That seams off. Everyone says Apple is so great at reading the room.
Says MacRumors… Who consistently try to pump Apple even when they release trash products…
Apple likely wasn’t thrown off guard at all. And, there are often shortages when new products are released
I used to sell Apple gear…
This isn’t fresh news anymore and they are not lying
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/30/apple-was-surprised-by-ai-driven-demand-for-macs/
It’s hilarious how Apple was caught off guard to begin with.
Just going off of the triangle of “cheap-fast-good”, the Neo literally hits all three categories really well.
The majority of standard users only need a web browser nowadays. I’m not sure if it can view/sign PDFs and send print jobs, but I’m sure it can, and all of this covers the 99% use case for a household device.
I’m the tech guy of the family. Linux nerd, GrapheneOS on my phone, blah blah blah. If my mom needed a new laptop I would 100% recommend the Neo and be done with it. No frills, no bullshit. Shit I want to pick one up just to play around with it because it’s CHEAP, even though I dont like Apple’s ecosystem.
I’m not sure how it would fare as a college device(test taking, remote screen sharing, proprietary programs, etc) but even for middle schoolers and high schoolers this should cover most, if not all, bases.
We got one for my sister in law, and she likes it for college.
She wanted to just use an iPad, but she had to have macOS for the proprietary test tool spyware. It runs on the neo
To be fair I would say the vast majority of Mac users are using their machines purely for browsing, note taking, etc regardless of what model they’re on. Most buy a Mac so they can prop open the lid and show off the Apple logo to everyone else. It’s a status symbol, it’s a flag of conformity.
So the Neo fills that niche without spending an arm and a leg to do so AND you can actually easily repair some things on it. As a netbook it’s perfect.
I think Neo goes with a typical Apple premium, so it’s not cheap for what it offers, BUT:
- Many people are ready to pay that premium, maaning other manufacturers need to go way below that mark with a similar hardware, which benefits us, and
- This is closest we’ve seen to a netbook for a while. This is good, we need them back!
netbook
Damn, I haven’t heard that in a long time…and you’re completely right. It is a netbook and we do need more of those in this new world(even though I don’t like what that means(ownership of hardware or lack thereof)).
even if not the neo, for college, they will just pay for the one that can do all those things. windows is too unfamiliar for most people.
It’s fine for all those use cases. The M1 Air rocks all that 5 years later.
Also: install xcode, then
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"or something like that, and stretch macOS a little. I bet if they refresh the model with 12 GB of RAM running emulation and virtualization will be hot.
I wish using their os wasn’t so painful coming from linux
Like, why is bash ancient? (3.2 vs 5)
Why is there no package manager (brew doesn’t count, just as npm doesn’t count as a legitimate package manager)
Why are the utils like ls and friends flag-order-sensitive (you can
ls -lah .but notls . -lah)Why do I have 40 network devices with cryptic names?
I got a fully loaded M5 at work and I don’t want it. I just have a linux vm for doing work on it.
Like, why is bash ancient? (3.2 vs 5) To avoid GPLv3, zsh is the new default.
Why is there no package manager Mac App store is the official one, can also install brew, macports, pkgsrc, or nix. Or use language/runtime specific ones like npm, pip, cargo, go.
Why are the utils like ls and friends flag-order-sensitive They avoid GNU versions of utilities, for similar licencing fears as avoiding modern bash. That said
ls . -lahis unhinged, I don’t know any other unix derived ls that supports that.Why do I have 40 network devices with cryptic names? Yeah they got some weirdo Apple stuff
None of these are good reasons for it to be like this.
Less expensive: yep
Actually fun colors: yep
Windows is worse than ever: yep
It would have been surprising if this thing wasn’t a hit.
windows went all in on AI, and neglected thier other stuff.
In turn Apple went ‘oh fuck what’s an AI now’ and turned out to be the winners. Who would’ve guessed huh.
What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
AI is a big part of it but the problem is so much deeper.
Windows went all-in on AI including for internal development, despite removing their dedicated QA teams years ago.
That’s the fun part about monopolies: when you have no real competition you just cut costs and degrade the experience for everyone, but it doesn’t matter because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Well yeah, if you sell a “budget” product that is cheaper than your usual premium-priced products, more people tend to buy them.
apple probably wants people to buy the more expensive one eventually.
I walked into a Best Buy last fall just to kind of browse the computers on offer. The sales rep recommended a laptop (Asus, I think) with 16gb of RAM, saying he actually even got his aunt one of the same model he was recommending to me.
