Episode 974: MacBook Neo review

Introduction

0:00unscripted unfiltered unafraid welcome to the mackerel podcast my name is michael simon and i am joined as always by my colleague jason cross good morning and our producer roman loyola hi there this is episode number 974 and if you're a fan of roman this is we are talking all about uh macbook neo this week and roman just published his review this

0:35morning so today is uh or right now it's tuesday march 10th you're probably listening to it on thursday or friday or whenever but um he his review just went up this morning so we're going to talk

Testing the MacBook Neo

0:46to him he tested it for a few days what he liked what he didn't like who should buy it colors design price keyboard whatever uh box to talk about box and uh yeah whatever else comes up um then we'll do a couple segments the best thing that happened this week this week in apple history and we will close as always with our comment corner speaking of comments you can contact us through blue sky facebook threads search for macro look for the blue mouse logo send us an email to podcast at

1:20macworld.com send us a personal email comment under a video comment under a post whatever get get a comment to us and we'll talk about it on a future show okay jason yes if you're watching

Studio Display Webcam

1:33this on youtube might look a little bit differently because he is using a different camera yeah we usually have these elgato um uh like webcams that give you all this control and stuff but just as an example since i've i'm doing the review and everything of the new studio display this is the new studio displays webcam that i'm using today is this the xdr or the regular this is the xdr but the camera's the same on both the same so it would look identical um they have the same camera and speaker

2:06hardware um right and software for that matter um so yeah just partly to give people uh just an example they can look at it like this is what it looks like over time and also just because the

Camera Quality

2:21quality is so much better it's usable for something like this like we used you don't have to go buy separate hardware uh i'm still kind of frustrated that you don't really have any control over kind of like exposure or brightness or or anything like apple doesn't expose yeah the apple way you can like turn on center stage or i can turn on uh like edge light or the portrait mode but but i can't adjust brightness or or anything like that right you got to get grab some there's third party utilities

2:52to do that kind of stuff i haven't used one in a million years but so i don't know how well they work with like modern mac webcams but there there have been ones in the past that just give you every slider you can think of yep but you can see it's a good it's a good picture like it's you should see how bad the old one was wow so what you can do because um so jason's review isn't up today

Comparison to Other Macs

3:18but it will be up on wednesday which will be up before you hear this and there's an image where he does like we have like a little comparison photo tool that we usually use for iphone's reviews like to show the clarity and stuff but so he used it to show the old webcam and the new webcam and i got like i i when i was editing it i was like oh my god like it's crazy to see how grainy and blurry and and just undef so if you remember because quick um back in the back when we reviewed the studio display

3:50in 2022 there was an issue with the camera apple fixed it just kind of but not really and so it's always been a point of contention but but but like we kind of forgot it's been four years so we just forgot that that existed and man it's never been review because it's hilarious how bad it is it's it's never been good it's funny because they have that they it is their whole 12 megapixel center stage camera but um but it's uh i guess it's between being an old sensor and what do they have in there like an a13 a14 or something like just the image 13 the image processing pipeline that they had for

4:26wasn't up to snuff it could not lock on to a white balance if things were like too yellow or whatever it was all over the place the new one it's not quite as good as using your iphone with continuity camera but it's getting there it has closed the gap a lot so yeah it's a perfectly it's beyond it's more than i would say a usable webcam it's an actual good webcam i'd like to see them do more at this price they could they could put a 4k 60 webcam in there and just crush everybody but no it's also

5:01like so when you're talking about a mass we're already we're already off the rails and we haven't even started this is supposed to be the video show and now we're talking about the video display but

MacBook Neo Availability

5:09real quick the that thing is like an inch thick yes so like when you talk about the macbook like it's understandable why you have to have a certain point but this thing they could fit anything in there any any camera they want so but all right before we get too far with the sqr it's even actively cooled right they have ventilation right fans and that stuff so yeah yeah before we get too far we will talk about this stuff as well as the new macbook pros in two weeks or no one week next week next but um today we're gonna do all neo because it's a new thing it goes on sale tomorrow

5:43morning i just checked right before we were doing this show oh is this sold out apple store yeah doesn't have any it's shipping in like a week and a half to two weeks which is really rare for a mac i can't remember the last time there was a mac that had any kind of shipping delays whatsoever like we see that that happens all the time with iphones yeah depending on the color and storage you like you have to get a different colored storage to get it to ship on time did you try that did you try

6:14looking at different colors and stuff and see and they're all silver was the most common but still not available for immediate shipping it was available at my store but pink and green yellow were not okay and indigo was i think delayed by a week so indigo roman is the color that you have so let's let's

Color Options

6:33start there i like it it's almost my shirt yeah like my shirt's almost the color that it is so it's a little bit lighter than the so the macbook air comes in roman is holding it up for those um on spotify or apple podcasts without video for the youtubers you can see so i have a light right here so it's reflecting the light so it's it's like midnight but brighter it's a bright right i was just gonna say so apple sells the macbook air in midnight which is a really really really dark blue

