Cook: "Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers."
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
isn’t what cook is pointing out actually the most important thing?
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
Not really. An independent Mac company with 8% of Apple's sales would still be the #3 computer manufacturer behind Dell and HP, and Mac gross margins could easily support significantly larger investments in OS development if Apple chose to do so.
Relatively well-founded estimates will start to appear in a month or so. It's unfortunate they don't give exact model breakdowns, but everyone knows that the Mac is a hobby for them.
From your point of view it is, but the headline is what Apple is giving them, and it works perfectly well for them: Lots of attention for Apple, zero interesting data.
Doesn’t it mean that it sold more units in its first week on the market than any past Mac? How does that say nothing about sales? It’s literally about sales numbers, they are just using a relative metric instead of an absolute metric.
They announced a sales record where the metric is "sold to somebody that never ever had a mac before" combined with "in the first week of availability". The headline is worse than Cook's tweet quoted in the article.
To get this record you need to have a long time were your costumers were buying something else from you (like Phones) and have a lot available inventory in a lot of places in the first week combined with a great media coverage. 3 things that Apple has an advantage in.
As @ibero above points out it is more important for apple to tap into the vast demographic of relatively young iPhone/iPad customers - the older Mac customers are buying different machines.
Enterprise is the sleeper story here. IT buyers who couldn't justify premium Mac pricing now have a toe-hold argument, and once you're embedded in the MDM stack, upsell paths to higher-tier hardware are straighforward. Thin margins on Neo units today, fat loyalty tomorrow.
I actually liked the Design of Neo more so than the Air. It is just more practical. I also like thin bezel rather than no / minimal bezel.
I still haven't found any concrete evidence but I think the Key travel on Neo is at least 1-2mm higher than Air and Pro. And back to the good old MacBook Pro Early 2015 era keyboard.
If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
> If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
The design of Air and Neo is completely different. Air is non-repairable, worst keyboard, zero bezels. The Neo is easy enough to fix I dont even need to look at the manual.
I think the target demographic is also young people raised with iPhones. So for them the new interface design is good for similarity (not for older Mac-people). As if apple planed that all along...
Makes me think if it was carefully calculated strategy, so Windows users would feel more familiar with new os. Everything in MacOs is frustratingly unusual for windows users, but at least annoying bugs are there. And you google how to deal with it, getting familiar with the os.
Yeah, and using macOS fresh is 100x better than the out of box experience for Windows Home. It took me nearly two hours to get that in what I’d call a usable state, disabling “world polar bear day” logos on the search bar and dumb stuff like that.
macOS is much better than any alternative and Tahoe and iOS 26 seem perfectly fine?
The icons in the menu bars are rough, the spacing isn’t great and the inconsistent window borders aren’t great.
I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
To be fair MacOS (and all apple software) is so heavily optimized for their current hardware. It is unfortunate that Intel macs are left behind, but my 2019 intel mac was capital-S Struggling with macos already in 2022. The M-series was such a leap forward. It’s a server under my desk now.
No, this is not switching to dark mode, it's particular system features now being dark only, like notifications, search, control panel, and some other lesser things I don't specifically now remember.
Compared to Windows? Tahoe is probably fine. Compared to previous versions of macOS/OS X? Nothing deal-breaking for me, but there are all kinds of little things that just don't have the polish long-time macOS users are accustomed to. Sibling comments have already listed a few things, but take the grab points of the window corners, which don't actually match the window borders. A minor thing, IMO, but not very "Apple-y" to let something like that ship. The menu icons are another: they add clutter, they don't add a lot of value, and they look like crap. Again, not a huge deal, but c'mon, Apple, UI is supposed to be your thing.
I don't hate Tahoe myself, but I don't particularly love it, either. I can still get done what I need to do with an OS, but along with a bunch of other paper cuts in recent macOS versions (looking at you, System Settings) on top of Liquid Glass, I can see why folks are upset.
As someone who lived through the early days of Windows, macOS Tahoe and Windows ME aren’t in the same universe.
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's meaningful that a product line that's 41 years old had its best launch for customers new to the platform. That's unprecedented in the computer industry.
I wonder if it’s time to try this again. Last time I tried it, it was intensely buggy, not to mention almost every feature I wanted.
