Less expensive: yep
Actually fun colors: yep
Windows is worse than ever: yep
It would have been surprising if this thing wasn’t a hit.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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windows went all in on AI, and neglected thier other stuff.
In turn Apple went ‘oh fuck what’s AI now’ and turned out to be the winners. Who would’ve guessed huh.
Their AI ended up being straight ass like Siri so they pivoted to this instead.
I work in IT and ~1/3 of our fleet are MacBooks and several ppl on my team are Apple fanboys, but I've literally never heard anyone talk about using "Apple Intelligence" even once
What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
AI is a big part of it but the problem is so much deeper.
Windows went all-in on AI including for internal development, despite removing their dedicated QA teams years ago.
That's the fun part about monopolies: when you have no real competition you just cut costs and degrade the experience for everyone, but it doesn't matter because there's nowhere else for them to go.
this is just an ad
Well yeah, if you sell a “budget” product that is cheaper than your usual premium-priced products, more people tend to buy them.
apple probably wants people to buy the more expensive one eventually.
IMO most of the the demand is due to Windows 11, not Apple. People are done with Microslop's crap.
Both Apple and Linux are winning big with the double wamy of Win 11 being complete garbage and Win 10 being murdered.
Win 10 being murdered is the important distinction. It's not the first time Microslop released a shitty and unpopular Windows version, but previously you always had the option to stay on an older still supported version.
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more apple than linux, lay people arnt likely going to switched to something too unfamiliar or complicated.
Imo if leaving from windows, Linux is easier to use than macos these days, simply because Linux has improved so much recently and the design paradigm is more similar to windows.
Macos has some weird ass UX sometimes like the ridiculous alt-tab equivalent or the switch around of all common keyboard shortcuts.
more people are asking me what linux distro i would recommend than ever
i know more people who use linux than macos
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The average person frankly doesn't really care as much as you think probably. Anecdotal but people I spoke to who also got it mainly got it for the price. They'd still prefer Windows since it's what they're used to but the lower price makes trying something new a lot more palatable.
Most of the stuff "regular people" do on computers these days is either web-based or cross-platform, too. A lot of them are getting the Neo because it's better than practically every other $600 new laptop in terms of build quality.
IMO the average person (and multiple people I know) no longer likes using their computers since W11 was forced down. They've heard good things about Apple and are ready for a change.
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Says MacRumors.... Who consistently try to pump Apple even when they release trash products...
This isn't fresh news anymore and they are not lying
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/30/apple-was-surprised-by-ai-driven-demand-for-macs/
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It's hilarious how Apple was caught off guard to begin with.
Just going off of the triangle of "cheap-fast-good", the Neo literally hits all three categories really well.
The majority of standard users only need a web browser nowadays. I'm not sure if it can view/sign PDFs and send print jobs, but I'm sure it can, and all of this covers the 99% use case for a household device.
I'm the tech guy of the family. Linux nerd, GrapheneOS on my phone, blah blah blah. If my mom needed a new laptop I would 100% recommend the Neo and be done with it. No frills, no bullshit. Shit I want to pick one up just to play around with it because it's CHEAP, even though I dont like Apple's ecosystem.
I'm not sure how it would fare as a college device(test taking, remote screen sharing, proprietary programs, etc) but even for middle schoolers and high schoolers this should cover most, if not all, bases.
We got one for my sister in law, and she likes it for college.
She wanted to just use an iPad, but she had to have macOS for the proprietary test tool spyware. It runs on the neo
I think Neo goes with a typical Apple premium, so it's not cheap for what it offers, BUT:
- Many people are ready to pay that premium, maaning other manufacturers need to go way below that mark with a similar hardware, which benefits us, and
- This is closest we've seen to a netbook for a while. This is good, we need them back!
netbook
Damn, I haven't heard that in a long time...and you're completely right. It is a netbook and we do need more of those in this new world(even though I don't like what that means(ownership of hardware or lack thereof)).
To be fair I would say the vast majority of Mac users are using their machines purely for browsing, note taking, etc regardless of what model they're on. Most buy a Mac so they can prop open the lid and show off the Apple logo to everyone else. It's a status symbol, it's a flag of conformity.
So the Neo fills that niche without spending an arm and a leg to do so AND you can actually easily repair some things on it. As a netbook it's perfect.
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My college kids do everything through cloud services, so it shouldn’t really matter what their device is.
- One of them has a Mac and is just finishing his first year with no problems, so I would expect a neo to be no different.
- My older kid jumps among an iPad in class, his laptop when necessary, and his gaming rig in his dorm, and has had no issues
On the other hand, my niece has very specific requirements for her major, so there will always be a few specialties
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I just now noticed that the wallpaper in that image says MAC.
I preffered not knowing this
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I walked into a Best Buy last fall just to kind of browse the computers on offer. The sales rep recommended a laptop (Asus, I think) with 16gb of RAM, saying he actually even got his aunt one of the same model he was recommending to me.
That's insane. What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
spoiler
Rhetorical question, the answers are: mega-reliance on webviews, every mid-level PM having to ship "features" to justify their position and to climb the corporate ladder, and every UI designer getting the brain-sickness that's rounded-corners and animations everywhere, while some VP of product insisting on more ads and user-tracking. Add "agentic" aka slop coding to cap a decade of learn-2-code bootcamp 2nd-rate programmers who vigorously studied Cracking the Coding Interview without properly understanding the fundamentals... and voila!
That's the splendid thing about the Neo. Apple is saying ok, we know it's only 8GB of RAM, but through the service life of the laptop we can ensure that that will give you a good desktop experience.
Apple has been optimizing macOS for underpowered machines for a long time.
Testing a bunch of linux distros on old intel macbooks has shown me that apple is really good with resource management on their vertically integrated hardware, even with greedy daemons like identityserverd or whatever it is, trolling through your drive cataloguing faces in your photos all the time, and the relentless indexing system, and telemetry.
Most models work smoothly most of the time, even the little 11" Air with 4GB, doing standard basic user stuff, and the 2020 1.1 GHz i3 Air is somehow usable on macOS 15, basically current.
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What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
Uhhhh 16GB RAM should be the bare minimum, what are you on about?
Why? Were we incapable of using computers 10-14 years ago when 2-8gb were standard? 16 gigabyte computer to log into email, instagram, and facebook. Give me a break.
LOL are you serious?
I dunno about you but I'm not running a 10+ year old OS, nor 10+ year old software. You may not have noticed but times have changed...
2016: most people just do some web browsing, videos, and documents.
2026: most people just do some web browsing, videos, and documents
But I like your take. You're right. Software should linearly get bloated and slower as a function based on time.
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Yeah, now every "desktop app" is a shitty website that bundles its own copy of chromium. Progress!
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That seams off. Everyone says Apple is so great at reading the room.
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