Yea, it isn't a statement or anything it's just Nintendo just making a good product and you can see the industrial design that it is the selling point. Apple used to have people complaining their AI solutions are sub par but, now since they control the App Store where many AI apps live they are the only ones making money.
This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. No one cares if the next iteration will be better with 12GB of ram. The workloads that people say that 8GB can't handle will be ones that the actual users will either wait or tolerate. I've been noticing that people who review the Macbook Neo basically don't get the point [1] and just the headline of this article matters that VMs work and thats a big win. The most ridicuous thing about the laptop is that it appears to be reparable which sort of tells me this is a template similar to the M1 Air of the future laptop designs that Apple will come out with. [2]
> This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market.
You took what I said out of context and then replied to something else. Running Parallels on a Neo is a novelty. Parallels is both what the thread is about AND what my reply was expressly about.
Nobody can reasonably read what I wrote, in context, and believe I was referring to the computer itself as a novelty.
I saw the other day people complaining about AI slop being posted on this site by new accounts - which I agree is bad.
Someone suggested that people with 10k karma and/or 10 years subscription to this site should be able to do things (such as auto-ban) to those accounts.
The account that misrepresented your comment and thus acted in bad faith is one of those 10k+ accounts.
To me, this is a data point showing the fallacy of long term subscription and/or karma accrual as evidence of their quality/good faith abilities
I admit now after rereading that I did misrepresent what they said and I should have read their comment more closely and it was a knee jerk reaction and that its my fault.
I take it's repairability slightly differently. That's because it is highly modular, and I think the reason for that is longevity. They put a lot of engineering effort into this thing, and so at this price point that has to pay back over a lot of devices over a long period. This design isn't going to change for many years, but the internals will iterate independently.
Windows doesn't run "just fine" on 4 GiB of RAM. I had a laptop with 6; Windows 10 became barely usable. If you want to run one, small, program at a time I think you'll be ok. Forget about web browsing; you'll get one tab and it'll be slow.
Agreed. Windows 10/11 can run just fine on 4GB of RAM. You just can't run anything inside of Windows 10/11 with 4GB of RAM.
The last version of Windows that felt like 4GB of RAM was performant for me with applications was Windows XP. Not that every computer running the 32-bit edition of Windows XP could even see/utilize a full 4GB of RAM properly, but at least it was fast.
I ran a Windows 7 system with 3GiB as a gaming machine and it was just fine. Windows 7... the last Windows release that was acceptable-ish. Memories...
A lightweight Linux desktop can keep a decent amount of browser tabs (using Firefox; avoid Chrome) on 4GB RAM if you set up compressed RAM properly. It's not foolproof like 8GB would be, but it's absolutely fine for casual use.
2015 laptop, spinning rust. Nevertheless, it was at least somewhat acceptable at purchase, but crapware installed with successive system updates brought it to a standstill. An SSD might've helped, but not by much. I wiped it and put Kubuntu on it to give to my wife, for whom it ran acceptably. She gave it back when she got a shiny new MacBook Air.
A SSD would have made an absolutely massive difference.
Source: I have clients that still have 2nd/3rd gen i5 systems running 3-4 GB of RAM with Windows 10 and they're tolerable solely thanks to SSDs. Swapping that much on a hard drive would just be painful to use.
Nobody should be interactively using a computer post-2018ish (whenever SSDs fell below $1/GB) that's booting and running primary applications off spinning rust. They're perfectly fine for bulk storage drives but anyone waiting for an operating system booting off one has wasted enough of their life in the last year to have paid for the SSD. Companies that wouldn't spend $100 on an upgrade are literally throwing money away paying their employees to wait on a shit computer.
> Heck, you can get 8GB Windows laptops with twice the SSD size of the MacBook Neo's for a little over half of the Neo’s price (again, at full MSRP.)
Let's see one of these $300 Windows laptops with 512GB of SSD (in a reasonable format, e.g. not an SD card), a body that isn't disposable, a screen that isn't a dim potato, a CPU that's within 20% of the Neo's performance, and a GPU that isn't embarrassed to be called a GPU.
I think you're misunderstanding, of course they do not exist. People don't get $300 windows laptops for their performance, build quality, or anything similar. Nor do they care about screen brightness, and 256GB is fine for the use case which is running word or some other simple application for as little $$ as possible.
The implication in the comparison is that they’re similar. The similarity between a Neo and a $300 PC is that they can both boot up and run at least one program. That’s about where it ends.
They existed on AliExpress. Chuwis and the likes (though the latest ones are lying about the CPU model). You usually get nvme storage, not the very best of course but it does the job. And IPS display. It's overall ok stuff, but the memory crisis has pushed them above 300 now.. They usually run N150s.
I also got two N100 NUC like boxes with 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe for €115 each. Bought them as the memory crisis was starting. One is now my home assistant, the other one runs matrix.
I still use an ancient chuwi for going to the makerspace. It's still got hours of battery.
I went looking, and did find stuff on Amazon, though none were made of an aluminum chasis, and none had the geekbench score anywhere near, and none had the screen brightness.
As I write this, the top Amazon search for "windows laptop" is a
> Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6 inch Business Laptop with Microsoft 365 • 2026 Edition • Intel Core • Wi-Fi 6 • 1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD) • Windows 11
The person who approved describing its 128GB storage as 1.1TB should be hanged.
The CPU also has[0] 31% of the single core and 14% of the CPU Mark rating. The screen has 220 nits (vs 500) brightness, comes with 4GB of RAM, and weighs 30% more. At least it's half price, though.
The shopping situation for Windows laptops is utterly dire.
I recently helped a friend ditch Windows for Linux on an 8GB budget laptop he had. It had win11 on it which could barely function with nothing running, kept swapping like crazy to it's anemic eMMC "SSD". Windows can't really run reasonably with 4GB of RAM. It will only technically boot.
Neo is powered by a fast and battery-friendly chip. It's definitely not a novelty any more than Chromebooks or Windows 11 notebooks with integrated graphics have been.
The M4 Ultra doesn't exist and there is more credible rumors for an M5 Ultra. I wouldn't put a projection like that without highlighting that this processor doesn't exist yet.
To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
While this may be a better sandbox, actually having a separate computer dedicated to the task seems like a better solution still and you will get better performance.
Besides, prompt injection or simpler exploits should be addressed first than making a virtual computer in a browser and if you are simulating a whole computer you have a huge performance hit as another trade off.
On the other hand using the browser sandbox that also offers a UI / UX that the foundation models have in their apps would ease their own development time and be an easy win for them.
For consumers, there's little reason to run unquanted, especially for large models which take less of a hit from quantization. I'm running a 200b model at Q3 with very little degradation. A 1000b model would see even less change.
Yes and the result of this $10k endeavour is a much slower a dumber model than any SoTA $20/mo API. On top of the maintenance burden to keep software/models updated.
That's my whole point. M3 Max 128GB -> M3 Ultra 512GB. M5 Max 128GB -> M5 Ultra 512GB. But if M5 Max 192GB -> M5 Ultra 768GB, i.e. Ultra having 4x the memory of Max.
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