Technology

the reason I said the price was low is simply because IT IS for what you're getting, especially where I live. This Macbook Neo starts at $900 AUD, and after checking local retailers like Officeworks, JB HI-FI and Centrecom, and from what I've found, the laptops at that same or similar price tag are usually worse performing, plastic built laptops with worse displays. Sure, some come with 16gb of shared SODIMM memory, but a majority come with 8gb. Around a third of them are Chromebooks, the rest are windows laptops. Most come with core i3 or i5 or Ryzen 3, 5 or 7.

For the Macbook Neo, which you can preorder from these retailers for around that 900 bucks, you get a rigid aluminium build, a solid high PPI screen, 8gb of unified LPDDR5X memory, a better SoC than the competition, guaranteed OS support for around 7 years, strict OS memory compression and management, and some pleasant colours compared to the drab grey and uncreative black colours.

RAM is never the only factor when choosing to buy a laptop, its all the other factors as well, those of which people miss and happen to get a laptop where the hinge breaks a year after, or the shared memory puts limits on their workflow and forces the CPU to work more copying data between two pools, or the display has shitty viewing angles that make it hard to look at, or an short accidental drop renders the machine inoperable, or even overuse of the ports cause them to fail, but they're soldered on and render that function of the device useless.

There are so many reasons to bag Apple, but you gotta hand it to them, they know how to standardise and have demonstrated that their devices are designed to weather being used well. And sure, you can definitely buy something a lot cheaper with a hell of a lot more ports, but its likely these ports in the Neo will be modular, since all ports are modular in the Airs, Pros, Mac Minis and Mac Studios.

It’s the same price and similar specs to current Chromebook models, which is what I think they are trying to compete against.

that's pretty awesome that your store repurposed old tech with a solid reason to do so, and frankly people constantly bag old tech for being old, even though most of the time it can still fulfill most of what they need, and I'm saying that as I type this on the aforementioned 10 year old laptop, a laptop of which I bought off a friend for $10 AUD because he got a new one because it felt shit using this one, mainly since it was on an old windows 10 install with a ton of bloat.

What my point was in the previous comment was not that you should avoid modularity, other brands or used tech, rather I was stating that people in these threads are constantly overblowing the point of 8gb of unified memory being the only tier, since most of us game, design, self host or do other things which can be quite demanding, but web browsing, document editing and the many other use cases for this Macbook Neo would barely phase it, just like how the machine I'm typing this on right now is cool to the touch and hasn't stuttered at all since boot around 2 hours ago.

and shit, If I needed a laptop right now and had to buy new, if there was an option a little more expensive for something with slightly worse build quality and performance, so I can have modularity, I'd snap that up, but these days its damn difficult to beat apple in the new tech market. The Mac Mini was probably the first stupidly affordable Apple machine, then the MacBook Air (which now sorta lost its edge since apple just price gated it by making 512gb storage minimum,) and now this Macbook Neo, all happening through a RAM shortage where consumers are benefiting from Apple's excessively long hardware contracts, mainly for the LPDDR5X chips.