They really said ‘Cheap’ and $600 in the same sentence.
They sell 4 wheels for $700. People buy it.
Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit - Apple https://share.google/FCOp7IY3rKkfeIOth
“Adds improved mobility to your Mac Pro”
That’s absolutely ridiculous. Easy to see how Apple got to where it is now if people actually pay this amount for this crap.
Easy to see how America got to where it is today too… Grifting is the only American culture.
this laptop running Asahi would be a great entry level machine
As an IT person that’s worked at schools for 20 years I can say this has no place here for us. Too underpowered for adobe products or composer products that our arts/graphics/music labs are interested in and too expensive to replace the Chromebooks that the students use. This is for the wealthy to give to their 4 year olds instead of a MacBook pro like they usually would have. Or a really good porn machine 😁
8GB RAM? No.
You are not the target audience
If you know what ‘8GB RAM’ means you’renot the target audience for this machine.
This is basically Apple’s version of a Chromebook. It’s an iPhone in the shape of a laptop.
But it runs full macOS.
Question, what is the used market for Macs like?
I can’t check the prices for the USA, but I really wonder if getting an used M1 Air wouldn’t end up being better bang for your buck?Just checked eBay. ~200-250 for used M1 Air 8gb RAM and ~300-350 for used M1 with 16gb RAM.
Probably, so I would guess the core audience to be businesses or schools who need a few hundred a year, but had no need for the computational power of more expensive models.
If this is the regular price, schools can probably get them for $550 or less on a bulk contract. They seem to give 10% discount on any large school purchase.
Yeah it def would be. The laptop has a pretty slim target markt
RIP to the mid range Chromebook and windows laptop market.
funny joke
Why would anyone get a Chromebook for $600 over this
they wouldnt. they’d get a 200 dollar chromebook
Maybe in 2019. In 2026 8Gb of ram alone costs $150
sure a stick of ram, but this is not that. i can find chromebooks well under 300 dollars american, i dont know what to tell you.
But it’s 8 gigs of RAM on a Mac so It will perform like a Chromebook with 4 gigs of RAM.
I think you’re mixing things up here. Mac’s are actually VERY performant, both objectively and relative to the on board ram.
There are many critiques that can be made of macOS. But saying it runs inefficiently is not one of them.
i absolutely hate apple and i endorse this message.
Just bought a PC laptop for $399. It does everything I need a laptop to do.
Don’t want to pay $200 more for street cred.
Street cred and spying on you
If the PC is running Windows, the spying is worse. Linux is a good choice, though.
I don’t get the complaining about the amount of ram, this is intended for students and other people with less demanding workflows. If it doesn’t fit your specific workflow, it’s fine, it’s just not for you, it’s just like people hating on Chromebooks because you can’t play ray traced cyberpunk on it or edit 4K video without stuttering.
There’s also the fact that macOS memory management is simplified due to having a singular memory pool between all processors, as well as the aggressive memory compression.
And those of you saying “8gb isn’t even enough for web browsing”, how? I’m using a decade old ex-school laptop on a daily basis, with 4gb of soldered DDR4 and a celeron n4100, I have I’d say around 30 tabs open at once and switch probably a couple hundred times in a period of around 5 hours, fully sustaining an interior design course with only a few very rare stutters.
There’s also the fact I’ve heard from many base model MacBook Air m1 users that it barely ever hitches, one of those is my sister, her workflow is heavy image editing, video editing and other design work, she has not had a single issue with it, and that’s with the bloated adobe suite.
And people misunderstand the reasons Apple solders their memory, sure it’s firstly to lock the consumer into a specific tier, but it’s also so their unified memory architecture can work as flawlessly as possible. You can’t add SODIMMs or LPCAMM modules to a MacBook, just like how you cant either with a strix halo APU just like Framework demonstrated, inconsistent signal integrity causes enough issues that it isn’t commercially viable.
