There's no way it makes it two weeks.

Still better than working for Electronic Arts.

Absolutely not the case. The Neo is essentially Apple's first attempt at a budget laptop, and the market segment they're targeting is entirely different.

Case in point: My dad has been a Windows user for 20+ years and has always decried Apple as "decent hardware that's overpriced and running a lobotomized operating system." However he hates Windows 11 more and decided to replace his aging Windows laptop with a Neo last week. So far he's been impressed, though is still dealing with a learning curve. I guarantee you he isn't alone.

I think the Neo is Apple's attempt at getting into a new segment of lower-priced computers AND taking advantage of Microslop dropping the ball hard when it comes to Windows 11 shit quality and bullshit hardware requirements.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, I suspect the market really being cannibalized is potential new Linux users who go with a New instead of installing Linux on a cheap Windows laptop.

eBay? That's your go-to for new product research?

I can walk over to Microcenter with $600 and walk out with a spiffy laptop with an 8 core snapdragon CPU, 16 gig of RAM and 1TB of storage - running Win 11, the same OS most companies & schools run. (Acer Aspire 14 and 16 laptops in specific)

The people excited about a $600 iPad are looking for a laptop to take the place of an iPad, and they have to be casual users that don't have specific software requirements/needs - nothing beyond a browser or office suite.

There are a lot of them, but not enough to scare or "terrify" a company like Acer in any meaningful way.

Physicist here. They are talking about nitrogen vacancies in diamond. Itâ(TM)s cool, but I donâ(TM)t know about calling it quantum magnetometry. Itâ(TM)s a stretch, a bunch of layperson mumbo-jumbo.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Since pertinent information was withheld (that it didn't know), then by your own post you acknowledge it was a lie of omission.

The stupidity of people these days is truly beyond belief. And, yes, get the f off my lawn.

We learned back in the 80s that trying to get a neural net to emphasise what you want is actually very difficult. What it will tend to emphasise are the assumptions that underly the test data, and that's usually a completely different sort of fiction.

I always dislike the nostalgia for the Classic. When brand new, it was already nostalgia bait and seriously under specced for the price. The original 9" Macs I really like, worked with and owned as a retro computer (I owned a contemporary LC). The Classic I always thought was a cash grab.

Colour Classic...yeah maybe, and again as a retro machine I like them. As a contemporary machine though they were way overpriced for what they were.

Who's the power provider? I see agreements on chip supply, but not on the electricity.

Google Assistant has supported this for like a decade via "hey Google, note to self"

FWIW I live in Queensland and we have several zones which use average speed over distance. There are still plenty of stationary point-in-time cameras but a bunch of average zones. Most recently I think was in some of the tunnels in Brisbane.

5-6 million pieces is a far cry from 'limited edition' in my opinion...