommend 8GB of RAM if possible, but for the typical Chromebook casual web browsing use case 4GB is perfectly serviceable (especially on a newer ARM SoC).

A $150 Chromebook is not intended to replace a $3000 Macbook with 64GB of RAM to run a half dozen Docker images, etc so sure, they'll "suck" in that match up, but they are an extremely competitive option on most metrics for the "someone just needs to browse the web and I don't want to be pestered by IT issues" case.