The concept is great, and I would love to ditch OrbStack for it. (OrbStack is slick. But their everything-shares-one-kernel-and-they-don’t-give-privileged-access model falls apart as soon as you try to do anything that doesn’t fit in their not-amazing sandbox. Even user namespaces don’t appear to work.) But, other than the actual core mostly working, Apple Containers was a buggy mess, and it was the only thing that made me frequently reboot the whole machine.
Buggy as well as severe UX regressions. It is so unfortunate that their software division is underperforming when their hardware team is outperforming. Craig Federighi, get your act together!
Such as new screenshot dialog in iOS, where one click has now become three, because we've hidden the primary controls under two pointless single-fold menus.
I like the new dialog? I basically always crop the image when screenshotting so the new UI results in less button pressing for me. How often do you need to capture your entire screen? I almost always want to focus on something.
There was already a way to do that. Cmd-Shift-4, drag a rectangle around what you want to screencap. Cmd-Shift-4 Space, click a window to screencap it.
These have been in the OS for so long I can't even remember when they were added.
I usually want to capture a window, not an arbitrary region (and will sometimes resize a window before a screenshot to enable this). Hotkeys already supported this without cropping needed, and with bonus proper transparent corners.
The new screenshot flow is mostly to provide extra surface for Visual Intelligence. I've found it extremely useful for stuff like ingesting event details and doing Google Lens-esque searches.
What are you talking about? How is breaking sales records chickens coming home to roost? Does that phrase not mean the consequences of a bad decision are being realized? If anything isn't this story the opposite, and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
> and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
People weren't that mad about the butterfly keyboard or the 16" Macbook Pro that idled near it's junction temp. That doesn't mean they were good products, it means that the majority of Apple customers fail to evaluate the products they're buying based on quality.
Part of me thinks this is a bad sign for Apple. They have always been a premium brand. I'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets.
But on the other hand, this is kind of the culmination of them owning their hardware stack. They can avoid the commoditization race to the bottom since they are the exclusive owners of a significant amount of their hardware vertical, From chips to enclosure. Perhaps that will let them retain the margins that were previously driven by a consumer base that prized prestige over price.
While my intuition is that this may be the last big cash grab that Apple squeezes out of their premium image, they did have a massive hit back in the day with the original iMac (the CRT based one). They've defined "cheap and premium" categories before.
Tim Cook, as CEO of a public company, is incentivized to deliver shareholder value.
Entering this market with a good product does just that.
Beyond that, this is an entry point for people to use Apple products. It can be bridge to get this consumer to buy more premium hardware and software later on.
I'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets.
Microsoft's malevolent stewardship of Windows has handed the market to them on the proverbial silver platter. It's only reasonable for Cook to take advantage of their generosity.
The ARM transition is really what made this posisble — you can't offer these specs at that price point on x86, full stop. The real story isn't the hardware margin but whether first-time Mac buyers end up converting to iCloud, Apple One, and the broader ecosystem.
I worked at a Dell repair facility as Apple adopted x86 architecture — and watched as all my bosses gawked at my plastic 13" MacBook Core2Duo [what the Neo most-closely reminds me of, physically and metaphorically]. They'd transition themselves onto larger desktop iMacs within just a few months.
IIRC, 2006's 13" MacBooks started at ~$1000... with a conservative inflation metric this new Neo's pricepoint is absolutely incredible. The last time I remember something like this was 2023 M2Pro Mac Mini, but the above 2006 example was the previous... and so many new Mac users are minted with such brilliant hardware introduction.
Cheap Apple products is a long term net negative. Apple's justification for their price on high ticket items is not their technical edge, is the "cool people have it so might as well pay a premium for it". Lululemon did something similar to appeal to the masses and it backfired a few years after, opening the door for competitors that had nothing on them a few years back.
This was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows
Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
Plastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
High quality for their time. The toilet bowl was very heavy for its screen size, and had minimal volume for battery. The G3 iBook lacked rigidity, and had a tendency to damage the mainboard if picked up from a corner. The G4 iBook had grounding issues, and would occasionally get spicy with two-prong outlets. All three of these issues were directly related to the plastic chassis. All three were great laptops for their day; none would be acceptable in this decade.
There’s nothing wrong with plastic as a material, but there’s a lot wrong with many of the designs of mid-tier laptops that happen to use plastic. The plastic isn’t as much a cause of their problems as it is a signature feature of all hastily assembled corner-cut devices.
