Technology

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.

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.

Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.

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.

I'm not mad about this, especially with Google pushing Gemini so hard on all their devices. I pulled up the Chromebook site to see their current offerings, and the prominent advertisement for Gemini is pretty disgusting after fresh news of another death.

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.

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...

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Completing the MacBook Neo experience is macOS Tahoe

Woah, this is new! A version of Mac OSX running on a iPhone/iPad CPU.

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.

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.

So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.

How soon until Asahi will run on it