A nice side effect of Apple entering this price range is that it might raise the bar for what people find acceptable in laptops at that price.
Right now $600-$700 is where you start seeing much more dramatic corner cutting, with thinner body panels, way more flexing, crummy hinges, “just ok” trackpad/keyboard, etc. A $599 MacBook is almost guaranteed to solidly beat everything else at that price in those categories.
bestouff · 2h ago
Is it, really ? Even Apple has to cut corners somewhere to reach that price.
cosmic_cheese · 2h ago
Not necessarily. They’re saving quite a bit from using their own SoCs which they’re also shipping in iPhones and iPads, both from massive economy of scale as well as from not having to make money on each SoC sold (unlike e.g. Intel or Qualcomm).
There’s also other tricks they could pull like sharing screen panels and other components with iPads. Heck they might just use an iPad mainboard flashed with different firmware.
willio58 · 3h ago
As someone who's converted (unintentionally) a few people from Windows to Mac machines, I will say for most people there's less barriers these days. Lots of people use these machines as glorified Chromebooks anyway. So it really comes down to price, if they like how it looks, etc.
Do you get any pushback from users when it comes to the forced apple id to be able to use the computer or do updates?
I recently tried my former m1 air for the first time in a couple years, but the forced apple id to be able to even use the hardware soured my taste. That combined with the $99/year fee for development (vs one-time $35 fee for android) convinced me it wasn't worth my time, and I sold it.
Windows tries to do this, but you can at least bypass it with a pro version and a simple command during setup.
wmf · 2h ago
I don't think an Apple ID is required for updates. It's easier to skip the Apple ID than it is on Windows.
hellojesus · 21m ago
I just looked it up, and you're correct. I must have misinterpreted its messages to me, or maybe it was the one-prompt-too many for it as I was using it that got to me.
Edit: I think I remember now. As I was using the terminal it was asking me to allow it to access directories as I was cd-ing into them. That forced use of the mouse was too much, even if there was probably a trivial way to disable it.
cosmic_cheese · 4m ago
You can grant full disk access to the Terminal app in System Settings to prevent those permission dialogs. They’re in place by default to reduce effectiveness of people being socially engineered to paste in malicious commands.
hangonhn · 3h ago
Glorified Chromebook at this price point can be a game changer for some enterprises. We do use Chromebooks for our line employees but for our engineers, etc. we use Macbook Pros. I'm sure our IT would appreciate it if we standardized on all Macs.
jmkni · 2h ago
I have a base m2 macbook air I got a while ago for travelling, and I regularly use it for coding.
At one point I even had to install XCode onto it to release an emergency bug fix for an iOS app while on holiday, and it worked fine (just a bit slow).
It's definitely not a glorified chromebook, really interested to see how the $599 model performs
bena · 2h ago
As a developer, I like Mac OSX. It seems to be a fair compromise. It has a decent window manager, the finder is excellent, and if I need to I can drop into a terminal and do what I need to.
stronglikedan · 1h ago
The cool thing about Win10 is that I can do all that as well, but with third party tools of my choosing. Not saying OSX is limited - just saying I can do the same in Win10, in multiple ways. I work with both, and will always choose to work with Win over Mac.
Maybe if Mac had got their shit together with the keyboard (swapped ctrl and super key) from the start I may have switched. Shame they isolated so many potential users with that boneheaded move.
notfried · 2h ago
A new M4 Air is now $799 at Amazon, and a new M1 Air is $599 at Walmart. So it's not like $999 is really the starting price if you spent a minute to search outside of Apple's Online Store.
AstroBen · 2h ago
Yeah I just picked up an M4 air for $799. Feels like insanely good value there. A year ago the equivalent was >$1000?
politelemon · 2h ago
This is an advert/promotion, not a good HN submission.
evanjrowley · 2h ago
If their cost cutting measures include releasing this with a FHD/1080p screen, I would support that.
