alt Hacker NewsCrazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad.
Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.
Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.
Replies
This. My daughter is a high-school junior, and she's been asking for a laptop going into her senior year/college. This is exactly who Apple is going after.
I still find it funny that for my personal setup I have a $700 Macbook Air but a $1500 iPhone Pro and it feels like it makes sense.
> Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life?
A Chromebook with 8Gb ram and stock ChromeOS gets 10 hours doing real work. And with real work I mean full local dev with containers, vscode, Vivado, and 100+ chrome tabs open. And even running small VMs from time to time.
I managed to get through 3 years of college (in a humanities degree, granted) with a dinky used thinkpad running the latest ubuntu distro. Only needed it for note taking, pdf reading, and essay writing, and it got the job done for $50. There were only a few times I was screwed when it came to needing special software...
Honestly I think these will sell well in high schools.
Where I am, our primary schools require iPads, the kids want iPhones (and mabye tend to inherit their parents old phones), and now there's a lightweight laptop for high school cheaper and faster and better screen (and I'm hoping with a more robust build) than the slightly-more-expensive 13" windows laptops I've been buying them.
The parents will later buy them a macbook air or whatever when they go to college.
I think Apple could be onto a winner here, in terms of long-term MacOS uptake.
I think this also looks super compelling for people who want to ditch the Macbook Pro.
I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.
The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.
For a student, a Kompanio Ultra Chromebook is a far better deal. The faster processor and more RAM make it better for typical laptop use. The touchscreen makes it better for educational use. It's only $100 more than just the Neo by itself.
> it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad
Why would you want an iPad?
The Neo can run iPad apps and it's small enough that it can be used in most situations where you'd typically use a tablet (bed, couch, etc).