It's made of metal and is sturdy. I've taken it on 2 trips (including international), it's all good and still feels like new but to be fair I don't abuse it. For traveling I put it into a regular backpack that has a laptop sleeve, I don't use extra packing.
The track pad is of course not as good as Apple's but it's good enough where it's not in the way and feels ok to use.
The brightness and battery life both fall into the same category of they haven't negatively impacted me in my day to day. For example a few hours of dev work in the park with the sun out hasn't been a problem for both battery life or visibility.
You are right in that I don't value battery life as a top tier feature. ~5 hours of "real work" is enough because if you need extended battery life for doing intensive tasks away from human civilization you can always keep a power bank on hand for extended usage. If you're not out in the middle of no where, access to a power outlet is readily available.
> A much larger laptop with less than half the number of display pixels is not really the same market. And how's that battery life?
Yes, the display isn't as good but the Neo with 512 GB of storage is already $700 and has half the storage of the other laptop. The Neo also has 8 GB of RAM vs 32 GB. Big differences IMO.
Battery life is "good enough" but not great. It really depends on what you're using it for. If you're doing CPU bound tasks a lot, it's not going to last as long. I guess a takeaway is I was never in a situation where I had to change my behaviors because of the battery life. Unless you're planning to be out in the middle of no where without a power bank for an extended period time doing workload intensive tasks it's fine.
Likewise, the display being only 1080p isn't as bad as you would think. I'd be surprised if anyone is running their 13" Neo at 2408 x 1506 at native scaling. That would be 219 PPI. For reference I run a 4k 32" monitor at native 1:1 scaling and that's 138 PPI. It would be bonkers to consider using 219 PPI from a normal viewing distance. Most scaled resolutions with the Neo would be effectively 1080p resolution but with sharper text.
What you’re missing is that the target market for this devices — the casual laptop user — DGAF about memory or storage if it is at the expense of the directly observable user experience.
Few people want or need 32gb of RAM, nor give a shit about what it even means. Most people just want to run MS Word and Google Chrome and maybe TurboTax.
Sure but if people want a device for only casual browsing and are ok with 256 GB of storage and 8 GB of memory they can get a Chromebook for half the price of the Neo. Not all of them are bad, there's tons in the $300 range with good enough specs for casual usage.
If you want to spend ~$600-700, the laptop I mentioned fits the bill for casual use, a development workstation, media editing and casual gaming at a directly comparable price to the Neo. I replied initially because you wrote nothing good exists in the $600-700 range.
Again, this device isn’t someone who’s buying based on specs. Nor is it for somebody who’s buying based on price.
It’s for somebody who goes to the store, puts their hands on the keyboard, uses the touchpad, looks at the screen, and feels the chassis, and then makes their decision. This is how regular people purchase these commodity items. Most people have no clue what the difference between storage and memory is. They just want to know: will it run [software]? That’s all the specs they need to know. Maybe the battery life as well
If you haven’t already go put your hands on one of these at the store. There’s no $600 laptop that feels like it.
You're not in the market for a netbook-type machine if this is the case.
> but with sharper text.
Text huh? Sounds important.
> Battery life is "good enough" but not great.
So, do you want a lightweight client / light productivity machine with tons of battery life, great text, and a kickass trackpad? Or an affordable workstation replacement? Different markets.
Also Apple are masters of the up-sell. Someone who knows $600 windows laptops are crap might just buy a cheaper Chromebook because crap is crap, but they might spring for another few hundred bucks for something they have confidence is actually pretty nice and has brand Caché.
My M4 Air was $750 on black friday 2025. I bought it after I cracked the screen on my M1 and the cost to repair was half the cost of the much newer computer.
The problem has always been no direct "I want a Mac but Windows" laptop - before the switch to the M1 the best way to get a "Mac quality laptop" that ran windows was to put windows on a Mac.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
Microsoft could probably put Windows on the M series macs if they wanted to. Windows for ARM exists, and Apple very specifically made the bootloader unlockable on the Apple Silicon laptops.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
Microsoft Surface laptops are the closest you can get to a "Mac with Windows" in quality/thought (that I've found) and the ARM CPU not being able to use x86 printer drivers is infuriating.
> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers"
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
Neo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.