7:07this is not that it's it's definitely lighter i would have loved it to be like finder blue like the color oh that really light but not really like not super light but it they didn't do that but it's it's a nice blue i saw it last week when i was doing the hands-on obviously everybody gravitated to the yellow green one because it's new like apple doesn't do that color but the the indigo was i was my second favorite color the that's probably the color i would choose if i was buying one right

7:38yeah it's the indigo i like it yeah it's a personal choice like some people will want the yellow a lot of people won't um indigo is it's it's really nice i wanted an orange one but um you know it would have been kind of funny if they had come out with you know like a cosmic orange well the most expensive phones cosmic orange and then the cheapest macbook is cosmic the phone is twice as expensive as the laptop right so that would be an odd dynamic for apple i do really wonder how uh how many they've

8:13manufactured like how indicative of sales this the the fact that it's kind of sold out it's not sold out there'll be ones that you can't order that are in store but those will go quick so i'm just

Keyboard and Touch ID

8:25wondering like how how much did they produce ahead of launch is or you know because sold out never tells you anything like how many did you make right so i i would assume that they made more yellow because apple knows its fans are gonna want the new thing but i remember back when apple was making the uh the g3 imax there was a report that like everybody all the stores wanted the blue one and like they they had like stockpiles of like grape because nobody wanted purple but apple forced

8:58you to buy all of them at once when you when you were getting them right um roman would you buy if you were buying one would you buy the blue one i need to see um i have to apologize i have a bad cough and to prevent myself from hacking all over this show i have a cough drop in so if i sound weird i'm not i'm not trying to speak in a stupid uh you know so i apologize for that but um i need to see the other colors in person because in person yeah um it's been pointed out to me

9:36by by by a couple readers that i think i said in my review that uh citrus equates to yellow and they're all no it's green and so having seen it it's kind of like right in between yeah depending on the room you're in the light you're in yeah yeah yeah kind of like uh like a lemon that's just getting ripe but yeah yeah i think if they had named it highlighter it looks like just the

10:06original highlighter color like it's like yellow but with some green in there and if you see it in person it like it like in the apple store it's going to look one way you're going to take it home it's going to look a different yeah there'll be returns um so i want to see like i want to see what blush looks like it's very light yeah and then it's almost like iphone 17e light it's very like it looks pink in the in this in certain angles yeah it's it's i thought it was silver at first when i

10:37walked into the over to the table and it was the it was the pink one it's it's a very light it's a nice pink it's nice yeah but it's it's it's very light my favorite color of course was the was the citrus one because it was new it stood it stood out on the table because it was next to blue and pink and like it really stood out but um i think if i was buying one i'd probably get the blue because yeah i gotta get sick of it i get sick of the green uh yellow yeah quickly when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work use indeed sponsor jobs it gives

11:13your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills certifications and more spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast that's indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply need a hiring hero this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs i do like this blue color so i it would but i would not need to see the others to i i definitely don't think i would get silver uh not because why would you get silver when

11:47you can get like you've been able to get that for for 20 years exactly you know everybody like silver is all over the place but i understand why they made like they have to make a silver laptop because there are a lot of people who right right that's what they want yeah and that's color it's the it's also the very mac thing like not a lot of there's some gray windows laptops and stuff but they're gray they're not that aluminum silver color that we know right so like if you want everybody's be like oh they've got a mac like that's the mac color you know yeah it's it's i don't know i i don't

12:20know apple's i've never seen apple's branding uh definitions but i'm i'm almost certain that silver is part of their branding definitions so yeah yeah yeah sure all right so the keyboard on yours

Keyboard Finish

12:33was my favorite of the four because it has like a like a smoky yeah kind of finish to it so that the keyboards are are are slightly covered color matched to the india so you can he's holding it right there's a they all have a little bit of a tint to their slightly color match so the the silver is the only one that's completely white right the pink has a pinkish hue the yellow issue but the the the blue hue kind of looks like a gray and it's it's it's it's nice in person yeah it's

13:07nice in person uh the one big drawback is that it's not backlit and it's a good reminder of how much i always i often work in the dark so and and because i'm not a trained touch typist i do look down at my keyboards sometimes i i don't but i will look down and when you're typing in the dark and you can't see your keyboard it's kind of like whoa uh yeah this is the back keyboard that's probably the worst color for that situation too yeah like the silver one the white with black

13:40lines on it's got to be the easiest to see when it's kind of dark just the light from your screen right yeah so and you have roman i you have the the 699 model with touch id and no it's the 799 the 599 model this does not have touch id interesting did you find that to be an annoyance frequently um i did not uh but it has been pointed out so i wrote an article about how people should buy the 699 one because it has touch id and a 512 uh gigabyte ssd and a reader pointed

