Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.
Apple introduces Macbook Neo - cheaper Macbooks starting at $599
Submitted 2 weeks ago by popcar2@piefed.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/say-hello-to-macbook-neo/
Comments
random_character_a@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reasonably priced Mac.
Phone CPU. Similar priced iPads come with a much better CPU.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Counterpoint: Phone CPUs can rival yesterday’s desktops.
otacon239@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ve been running an M1 for years now. So tired of the argument that Mac is underpowered. No, it’s not a video editing/compiling/gaming powerhouse, but it more than makes up for it with an 8+ hour battery life going on 5 years now.
It still handles everything I throw at it just fine. If I need to bust out the compute power, Mac just isn’t the right rig for it. But that doesn’t make them useless.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But only run iPadOS, so they’re a paperweight.
Regardless, I’m never buying another mac unless I can run asahi linux on it. Apple has progressively destroyed MacOS for the last 15 years, and will continue to do so.
KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It has comparable performance to laptop CPUs in its price bracket while being significantly more power efficient.
9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
doesit@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Probably means their normal go-to market is saturated. In this price range they can still sell and profit.
nothingcorporate@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
[deleted]Lawnman23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
$899 was education price, $1099 is retail.
Don’t need to lie to make a point.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Or maybe it will come with some subscription model to get you more power, from the cloud of course.
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The low price
Dude, there isn’t anything low about that price. That’s the point, with 600 dollars you can get a very decent computer for pretty much any other brand with at least the double of ram.
You see, you can get an used thinkpad for less than half the price and still have twice the ram.
It’s just a scam product for people who know nothing about computers and will pay for this trash because they simply think “apple a good brand, right?”.
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
the reason I said the price was low is simply because IT IS for what you’re getting, especially where I live. This Macbook Neo starts at $900 AUD, and after checking local retailers like Officeworks, JB HI-FI and Centrecom, and from what I’ve found, the laptops at that same or similar price tag are usually worse performing, plastic built laptops with worse displays. Sure, some come with 16gb of shared SODIMM memory, but a majority come with 8gb. Around a third of them are Chromebooks, the rest are windows laptops. Most come with core i3 or i5 or Ryzen 3, 5 or 7.
For the Macbook Neo, which you can preorder from these retailers for around that 900 bucks, you get a rigid aluminium build, a solid high PPI screen, 8gb of unified LPDDR5X memory, a better SoC than the competition, guaranteed OS support for around 7 years, strict OS memory compression and management, and some pleasant colours compared to the drab grey and uncreative black colours.
RAM is never the only factor when choosing to buy a laptop, its all the other factors as well, those of which people miss and happen to get a laptop where the hinge breaks a year after, or the shared memory puts limits on their workflow and forces the CPU to work more copying data between two pools, or the display has shitty viewing angles that make it hard to look at, or an short accidental drop renders the machine inoperable, or even overuse of the ports cause them to fail, but they’re soldered on and render that function of the device useless.
There are so many reasons to bag Apple, but you gotta hand it to them, they know how to standardise and have demonstrated that their devices are designed to weather being used well. And sure, you can definitely buy something a lot cheaper with a hell of a lot more ports, but its likely these ports in the Neo will be modular, since all ports are modular in the Airs, Pros, Mac Minis and Mac Studios.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s the same price and similar specs to current Chromebook models, which is what I think they are trying to compete against.
sonofearth@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Lol our store is doing billing customer management in google chrome on Debian With KDE Plasma on 8GB DDR3 pentium something. It was running Windows 7 6 months ago with 4gb ram for the same purpose. I then put a Sata SSD, increased the RAM to 8 and installed Debian.
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
that’s pretty awesome that your store repurposed old tech with a solid reason to do so, and frankly people constantly bag old tech for being old, even though most of the time it can still fulfill most of what they need, and I’m saying that as I type this on the aforementioned 10 year old laptop, a laptop of which I bought off a friend for $10 AUD because he got a new one because it felt shit using this one, mainly since it was on an old windows 10 install with a ton of bloat.
What my point was in the previous comment was not that you should avoid modularity, other brands or used tech, rather I was stating that people in these threads are constantly overblowing the point of 8gb of unified memory being the only tier, since most of us game, design, self host or do other things which can be quite demanding, but web browsing, document editing and the many other use cases for this Macbook Neo would barely phase it, just like how the machine I’m typing this on right now is cool to the touch and hasn’t stuttered at all since boot around 2 hours ago.
and shit, If I needed a laptop right now and had to buy new, if there was an option a little more expensive for something with slightly worse build quality and performance, so I can have modularity, I’d snap that up, but these days its damn difficult to beat apple in the new tech market. The Mac Mini was probably the first stupidly affordable Apple machine, then the MacBook Air (which now sorta lost its edge since apple just price gated it by making 512gb storage minimum,) and now this Macbook Neo, all happening through a RAM shortage where consumers are benefiting from Apple’s excessively long hardware contracts, mainly for the LPDDR5X chips.
thoralf@discuss.familie-will.at 2 weeks ago
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.