1) The way to manufacture things cheaply is to do it at scale, and Neo has that in spades.
2) They will generate more profits than the hardware itself. You're not counting services and ecosystem. Now you got a new matching iPhone to go with your Neo, and an iWatch, an iPad, an iPencil...
Cook: "Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers."
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
isn’t what cook is pointing out actually the most important thing?
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
it doesn't give a sense of how much the Neo moves the needle or grows the pie though. Mac and iPad are each 8% of Apple's business. iPhone is 50%.
for Apple to focus on fixing things in macOS again (as opposed to just backporting stuff from their other lines) Mac would need to grow by a lot.
Not really. An independent Mac company with 8% of Apple's sales would still be the #3 computer manufacturer behind Dell and HP, and Mac gross margins could easily support significantly larger investments in OS development if Apple chose to do so.
I agree - I just would like to know what a "best launch week ever" means in numbers
Relatively well-founded estimates will start to appear in a month or so. It's unfortunate they don't give exact model breakdowns, but everyone knows that the Mac is a hobby for them.
The reporting and headline are even worse. “Best launch week ever” says nothing about sales.
From your point of view it is, but the headline is what Apple is giving them, and it works perfectly well for them: Lots of attention for Apple, zero interesting data.
from the point of view of a high school journalist.
Doesn’t it mean that it sold more units in its first week on the market than any past Mac? How does that say nothing about sales? It’s literally about sales numbers, they are just using a relative metric instead of an absolute metric.
They announced a sales record where the metric is "sold to somebody that never ever had a mac before" combined with "in the first week of availability". The headline is worse than Cook's tweet quoted in the article.
To get this record you need to have a long time were your costumers were buying something else from you (like Phones) and have a lot available inventory in a lot of places in the first week combined with a great media coverage. 3 things that Apple has an advantage in.
As @ibero above points out it is more important for apple to tap into the vast demographic of relatively young iPhone/iPad customers - the older Mac customers are buying different machines.
Enterprise is the sleeper story here. IT buyers who couldn't justify premium Mac pricing now have a toe-hold argument, and once you're embedded in the MDM stack, upsell paths to higher-tier hardware are straighforward. Thin margins on Neo units today, fat loyalty tomorrow.
I actually liked the Design of Neo more so than the Air. It is just more practical. I also like thin bezel rather than no / minimal bezel.
I still haven't found any concrete evidence but I think the Key travel on Neo is at least 1-2mm higher than Air and Pro. And back to the good old MacBook Pro Early 2015 era keyboard.
If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
> If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
What you’re asking for is an Air.
>What you’re asking for is an Air.
The design of Air and Neo is completely different. Air is non-repairable, worst keyboard, zero bezels. The Neo is easy enough to fix I dont even need to look at the manual.
I guarantee you that if you used both you’d prefer the Air.
What advantage does the Neo’s keyboard have have over the keyboard that’s identical in all other modern Macs?
Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created. I counted 0 net improvements and countless new bugs.
Apple is having their Windows ME moment.
It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's all about the software they would say. The chickens have come home to roost.
To a new customer it doesn’t matter how Tahoe compares to previous MacOS, it matters how it compares to current Windows.
I think the target demographic is also young people raised with iPhones. So for them the new interface design is good for similarity (not for older Mac-people). As if apple planed that all along...
Makes me think if it was carefully calculated strategy, so Windows users would feel more familiar with new os. Everything in MacOs is frustratingly unusual for windows users, but at least annoying bugs are there. And you google how to deal with it, getting familiar with the os.
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
> Apple Announces New Mac Sales Record Following MacBook Neo Launch
Yeah, it apparently matters at least a little
This.
Maybe it's not the cheap hardware? I don't know?
But when you put the following assertions out there:
>Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created
and
>It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses
with the market data being what it is.
I guess I'm just saying those statements definitely go under the old Abe Lincoln admonition that at times "Both may be, but one MUST be, wrong."
What was that sales record?
> Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created.
What is everyone seeing that I'm not? I like Tahoe/iOS26, I haven't noticed regressions with it.
Yeah, and using macOS fresh is 100x better than the out of box experience for Windows Home. It took me nearly two hours to get that in what I’d call a usable state, disabling “world polar bear day” logos on the search bar and dumb stuff like that.
macOS is much better than any alternative and Tahoe and iOS 26 seem perfectly fine?
