alt Hacker NewsA 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.
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Depends what you consider luxury feeling. It's so stripped down.
Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:
TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.
Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.
You can't kill Chromebook with hardware. Apple needs software if they want more share of that market.
> 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.