Apple made a lowerc cost MacBook, the MacBook Neo. And it starts at just 500 bucks. You get 8 gigs of memory, 256 gigs of storage, regular USB ports,
no Thunderbolt, and already some of the early reviews are talking about it like it could really shake up the budget laptop market. And some are saying
the opposite. There's my Whimo.
Hello from Whimo. As we get going, >> oh my gosh, >> not so fast. you right. >> So, I wanted to know what laptops at $500 to $600 actually get you
right now because at this price, nothing is free. Every laptop is making some sort of tradeoff.
Hey, thanks. So, I'm over here at MicroEnter in Santa Clara, California, and I'm going to buy a few laptops around the same price range as the MacBook
Neo and find out what kind of corners everybody's cutting. Hey, look at that. There's a Neo right there, but I already have my own. Now, MicroEnter
has a ton of different laptops in different price ranges.
They have hundreds, and I've already covered some pretty high-end ones in different videos. So, I'm not looking for the fastest laptop in the building
today. I'm looking for a few kinds of compromise. Perhaps another one that feels like a MacBook replacement if you're into that. And perhaps one weird
value one here, look at that.
$5. 99 on sale. Maybe the best way to start is using their filter here and just filtering down on price. Let's go to 600. Apply filters.
90 laptops under $600. Are you kidding me? All right, I'm going to need to adjust the filter. Let's raise the lower price to 500. There we go.
- And of course, I want to skip certain ones, like anything with 4 GB of memory. I don't think they have any of those, but maybe there's a micro
center that has one still. Probably not. I want to skip any of them that have 128 GB of SSD.
That's just not enough these days. Ones with the trackpads I'm not a big fan of. This is a good one, huh? And maybe a larger screen, the 13 because I
like more real estate. Although adding a second portable screen later is a valid option, too.
Oh, they do have a 4 GB model. It's a Chromebook, though, so definitely doesn't fit the bill. Found one. Here's the Acer Aspire 14 AI. It's got to have that AI in the name, but 16 GB.
Pretty good. 1 TBTE SSD. Very good. All for 529 bucks. Looks like it was 700 slashed to 529.
And second generation Core Ultra 7V. It's not the fastest processor, but Core Ultra 7, not bad. Here is another one. And this one is 569, down from 800 bucks. It's a HP Omnibook 5 NextG AI.
Also 16 GB, 1 TB SSD, and that's fast RAM right there. You get a faster chip, a much faster chip, longer battery life with the X Plus, but this is
Windows on ARM, so your software has to be compatible. If you're doing web development, JavaScript, you'll be fine. If you're doing native app
development, uhnet with Visual Studio, you're good to go. All right, I found two on the website that are not out here.
Francisco brought this out for me, and here it is. Dell Inspiron 14 business class laptop down from a,000 bucks to just under 600. 16 gigs of memory,
1 TBTE AMD Ryzen 8840HS and a 14-in with touch display. The other one, Lenovo IdeaPad 5 2 in1, but this one is factory refurbished 549 brand new.
These things go for like a,000 bucks.
So, this is one of those hidden gems that you only find in store, but time will tell if it's a gem or not. So, we'll see about that. All right, time
to go and test these out. How am I going to get these back? Oh my god.
Now, I already managed to spend some time with the MacBook Neo, and surprisingly, it's it's 8 GB, but it works very well. Now, I don't want this to
sound like I'm going to favor the MacBook Neo because these other machines have way more specs than the MacBook Neo does. And even though they're the
same price, this is the Mac ecosystem. It's built really well. Like it's a really solid piece compared to these where they have a more flexible
chassis style.
I do have to favor just on specs alone all these other machines for now. For now, until I see how they perform. I've never used a better trackpad than
this except for the haptic ones that come on the MacBook Pros. But as far as non-haptic, this has the best usable trackpad I've ever tried. These
these are all diving board designs where they don't work up on top at all and they work on the bottom.
What's the point of having such a big trackpad if they're not going to work on top? Furthermore, there's no give on the body of this while I'm playing
with the keyboard. But all these, they basically have no support in the middle. No biggie. Okay, if we're getting a computer for 5 to 600 bucks that
has 16 GB of memory like these do and a terabte of SSD like these do, maybe we can overlook some of these other things.
Now all these three have aluminum at least somewhere in the body. For example, the Acer is all aluminum. The inside is plastic. The keyboard is
plastic. The Lenovo has aluminum top but ABS plastic on the bottom, plastic on the inside keyboard.
The Dell has a fully aluminum chassis, including the palm rest area. Now, here's where I think these machines have a massive advantage over the
MacBook Neo. The ports first. I think the winner of the ports competition goes to the Acer. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, USBC here, HDMI, two USB ports,
USBA and a headphone jack.
Those two Thunderbolt ports can go a long way. Now, the Lenovo is no slouch either. We have two USBC ports. We also have HDMI here and a headphone jack. Two USBA ports and an SD card reader.
Those are not Thunderbolt ports, but they still are USBC. They're the faster kind with 10 Gbit per second and one of them has power delivery and
display port. All right. The Dell also has two USBC ports. Both of them are USBC 3.
2 Gen 2 with power delivery and display port. So, not quite Thunderbolt, but still pretty good. USBA again, HDMI also, and another USBA full-size SD
card reader and a headphone jack. While the MacBook Neo famously by now only has two USBC ports, nothing else. Well, a headphone jack, but one of the
USBC ports is the old USB 2 at 480 megabits per second.
It's going to be torture to use that unless you're using a mouse or a keyboard or something with that. Finally, a significant difference in the
battery sizes. 36 watt hours on the MacBook Neo compared to 54 on the Dell, 57 on the Lenovo and 65 on the Acer. So, if I were to just judge by what
we've seen here so far, I'd say the MacBook Neo makes some big compromises here. Unless if I'm sitting in a coffee shop, I want to have that nice
little logo right there.
Oh, yeah. Then I'm going to look good. Let's get on with some dev tests. This is the most annoying part right here. Now, you might think it's fun to
set up a new computer, but try doing Windows setup three times in a row.
Yeah. Decline, decline, next, skip, and it goes on and on like that for a while. Now, for every one of these machines, I'm setting the power to best
performance when plugged in and on battery. And I'm also setting the screen to never turn off on battery or plugged in. Don't do this.
This is just for my tests. I am keeping the energy saver at 30%. Now, for the MacBook, only the MacBook Pros have a high power mode. The Neo just has
low power available, but I'm keeping it on the regular power setting. Just as an aside, look at the brightness differences between the screens.
The MacBook can be viewed from any angle. The Acer is not too bad, but it is a darker screen. Lenovo, not a bad looking screen, but when you look at
these at an angle, they go pretty dim. Going to kick things off with Speedometer 3. 1.
Basically, it runs through a bunch of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Angular, React. What's important to know about this one is that it's a single
core operation because JavaScript runtime runs as a single threaded operation in the browser. Woah. Well, the Lenovo and the Dell certainly perform
differently here. 25.
3 on the Lenovo, 26. 6 on the Dell. Not too bad on the Acer Aspire, 34. 9