The icons in the menu bars are rough, the spacing isn’t great and the inconsistent window borders aren’t great.
I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
To be fair MacOS (and all apple software) is so heavily optimized for their current hardware. It is unfortunate that Intel macs are left behind, but my 2019 intel mac was capital-S Struggling with macos already in 2022. The M-series was such a leap forward. It’s a server under my desk now.
Start noticing all the text on top of text (caused by "liquid glass"). Then please don't hate me for pointing it out to you.
I was seeing this in the Xcode debugger. Didn’t realize this was a Tahoe issue, not Xcode.
My Mac is staying releases back, but iOS26 no longer respects light mode. Since I see astigmatic halation, this will be my last iDevice.
I run light mode on my iPhone and haven't noticed it switching to dark mode in any way. Do you have the automatic mode selection enabled accidentally?
No, this is not switching to dark mode, it's particular system features now being dark only, like notifications, search, control panel, and some other lesser things I don't specifically now remember.
Its slightly worse in my opinion but I don't have huge issues with it. Still way better than Windows 11 on my work computer.
Compared to Windows? Tahoe is probably fine. Compared to previous versions of macOS/OS X? Nothing deal-breaking for me, but there are all kinds of little things that just don't have the polish long-time macOS users are accustomed to. Sibling comments have already listed a few things, but take the grab points of the window corners, which don't actually match the window borders. A minor thing, IMO, but not very "Apple-y" to let something like that ship. The menu icons are another: they add clutter, they don't add a lot of value, and they look like crap. Again, not a huge deal, but c'mon, Apple, UI is supposed to be your thing.
I don't hate Tahoe myself, but I don't particularly love it, either. I can still get done what I need to do with an OS, but along with a bunch of other paper cuts in recent macOS versions (looking at you, System Settings) on top of Liquid Glass, I can see why folks are upset.
> Apple is having their Windows ME moment.
As someone who lived through the early days of Windows, macOS Tahoe and Windows ME aren’t in the same universe.
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's meaningful that a product line that's 41 years old had its best launch for customers new to the platform. That's unprecedented in the computer industry.
0 improvements is unfair
https://github.com/apple/container
Maybe we can go back to a world where we decouple new under-the-hood features from complete UI fuckery.
You shouldn't have to cope with one to get the other.
I wonder if it’s time to try this again. Last time I tried it, it was intensely buggy, not to mention almost every feature I wanted.
The concept is great, and I would love to ditch OrbStack for it. (OrbStack is slick. But their everything-shares-one-kernel-and-they-don’t-give-privileged-access model falls apart as soon as you try to do anything that doesn’t fit in their not-amazing sandbox. Even user namespaces don’t appear to work.) But, other than the actual core mostly working, Apple Containers was a buggy mess, and it was the only thing that made me frequently reboot the whole machine.
I certainly haven’t done anything outside of general happy path but i swapped out docker for it and it “just worked” - and i got more battery life
This doesn’t excuse the issues, but the mainstream alternative, Windows 11, is infinitely worse imho.
> Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created.
Someone hasn't been around for very long in the Apple era, not even counting things before NexT took over.
Indeed. In the NT 4.0 era, pre-Mac OS X, it was fun to watch Mac fans extoll the virtues of their OS while rebooting multiple times per day :)
I remember taking my Mac OS 7 laptop to the dealer because it wouldn't start up and they said it had crashed 273 times. It was a few months old.
Heck the first version of MacOS X on that titanium power book that flopped up and down like a 5 and a quarter inch floppy was maddening.
To say Tahoe is the worst only reveals how few of the releases of MacOS X the poster actually used.
Buggy as well as severe UX regressions. It is so unfortunate that their software division is underperforming when their hardware team is outperforming. Craig Federighi, get your act together!
Such as new screenshot dialog in iOS, where one click has now become three, because we've hidden the primary controls under two pointless single-fold menus.
I wonder if someone got a raise for that.
I like the new dialog? I basically always crop the image when screenshotting so the new UI results in less button pressing for me. How often do you need to capture your entire screen? I almost always want to focus on something.
There was already a way to do that. Cmd-Shift-4, drag a rectangle around what you want to screencap. Cmd-Shift-4 Space, click a window to screencap it.