ClydapusGotwald@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Most notably web browsing which one would think this thing is mostly for.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Seriously? I have recently been working on my personal programming projects on my ThinkPad from 2014. That thing also has 8 GB RAM. It’s slow, but that’s only because the dedicated video card is no longer supported by NVIDIA. I was totally able to run PyCharm, my program (which was hungry for ram), and Firefox with quite some tabs open without any issues. And most people will be doing more basic stuff on this than what I was doing. Browsing around, editing some documents, viewing some photos. I’m not sure how heavy MacOS is, but I’ll assume it’s more like Linux than Windows. You can do a lot with 8GB if your OS isn’t gobbling up resources to spy on you, show you ads, or run some useless AI shit you didn’t ask for.
I agree that it’s not a lot, but this laptop is not meant for people who need to do more than what I mentioned, putting much more RAM in there would just creep up the price without really offering anything.
Note that I’m not an Apple fan or anything, I’ve never even used anything from Apple.
foxfell@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
It would be. Even my pixel have 16gigs of ram, lol.
Testing was conducted by Apple in January and February 2026 using preproduction MacBook Neo systems with Apple A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 8GB of unified memory, and 256GB SSD.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is basically Apple’s version of a Chromebook. It’s an iPhone in the shape of a laptop.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
But it runs full macOS.
Harvey656@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
worhui@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They have had an ‘affordable’ Mac for a lot of their history. The Mac mini was a downright value for a while. They have had near $1000 laptops for most of my memory.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
just typical /r/technology apple hating.
jaydev@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sorry but near $1000 and near $600 are not even remotely comparable.
I got an HP EliteBook 840 G3 in 2018 for $585 with 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB storage. That was NEVER possible with any Apple laptop. Until now.
Or actually, it still isn’t now! The RAM and storage on this are absolutely abysmal for a 2026 laptop. PCs have already vastly eclipsed this bullshit.
As an Apple devotee that pays your annual tithe, you’re welcome to crow about their smooth interface and nicer terminal and better privacy, but you will never, ever, ever beat PCs on price. Ever.
Apple is a monopoly. Monopolistic exploitation that maximizes profit by keeping prices high and sales low is literally introductory level macroeconomics. They have never made their products good value for money, and they never will.
fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
FireWire400@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’d make for a great student laptop, reminds me of the old polycarbonate MacBooks actually. They did cut corners a lot, but retained all the niceties you’d expect from a MacBook.
And they finally added some colour; could’ve have gone with more vibrant colours IMO but it’s better than nothing.
I gotta say, I do like fuzzy wombats as well^^
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.
BladeFederation@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!
KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thanks go the amazing people over at Asahi Linux, you can on macbooks too!
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
There’s no reason for the average person to ever buy another windows device
adespoton@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Exactly. Most of Apples software design decisions since the iPhone are anti-consumer and monopolistic, and should be straight up illegal.
Apple owns your device; not you.
protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
a sane light in the replies
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Wait, but legally I own the laptop, right?
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
8GB RAM? No.
snapcatcher@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
You are not the target audience
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
If you know what ‘8GB RAM’ means you’renot the target audience for this machine.
BladeFederation@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
You known what, good job Apple. You’ve been winning me over lately. I’m not sure I’d exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we’ll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.
veeesix@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
ICYMI, the Neo is an even better deal at $499 with education pricing.
mehrshad@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
This right here. Everyone in this thread is looking for MBP use cases from a device that is CLEARLY designed to take foothold in the classroom. The $499 price point goes even lower for volume EDU sales. The company is not going to explicitly position this as a classroom device - it’s inherent through its spec limitations and even its packaging.
Now it’s a matter of how delicately they promote it with third party learning management tools, Google Classroom, Canvas, etc.
cole@lemdro.id 2 weeks ago
MDM on MacOS still kinda sucks compared to Linux or Windows. I mean, it’s fine. But they genuinely have work to do there
LuigiMaoFrance@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
$600 MacBook in 2026 is absolutely insane to me. Around 2007/08 when I started using MacBooks as a student the entry level ones used to be 1200€.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Consider that this is an iPhone 16 in a MacBook shell, though. This gives you performance comparable a 5 years old used MacBook M1. It’s usable, but it’s designed to act as a gateway drug, you’ll immediately hit storage and memory limits and want to buy a more expensive one.
8gb of RAM in 2026 where most modern apps are made in electron and a basic text editor takes half gig to show a blank page is less than ideal
fatcat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
To be honest it is not as big of deal. I have a MacBook M1 with 8 GB of memory and my swap is regularly 20 GB but I don’t have any problems when actually working with the system. It’s handling the low memory situation very gracefully.
For browsing, office and some media it’s totally fine.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This thing can run iPad apps right? So at least that is an option when the desktop version is shite. I mean I’m using an iPhone 14 for the last 4 years and it’s fine to use. This laptop is aimed at college and high school kids who just need a browser and take notes. It’s probably fine for that. It’s a Chromebook competitor it’s not for power users.
mriormro@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is meant to tackle the chromebook market.
