This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Apple has been violating people's wallets for how long and they finally decide now is the time to make affordable macs?
Complaining aside, this is a darn good move. The timing is great, so they are likely to be very popular too, which is good for the future of the market. I hope.
Honestly this seems absolutely incredible for the vast majority of people, a good MacBook at a decent price point. Benchmarks haven't come out yet but I heard its as good if not better than the M1. For the vast majority of people that's good enough, and even with the worse battery the real world battery life is gonna be amazing.
Also for those complaining about Linux support the main competition is Windows laptops running Snapdragon X Elite which should have somewhat similar performance and also doesn't support Linux. Hell the snapdragon x2 probably won't support Linux either. These laptops cost two times as much as this and usually with significantly worse build quality.
It's pretty. But I recently bought a Lenovo IdeaPad at Costco for less, with 16GB ram and 1TB SDD and am running Linux Mint on it, which I'm getting way more out of than any other Mac I've owned.
Without a doubt the Mac's screen is better than mine. But I feel like, all things considered, what I have can do more (and probably for longer). I'm happy to see something like this come along and take the wind out of Microslop's sails (and sales). At the same time, I feel like one is able to get far more value out of a less-costly machine. If one were going to switch OSes anyway, why not Linux? I guess they're banking on people already owning iPhones and therefore making this a more seamless transition or whatever...
I would be kinda impressed that Apple is finally offering something that's good value, but 8GB of RAM? ehhhhhh. It's probably still a decent-ish deal, I don't really know how good a phone SoC would handle anything more than light tasks, though.
How soon until Asahi will run on it
How soon until Asahi will run on it
Years. Asahi fully relies on reverse engineering by the community and those community members tend to get hired by the competition. Get a device where the platform designer supports Linux development upstream if your priority is Linux.
You known what, good job Apple. You've been winning me over lately. I'm not sure I'd exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we'll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.
Not usually an Apple guy, but it's hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)
This is the opposite of "own nothing and be happy" and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.
Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡
I know you didn't mean it like that, but at $599 it is not a "$500 device". It is a $600 device. Which maybe isn't much worse but still quite a price difference.
It’s $499 for students.
Also microcenter usually sells apple products at the student price to non students too
If it wouldn’t carry just 8 GB of RAM, it would be a great deal. Sadly, it’s not even upgradable, so its usefulness is rather limited.
Considering Windows has become a complete dumpster fire recently, this $600 laptop could be a really appealing option for some if they're mostly browsing the web.
It'd make for a great student laptop, reminds me of the old polycarbonate MacBooks actually. They did cut corners a lot, but retained all the niceties you'd expect from a MacBook.
And they finally added some colour; could've have gone with more vibrant colours IMO but it's better than nothing.
I gotta say, I do like fuzzy wombats as well^^
Honestly I'm expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).
Unless you're buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.
I don't like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.
That is so true, and can't be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn't even a great deal, though I was fine with it.
Now the budget market is...pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It's GRIM out there.
So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.
Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!
There's no reason for the average person to ever buy another windows device
Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn't.
Thanks to the amazing people over at Asahi Linux, you can on MacBooks too!
On some Mac books. With limitations.
It's an amazing project, but outsiders might overestimate it's status if you say it that way.
This one will not even boot in a long time.