These have been in the OS for so long I can't even remember when they were added.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102646
I usually want to capture a window, not an arbitrary region (and will sometimes resize a window before a screenshot to enable this). Hotkeys already supported this without cropping needed, and with bonus proper transparent corners.
The new screenshot flow is mostly to provide extra surface for Visual Intelligence. I've found it extremely useful for stuff like ingesting event details and doing Google Lens-esque searches.
This can be changed back to the old version. Just search screen capture in settings and disable Full-Screen Previews.
Well, I remember a time where I had to restart my PowerMac 7200 a lot because of some bug in MacOS 8...
Edit: Apple turns 50 this year
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses. > It's all about the software they would say.
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is even worse in this regard.
What’s so bad about it? I haven’t noticed anything different.
I only need Apple ecosystem integrations, Docker, a bunch of CLI tools, Homebrew, and VSCode with Claude.
It’s mostly UI and UX issues introduced by Liquid Glass, nothing as extreme as people are making it out to be but pretty annoying in their own right.
What are you talking about? How is breaking sales records chickens coming home to roost? Does that phrase not mean the consequences of a bad decision are being realized? If anything isn't this story the opposite, and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
> and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
People weren't that mad about the butterfly keyboard or the 16" Macbook Pro that idled near it's junction temp. That doesn't mean they were good products, it means that the majority of Apple customers fail to evaluate the products they're buying based on quality.
"Just avoid holding it that way." - Steven Jobs
It’s the customer who is wrong… for being happy with their purchases!
Part of me thinks this is a bad sign for Apple. They have always been a premium brand. I'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets.
But on the other hand, this is kind of the culmination of them owning their hardware stack. They can avoid the commoditization race to the bottom since they are the exclusive owners of a significant amount of their hardware vertical, From chips to enclosure. Perhaps that will let them retain the margins that were previously driven by a consumer base that prized prestige over price.
While my intuition is that this may be the last big cash grab that Apple squeezes out of their premium image, they did have a massive hit back in the day with the original iMac (the CRT based one). They've defined "cheap and premium" categories before.
It's not really that low end though. Cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks start at less than a third of the price. It's more mass market.
They dominate the premium market.
Tim Cook, as CEO of a public company, is incentivized to deliver shareholder value.
Entering this market with a good product does just that.
Beyond that, this is an entry point for people to use Apple products. It can be bridge to get this consumer to buy more premium hardware and software later on.
it’s also other gateway to sell subscription services.
I'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets.
Microsoft's malevolent stewardship of Windows has handed the market to them on the proverbial silver platter. It's only reasonable for Cook to take advantage of their generosity.
They have made something that can more easily be adopted by schools for students.
They are creating countless customers for life.
The ARM transition is really what made this posisble — you can't offer these specs at that price point on x86, full stop. The real story isn't the hardware margin but whether first-time Mac buyers end up converting to iCloud, Apple One, and the broader ecosystem.
I worked at a Dell repair facility as Apple adopted x86 architecture — and watched as all my bosses gawked at my plastic 13" MacBook Core2Duo [what the Neo most-closely reminds me of, physically and metaphorically]. They'd transition themselves onto larger desktop iMacs within just a few months.
IIRC, 2006's 13" MacBooks started at ~$1000... with a conservative inflation metric this new Neo's pricepoint is absolutely incredible. The last time I remember something like this was 2023 M2Pro Mac Mini, but the above 2006 example was the previous... and so many new Mac users are minted with such brilliant hardware introduction.
Wishing I owned AAPL right now =D
Who knew, people just wanted Apple to make cheaper products.
People have been asking for iPhone SE to come back for what feels like decades, maybe they will do that next.
Cheap Apple products is a long term net negative. Apple's justification for their price on high ticket items is not their technical edge, is the "cool people have it so might as well pay a premium for it". Lululemon did something similar to appeal to the masses and it backfired a few years after, opening the door for competitors that had nothing on them a few years back.
The iPhone SE was merely rebranded to iPhone (n)e. Exact same thing. Exact same product category.
No Touch ID though.
Huh the neo can't really be the driver of this right? As it's barely out and I think not yet physically available in most places.
The headline hints at a causation that I don't think exists.
This was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows
Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
Oh I think Microsoft got the memo:
This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11 https://www.theverge.com/news/897834/microsoft-windows-11-qu...
