Technology

They really said 'Cheap' and $600 in the same sentence.

This is basically Apple's version of a Chromebook. It's an iPhone in the shape of a laptop.

Honestly I'm expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).

Unless you're buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.

I don't like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.

Not usually an Apple guy, but it's hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)

This is the opposite of "own nothing and be happy" and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.

Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡

8GB RAM? No.

Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.

I don’t get the complaining about the amount of ram, this is intended for students and other people with less demanding workflows. If it doesn’t fit your specific workflow, it’s fine, it’s just not for you, it’s just like people hating on Chromebooks because you can’t play ray traced cyberpunk on it or edit 4K video without stuttering.

There’s also the fact that macOS memory management is simplified due to having a singular memory pool between all processors, as well as the aggressive memory compression.

And those of you saying “8gb isn’t even enough for web browsing”, how? I’m using a decade old ex-school laptop on a daily basis, with 4gb of soldered DDR4 and a celeron n4100, I have I’d say around 30 tabs open at once and switch probably a couple hundred times in a period of around 5 hours, fully sustaining an interior design course with only a few very rare stutters.

There’s also the fact I’ve heard from many base model MacBook Air m1 users that it barely ever hitches, one of those is my sister, her workflow is heavy image editing, video editing and other design work, she has not had a single issue with it, and that’s with the bloated adobe suite.

And people misunderstand the reasons Apple solders their memory, sure it’s firstly to lock the consumer into a specific tier, but it’s also so their unified memory architecture can work as flawlessly as possible. You can’t add SODIMMs or LPCAMM modules to a MacBook, just like how you cant either with a strix halo APU just like Framework demonstrated, inconsistent signal integrity causes enough issues that it isn’t commercially viable.

Sure, I’d love Apple to make modular memory a thing for their Macs, but quite frankly, I doubt they can even achieve it without any compromises. There’s also the fact that I’d love if Apple could’ve put 16gb of unified memory into the MacBook neo with no raise in price, but realistically, the chipset design they chose, the a18 pro, only supports up to 8gb, and quite frankly they would never achieve a better price today while also designing it to handle a dozen memory tiers, as either they’d need to choose an M series chipset or design a dozen different types of A series packages with some future chipset that doesn’t exist right now, defeating the purpose of having a low price. The low price isn’t just due to the external design choices, it’s also because they chose to only build a single package, an 8gb a18 pro, which would reduce costs overall for the model as manufacturing can just scale, not increase in complexity.

I don’t mind if you downvote, it’s just a bunch of gripes I have with the overall reaction about this frankly pretty awesome new product offering, even if I don’t really like Apple a whole lot.

If it wouldn’t carry just 8 GB of RAM, it would be a great deal. Sadly, it’s not even upgradable, so its usefulness is rather limited.

Question, what is the used market for Macs like?
I can't check the prices for the USA, but I really wonder if getting an used M1 Air wouldn't end up being better bang for your buck?

Considering Windows has become a complete dumpster fire recently, this $600 laptop could be a really appealing option for some if they're mostly browsing the web.

So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.

Apple has been violating people's wallets for how long and they finally decide now is the time to make affordable macs?

Complaining aside, this is a darn good move. The timing is great, so they are likely to be very popular too, which is good for the future of the market. I hope.

This is the “let’s get the budget computer crowd using iCloud services” solution.

They can afford to sell at a loss if needed, because the onboard storage is just low enough to make NOT subscribing to cloud services painful after 6-8 months.