I think anyone with tens of millions of dollars would find it hard to compete in the business world - they should stay in their garden with their rare plants
How is this different than me using the voice to speech feature on my iPhone or Mac that is built in, and free? I can talk into voice memos as well and get a full transcript even from crazy long files
The main differences are transcription quality and what happens after the transcript is generated.
Utter uses GPT-4o Transcribe by default for cloud transcription, and in my experience it’s best in class. The gap is most obvious on names, niche terminology, and technical vocabulary. I use it a lot for prompting coding agents, and I've found Apple’s built-in dictation and most other apps don't come close in terms of accuracy.
It also adds a custom post-processing step. So instead of ending up with a raw transcript, you can record a long, messy voice note and have it turned into a clean, structured markdown notes.
If you want to test the accuracy difference yourself, try dictating this with both Apple dictation and ChatGPT web (uses same model) and compare the output:
“My FastAPI service uses Pydantic, Celery, Redis, and SQLAlchemy, but the async worker is deadlocking when a background task retries after a Postgres connection pool timeout.”
Thanks for catching that! The correct repo link is https://github.com/ppcvote/free-tier-agent-fleet — I used the wrong org name in the post. Everything's there: scripts, timers, config, and docs.
It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.
The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.
> K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.
Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.
true, which is why chromebooks are almost ubiquitous in k-12, at least in the US. a mac, even for only $500, is still ~2x the price and lacks the management tools that Google Classroom provides
Interesting pricing differential. Seems in your country, that IdeaPad is significantly cheaper than the price in the US. But for your Macbook Neo, it's the other way around.
No idea. Maybe Lenovo includes purchasing power in the price calculation for some reason, such as making more money in the U.S. while gaining market share here in Czechia, where purchasing power is lower. Apple may be able to afford not to do that.
I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.
Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).
After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.
In my area, an Acer Chromebook Spin 514 has a faster processor, more RAM, and a touchscreen and costs only $100 more. With those specs, it's much better for productivity, development, and games, so it's well worth the price. It has better Android integration than the MacBook has iOS integration and even runs Android apps natively itself. The same people who didn't know that Acer sold this before will still not know they sell it now. The people who knew Acer sold that device before will continue buying it.
When I was in college the exam nanny software required Windows, and not in a VM. (I had a Windows desktop at home, so I just remoted into that to take exams.) This was a few years ago but much less than 15.
Also most "professional" CAD software is Windows-only, which is going to affect a big chunk of engineering majors.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
You can nowadays do fine with macOS or Linux in most college degrees I've seen, since nowadays there are decent open source alternatives for the most prolific software that's on the level of popularity that it will be used in teaching.
However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.
> the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...
This is true, but I was on the School's IT in HS and they were much easier to repair.
Things like the keyboard caps were a constant pain point, but they were durable little devices and 30 minutes as all it took to fix the worst of issues.
We would just hang on to the Chromebooks whenever they had a fault that made them inoperable, and when a new one came in with a problem, like missing keyboard caps or a broken webcam, we'd just part out one of the Chromebooks from the graveyard.
I imagine that would be significantly more difficult with an iPad, even just opening them up is much harder, and there's not a whole lot you can do to fix them.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
CompSci grad in the US as well, it is genuinely a sea of either Macs or ThinkPads with $INSERT_FAV_LINUX_DISTRO here, and even then 66% of that are Macs.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.
Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.
This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
Yes it does. I was clarifying what the commenter was saying; not making his statement myself.
akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
correct, I thought he meant that the Neo does not support it, since his M1 Macbook does support Apple Intelligence but perhaps he's not aware of that or hasn't updated yet.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
That's good info thanks and you are right I didn't take that into account. I do however think that 8GB may be basically usable now but I'd like to see students able to use these machines for a decent length of time and to be able to become digital creators using them. I get it won't edit video or do 3d modelling the same way a Macbook Pro can but it needs to do enough to get students interested.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.
My kids school has been giving every kid in the upper school an m1 macbook air and they have to replace a LOT of them. Everything they do is in the cloud (Google classroom, docs etc) so they don't need powerful machines. The school was considering moving to chromebooks but I can see them choosing this instead just to keep their current provisioning workflows etc.
A refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in 'fair' condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck. How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a
redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
Why is the finder the way it is? Is it actually easier to use than (whatever the normal file browser windows and linux uses is called) if all you ever use is macs?
Most of the other quirks I can work around (though the default alt tab behavior not picking up windows of the same app is an insane default) but the finder is just unusable.
As much as this saddens me I think its because most computer users these days never think about files. Everything we do on a day to day basis exists as database records, either in sqlite databases hidden away in application data directories, or in the databases behind a million SaaS products. Music is done in Apple Music, photos are managed in iPhoto, and so and so forth.
In which way are other GUI “finder-equivalents” better? I’m not invested either way, but I’m quite curious. It would be a great biz opportunity to make an aftermarket replacement if there is huge gap.