14:18out to me that if you have an apple watch that essentially fills in the gap but as people who listen to this podcast know i never wear my apple watch i don't think it's compatible at this point anyways don't you have like a series 2 or something i have like a series 6 so yeah oh that works oh no series 4 i'm sorry series 4 series 4 for my son i'm not sure um it may not work uh the other thing is if you're a switcher you probably don't have an apple watch right right so they also probably don't

14:51have a computer with touch id but that's another right that's true yeah so that's a it's a whole new thing yeah um so you know maybe because i was conscious of that uh going into it i didn't i didn't let it get to me but i could see after six months i'd be like oh i gotta start wearing my watch or something it's not just the that that's handy for the unlocking your mac thing but yeah it's it's the entering passwords into everything right and apple pay and stuff yeah yeah that's where i end up touching my touch id all the time on my keyboard like a million times a day just to enter passwords

15:25on everything yeah because everything everything signs you out now with like pass keys i know the biggest lie in the world is that check box that says like keep me logged in that is right yes right never like every website i go to whether it's you know from nike to to our own cms cms i always have to log in yeah so yeah i do i use the touch id thing often um if you don't have it roman like how did i forgot how it works you just click like is there an extra click and you have to type

15:58in your password you have to type in the password so you get a pop-up that asks for your username and password so iCloud iCloud passwords is a thing like how does that work with oh so you get the number thing you have to you get the thing that pops up where you have to you get an alert and then you get another alert that shows up on your other devices oh right right i think even on the same mac sometimes i've i've had it where and then you have to enter a six six number code yeah yeah right that that's how it worked i was trying to remember um yeah the the unfortunately touch id is

16:33really handy and also you know secure and it's it's it's unfortunate that apple that's the thing that apple chose to be the dividing line between the 599 and a 699 model because you know it is your

Security Concerns

16:50your machine will be less secure your machine will be less convenient and it's it's it's a hundred dollars so like you can go out and tell well just get an apple watch se like that's 250 dollars like now we're now we're now we're we're adding 25 or 50 percent of the price onto the computer so it's it's it's frustrating for me as a as an apple fan right it's it's difficult to defend that decision it really is i mean there's a lot more sites are moving to pass keys now where yeah but but even then

17:23that's you could do that with touch id and that's that's another one like well if you have an iphone then you have to pick up your iphone and look at your face so that you could like no no nobody wants to do all that that's what makes you go and use the same password for everything that's like seven characters with one special character and it's the same one for everything and then one i just read this morning about some food tracking app that all these celebrities have been endorsing that just got

17:54they were completely insecure and their whole info 13 million users or something just got dumped and it's everything it's what time people eat it's their contact info it's everything and if you have the same passwords it's all they were completely wide open and if you use the same password for anything else the fact that that got you know it's not just that account that was compromised it's any other account that you use the same password for so yeah the we really need to get to where biometrics are like

18:27standard oh i thought we had gotten there yeah it's you know i thought we were there i was like when they did the the video thing that i was watching last week like it was surprising like like i was like really like that's the that's the thing one has touch id and one doesn't like it's almost like it's almost forcing people to up to upgrade which i is an apple thing and it's an everybody thing and i get it i just wish it what they weren't compromising on on security especially the people that they're

18:59selling it to you know grandparents kids who need it the most yeah and they're forcing first time and apple buyers people to make a decision yeah right i i'm almost certain that the next one will have touch id standard at the 599 model i'm assuming or maybe two generations like eventually we'll get there yeah i really hope so you know like if like the iphone 17e has face id like like like like apple doesn't usually skimp on security yeah they don't sell other stuff that um doesn't have some form of

19:33biometric something but otherwise cheapest ipad right like right even the cheapest ipad has it built into the uh the home the power button yeah but roman your review otherwise even like even that you said listen it's it's it's it sucks but it's not a deal breaker because this thing is so good for 599 yeah like yeah uh they apple really got it got it right with the need so yeah so if people

Performance and Benchmarks

20:00are wondering next uh if people want to wondering about performance yes let's do that so you know it's single core performance is pretty good it's it's great really good you know yeah it's it's equivalent to well i was going to say it if it was equivalent to an m4 it'd be i was going to say now it's great uh but it's equal it's close it's really close yes it's faster than m3 so i'm just i was just being a little uh putting the pressure on it um but it's but it's satisfying it's that the

20:32single core performance is very satisfying people using productivity apps and surfing the web and stuff like that that they'll be happy with it it's the it's the multi-core stuff the more complex stuff where you know if you do it every once in a while it'll be fine you know you'll have to wait for your stuff to render and things like that uh but i mean how many people are going to be buying this to to to rendered yeah it was more yeah i pointed that out in the review more because

