Very weak argument. You could have had the same speech before AI.
I would rather say that the core product is not strong and differentiated enough to resist this new age of coding, and it's an attempt to protect revenues.
Its scary how often that happens these days. People are incapable of verifying claims due to how many layers deep things go and lazy publications can mistakenly legimatise false claims.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.
> the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...
This is true, but I was on the School's IT in HS and they were much easier to repair.
Things like the keyboard caps were a constant pain point, but they were durable little devices and 30 minutes as all it took to fix the worst of issues.
We would just hang on to the Chromebooks whenever they had a fault that made them inoperable, and when a new one came in with a problem, like missing keyboard caps or a broken webcam, we'd just part out one of the Chromebooks from the graveyard.
I imagine that would be significantly more difficult with an iPad, even just opening them up is much harder, and there's not a whole lot you can do to fix them.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
I can totally see many, many students and parents use that machine for daily tasks. Yes, base specs are pretty low: 8Gb RAM, 256 Gb drive - but the price tag is also low in the Apple world. I assume the trackpad will be excellent and the promise that the battery lasts all day is probably true (all day = 6-7h max). Good move from Apple, for once.
I also know many professionals who have a work computer and just want a personal device for occasional things like personal web browsing/shopping/occasionally watching videos -- things that would be inappropriate on a work computer and inelegant on a phone. These people already basically use their phone for everything -- many of them have never upgraded from their college laptop, which is now obsolete. They'd value a well-built (design, feel, screen) computer but have no performance needs.
A 2011 MBP is likely a better a general purpose PC, those early models had some great engineering. Wait for the reviews and benchmarks but the M1/M2 based MBPs are still great daily drivers.
Those old 2011 machines aren't really getting macOS security updates anymore, and compatible apps are dropping; I wouldn't recommend using anything but Linux on them. And even with a non-15-year-old battery, you'll be lucky to get half the battery life of Apple Silicon with a 2nd gen Core i5 CPU.
Fair but it’s probably not the thought to buy an 8GB laptop for docker in 2026 when we’ve known about it for a long time.
There was a post recently about apples built in virtualizer that might be useful.
Before fusion or docker I’d probably try something like UTM on a MacBook neo.
If you’re after a light terminal remote access to the house power (a Mac mini somewhere etc) is probably easier.
I was really hoping the Neo would be a replacement for the 12” MacBook retina - it’s only 2 lbs and the best form factor I’ve ever carried for travel. It’s the only device I’d be in line for tomorrow, and until then we can pretend to use MacBook airs or MacBook pros.
This explicitly says "Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control and support for gestures", so at most it's the clicking action that is mechanical (rather than the click being faked with haptic feedback, as it is on the current models)
Impressive feat. Definitely not for me though, and for sure I won't be there to debug one of these when my parents will call me because it broke their computers.
Very disappointed by this. I've been a customer for many, many years on a Family plan, but I do not understand this price raise. The only reason they raise price is definitely because of the need to answer to investors, and the necessary enshitification that follows. While I understand every business needs to generate revenues, they put on us, the customers, the burden of their rapid hiring spree and growing operating costs. It's just sad. There is just so much you can charge for managing passwords, and the family plan becomes way too expensive for the value it truly provides. We will need to switch to a less expensive competitor.
