alt Hacker NewsI keep shouting from the rooftops the fact that the Neo is really not that disruptive or even necessarily that good of a deal.
Like, have any of you actually looked at street prices at Micro Center or Best Buy recently? In the price range of the higher model Neo you can get a Yoga 7 with an OLED convertible touch screen, 1TB storage, 16GB of RAM, along with a processor with better multicore and iGPU performance (Ryzen 7 AI 350) in a 2-in-1 convertible package that has better battery life doing office tasks.
Yes, the Neo is a cheap machine, with a lot of the exact same cheap machine compromises that are all over the $500-800 laptop market. Not really the best CPU, extremely cut-down battery, missing features, etc.
It even loses keyboard backlighting which is such a standard feature that it might be the only laptop on sale without it.
Losing the haptic trackpad means that the Acer you can buy at Micro Center for $530 with double the RAM and way better I/O (USB4, USB-A 3.0, microSD, and HDMI) has a pretty similar quality of trackpad experience. Yes, I tried both in store, the MacBook Neo's trackpad is really at the same level of all the PC competition.
MacBook Pro/Air Trackpad: 10/10
Best PC haptic trackpads available: 8/10
MacBook Neo trackpad: 7/10
Typical PC mechanical trackpads: 6 or 7/10
Hell, the older generation HP EliteBook 840 G10 that Micro Center sells as a business laptop makes a bunch more sense in a lot of ways. It's also an all-aluminum build thin and light system, comes with more RAM, which is upgradable, has a fingerprint reader, backlit keyboard, etc.
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> Hell, the older generation HP EliteBook 840 G10 that Micro Center sells as a business laptop makes a bunch more sense in a lot of ways.
And the best thing is that you can format the drive, install Linux, and be completely free of Microsoft and Apple.
And it comes with Windows.
Back in the normal world people don't use Linux. If you have the funds you can get an M4 Air with 16GB for 800$.
I still have a 8GB M1 air, it's fine for filling out paper work and watching YouTube, which is the extent of what most people do
The trackpad on the Neo is at the level of a Surface trackpad, which is to say it is worlds better than the typical budget junk you can pick up from Acer.