21:05you know that's what people are are saying is that is the problem with it it's just kind of like no yeah and it's it's it's it's a it's a fine point to bring up but single core performance jason do you want to talk briefly about the difference between single core and multi-core when we're when we're running these benchmarks um i mean yeah really we should call it to call them threads but like yeah single thread is just you know if one line of commands through the through the processor it's going to use the big cpu core because there's big and little cpu cores on there uh a lot of standard

21:37kind of a lot of the stuff you do on the web that's sort of javascript and um and just a lot of everyday applications are kind of limited by there's there's one sort of master they're all everything's multi-threaded but there's sort of one master thread that's kind of holding up the works so the single core performance is kind of what matters most and multi-threading and multi-core performance having multiple cpu cores and running other threads it's good for a lot of background tasks you're not for a system like this a six hundred dollar entry level system you're not going to be doing

22:12a lot of stuff that stresses all has a bunch of threads that are limiting performance all at once those are things like putting filters on video and doing big video editing things and stuff like that um what this is good at i was actually very surprised at i wasn't at all surprised by the performance of like the cpu and gpu just because we know what an a18 is we know right yeah so uh multi-core performance was i you know better than in like around m2 ish level like yeah better better than

22:47an m1 it's worse than an m3 like it's not quite as good as an m2 but yeah yeah uh in other places it's it's better the gpu is worse we knew it was going to be um the neural engine is faster than any it's like m4 level like it's you know so anything like that but this this is for people whose concept of video editing or not concept but the things they're doing is i'm trimming the ends off right and this has all the best but yeah this has all the best video encoders and everything like the video media media

23:22engines those things flew in roman's benchmarks like the handbrake scores when you use video toolbox which is there hey i'm using the chips like video media engine are killer yeah um so yeah i think the things that this is for like the things that you do with this i'm i'm online shopping i'm browsing social media i'm answering emails i'm browsing the web you know all that kind of stuff um really aren't going to be stressing a whole lot of cores all at once right uh for most people there's always

23:55those people who have so many browser tabs you just can't it's just like they're like one little pixel wide all the way across yeah we're gonna we're gonna roman's gonna do a test where he runs like 150 safari tabs and just joke yeah how many will they i gotta tell you at what point is it whenever i go to visit my parents and they show me their phone and they bring up safari like i'll open safari and i swear to god they have like 250 tabs open oh yeah yeah so my wife has easily that many

24:29i believe the chip will be able to handle it i believe that um it'll be even if you're one of those people who'd ever close a tab and just open like the way mac os is optimized optimized the way safari is optimized i think it'll be fine it puts most of those tabs to sleep right it's just like uh it's just like an application you didn't close on your iphone it basically freezes it it'll freeze it so it's not doing anything you know um so yeah there's a lot of that stuff going on it's very smart but i mean it's kind of to me it looked like it looked like anything you could do with a

25:05four-year-old macbook you could do this is going to do just as well and something's much better the the only area i was kind of really disappointed at was the ssd speed's really slow it's even slower it's even like half the speed of an m1 it's it's kind of that was a kind of a sore spot especially since apple relies on swap so much this is an eight gigabyte machine yeah all that so i think that might end up being kind of a limiting factor um but like again hey this is a 600 computer with

25:37that's full aluminum and all that other stuff like i don't think anybody who buys one is going to be disappointed in the performance for what they paid for roman in like real world stuff like forget benchmarks for a second like while you were using it how did it feel compared to like an error or something um i didn't really notice a difference in like everyday stuff whereas like in terms of like like what we do for work launching and things apps launching you know working in our cms using like

26:12i was using word um of things like that uh i'll i i used a lot of web-based tools um good like office 365 online you know because people were one of the uh common comments about the neo is that it's basically a mac chromebook sure so i was kind of like okay well what if i used online tools more than built-in apps so that's what i did and that wasn't a problem um i saw someone call it safari book

26:46yeah someone called it like okay yeah so yeah and apple apple has all that stuff on i mean they have like pages and numbers like all that stuff's available on the web so right they could right just have a web-based computer if they wanted to at this point i do plan on editing this podcast on it with with adobe premiere we'll see how that goes oh okay so uh but we'll see how that goes and i i you know i don't do a whole lot of heavy editing and it's more like adding lower thirds and stuff for the

27:18video for youtube so uh it's not super everyday i'm not making a movie i'm not doing a lot of transitions or anything like that but here's a question for you if someone handed you this to you last week didn't tell you anything about it would you know it was running a significantly slower processor than an m4 air or something like that or an m3 air whatever it is uh i would know but not because uh maybe because i'm more sensitive to it than than other people sure i would know not

27:55because like general stuff is uh noticeable it's doing the things like working in iMovie and then i decide i'm gonna you know render out this video and it takes you know 10 minutes instead of four or something like that that that's where i would notice it uh okay the ssd thing is a is kind of a big deal to me also there are certain times when you're like you know it's you know it's taking a long time because the ssd is slower yeah copying over a big file copying over a big file somebody