Sure, I’d love Apple to make modular memory a thing for their Macs, but quite frankly, I doubt they can even achieve it without any compromises. There’s also the fact that I’d love if Apple could’ve put 16gb of unified memory into the MacBook neo with no raise in price, but realistically, the chipset design they chose, the a18 pro, only supports up to 8gb, and quite frankly they would never achieve a better price today while also designing it to handle a dozen memory tiers, as either they’d need to choose an M series chipset or design a dozen different types of A series packages with some future chipset that doesn’t exist right now, defeating the purpose of having a low price. The low price isn’t just due to the external design choices, it’s also because they chose to only build a single package, an 8gb a18 pro, which would reduce costs overall for the model as manufacturing can just scale, not increase in complexity.
I don’t mind if you downvote, it’s just a bunch of gripes I have with the overall reaction about this frankly pretty awesome new product offering, even if I don’t really like Apple a whole lot.
The low price
Dude, there isn’t anything low about that price. That’s the point, with 600 dollars you can get a very decent computer from pretty much any other brand with at least the double of ram.
You see, you can get an used thinkpad for less than half the price and still have twice the ram.
It’s just a scam product for people who know nothing about computers and will pay for this trash because they simply think “apple a good brand, right?”.
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.
Yeah this device is not for me, but I’m glad it exists as it means software/OS will have to support 8gb ram for years to come, and my 16gb MacBook will benefit.
but I’m glad it exists as it means software/OS will have to support 8gb ram for years to come
Electron/JS/TS would like to have a word with you
Honestly same, I’ve got a 16gb Macbook Air m2 I bought new a few months ago, and frankly, even if m4 is the first tier to fully kick out 8gb, I’m glad that the Neo means this focus on lower resource use will continue.
What I do suspect though is once all the Neo stock is depleted, they’ll either discontinue the whole line or make a new one with some stockpiled a19 chips, but I’m not sure which one… I guess we’ll have to wait and see!
It’s the same price and similar specs to current Chromebook models, which is what I think they are trying to compete against.
But why would anyone want to buy a chromebook? When they can buy a real computer for the same price?
If battery life is such an issue, just buy a powerbank.
Hardware is Chromebook priced. OS,is (AFAIK) full macOS, AKA a posix compliant Unix machine with a pretty nice GUI. Nice enough that several Linux WMs try to duplicate it.
Lol our store is doing billing customer management in google chrome on Debian With KDE Plasma on 8GB DDR3 pentium something. It was running Windows 7 6 months ago with 4gb ram for the same purpose. I then put a Sata SSD, increased the RAM to 8 and installed Debian. The laptops then would have costed like 300 USD and the upgrades costed like 30usd each laptpp for 4 laptops.
You really don’t need a soldered Half eaten and overpriced Apple laptop to do what you’re saying. Even an old laptop does it with few tweaks for fraction of the cost while keeping all the good stuff from those laptops like shit ton of ports. The only advantage of this mac is that its battery drain is quite low being ARM.
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.
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$899 was education price, $1099 is retail.
Don’t need to lie to make a point.
Or maybe it will come with some subscription model to get you more power, from the cloud of course.
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. 🫡
Eh, you can just buy $200 ThinkPad and it’ll be fine :)
Asahi Linux on MacBook Neo? A man can dream…
Affordability and battery life. I am team linux and android normally, but you really cannot beat a MacBook as an SSH terminal or remote development terminal because they are reliable and the battery lasts all day.
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
Hell, Apple themselves usually sell Apple products at the student price to non-students, as long as you nod and wink when you click the Checkout button.
Macs do not respect your privacy. In comparison to windows it’s better but they still log and send every application you open to Apple.
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)
If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face
If your mom is going to install facebook, X and instagram to post all personal details and photos away along with all the permissions app requests. I don’t think it matters?
Are you talking about security? What else is Android secretly supplying these apps?