That’s insane. What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
spoiler
Rhetorical question, the answers are: mega-reliance on webviews, every mid-level PM having to ship “features” to justify their position and to climb the corporate ladder, and every UI designer getting the brain-sickness that’s rounded-corners and animations everywhere, while some VP of product insisting on more ads and user-tracking. Add “agentic” aka slop coding to cap a decade of learn-2-code bootcamp 2nd-rate programmers who vigorously studied Cracking the Coding Interview without properly understanding the fundamentals… and voila!
That’s the splendid thing about the Neo. Apple is saying ok, we know it’s only 8GB of RAM, but through the service life of the laptop we can ensure that that will give you a good desktop experience.
What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
Uhhhh 16GB RAM should be the bare minimum, what are you on about?
Apple has been optimizing macOS for underpowered machines for a long time.
Testing a bunch of linux distros on old intel macbooks has shown me that apple is really good with resource management on their vertically integrated hardware, even with greedy daemons like identityserverd or whatever it is, trolling through your drive cataloguing faces in your photos all the time, and the relentless indexing system, and telemetry.
Most models work smoothly most of the time, even the little 11" Air with 4GB, doing standard basic user stuff, and the 2020 1.1 GHz i3 Air is somehow usable on macOS 15, basically current.
thinking 16GB is excessive
What AI does to a mfer.
IMO most of the the demand is due to Windows 11, not Apple. People are done with Microslop’s crap.
Both Apple and Linux are winning big with the double wamy of Win 11 being complete garbage and Win 10 being murdered.
Apple murders MacOS every ~7 years.
To be pedantic, macs are usually supported for 7 OS releases, which are annual. Every OS version is then supported for about 3 years. So a new Mac released this year will receive its last update in about 10 years.
Not great, not terrible. Also, idk about the apple silicon macs, but with the Intel macs there was usually a way to update it unofficially past the 7 year last supported version, stretching it for a few more.
Every OS version is then supported for about 3 years.
Define “supported”, because in my experience, you can’t run modern apps on older OS’s.
with the Intel macs there was usually a way to update it unofficially past the 7 year
Yes, there were a bunch of unpaid volunteers who made OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and extended the life of devices 10+ years further, which just makes it all the more offensive that Apple either couldn’t be bothered or (more likely) just wanted them to be unsupported so you’d have to go buy a new one.
Win 10 being murdered is the important distinction. It’s not the first time Microslop released a shitty and unpopular Windows version, but previously you always had the option to stay on an older still supported version.
more apple than linux, lay people arnt likely going to switched to something too unfamiliar or complicated, apple dumbed down the os enough although walled its easier to use.
“unfamiliar or complicated”
On macos, how does one snap a window to the left or right of the screen? That’s right, you install a 3rd party application and make sure it autostarts to do basic window management.
Also they re-introduced Vista Aero to the apple ecosystem as Liquid
GlassI’ve seen so many UI anti-patterns since I got my M5 that I think Jobs would be spinning in his fucking grave.
Someone would have been strung up from a pirate flag for the liquid ass foolishness.
Imo if leaving from windows, Linux is easier to use than macos these days, simply because Linux has improved so much recently and the design paradigm is more similar to windows.
Macos has some weird ass UX sometimes like the ridiculous alt-tab equivalent or the switch around of all common keyboard shortcuts.
Considering I still have Linux desktops in the office that often suddenly appear to stop working because the Nvidia driver decides to shit itself, I’d say for the average user, getting used to macOS idiosyncrasies is far preferable to deal with.
The average person frankly doesn’t really care as much as you think probably. Anecdotal but people I spoke to who also got it mainly got it for the price. They’d still prefer Windows since it’s what they’re used to but the lower price makes trying something new a lot more palatable.
The average person is furious the computer just restarts by itself because of an update. You don’t have relatives that use Windows? They have asked me to disable updates because of this
Yes but people mostly just let it do it’s thing. Sure they lament about it, but switching to something unfamiliar is a far more larger leap than most are willing to take. Before the Neo, the cheapest Macbook is still at the same price or higher of a Windows equivalent and those who need a laptop instead of using a phone/tablet typically are people who are using it for work or to game. That’s when they start to worry if the apps they use would work and that plus a thousand+ bucks then starts to become a huge friction to overcome.
Most of the stuff “regular people” do on computers these days is either web-based or cross-platform, too. A lot of them are getting the Neo because it’s better than practically every other $600 new laptop in terms of build quality.
IMO the average person (and multiple people I know) no longer likes using their computers since W11 was forced down. They’ve heard good things about Apple and are ready for a change.