28:27sends you like a three gigabyte zip and you've got to unzip it and you're fat yeah why is there a progress bar why is it taking a minute right usually there's a little thing pops up a couple seconds later it's gone and yeah for that to be just a few more seconds it's all of a sudden it's noticeable yeah and for me that that was a little heightened because i also reviewed the m5 max macbook pro which has a super fast ssd now five times the price but okay yeah yeah so it's it's like 10 times the speed

29:00though like that thing right things ssd is yeah it's kind of i think it's i think it is around 10 times the speed it is it is instead of like 1.2 gigabytes per second it's like 12 gigabytes yeah it's crazy so so that's the gap that's the performance gap of a of a mac the cheapest to the most expensive yeah um i'm trying to look the before we get away from the ssd is the the 512 is the same as the 256 as far as speeds go i mean you wouldn't know because you didn't they didn't

29:32they didn't announce anything i didn't see any reviews saying yeah this was different so i think they are the same i think they are the same um yeah okay i i didn't check any other reviews i don't know what other machines people had to do that were there any reviews of the 699 model let me look touch id just wondering so somebody must have gotten one yeah someone must have got one um i guess the other the one point of contention in my review it it's kind of not a big deal to me but it is

30:07kind of an odd thing is the usb implementation yes um so there are two usb ports uh they're both usb-c uh but the implementation is different so the rear port is usb3 which and it's 10 gigabits per second the the front port the one closest to the user is usb2 which is what 480 megabits per second is that that right something like that it's basically yes yeah uh so it's a lot slower um and you know a lot

30:43of that has to do with the fact that a19 a18 pro i always want to call it a19 but a18 pro was yeah it was designed for one usb port yeah so i'm really curious if they do this next year because we don't really know again like the the a19 pro like that only really shows up in phones and tablets like it's with one usb port so i'm wondering if you know this product's been in the

31:13works for a while so i wonder if they're actually designing things like the a19 pro so with with two usb3 external connections in mind because that would be yeah that's a usb2 is really slow you guys yeah yeah yeah yeah if if the next macbook neo has an a19 pro two usb3 ports 12 gigs rm and touch id i mean that's perfect oh yeah no that's that's a killer upgrade that's that's if that was all 599

31:47i mean they're already going to sell a lot of these but man that would be it would be hard for people to like keep a straight face and not recommend it at that point like oh you can't buy a computer without a backlit keyboard they'd have to find some excuse yes so i'm you know i'm not an engineer so there's possibly some engineering limitations in terms of when they had to implement the second usb port in this laptop i think that's probably true so yeah yeah so no way that to me that's kind of disappointing because it would have been nice if they were both

32:21usb3 yeah at the same time you know it's a 599 laptop i kind of expect that kind of thing to happen so yeah um yeah so that's the usb thing and you can use both ports to charge which segues into the other thing that i was going to bring up about charging so apple does not specifically state that the neo supports fast charging um and but right and they include a 20 watt adapter the same adapter

32:54that i think well no they don't include an adapter but the same adapter they use the ipad is that correct i think or do they switch to that 40 20 watts i think that's right the 20 watt yeah okay so um but what i've been doing is and i'm actually doing this right now that's why when i've held up the macbook on screen it's it has the cable attached i've been seeing what happens when you use the 96 watt adapter compared to the 20 watt adapter and so i'm going to be writing this up so what i found is

33:27when you use the bundled 20 watt adapter you're essentially getting um in 30 minutes you're getting about 15 percent that's okay that's okay you're talking about extra oh yeah you gain 60 you get you about 15 battery life so i it went from 20 to 35 in half an hour okay 20 watt adapter right when i when i uh so i you know what drained the battery back down to 20 charged again using a 96 watt adapter

34:01uh battery life went up to 50 so 30 battery life that's true like twice as fast instead of gaining 15 15 in half an hour you gained 30 in half an hour it's interesting so it seems like it does make a difference but it's not like fast charging as apple sells fast charging but it's exactly it doesn't fall under apple's definition of fast charging which is 50 in 30 minutes right and on max that generally

34:35requires like 140 watt power adapter like even on other max like they're they're like you 96 watt power adapter doesn't charge any mac 50 in 30 minutes it does you know you need the 140 watt power adapter that is one of the differences with the studio displays that i'm testing uh now that the xdr is um 140 watts out while the regular one is 96 so it will fast charge a macbook pro they like

35:10specifically call out this will fast charge a macbook pro because it's 140 watts not 96 so yeah i'm not surprised that one it's not apple's version of fast charging but yes it will charge faster than 20 watts they're just cheaping out giving you a 20 watt adapter is that what you're saying and not telling anybody basically better yeah yeah so hey listen they don't have to give us any charger for a laptop they would they would people would be big mad but yeah in the eu they don't in

