> There’s no source mentioned and no link to substantiate this claim
.. when someone mixes up two things, saying for example "People previously said the UK rape gangs were debunked claims against minorities and we now know that to be false and that hundreds of thousands of poor girls were assaulted", the hammer on my bullshit meter starts to slam the right-hand bell.
The implication here is that "hundreds of thousands of poor girls" were raped by gangs in the UK, according to studies [1], that figure was actually ... 706 in the latest figures that I could find. Being absolutely clear, that is 706 too many, but it's not "hundreds of thousands".
The conflation is that half a million or so cases of sexual assault are made against minors on a yearly basis, but the bar for that is a lot lower than "rape gang". Also, to be clear, that's half a million too many.
The good news here is that investigations into police and governmental policy have been made, 12 recommendations were produced, and all have been accepted by the government. Hopefully this can help matters, and these poor kids (of both sexes) in the future.
> There is nothing wrong with not believing in trans ideology
Well, that's open to debate. If you believe that sexuality is innate, like skin colour, then discriminating against someone's sexuality is akin to being racist. Just saying.
> It’s also fairly obvious when one watches An Inconvenient Truth that global warning concerns were amplified beyond what actually happened in the next two decades
Uh huh. The Y2K problem was massively mitigated by a huge effort to fix it, and the success of that effort meant there wasn't much that went wrong on the actual day. Global warming has had a lot less effort (though still substantial), the ozone hole has been pretty much closed, but the world is still on a pretty terrible path. It's almost as if people can't see the ever-increasing heat in Summer, and "polar vortexes" in Winter as the evidence that's as plain as the nose on your face.
> Likewise it’s more likely that the novel coronavirus came from the novel coronavirus lab than a wet market
"Free speech has consequences" almost never refers to those consequences being imposed by the government of the day. It's generally used when (to pull an example out of the air) some woman cycling around might come across the Trump and Trumpets out and about in their convoy. Said woman might clasp one bicep while vigorously pumping that arm up and down in the air, with one single finger extended towards the top.
Sadly, that woman's employer might be more delusional than herself, support the pedophile rapist, and decide to terminate her employment. Now those are indeed consequences of her exercising her right to free speech, at least in a symbolic form, but it wasn't the pedophile-in-power imposing them, it was the toadying employer.
- I don't think you're correct about the gulf in single core performance. On battery, the Cinebench 2024 scores (single core) of the Ryzen 7 AI 350 are 97% of the score you get from an M4 MacBook Air. (Cinebench is a lot better than GeekBench, IMO).
- Screen real estate does not equal resolution. Nobody is going to scale their MacBook Neo's smaller 13" screen down to take advantage of those pixels. I.e., if I have a 10 inch 8K screen that’s not really “more screen real estate” than a 27” 4K screen in practice. So the real question is whether the $500-800 user is a pixel hunter and loves smoother text at the expense of other purchase factors. IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling (e.g., 27" 4K monitors look worse in macOS than on Windows, which is why Apple goes with 5K)
- Yoga 7 video playback on battery actually beats the Neo at almost 17 hours.
- Yoga 7 office productivity rundown is very close at 10 hours 54 minutes, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at that coming slightly behind the MacBook Air:
You might prefer a different benchmark, but I am correct in the gulf on geekbench. I just looked at their benchmark results. For what it's worth, Geekbench is a lot better than Cinebench IMO, because it's more "real world".
> IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling
That is not my experience. I have run MacOS on monitors ranging from 43" down to 23", in various resolutions. MacOS looks great to me.
> 2.7 vs 3.1 pounds is insignificant
Well, it's 15% heavier. Whether that's significant is up to the carrier.
Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors.
A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following:
smartctl --all /dev/disk0
...
Data Units Read: 1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB]
Data Units Written: 154,244,108 [78.7 TB]
...
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
...
I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.
> I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more
It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB.
Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse.
On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.
Most people using these things aren't going to be using more than 8GB on an ongoing basis, and if they do, they'll not be swapping it like mad as you suggest, because it's only on application-switch that it will matter.
As for 600TB in just over 3 days, I want some of what you're smoking.
> Most people using these things aren't going to be using more than 8GB on an ongoing basis, and if they do, they'll not be swapping it like mad as you suggest, because it's only on application-switch that it will matter.
To begin with, a single application can pretty easily use more than 8GB by itself these days.