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
“Let’s just giveaway more leeway for corporations, so we can get more accustomed to losing our rights, until we have to jump off the cliff for the lesser evil”
Apple fanboys were proud they had no ads, Apple put on ads. They said they fight the government, they work with authoritarian governments around the world. They said they care about user privacy, they were funneling notifications to directly to the US government.
Yea, keep defending these knucklefucks, they’re totally not trying to manufacture consent for global surveillance while you’re given the illusion of “lesser evil” and losing ownership of devices you bought.
Downvote away, cult.
Look - I can’t prevent my mom from being on facebook and playing candy crush. Nothing I say or do will make that happen. I can improve the situation by:
- Introducing alternatives and hope they spread (Chat with your mom on Signal)
- Reducing data harvesting during ”passive” behaviour (e.g. reduced permissions for apps. Graphene is probably the best here, but good luck getting your mom on that)
- Reducing data harvesting by the phone vendor (Samsung, Google, Apple). This is primarily done by buying an iPhone, simply due to incentives. (Again, good luck getting your mom on Graphene).
If I go too hard on my mom, she’ll just buy herself a cheap chinese android without telling me. Is that better?
That claim seems like it’d be trivial to fact check, and indeed does seem to be false.
I am not ever trusting a proprietary OS, specially when it has been actively advertised as “caring about your privacy”
It is the advertising of any market differentiator or specifically when it’s for security.
indeed does seem to be false.
That’s from 5 years ago. Let’s look what Apple themselves say about that topic:
Personal Data Apple Collects from You
Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data
this is HIGHLY misleading. The page you linked is for Apple’s global/web properties (hence “within our services”); device-level settings govern app and OS telemetry separately. You can opt out of telemetry on apple devices you own.
Which apps are launched from their website?
Only if you decide to send that telemetry, which is prompted to you clearly and unambiguously.
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.
makes it really good value
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor.
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
You can’t really use an iPad as a laptop. The hardware exists and should work, but the software is awful.
It’s often several seconds to switch to Safari on my iPad Pro with M series chip. We’ve had app switching in computers for 40 years. Why can’t iPad do it?
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
So form factor, not hardware internals should be the deciding factor in cost?
To a degree, yeah.
The laptop form factor is engineered with lid and palmrest assemblies, if you’re going to compare the two then you’ll want to add a nice keyboard to that iPad. Apple’s is $270.
Apple’s is $270.
Typical Apple tax, completely unrelated to the few dollars a keyboard costs to make for real.
You’re not entirely wrong, in that the Apple Tax is real.
Nonetheless, the quality of the Magic Keyboard is substantially higher than that of a keyboard you can get for “few dollars”
Ultimately, your assertion was:
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air with a keyboard that matches the form factor and build quality of a MacBook Neo does not actually cost the same, it costs an additional $270.
The MacBook doesn’t have a touchscreen. It cancels the keyboard cost out.
They don’t even put touch ID on the entry model.
What something should be priced at is what the market is willing to pay for it. People are definitely willing to pay more for a MacBook than an iPad. Also there are similar spec’ed Chromebooks on the market that cost around the same price and people buy them. The Neo is competing with Chromebook.
In addition to being more locked down, you’d also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?
It’s an iPhone 16 with a MacBook shell
I mean if by shell you mean KVM then yes.
It’s a pretty good price for those peripherals plus the low end phone though
I wouldn’t consider it low end, early benchmarks put it in the range of M1 which surpasses Intels N-Series.
IMO it’s the perfect typewriter/frontline worker machine when personal computing is getting more expensive by the day
Yeah sorry I was thinking more of the other specs than the chip itself. As you say, a pretty good little A chip, I suspect the first real go to market one given M comparisons. Perfect as you say for heavy keyboard users.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook
One has a keyboard (cheap components), the other has a touchscreen. The cost cancel each other out.
Better specs sure, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi’s memory management wasn’t as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).
For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?
I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.
Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it’s still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn’t surprise me given Apple’s laptop history
They were talking about memory not storage
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we’re pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.
Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.
It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.
This is a step backwards from M1 in terms of cores, core speed and bus speed. This is not going to feel like an m1 base even.
We’ll see when the reviews hit. It’d be pretty dumb for it to be worse than an M1 when older airs get discounted down to similar prices.
I seriously doubt many people using this will be doing much video editing with 40 tabs open. Your expectations are unrealistic for the type of user who will be buying these.
8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn’t great, but it’s not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn’t so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.
Honestly, it might be a wakeup call for laptop vendors, or it might just put a lot of them out of business. This is not a good economy for them to suddenly have to compete with Apple on value…
They should have done so from the beginning. If they vanish because they waited too long to compete, so be it.
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
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.
Agree. Probably best notebook for students and also for smaller companies, if you’re not relying on high end hardware.
I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!
No, 8gb of RAM (obviously older DDR but still) and 256gb or storage.
Of course the CPU and other older components will be less powerful, but like… What do we use computers for now that we didn’t in 2017? AI? Oh nooooo, what will I ever do without local AI… It all works the same, at a pretty decent speed running Bazzite (cause I wanted to see how it ran games. It topped out at Skyrim Special Edition running at 15fps, did good at fallout New Vegas though).
I got a bargain, but say you can only get it now for double what I paid. That’s 1/6 the price. Why pay 600% more for a computer that’s not even that much better?
this MacBook is going to have 10x the battery life of your used laptop, and weigh less.
plus, it’s brand new so it has a warranty and doesn’t require people to spend time searching for a good deal.
this is an excellent product launch at a good price and it is gonna sell like hotcakes
Mine has a replaceable battery, in theory I can buy whatever quality level of battery I want :3
Again, 1200% the price.
You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?
Do those things warrant 6x the price? Or, in reality, 12x the price? Let’s be real here, the exact hardware specs down to material aside, is it?
Just to be clear in regard to your original comment:
600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You expect manufacturers to sell laptops for fifty bucks?
I expect people to be able to obtain a laptop for 50 or 100 bucks, which they apparently can. Manufacturers should have to reckon with that fairly, or lose business.
I want to destroy new device culture.
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$600 MacBook in 2026 is absolutely insane to me. Around 2007/08 when I started using MacBooks as a student the entry level ones used to be 1200€.
Consider that this is an iPhone 16 in a MacBook shell, though. This gives you performance comparable a 5 years old used MacBook M1. It’s usable, but it’s designed to act as a gateway drug, you’ll immediately hit storage and memory limits and want to buy a more expensive one.
8gb of RAM in 2026 where most modern apps are made in electron and a basic text editor takes half gig to show a blank page is less than ideal
I have a 2015 13" Macbook Air with 4gb ram, and a new battery running, Mint with i3 wm and except for a few very unoptimised webpages I don’t experience any significant lagg when browsing. streaming 1920x1080 video without issues(the screen resolution is 1440x900 so no need for more) sure I only use it for writing on the go and minor surfing, anything heavier like video editing or Blender I do on my main desktop or my lenovo legion. This whole - anything less than 16gb ram is garbage in current year. Does not take into account that a lot of consumers and middle managers actually don’t do anything heavy on their computers.
To be honest it is not as big of deal. I have a MacBook M1 with 8 GB of memory and my swap is regularly 20 GB but I don’t have any problems when actually working with the system. It’s handling the low memory situation very gracefully.
For browsing, office and some media it’s totally fine.
This thing can run iPad apps right? So at least that is an option when the desktop version is shite. This laptop is aimed at college and high school kids who just need a browser and take notes. It’s probably fine for that. I mean I’m using an iPhone 14 for the last 4 years and it works just fine. It’s a Chromebook alternative it’s not for power users.
Just look at how many crappy Chromebooks get sold to schools. The Neo is the perfect replacement for that market.
This is meant to tackle the chromebook market.