35:41the uk yeah yep yeah some of those regulations are different so yeah so if you have a faster charger and you're getting this laptop you can use it uh yeah uh and you probably should because the one that apple supplies is just clunky and ugly and slow like anything anything 15 and 30 minutes is not great that means it's going to be you know three hours to charge it or something you know it's it's really going to take a while um i'm not you know laptops i don't think a lot of people expect a

36:17laptop to fully charge in in like 30 minutes or anything but uh like several hours is where it starts to get really frustrating right i think we've kind of gotten used to plugging in at oh i'm down to 10 and then you plug in and then an hour 10 minutes later whatever it's back to full or or that 80 charge it's good so um i can't find a single person who tested these ssd i've been looking for the last five minutes um we're one of the only reviews kudos roman that even tested it at all and um i can't

36:55find anyone that that can compare it to the 512 um here's my question for you roman remember that at the m2 the macbook air m2 ssd i i don't know if you have this off the top of your head i would be shocked if you do but there was some issue with it where it got slower is it slower than that is oh i remember this slower than that yeah remember the m2 the entry with the 128 gig yeah entry level model the 128 gig uh had a ssd that was half as fast as the 256 they didn't yeah they because they

37:30were using like one chip instead of two instead of two yep yeah yeah so so they were using sorry go ahead no go ahead i was just gonna ask is is the neo slower than that do you know yes yes it is it's neo's ssd is it might be the slowest that i can remember uh ever seen on on a mac it's it's pretty slow it's it's half the um it's half what the m1 is or so something like that yeah it's it's

38:06it's quite a bit slower than yeah yeah um i i'm not sure why that is i don't know if it's you know because it's you know it's necessarily a mobile chip and you know there's certain limitations that go along with that um so yeah yeah i think that's all part of it and it's one of those things that i'm really curious about when this git becomes an a19 product an a19 pro product or something because that's again we only see those in ipads and iphones where people don't know or test the ssd

38:41speed yeah i was gonna it's not part of this spec and it's not part of anything so are they making these things faster and just not telling us and we'll find out when it gets in a mac i'm gonna ask if either you knew and maybe we don't if no no clue iphone iphone speeds disc read write speeds yeah what what are they do we have any idea somebody somebody's got there's there's a benchmark application out there somewhere i'm sure right yeah yeah nobody tests that nobody yeah seems to care

39:13yeah nobody yeah it's fast enough and it's been fast enough for years so like jason do you know this answer a comparable six hundred dollar windows machine is it slower than that oh i don't i have no storage speeds i don't know yeah i have no idea i mean there's a there's so many and some of them are the snapdragon platform and some of them are there's chromebooks and all that there's there's so all over the map i i don't really know yeah well that's an interesting um exact compromise that we

39:44hadn't really talked about before is the because as you say because it has a gig ram because apple relies on mac os relies on swap so much it could down the road two years from now whatever you know become an issue where other macs it wouldn't be yeah and yeah i can't wait next week to talk to you about that those ssd speeds and that macbook pro because holy god those are incredible like i don't want to get off the rails here we're ready 40 minutes in but uh man those things are crazy yeah

40:15all right what else we got in this thing battery life battery life so i got about 13 hours uh battery

Battery Life

40:24life which you know if you're doing general stuff is fine if you but then if every once in a while when you're doing that more intensive thing whether it's like run you know you're working in iMovie or or something like or you know where you're imaging working on an image or something like that it's you know i'm just going to draw a little bit more power so it's possible that towards the end of the day you might have to charge it it all depends on you know what what you're doing which you know i kind of expected that that wasn't such a big deal to me i don't think that's such a

41:03big deal but um if you're thinking that you're gonna be you know out and about uh you know on set so to speak or something like that and you're not going to be plugged in uh you have to be more mindful of of the battery um i think um so apple says 16 hours of video streaming based on uh does it say the nits it doesn't really say so they do they do a weird oh it says they don't collect from the

41:35bottom whatever that is yeah yeah that kind of thing which isn't the same on every macbook so they that's not right is your testing less than eight clicks in the bottom room so it's we set the display at 150 nits yeah yeah um and then we reasonably bright yeah which is reasonably bright right i think it is a little harsher than apple's test okay um that's good so so 13 13's good i mean 13 should get most people through the day for what they're going to use this for even if they're yeah even if it's like a secondary machine or something or even if it's primary for for light

42:09work 13 hours is yeah you're taking it that's that's a whole you're taking it to a couple of different college classes to take notes or whatever yeah and that's with my it's gonna be fine that's not like apple watch testing where it's like four four alerts and three phone calls like this is just 13 hours of straight screens on and you're working so i think that should be plenty um yeah you know and you'll probably get a little bit more if you're doing you know email and you know you shut the screen over for a half hour you know like it should be fine yeah well our test is uh playing a video that's right downloaded on the hard drive that's about the