But suppose you are using multiple applications at once. If one of them actually has a large working set size -- rendering, AI, code compiling, etc. -- and then you run it in the background because it takes a long time (and especially takes a long time when you're swapping), its working set size is stuck in physical memory because it's actively using it even in the background and if it got swapped out it would just have to be swapped right back in again. If that takes 6GB, you now only have 2GB for your OS and whatever application you're running in the foreground. And if it takes 10GB then it doesn't matter if you're even running anything else.
Now, does that mean that everybody is doing this? Of course not. But if that is what you're doing, it's not great that you may not even notice that it's happening and then you end up with a worn out drive which is soldered on for no legitimate reason.
> As for 600TB in just over 3 days, I want some of what you're smoking.
2GB/s is 8200GB/hour is 172.8TB/day. It's the worst case scenario if you max out the drive.
In practice it might get hot and start thermally limiting before then, or be doing both reads and writes and then not be able to sustain that level of write performance, but "about a week" is hardly much better.
Yeah dude, "Rendering, AI, code compiling,..." is not the target market for this device. It's just not.
> 2GB/s is 8200GB/hour is 172.8TB/day. It's the worst case scenario if you max out the drive.
Right, which is completely and utterly unrealistic. As I said, I want what you're smoking.
I have an 8GB M1 mini lying around somewhere (I just moved country) which was my kids computer for several years before he got an MBP this Xmas. He had the sort of load that would be more typical - web-browsing, playing games, writing the occasional thing in Pages, streaming video, etc. etc. If I can find it (I was planning on making it the machine to manage my CNC) I'll look at the SMART output from that. I'm willing to bet it's not going to look much different from the above...
> Yeah dude, "Rendering, AI, code compiling,..." is not the target market for this device. It's just not.
None of the people who want to do those things but can't afford a more expensive machine will ever attempt to do them on the machine they can actually afford then, is that right?
> Right, which is completely and utterly unrealistic.
"Unrealistic" is something that doesn't happen. This is something that happens if you use that machine in a particular way, and there are many people who use machines in that way.
> He had the sort of load that would be more typical - web-browsing, playing games, writing the occasional thing in Pages, streaming video, etc. etc.
Then you would have a sample size of one determined by all kinds of arbitrary factors like whether any of the games had a large enough working set to make it swap, how many hours were spent playing that game instead of another one etc.
The problem is not that it always happens. The problem is that it can happen, and then they needlessly screw you by soldering the drive.
> The problem is not that it always happens. The problem is that it can happen
Ah. So, FUD, then. Gotcha.
“This ridiculously unlikely scenario is something I’m going to hype up and complain about because I don’t like some aspects of this companies business model”.
600 TBW in 3 days. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
Most of us aren't "$2 million net worth or $206,000/yr annual income for 5 years."
I'm glad the fee is lower again, but the fee isn't really what is stopping me from abandoning the US forever. When my mother dies, I'm probably gone. The US sucks in so many ways, and just trying to describe it all will end up dinging my HN karma at least 50 points :) For a bunch of "current admininstration haters" you guys sure do defend this shitshow tooth and nail.
Oh, I’ve already left. I did that when a US hospital decided my wife’s life was less important than how much money they could make from an ER bed… [1]
I just thought it was pretty weird to be forced to become a citizen, just so I could leave the country without paying 23.8% of my entire net worth, including future income on things like investments, 401k, etc - all in one lump sum. Like that is even possible unless you’re stupid-rich and money doesn’t matter.
So I’m one of very few (I suspect) people in the naturalisation ceremony thinking to myself “fuck you, you motherfuckers, making me implicitly support this shithole of a government” when everyone around me is going nuts about becoming a US citizen…
And the source of that claim is? The whole point is that the new Ryzen AI 3xx generation is extremely efficient. Without an apples-to-apples comparison (like how many times HP and Mac can compile Linux kernel till battery drains) this is pure religion.
I was thinking the same but then I looked at what I could get for 70000 INR on Amazon and it would be crazy to buy this over the alternatives. What is the draw for this device given the price?
If you've tried some of those cheap PC laptops the build quality is no where near macbooks (even for laptops twice the price). Macs tend to live a long time and retain their resale value like crazy compared to PCs too.
I bought a macbook pro m1 pro. Its value is 25% in 4/5 years. I bought a second hand dell latitude 7/8 years ago, it was 3/4 years old then. Still running as a server today. A cheap acer bought in 2017 runs almalinux and is surprisingly fast and capable today, I had upgraded ram and put in nvme SSD long back.
