feels like the only bad thing about the macbook neo is it’s basically just an m1 air with a slightly worse trackpad, probably worse speakers, probably worse battery, which means it’s fine but the value is on apple’s end since they just discontinue the air and make the neo for cheaper. the m4 air was $750 a few times. that’s simply a better deal imo, but it’s also not likely to ever exist again, while this thing will always be there at this price point. m1 air continues to be the best tech thing I’ve bought in the last decade value wise
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Lots of things about it are a bit worse than the M1. No keyboard backlighting, no magsafe charging, the two ports are USB 3 and USB 2 respectively, and the CPU doesn’t sustain its peak single-core performance for even 2 seconds.
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if any or all of those are dealbreakers, then hey, does Apple have an upcharge for you
whenever anyone talks about this, it’s in reference to refurbs and what refurbed macs you can buy are contingent on Apple’s stock (they literally have no refurb minis or Studios at the moment). like, right now, you can just buy a Neo (so long as you want a base silver Neo) whereas the cheapest refurb Air is 15"/16gb/256gb for over 930. yeah, that’s a better computer, but is it 30% a better computer for the target market. you’re getting a lot despite spending 600 on a confused phone in a laptop chassis
I’d just keep pointing out that Apple has two premium-feeling computers for 600 dollars that pretty much embarrass their Windows counterparts
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All true about the M1 air, but they still have room to move on Neo pricing. Retailers haven’t started discounting, but the real price for this thing is $500 on the apple education store (you don’t need a .edu address). The M4 mac mini also lists at $600, but has been consistently on sale for $450 and was $400 at micro center last december.
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nah, they were new on amazon and I think a few other places around december. I don’t think that deal is going to be beaten any time soon given the state of… everything
Crazy that Apple’s cheap computer is competing with Apple’s two other cheap computers.
Really hoping for some renaissance in low spec Mac games.
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speaking of mac gaming I really wanted a native mac silicon port of SF6. When RE8 got a mac port I was hoping for a RE Engine mac renaissance but oh well
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mac gaming is in a great place, you just have to give CodeWeavers a bunch of money for mac Wine and hope the game likes it and then sideload iOS games and hope they don’t have root detection so they’ll boot and then hope they don’t ban you once they figure out they’re not running on an iOS device
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proton on mac sure was nice for like 5 years
Crossover is only like $25 on Black Friday every year and is about equal w Proton now. My M3 Max GPU performs more or less like my old 1080 Ti
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I’m running RE9 with a big long hdmi cable attached to my 1080ti (doesn’t run that well, tbh) instead of on the M3 Max, only because it crashes immediately if you’re not on Tahoe.
Also I didn’t necessarily realize it at first but they kinda talk about Crossover pricing like it’s a subscription, but the versions you get during your year of purchased upgrades do continue working forever.
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this is not to denigrate the idea of mac gaming, as Apple actually really we swear giving a shit this time is putting it in the best place it’s been in at least 15-20 years (upcoming open world shitpost Crimson Desert is day and date on macos, which is kind of wild)
it’s just that, like Linux, a large chunk of stuff isn’t running natively or with a lot of strings attached and the best thing that can be said is at least it’s not parceled out over a billion different distros
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It is very very funny to me that running UE4 games in Crossover is less taxing on my M2 Macbook Pro than watching a stream or playing Mac Unity games*. What a world…
*OK mostly Magic the Gathering Arena which is an unoptimized shitshow everywhere. Especially on Mac…but I’ll still keep playing that garbage
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early Unity era was arguably better in terms of not needing Crossover because signing requirements weren’t as onerous and everything pretty much ran at parity. Native Mac stuff has been a weird grab bag of who got funding to port it ever since, but since Valve did so much to normalize using Wine and the Apple M series GPUs are so good, it is now better than ever if you’re willing to track down or pay for a copy of Crossover. arguably the late 2010s before Crossover/Wine caught up and when indies were moving to UE (and Intel iGPUs kind of sucked) were a relative dip from the 2014ish Unity heyday, but we basically have the best of both worlds now with a little legwork.
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Mac gaming (imo) is simultaneously: surprisingly possible and performant; accessible (because you can do it on a computer you almost certainly bought to do other stuff); and a huge boner because apple does its best to scorch everything outside the app store and Valve has quite reasonably decided to put in minimal effort.
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Crossover is basically even with Homebrew at this point in terms of being a load-bearing workaround for platform restrictiveness, but (as someone who is in a tech job that involves a lot of weird kayfabe wrt audience positioning) I think that situation is very much encouraged and appreciated by Apple — the alternative would be, arguably, scope creep; Windows APIs are pretty established as the best APIs to develop games against and it’s great that there are so many ways to use them (with commercial support!) without using Windows. it’s just that you have to be willing to perceive the limits of each respective party’s marketing around their platform and people act like this is somehow a market failure as opposed to a pretty good bodge.
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you wouldn’t fucking know it the way the OS throws a hissyfit every time you try running something from an untrusted source
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like even saying that Valve isn’t supporting Macs or something twigs the “the product department is not the engineering department and that’s intentional!” part of my brain because Valve has done so much to get contributions and actual maintainer headcount for upstream Wine by supporting the Steam Deck (in a refund-friendly environment that makes it acceptable to sell games on a platform they aren’t necessarily built for), Crossover would not be where they are at rn otherwise
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This Mac gaming talk makes me feel like my next digi-evolution to Boomermon will come sooner than i thought, feeling like this itt
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small domino: nerd wants to play Nier Automata under Linux
big domino: Macs are performant with translation-based gaming
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