42:45lightest weight thing a modern computer yeah yeah uh it's it's about almost everything else is going to drain your battery faster than that because these modern processors have a video decoder in it that is super super efficient and it's 100 using that it's not stressing the cpu or the gpu at all so it's it's almost more of a test of how efficient the display is than anything else at this point yeah yeah um speaking of the display um it's it's notably a a lesser color thing i don't know what

43:20the word is color gamut yeah yeah air did it look different to your eyes it you know it doesn't look different to my eyes and i have bad eyes so um it supports the srgb color gamut which might be problematic if you're you know if color uh accuracy is part of you know your your workflow uh you know all apple's other macs support p3 yeah um this one doesn't um i can't notice a difference but i i'm

43:56also not that discerning so i you know and i don't work in that space uh but if you are that kind of person you know maybe you're a video editor and you know you work you need to do color correction a lot that might you know or you work in publishing and you work in photos a lot you know that that could be a problem so um but the display itself you know the one the other thing that i kind of notice are the bezels okay oh they're a little big yeah they're a little big they're not it's funny because

44:33if you look at you know some you know old macs those bezels are like an inch yeah i was looking back at an m1 macbook era which is the old wedge that was similar that was the same body they put the intel macbook airs in and it was like holy cow those yeah it's not like that that was only five years ago yeah yeah um and so i could see if you were somebody who worked on a lot of super thin bezeled

45:04uh displays how that could be something you know a nuance that you don't like i didn't i didn't find it problematic in terms of using it or it's like you know when those big bezeled macs you would sit there and go oh you know this so cuts into my workable screen you know whereas this i mean it's noticeable from a you know it's an aesthetic and whether you like it or not you know that's that's up to you i didn't find it bothersome but it is noticeable to me so i agree with roman it didn't

45:38bother me but i did notice it and i also thought like wow they can make this thing really small in a couple years if they trim those bezels yeah and push yeah i think it's i think actually that size and the bezels and stuff is more about the keyboard than anything probably yeah like trying to probably not to shrink the keyboard um roman i don't know if you notice this or even if you could check since you've got it there but like one of the things that i see a lot on really cheap laptops like you know i'm in best buy and i'm just curious and i'm going down the line is backlight uniformity is

46:12terrible right so like you pull up a big a web page with a bunch of white or anything else with like a bunch of like bright unified color on it you can see little areas where it's dim maybe in the corners or on the side or you sometimes you see even a stripe or two across the screen where you can see it's dim the backlight's not even and it's like dimmer it's like yeah yeah ish and stuff that's the kind of thing apple pays attention to a lot i was wondering if you knew does this have really excellent backlight uniformity is there i actually tend to use a white wallpaper all the time okay

46:48because it just makes it easy for screenshots yeah and and so like i switched it over to the mac wallpaper for for the podcast but i just switched it back i don't notice any you know it looks pretty even to me okay and i noticed and you know it looked pretty even during my testing as well um so it'd be interesting to see over time if that stays true uh but yeah it looks pretty even to me

47:18so i i don't think that's uh a worry about it apple tends to be very conscious about that kind of thing with with the displays yeah so they don't like they feel like if something like that is on their displays they feel like that hurts their brand very much so they're sure yeah it's the kind of thing that looks cheap and yeah you don't want it to look cheap yeah but it's also the kind of thing that is cheap i mean that's like right one of the things that you get in a low-cost display yeah when when i was at the new york event they had a hp a 15 inch hp laptop that they were using as like a

47:55comp and that was one of the things that they showed they they upped the brightness on both and they looked at the the color the vibrancy the the evenness the evenness of the brightness like that was a that was a point of contention that they raised so my guess is without having one in front of me that it's going to be super solid when it comes to brightness and uh it's the same i it appears to be the same screen as the as the base entry level ipad although a little bit bigger because that also doesn't have p3 so that one that one's always been good so um like like little

48:30things like that they make sure they get right i mean they'll they'll skimp on obviously the p3 color spectrum things like that but right um i would assume that like that stuff they're gonna they're gonna nail down but i do agree the bezels are they're not they're not bad they're not ugly but they're noticeable because apple has had skinny bezels on its laptops now for like three or four years all right roman what else what do we got are we done do we do we do we hit all the points that that you wanted to hit i know you're muted though you're muted how's the how's the sorry that's

49:05because i was coughing in the background uh i didn't really test the speakers very much so i can't really well how they sound just just they sound apple makes pretty good speakers under a laptop these are different you know for those that don't remember they they fire out the the sides their their little slits yeah fire out the sides of the machine yeah i didn't do like a comparison against the macbook pro or anything or other macs i just used it and so i mean they they sound fine like