Snarky but I agree. I dislike how much MacOS changes with each version. My kids have a Linux box (NUC). I wish we could have Linux on a late model Mac Mini
The amount of people that know how to and also want to replace their operating system is effectively a rounding error in the consumer electronic market in general.
I like Linux and had Linux laptops before, but can’t comprehend why anyone would go as far as replacing MacOS on an Apple laptop. The OS is just fine, there is nothing superior about Linux Desktop environments. And you can easily run Docker containers for work that needs Linux.
Oddly, except for font sizing, it's OK on the iPhone, and fine on the iPad, too, but it just bothers me endlessly on MacOS. I'm glad Sequoia still works well.
As much as I disagree with the cameras, you should not have been downvoted. If anything, people who are against the cameras need to see your anecdotal experience so that they can see how easy it will be for these cameras to proliferate.
The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone. Then came the surprise with 12 mini in September of 2020, except the battery life and performance sucked, garnering bad reviews.
Then, finally in September 2021, they released the 13 mini, an objectively good, smaller phone. But over the previous 18 months, a lot of the buyers for the 13 mini had already bought the 2020 SE or were burned by the 12 mini.
> The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
I still use my 12 mini; it's by far my favorite iphone I've had since my 5s. It might have had sucky battery life but I was just happy to have a phone that could fit in my pocket.
I've replaced the screen twice, battery once (by myself) and I have really very little intentions on moving to anything newer than the 13 mini.
I'm not sure why Apple doesn't care about the mini apple users. My friends, when they pull out a 17 pro look absolutely ridiculous, constantly having to pull the phone out when doing any real work since the phone just keeps getting in the way.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone.
Count me in this group. I wound up buying the 13 mini right before it was going to be discontinued because I knew that would be the last small phone they would produce and I'm keeping it until it dies (or I can't get a battery for it).
Also, the mini had worse cameras than the larger screens.
Camera quality is the second most important thing to me (after not needing finger enhancement surgery to hold the phone).
So, they designed it to fail, and it still was 3-5% of sales vs. ones that actually got good spec bumps every year. (If you’re upgrading the phone every 12 months, why buy the one with cameras a few years behind the curve?)
Anyway, I like my mini. I wish it had touch id instead.
The Minis had the exact same cameras as the non-Minis. The Pros had the only camera improvements. In my experience all were worse than the contemporary Pixels though.
Ah true. It came down to Pro vs. Mini for me because I usually just buy the best iPhone without regard to price. (I don't care about spending an extra $200 for a device I'll use for 4-5 years, but Apple's cheapest phones were also the best back then.)
Tenth of millions of devices were sold (somewhere between 20 to 35 Million?). You could build multiple plants for it, with government funding in Europe.
The MBAs at Apple noticed:
* Big size is a status symbol in Asia. And TV replacement. Their a lot of people in Asia.
* Due to vendor lock-in people need to purchase anyway. So just sell them the standard phone.
They got the sales anyway. We don’t have a “functional market”. But Apples marketing was weird. They named it Mini instead of Compact or Air. And launched it against the SE? A lot people already refused to move from the SE 1st Gen to the Mini, to due the increased size and missing TouchID.
So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.
Crazy people fixate. It’s why you get people talking about how 4o was the best AI model ever and crying for it to be brought back. (It had no internal thinking process and would believe you are the messiah without question)
I'm shocked to see this as the top comment. My entire household is on Apple devices. There are over a dozen products with keyboards (physical or virtual) and no one has ever had in replaced with inn.
Where does it even happen? Can you create a keyboard shortcut or solve it with some LLM help?
"in" to "inn" is just one of the numerous words it LOVES to replace for me. (But it is one of the most common)
Just this afternoon it also replaced "for" with "fire", and it loves censoring me with "ducking".
One time it got me into hot water when it corrected "tacos" to "Travis". "I picked up Travis on the way home" isn't the message your wife wants to see after being dropped off at the airport.
Just my iPhone 13 mini does this my iPad isn't as bad. It has persisted between iOS updates and has been an ongoing issue for a few years.
Apple’s keyboard problems are very evident. There are videos showing some very blatant flaws.
But I suspect there are Apple homers who are gonna defend Apple just like they defended the butterfly keyboards, right until the day Apple finally accepted it was broken and surprise, here’s a new laptop you can buy from Apple without the butterfly keyboard to replace your existing broken one.
Or alternatively Apple will accept that the device was indeed broken but 5 years later, when people barely have their device anymore and if they do it’s not worth getting the replacement from Apple anyways because it’s outdated, like they did with the graphics cards in the laptops for several years.
I get what you’re saying, I’m saying you don’t know if the keyboard problems are affecting 0.3% or 30%. The internet makes both of those look the same, and yes Apple can’t be trusted. If we’re doing anecdotes I have no issues with my keyboards either.
Moonbirds
Digg
Too comfortable with money in the bank to give full attention to a new venture.
I'm done falling for the Kevin Rose hype train. Long time fan but this is just pathetic.
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