Ive owned a lot of macs and PCs over the last 15-20 years (many of them from work so i didnt "own" them but i used them daily), the % of pc laptops that have technical/hardware issues is way higher than macs in my experience. Of course YMMV with either.
If you are satisfied with the build quality and general longevity of an Acer computer then you are wasting your time trying to understand a huge comparative advantage of the Neo. I’d just accept that you aren’t the market and move on.
Yeah, I guess so. I was just wondering when people said it's great value, is it because they believe that the build quality (all metal) is the most important factor here. But then I can get an HP omnibook 5 oled for the same price with "almost" a metal body.
I started thinking, ok I was going to buy an iPad maybe, why not neo? It makes so much sense since my wife could do much more with it. Then I started looking at what the market has to offer for the price and it stopped making sense. The marketing does seem great on this. I am sure it makes a lot of sense to some people who wanted a cheap macOS laptop and got it.
> But then I can get an HP omnibook 5 oled for the same price with "almost" a metal body.
The bargain HP laptops don’t compare at all to MacBook build quality or battery life.
That laptop is also 4lbs and has below average battery life.
We recently got a higher end HP laptop for someone and the build quality on it is marginal at best.
If you’re only looking at spec sheets and trying to treat this like a comparison table of simple points then you’re going to miss the reason why these products appeal to buyers.
> I bought a second hand dell latitude 7/8 years ago, it was 3/4 years old then.
If your needs are satisfied by 4 year old second hand machines and you’re still happy with them when they’re 10-12 years old, that’s great for you.
I think you’re not the target audience. Your decade old Dell Latitude is not even close to the performance or usefulness of a MacBook Neo so the fact that you’re bringing it up is a good indicator that you don’t understand who the MacBook Neo is for.
The MacBook Neo is a great value for anyone who wants a high quality, long battery life, fast laptop for a bargain price.
I would invite you to read my comment again (take a wild guess what my main machine is from the list) and especially the comment I was replying to (like how the build quality is great for other laptops to still be running as a "server" and a capable laptop). My comment might start to make more sense than you think.
We’re in a thread about the MacBook Neo, so that’s what we’re comparing to.
You said you didn’t understand why anyone would buy a MacBook Neo and then went on to talk about old second-hand laptops. You’re not the target audience.
It might be because of me being relatively new to the Apple ecosystem (I got my first developer Mac in 2020), but to this day I have no idea what is it that it's SO bad about Tahoe.
Not much IMO has changed. I set reduced transparency anyway and that removed the main issues. Some of the corners are overly rounded but that seems pretty minor.
On the other hand, I'm glad people are making a lot of noise about it because it would be nice if Apple could spend a couple of OS cycles on the basics of improved UX.
> There’s no source mentioned and no link to substantiate this claim
.. when someone mixes up two things, saying for example "People previously said the UK rape gangs were debunked claims against minorities and we now know that to be false and that hundreds of thousands of poor girls were assaulted", the hammer on my bullshit meter starts to slam the right-hand bell.
The implication here is that "hundreds of thousands of poor girls" were raped by gangs in the UK, according to studies [1], that figure was actually ... 706 in the latest figures that I could find. Being absolutely clear, that is 706 too many, but it's not "hundreds of thousands".
The conflation is that half a million or so cases of sexual assault are made against minors on a yearly basis, but the bar for that is a lot lower than "rape gang". Also, to be clear, that's half a million too many.
The good news here is that investigations into police and governmental policy have been made, 12 recommendations were produced, and all have been accepted by the government. Hopefully this can help matters, and these poor kids (of both sexes) in the future.
[1]: https://www.mmu.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/story/uk-failed-g...
> There is nothing wrong with not believing in trans ideology
Well, that's open to debate. If you believe that sexuality is innate, like skin colour, then discriminating against someone's sexuality is akin to being racist. Just saying.
> It’s also fairly obvious when one watches An Inconvenient Truth that global warning concerns were amplified beyond what actually happened in the next two decades
Uh huh. The Y2K problem was massively mitigated by a huge effort to fix it, and the success of that effort meant there wasn't much that went wrong on the actual day. Global warming has had a lot less effort (though still substantial), the ozone hole has been pretty much closed, but the world is still on a pretty terrible path. It's almost as if people can't see the ever-increasing heat in Summer, and "polar vortexes" in Winter as the evidence that's as plain as the nose on your face.
> Likewise it’s more likely that the novel coronavirus came from the novel coronavirus lab than a wet market
I tend to agree with that.