Scrollone@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
I just wished Apple would revert that shitty Liquid Ass UI. It made the operating system unusable.
foliumcreations@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have a 2015 13" Macbook Air with 4gb ram, and a new battery running, Mint with i3 wm and except for a few very unoptimised webpages I don’t experience any significant lagg when browsing. streaming 1920x1080 video without issues(the screen resolution is 1440x900 so no need for more) sure I only use it for writing on the go and minor surfing, anything heavier like video editing or Blender I do on my main desktop or my lenovo legion. This whole - anything less than 16gb ram is garbage in current year. Does not take into account that a lot of consumers and middle managers actually don’t do anything heavy on their computers.
FireWire400@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I would be kinda impressed that Apple is finally offering something that’s good value, but 8GB on RAM? ehhhhhh. It’s probably still a decent-ish deal, I don’t really know how good a phone SoC would handle anything more than light tasks, though.
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
On the ram front, I’ve heard it’s just a limitation of the a18 pro chipset, not Apple being stingy, as that chipset can only support up to 8gb of ram total.
Also, apparently the a18 pro is similar to the m1 in terms of performance, which the base m1 beat out the core i9 9880H, which was the processor of the most powerful MacBook Pro pre-Apple silicon, so the a18 pro would likely be able to do a lot more than light browsing and document editing, although the limiting factor is unfortunately the 8gb of ram that just can’t be expanded.
FarrellPerks@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
They really said ‘Cheap’ and $600 in the same sentence.
minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They sell 4 wheels for $700. People buy it. Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit - Apple share.google/FCOp7IY3rKkfeIOth
FrChazzz@lemmus.org 2 weeks ago
It’s pretty. But I recently bought a Lenovo IdeaPad at Costco for less, with 16GB ram and 1TB SDD and am running Linux Mint on it, which I’m getting way more out of than any other Mac I’ve owned.
Without a doubt the Mac’s screen is better than mine. But I feel like, all things considered, what I have can do more (and probably for longer). I’m happy to see something like this come along and take the wind out of Microslop’s sails (and sales). At the same time, I feel like one is able to get far more value out of a less-costly machine. If one were going to switch OSes anyway, why not Linux? I guess they’re banking on people already owning iPhones and therefore making this a more seamless transition or whatever…
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Anyone who knows what Linux actually is, isn’t buying these.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
How is Linux support on your idea pad? Does everything work as expected?
btsax@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
How soon until Asahi will run on it
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How soon until Asahi will run on it
Years. Asahi fully relies on reverse engineering by the community and those community members tend to get hired by the competition. Get a device where the platform designer supports Linux development upstream if your priority is Linux.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This was my first question. This laptop looks like a really strange bird from the hardware point of view. It runs OSX (Tahoe), but uses an iPhone/iPad CPU (not an M1 or M2 CPUs that Asahi runs on today).
SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
you can run “normal” (non Asahi) Linux on those, since they have a normal cpu
jaykrown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when the second hand market is so available? It’s all just novelty. I wouldn’t touch this, all I can think about is what it’ll look like in the second hand market in about 3 years.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The MacBook 5C.
goatinspace@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
sveltecider@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
RIP to the mid range Chromebook and windows laptop market.
aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
If it has more memory I’d be on board. 8GB is fucking rough.
Honestly if it forces software to be leaner going down the line, I’m ok with memory crunches (it won’t, but I’m just thinking out loud).
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
A renewed interest in competing with Chromebooks?
banshee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m not mad about this, especially with Google pushing Gemini so hard on all their devices. I pulled up the Chromebook site to see their current offerings, and the prominent advertisement for Gemini is pretty disgusting after fresh news of another death.
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Honestly this seems absolutely incredible for the vast majority of people, a good MacBook at a decent price point. Benchmarks haven’t come out yet but I heard its as good if not better than the M1. For the vast majority of people that’s good enough, and even with the worse battery the real world battery life is gonna be amazing.
Also for those complaining about Linux support the main competition is Windows laptops running Snapdragon X Elite which should have somewhat similar performance and also doesn’t support Linux. Hell the snapdragon x2 probably won’t support Linux either. These laptops cost two times as much as this and usually with significantly worse build quality.
MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Does it run Linux?
/s or not
LiveLM@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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?DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Just bought a PC laptop for $399. It does everything I need a laptop to do.
Don’t want to pay $200 more for street cred.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Powered by A18 Pro
Completing the MacBook Neo experience is macOS Tahoe
Woah, this is new! A version of Mac OSX running on a iPhone/iPad CPU.
popcar2@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
popcar2@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
XLE@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
In addition to being more locked down, you’d also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?
MurrayL@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.
irate944@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Better specs in theory, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
homes@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
kingofras@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
djdarren@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn’t surprise me given Apple’s laptop history
ComputerAbuser@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn’t great, but it’s not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn’t so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.
deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
MurrayL@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?
in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
BladeFederation@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.
Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, less storage (but usually an SSD), slightly better CPU. It’s GRIM out there.
zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Agree. Probably best notebook for students and also for smaller companies, if you’re not relying on high end hardware.