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
Yep, they could literally have done nothing with their Windows 10 codebase and it would fulfil most if not all of their targets.
They SAY they got the memo. Colour me very skeptical, but we'll see.
I liked Ars Technica’s snarky take:
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/microsoft-keeps-insi...
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
Apple also gets to fund their manufacturing investments using phone and other revenue
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
I hope Apple eats into their market share hard.
Plastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
No, but the $600 MacBooks are coming straight for the $600 plastic shitbox windows laptops.
The competition at this price point is weak.
> The competition at this price point is weak.
Is it though?
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
All of those specs are orthogonal to the gripes people are referring to when they call a laptop a "plastic shitbox"
Apple sold high-quality plastic laptops for a very long time, so evidently there's something there.
High quality for their time. The toilet bowl was very heavy for its screen size, and had minimal volume for battery. The G3 iBook lacked rigidity, and had a tendency to damage the mainboard if picked up from a corner. The G4 iBook had grounding issues, and would occasionally get spicy with two-prong outlets. All three of these issues were directly related to the plastic chassis. All three were great laptops for their day; none would be acceptable in this decade.
There’s nothing wrong with plastic as a material, but there’s a lot wrong with many of the designs of mid-tier laptops that happen to use plastic. The plastic isn’t as much a cause of their problems as it is a signature feature of all hastily assembled corner-cut devices.
Very neat looking device for the price you paid, but you do not mention how (and I have doubts that) it competes in the areas of:
Fit and finish (not being made of creaky plastic) Display brightness & colour representation Battery life Trackpad Keyboard
For a portable these are just as important as “the numbers”for most people and definitely more noticeable. Perhaps not the case for you though!
It's made of metal and is sturdy. I've taken it on 2 trips (including international), it's all good and still feels like new but to be fair I don't abuse it. For traveling I put it into a regular backpack that has a laptop sleeve, I don't use extra packing.
The track pad is of course not as good as Apple's but it's good enough where it's not in the way and feels ok to use.
The brightness and battery life both fall into the same category of they haven't negatively impacted me in my day to day. For example a few hours of dev work in the park with the sun out hasn't been a problem for both battery life or visibility.
You are right in that I don't value battery life as a top tier feature. ~5 hours of "real work" is enough because if you need extended battery life for doing intensive tasks away from human civilization you can always keep a power bank on hand for extended usage. If you're not out in the middle of no where, access to a power outlet is readily available.
> 1080p
> It weighs the same as a MBP
A much larger laptop with less than half the number of display pixels is not really the same market. And how's that battery life?
> A much larger laptop with less than half the number of display pixels is not really the same market. And how's that battery life?
Yes, the display isn't as good but the Neo with 512 GB of storage is already $700 and has half the storage of the other laptop. The Neo also has 8 GB of RAM vs 32 GB. Big differences IMO.
Battery life is "good enough" but not great. It really depends on what you're using it for. If you're doing CPU bound tasks a lot, it's not going to last as long. I guess a takeaway is I was never in a situation where I had to change my behaviors because of the battery life. Unless you're planning to be out in the middle of no where without a power bank for an extended period time doing workload intensive tasks it's fine.
Likewise, the display being only 1080p isn't as bad as you would think. I'd be surprised if anyone is running their 13" Neo at 2408 x 1506 at native scaling. That would be 219 PPI. For reference I run a 4k 32" monitor at native 1:1 scaling and that's 138 PPI. It would be bonkers to consider using 219 PPI from a normal viewing distance. Most scaled resolutions with the Neo would be effectively 1080p resolution but with sharper text.
What you’re missing is that the target market for this devices — the casual laptop user — DGAF about memory or storage if it is at the expense of the directly observable user experience.
Few people want or need 32gb of RAM, nor give a shit about what it even means. Most people just want to run MS Word and Google Chrome and maybe TurboTax.
Sure but if people want a device for only casual browsing and are ok with 256 GB of storage and 8 GB of memory they can get a Chromebook for half the price of the Neo. Not all of them are bad, there's tons in the $300 range with good enough specs for casual usage.
If you want to spend ~$600-700, the laptop I mentioned fits the bill for casual use, a development workstation, media editing and casual gaming at a directly comparable price to the Neo. I replied initially because you wrote nothing good exists in the $600-700 range.
