alt Hacker News> I’ve been tempted to buy one and do “real dev work” on it just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine.
But... you can do the same exercise with a $350 windows thing. Everyone knows you can do "real dev work" on it, because "real dev work" isn't a performance case anymore, hasn't been for like a decade now, and anyone who says otherwise is just a snob wanting an excuse to expense a $4k designer fashion accessory.
IMHO the important questions to answer are business side: will this displace sales of $350 windows machines or not, and (critically) will it displace sales of $1.3k Airs?
HN always wants to talk about the technical stuff, but the technical stuff here isn't really interesting. The MacBook Neo is indeed the best laptop you can get for $6-700.
But that's a weird price point in the market right now, as it underperforms the $1k "business laptops" (to avoid cannibalizing Air sales) and sits well above the "value laptop" price range.
No, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine. No way such a setup is suitable for anything beyond browsing a tab or two and connecting to servers using SSH.
And, the whole shittiness of the experience will even distract you attempting real work: the horrible touchpad, the bad screen, the forced windows updates when you trying to start the machine to do something urgent, ads in Windows, the lack of proper programmability of Windows (unless you use WSL).... Add the fact that the toy is likely to break in a year or two. These issue exist on far more expensive Windows machines, how much more a $350 machine.
Leaving Windows machines and OS behind for more than a decade has been a continuing breath of fresh air. I have several issues with the Apple devices and macOS (as I have with Linux too), but on the whole they are far better than Windows. The only good thing about Windows that I miss on Macs is the file explorer and window management, not sure why Apple stubbornly refuses to copy those.