I just wished Apple would revert that shitty Liquid Ass UI. It made the operating system unusable.
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when the second hand market is so available? It’s all just novelty. I wouldn’t touch this, all I can think about is what it’ll look like in the second hand market in about 3 years.
Older ThinkPads are unbeatable, especially those that still have the CPU sockets in them, and can be upgraded. I put an i7-4702MQ into my L440, now it performs really well with Manjaro, at the cost of sometimes draining the CPU in 30-60 minutes under very high loads (battery might need some rebuilding).
I wouldn’t touch this, all I can think about is what it’ll look like in the second hand market in about 3 years.
That’s pretty sad, tbh.
Why is it sad?
For the target audiences, people just buying a low cost laptop for browsing as well as students, it’s unlikely the common person wouldn’t go directly to Apple to get the newest product. There will definitely be some who opt to get older second hand tech instead, but the vast majority would rather get something they have assurance is brand new and in fully working condition.
Personally, if I needed a laptop, I’d weigh my options both in first party offerings as well as the second hand market, and I’d probably come to the conclusion to just buy two broken laptops and combine them, but it’s rare to find someone who’s willing to splice two computers together for university or high school they’re going to in a month or so, and even if it’s more common, it’s still rare to find someone willing to dive head first into the second hand market when they don’t know how to check for fake listings, horrible deals and genuine bargains, which is why most opt for buying directly from manufacturers or from consumer electronics stores.
Reputable second hand sellers guarantee that the device works properly before shipping. If I needed a laptop, I would get a low grade one on eBay for cheap. I would probably get a used Dell Precision 5570 Laptop with an i9/A2000.
Apple is not trying to sell this go people like you.
you’re right, and I’d personally pick from a one, but realisticaly, if someone only just needs a laptop and doesn’t really know what to get, where to get it, why to get that specific one, etc, then I don’t think they’d even know second hand sellers can be reputable in the first place.
My mother for instance, she bought an Acer Aspire Go for around $550 AUD from one of our large consumer electronics stores (not sure but I think it was Officeworks),so she can do all her important stuff on, think appointments, setting up debit cards, tracking orders, etc. She didn’t want anything used or refurbished, since her view of such is that, if she bought one used or refurbished, it’ll be barely held together, half broken, probably someone bit part of the corner off, and so on.
if I were her, I would’ve just gotten a cheap refurb Thinkpad, but seeming that its at least somewhat common for non-tech literate people to think it’s scary to get into the second hand market, most would simply rather choose large consumer electronics store chains. Maybe this issue is just because of the tangibility, where you can walk into a store and physically hold the laptops and assess them, rather than the online only nature of the second hand market, unless there is a rare physical store for refurb and used tech.
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.
They have had an ‘affordable’ Mac for a lot of their history. The Mac mini was a downright value for a while. They have had near $1000 laptops for most of my memory.
Sorry but near $1000 and near $600 are not even remotely comparable.
I got an HP EliteBook 840 G3 in 2017 for $565 with 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB storage. That was NEVER possible with any Apple laptop. Until now.
Or actually, it still isn’t now! The RAM and storage on this are absolutely abysmal for a 2026 laptop. PCs have already vastly eclipsed this bullshit.
As an Apple devotee that pays your annual tithe to your exclusive, elitist blue bubble cult, you’re welcome to crow about their smooth interface and nicer terminal and better privacy, but you will never, ever, ever beat PCs on price. Ever.
Apple is a monopoly. Monopolistic exploitation that maximizes profit by keeping prices high and sales low is literally introductory level macroeconomics. They have never made their products good value for money, and they never will.
Good news: thanks to the AI Bros, PCs will probably have 8gb of ram and 256gb of nand too … isn’t progress grand?
just typical /r/technology apple hating.
It’s a big circle jerk. One day we suddenly hate Netflix. The next day Apple has always been terrible. Nobody cares about the complaints that are doing actual harm.