Again, this device isn’t someone who’s buying based on specs. Nor is it for somebody who’s buying based on price.
It’s for somebody who goes to the store, puts their hands on the keyboard, uses the touchpad, looks at the screen, and feels the chassis, and then makes their decision. This is how regular people purchase these commodity items. Most people have no clue what the difference between storage and memory is. They just want to know: will it run [software]? That’s all the specs they need to know. Maybe the battery life as well
If you haven’t already go put your hands on one of these at the store. There’s no $600 laptop that feels like it.
> If you're doing CPU bound tasks a lot
You're not in the market for a netbook-type machine if this is the case.
> but with sharper text.
Text huh? Sounds important.
> Battery life is "good enough" but not great.
So, do you want a lightweight client / light productivity machine with tons of battery life, great text, and a kickass trackpad? Or an affordable workstation replacement? Different markets.
What you just described is not better than Macbook Neo.
Sure it is. It's even better than the M-series, I bought a similar mini PC for my home theater and it's flawless.
Do note that in current economics 32GB of RAM alone will cost something like $400
Also Apple are masters of the up-sell. Someone who knows $600 windows laptops are crap might just buy a cheaper Chromebook because crap is crap, but they might spring for another few hundred bucks for something they have confidence is actually pretty nice and has brand Caché.
Which was formerly challenged by the $700 Macbook Air, to little avail.
One of my kids had a college visit recently. Everyone had Macbooks.
At $950 it has historically been pegged at the #1 spot on Amazons best sellers in the laptop category. It has been recently unseated by the Neo.
Wait until retailers start discounting the Neo.
What $700 MacBook Air?
Walmart has been selling the M1 MacBook Air for $700 for the past couple years. (And $650 for the latter part of that time frame.)
Those weren't leftover stock or sale prices - Apple was producing the M1 MBA specifically for the $700 price point at third-party retailers.
My M4 Air was $750 on black friday 2025. I bought it after I cracked the screen on my M1 and the cost to repair was half the cost of the much newer computer.
Costco and other in-person retailers marked down the M1 MBA to $799 and then $699 while reducing their stock.
It doesn’t make sense to compare MSRP of one product to sale prices of another. I’m sure the Neo will see similar discounts in those situations too.
I have a company-issued plastic shitbox. It’s $1100 and made by dell.
I have a semi-decent Lenovo Thinkpad T14 and its still meh. Prefer my M4 air.
Case in point, your company could have afforded a Mac but chose otherwise.
The problem has always been no direct "I want a Mac but Windows" laptop - before the switch to the M1 the best way to get a "Mac quality laptop" that ran windows was to put windows on a Mac.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
Microsoft could probably put Windows on the M series macs if they wanted to. Windows for ARM exists, and Apple very specifically made the bootloader unlockable on the Apple Silicon laptops.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
Microsoft doing that would be wild.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
Microsoft Surface laptops are the closest you can get to a "Mac with Windows" in quality/thought (that I've found) and the ARM CPU not being able to use x86 printer drivers is infuriating.
Otherwise, decent.
maybe, but performance wise they seem far ahead of typical Chromebooks in same , and with a real OS!
That's a shame, although I'm not sure what I would recommend instead
This is how you extrapolate one fluff marketing tweet into a full article, watch and learn. I also had the best sales this season
Uh yes generally corporations emphasize their success.
> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers"
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
It's a fitting analogy as macOS has since become bloated beyond belief.
Neo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.
The profit margin is probably better than you think. The iPhone 17e sells for the same price, and the neo is certainly less expensive to manufacture.
1) The way to manufacture things cheaply is to do it at scale, and Neo has that in spades.
2) They will generate more profits than the hardware itself. You're not counting services and ecosystem. Now you got a new matching iPhone to go with your Neo, and an iWatch, an iPad, an iPencil...
I suspect they have managed to drive their costs right down and are still maintaining their typical profit margins.
The talk for 20+ years has been about "halo" products - people buying iPods would be introduced to the Mac, same with the iPhone, etc.
I think this may actually be the first real Halo product they have that will do this for Mac, because it is a Mac.
I wonder if this move is to grab customer base as much as they can before the supply chain crunch dents Apple manufacturing for the first time ever
I don't think that apple will be affected more than their peers.