Technology

Damn man maybe the PC industry should've considered making even one single actually good laptop 

Well good, maybe it'll incentivise y'all fuckers to sell actually usable machine instead of Bordeline e-waste Celerons with a 4GB of RAM in the ultra-budget segment

Maybe Asus should invest more into linux and start shipping it on their laptops by default? Maybe add an improved software compatibility layer for windows apps to get more people in?

Dude, the difference between you and Apple is Windows 11. They don't have a crappy copilot or Edge hoarding 4GB in the background just to show the weather.

I'm suspicious.

I'm seeing social media FLOODED with Neo content. Definitely not organic.

I can't speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it's awful because of all that bloat. I'm guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.

He pointed to the laptop's 8GB of "unified memory," or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can't upgrade it.

Yes, because Asus laptops all have non-soldered RAM...

A few do have non-soldered RAM, the most expensive workstation laptop and a couple of gaming laptops; all of which are >$2000.

Honestly, I’m just surprised this is the first time someone has dared to put a phone SOC in a laptop chassis.

It seemed kind of obvious to me that a laptop experience on phone hardware (but like… with a bigger screen, keyboard and mouse/trackpad) was sort of perfect for most use cases. I just assumed that it would come in the form of a phone docked in to a hollowed out laptop. The core issue was just that the software was awful with such a set up. Apple just kind of bypassed that by having their whole OS and everything on it switch over to ARM and just running a non-mobile OS on a phone SOC.

It seems like Google is kind of edging that way by merging chrome OS in to android. And windows was maybe flailing that direction with windows on arm… but… I think that was mostly just them trying to copy Apple without really thinking to hard about it.

8GB of unupgradable ram is unforgivable in today's software landscape. Even if the OS is memory efficient, running multiple software still takes ram. I get it's a $600 laptop, but that's still an inexcusably low amount of ram for anything but grandma and similar.

The perfect time for a relatively cheap Apple laptop when Microsoft is forcing people to buy new hardware just to use their latest version of their operating system. I wonder what the percentage of Microsoft folks who go to the MacBook will be. I wonder what the percentage of users who go the UNIX/Linux route would be. I'm not an apple fan myself so would go linux, but a good business move from Apple though.

In Europe the price it's not that appealing, it's €699 and because they "care about environment 😉" the €99 charger (which is almost mandatory for a new user) is sold separately.

At €798 for 256g/8g it's not as good as the $599 they're selling in the US.

If someone is price sensitive, can get 3-4 refurbished ThinkPads with better specs for that price and run Linux much easier without hoping on some volunteer wizard to reverse engineer the proprietary components

Am I the only one even a little happy to see the head of a major company mentioning upgradability as an appeal for customers?

Please do stick with two unsoldered SODIMM slots for your laptops Asus.

As I always say:

...Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.

That's all they use their computers for. They don't want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid's picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.

And that's basically what the Neo is.

Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.

Its still a Mac

He also described the MacBook Neo as a “content consumption” device, similar to an iPad. “This is different from the use case of a mainstream notebook," which can handle more compute-intensive tasks, Hsu said.

I don't know what Windows have out of the box but is MacBook really content consuming device ?

Free build in OS offline office apps Word = Pages, Excel=Numbers, Power Point = Keynote, Notes, Calendar, Email, Reminders, PDF viewer = Preview, movie editor = iMovie, Journal, Password Manager = Keychain, Maps app ( yes you can download parts of map to use offline), Garage band where you can connect your midi devices and record them.

They've had Mac minis for over a decade.

I find this hard to believe.

He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.

Given the price of RAM, you'd need to sell a kidney to upgrade it in a Windows laptop these days, so that's not much of a difference, although 8MB is a little skimpy, I'll give him that one.

Just make some decent SD Elite laptops, preferably with Linux OOTB, I've been waiting...

Lemmings that focus on the RAM spec are telling on themselves. 256gb storage is the real travesty here.

I honestly dont care about the 8gb of ram, that is plenty for the target audience given MacOS's pretty good memory management, and optimisation of the first party apps the majority of users will use. I would have liked to see the base price be $499, but that would probably have needed something to be cut down to outside of apples standards, like the display or chassis quality.

I'm a little disappointed by the limited USB, its just one usb 3.0 (not 3.1 as far as I know) and one 2.0, I know that's a limitation of the platform, there arent really any spare PCIE lanes on a phone SOC. They could have put in a USB Hub chip to get two USB 3.0 ports with shared bandwidth, but I suspect that was difficult to do with reliable video and power throughput and someone decided saving a dollar was more important. That's plenty for your average user, but a pair of usb 3.1 would have been preferred of course.

However.. how many average PC users even use USB now? maybe just a thumb drive very rarely or to use an external display. I'm surprised it even has a headphone jack and an SD reader honestly.

I'd suspect the next gen model to use the newer iPhone chip that should bump the memory up to 12gb and I think has a usb 3.1 controller, so they could break that out better.

I dont hate it. it's filling in what used to be the mid range of laptops that has kinda died in the last 10 years and is full of spec bumped versions of bottom tier plastic garbage with awful screens and short battery life, and a couple of underspecced cut down versions of nicer metal case laptops that are just not very good either.

I think the real shock is the quality of windows and Microsoft, and the pc laptop industry also... When everything about a pc laptop is worse than a mac laptop, why do we expect?

It really is like no pc laptop manifacturer has pride in what they create anymore. They dont care if its a bad screen, shitty keyboard, horrible battery time. Just get it on market so the people can buy, and pay reviewers for good reviews.

It really is not appealing a mac air with 16gb RAM was $999 AUD and the NEO is $899 AUD. It's a step backwards..