alt Hacker NewsI would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).
Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.
If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.
Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.
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The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.
I have an RTX 5070TI laptop. 95% I use it with Tumbleweed.
Unfortunately with work I don't have too much to play with LLM training and such.
The ultra poor person system is a used 200$ Thinkpad ( something about 2 years old) + your Linux distro of choice.
I bought my mother in law a Lenovo Thinkbook for Christmas; I didn't know that the Macbook Neo was coming else I might have waited for that.
Anyway, I installed Linux Mint on there. She has been using it every day and at least according to her there hasn't really been any jank (and I told her to call me any time if something breaks and I'll fix it).
At this point, I think Linux distros have gotten good enough to realistically start stealing users away from Windows. Linux Mint is easy to use, runs fine even on modest hardware, and doesn't push a bunch of shitty ads at you. I think there is an option for telemetry, but I also think that disabling it actually disables it.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that outside of modern MS Office, most Windows things just run if you need it, but if you're not using MS Office heavily then you likely can get by with web apps and/or the Linux alternatives.
Maybe it really will be the Year of the Linux Desktop!
The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector
Buying a gaming laptop is like buying have a sports car. Sure, it looks nice, and you may even be able to wheel it around a bit. But it's not the ideal experience.
Meanwhile every MacOS thread is filled with people complaining how everything is broken and only getting worse.
Not that I'd know, I've probably seen <10 apple laptop devices in my life and never used one.
The Neo costs $200 more than a comparable Windows laptop, but with half the RAM and storage as said comparable Windows laptop.
They're fighting to seize the very specific market segment of "I don't like Windows and don't want to use Linux or a Chromebook, and I'm also poor, but still want to pay a premium price for an underpowered tablet with keyboard glued to it."