I'm looking for a fanless laptop with a FHD display that can be easily mirrored to cheap XR/VR glasses.
cosmic_cheese · 2h ago
It’s unlikely that it’ll feature a screen designed to render at 1x UI scale. They haven’t shipped “normal” DPI screens for a long time now and macOS type rendering is designed around that.
crazy5sheep · 2h ago
Apple is too greedy, it's a joke to have 256GB as a storage option nowadays
hellisothers · 2h ago
256 is plenty, I only had 256GB on my last work machine and was able to maintain 4 different checkouts of our entire (large) codebase and still tons of space for caches.
forinti · 2h ago
I can live off 256GB on a notebook (I run Linux), but 4GB of RAM would be ridiculous and I still see notebooks from various makers being offered with 4GB.
AstroBen · 2h ago
256GB is fine for me. I prefer external storage for large files
boombapoom · 2h ago
this is an arm based processor.... how compatible is that with most the stuff that macbooks run?
redwall_hp · 2h ago
Macs are around the five year mark for a full ARM transition. Remaining Intel Macs are right on the edge of not receiving software updates anymore, and the Rosetta translation layer already has a scheduled wind down.
Any Mac application will be built for ARM at this point, and anything made for Intel Macs will run seamlessly under Rosetta. And that stuff is mostly limited to developers making Intel Docker images, musicians using some VSTs that haven't upgraded, and games.
This is at least the third major architecture migration for Macs, and they always rip the band aid off and applications have to upgrade or not run. (Motorola to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel, Intel to ARM.)
kstrauser · 2h ago
Approximately 100%. All MacBooks have been ARM based for years now.
cosmic_cheese · 2h ago
Yep, the greater bulk of Mac apps had proper ARM builds just 1-2 years after the first M1 devices launched. Third party Mac devs don’t drag their feet on arch transitions.
lousken · 2h ago
how is the linux experience on the mac these days?
wmf · 2h ago
It's OK on M1/M2 but doesn't work at all on M3/M4.
boombapoom · 2h ago
I'm not pro windows or pro mac. I am pro let me do what the fuck I want to do. Cutting support for win10 is an abomination of a policy. I could see cutting support for windows 9 though....
hellojesus · 2h ago
Windows 10 support was cut to force everyone into tpm 2.0 machines. It was about control and the deprecation of general computing devices.
mistic92 · 1h ago
I don't get who would even consider buying macbook even cheap one (not enough storage, not enough ram) when using Windows. Hardware is great but mac software is very low quality.
Right now $600-$700 is where you start seeing much more dramatic corner cutting, with thinner body panels, way more flexing, crummy hinges, “just ok” trackpad/keyboard, etc. A $599 MacBook is almost guaranteed to solidly beat everything else at that price in those categories.
There’s also other tricks they could pull like sharing screen panels and other components with iPads. Heck they might just use an iPad mainboard flashed with different firmware.
I recently tried my former m1 air for the first time in a couple years, but the forced apple id to be able to even use the hardware soured my taste. That combined with the $99/year fee for development (vs one-time $35 fee for android) convinced me it wasn't worth my time, and I sold it.
Windows tries to do this, but you can at least bypass it with a pro version and a simple command during setup.
Edit: I think I remember now. As I was using the terminal it was asking me to allow it to access directories as I was cd-ing into them. That forced use of the mouse was too much, even if there was probably a trivial way to disable it.
At one point I even had to install XCode onto it to release an emergency bug fix for an iOS app while on holiday, and it worked fine (just a bit slow).
It's definitely not a glorified chromebook, really interested to see how the $599 model performs
Maybe if Mac had got their shit together with the keyboard (swapped ctrl and super key) from the start I may have switched. Shame they isolated so many potential users with that boneheaded move.
I'm looking for a fanless laptop with a FHD display that can be easily mirrored to cheap XR/VR glasses.
Any Mac application will be built for ARM at this point, and anything made for Intel Macs will run seamlessly under Rosetta. And that stuff is mostly limited to developers making Intel Docker images, musicians using some VSTs that haven't upgraded, and games.
This is at least the third major architecture migration for Macs, and they always rip the band aid off and applications have to upgrade or not run. (Motorola to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel, Intel to ARM.)