A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
You are comparing it to other Apple laptops but you should be comparing with its competition at a $600 price point. The aluminum enclosure, touchpad, battery life, display, and performance are all best in class (or near enough) at this price point.
People miss that point. An entry level Windows laptop is an upper and complete garbage. You get the ick within seconds of using it. This thing will sell like crazy. No longer is Apple an expensive brand!
> Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
In September I picked up a laptop for $575.
Its specs are 15.6" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores, 16 threads) CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, Radeon 680M iGPU that can allocate 8 GB of GPU memory, 1 TB SSD with a backlight keyboard. Weighs about 3.5 pounds and has (5) USB ports plus HDMI port. It comes with a 2 year warranty as well.
Running Arch Linux on it with niri and it's really nice for what it is.
There are decent laptops out there at affordable prices.
It's metal "A-shell", I got mine in black. It also comes in blue or rose gold.
I'm not a huge touchpad fan, but it's very usable. It doesn't misclick.
When picking it, you can choose up to 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD. It was $50 more for 2 TB instead of 1 TB.
The only problem is it seems to be out of stock. It's a Nimo N155. Amazon resellers are also marking it up like crazy compared to its official listed price.
That wasn’t the point. You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac. There’s always some other computer you can buy, but most people will just buy the Mac
> You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac
I do software development, video + image editing, writing and gaming. My requirements are it runs well, I can depend on it and I don't mind if it has a fan.
I only replied because the OP's comment made it seem like it's difficult to find a good laptop in the $600 range. If macOS is optional you can get quite decent specs.
Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.
I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).
* 86 million (27%) are under 21 and most of those are students.
* Those people have parents, assume 2 parents per 2 children = 86 million parents (27%)
That means 55% of the US population is eligible for the cheaper rate before you even account for people getting secondary degrees, educators, and yes - the schools themselves.
Also these days Apple actually allows sales and discounts at retailers. I bet this will be on sale for $499 at Amazon or BestBuy before the end of the year.
The iPhone Halo effect will bring in the first time buyers in droves. Windoze is inherently uncool among the younger Insta demographics.
Also, the Neo is the ultimate iPhone accessory, for this crowd. Who cares if the ram size is 8GB and Tahoe is a certifiable dog, that the vast majority neckbeards here are fretting about here. The Neo is not aimed at you. For Safari, Apple Mail, Photos and iApps, and ocassional Claude/ChatGPT usage, this is plenty good
What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.
You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.
Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.
I wonder why no enterprise where I've worked is aware of this fact, including technically sophisticated ones from Dropbox to Goldman Sachs. When I asked my favorite LLM whether Jamf Pro—which I should stress does not come in the box with MacOS—is capable of this level of zero-touch OS updates, it responded affirmatively then spent 95% of the rest of the response telling me about well-known workarounds for when such updates hang.
Because a technically-sophisticated enterprise generally wouldn't pick Jamf unless they were an exclusive Apple house - they'd consider something like VMware's Workspace One (now Omnissa) that works across windows, mac, and linux.
And no need to ask an LLM - we can read the doc and notice there are 6 different deployment methods that work (out of the box) for the built-in MacOS MDM, several of which allow transparent, mandatory updates to user environments without requiring user interaction.
Absolutely. Cheaper Chromebooks are terrible machines. Those screens should be illegal and probably causes a lot of eye strain and headaches. Same with a lot of the sub $800 PC laptops. The colors aren't even... colors. The trackpad? Yuck. Everything else falls apart right outside of the warranty period of just 90 days or 1 year. Oh and good luck spending the first day just uninstalling/formatting everything from scratch and getting the vendor specific features to work again.
For people who have always wanted an Apple laptop, this is it. The niceties are not necessary, and perfect little things to cut out to bring the price down for the masses.