49:36uh apple does do pretty good speakers um like but i didn't i didn't sit there and go oh no uh you know like like you might do with some other like cheap for example the iphone air when i when i got the air so oh yeah that is one of the things about the air yeah yeah and i thought before i got it i was like who cares it's an iphone yeah but man when you turns out you care yes yes turns out we all care about the speaker yeah yeah yeah but this is these are stereo speakers spatial audio you know all that

50:10stuff and yeah i i tested them in a big giant warehouse with tons of people around it was really hard to get an idea but it was reasonably loud and sounded good and there was you know bass to it and stuff like it sounded fine so um i'm going to agree with your um your non-professional opinion on that we got about 10 minutes so we should probably if we all right yeah let's move on to other segments all right so sum up buy or no buy sum up i i definitely think so here's i was trying

50:46to think of a way a better way than say the simple yes and here's here's what i came up with yeah people ask me a lot about what max they should buy and this is going to be on the top of the list the neo is going to be on the top of the list you know i'll ask more questions about what they do sure right but you know usually when i when people ask me i i parse that information i parse the max in my head more but i think this is going to be a go-to for from now on you know immediately go to that

51:21and then triage from there what they should do yeah yeah or something like that so i you know if you're using a macbook air and you're like oh i spent too much on this laptop take a look at this one you know maybe the macbook air might be too much for what you need if you're using a macbook pro you're probably not going to want this laptop but maybe you will because you want to use it in a certain situation like for instance i want one because and i wrote about this i use when i travel i bring a

51:57really old macbook with me so if i lose it or it gets stolen or it gets damaged or something like that i'm not going to sweat it but it is a 15 year old macbook pro so it'd be nice if i could have something a little more modern and this not that this is a disposable computer yeah but you know a lot lighter than a 15 year old it's also a lot lighter but i won't you know i won't stress over it like i would if i if something happened to my macbook pro so it's that kind of thing so there's there's

52:32a lot of use cases for it so and i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to people i think that when i look at it i feel like it's um it's easy to recommend to anybody who's trying to ask like like the there's a whole bunch of people mac's been around forever macbook's been around forever you know the macbook air you know the macbook pro there's some people out there going like well do i need how much money do i need to spend whatever but if you're just not into if you don't have a mac yet and you're wondering

53:02should i get one like that's like that's who this is for this is for all the it's my first mac i'm trying to mac macbook airs have been too expensive i don't want to upgrade because it's a thousand dollars like there's a this is huge huge market and it just feels like it's really easy to recommend to those people it's like you're not going to be disappointed it's fine yeah i think there's a whole contingent of people who are curious about max but just would never buy one because they either

53:33believe they're too expensive or they are too expensive depending on their budget yeah and for 600 bucks where the world you live yeah for for 600 dollars what you get i mean it's there's really nothing comparable i did a whole bunch of i'm gonna call it research but i looked at a bunch of 600 machines i went to best buy over there over the weekend and yeah like there's just nothing that's even close there's plenty where the specs look pretty good but they you can look at all this or you try and use it and it feels like junk right and the screen is crap it's flimsy

54:06um yeah it flexes like you can flex it with your hands yeah yeah it's plastic nothing that even close and uh pc wrote our our our sister site pc wrote just published a story this morning the trend force is saying that the cost of like mid to low end pcs could go up like 30 to 40 percent this year if that happens say good night apple's market share is going to go up to 40 percent because yeah i don't think people there's a lot of people who like enjoy windows i think they're familiar with windows

54:38and if they have a chance to give mac os a try you know they're just just not going to go back once you go back this thing is going to kill at retail like just in those places where it can be next to those other machines and you can pick it up and flex it and type on it and look at the screen and all that other stuff like it's gonna crush it's gonna fly out of the best buys and stuff like it's of the world you know like over black friday and stuff amazon runs deals on the say like the mac

55:12mini which is also 599 like you can get one for 480 if you can get this thing for under 500 dollars without being a student yeah i mean that's it game over right all right uh read roman's review on our our site uh read jason's xdr review on our site roman also wrote about the macbook pro jason's gonna write about the macbook air we got a bunch of reviews so um check it out and if you have any questions for roman specifically about something that he did or didn't write about um

55:43you know send us online okay i'm gonna skip roman best thing i saw this week even though i really want to talk about that finder guy but we just don't have that we should do it next week there's more fight show on finder guy yeah it's gonna be the best thing i saw last week next week because i do want to talk about it all right this week in apple history roman let's go uh so this week in apple history um it so sorry where oh here it is this week in apple history so today's march 10th when

56:19we're recording this on march 12 2015 um it was supposed to be the opening of macworld eyeworld for that year but idg the company that ran uh the show and used to own us not anymore right um decided that the show needed to go on hiatus uh and then the show never came back so so the last macworld expo was march 27th 1994 or 2014 night 24 no 1994 i've got them all mixed up 2014 right 2014 yes it was supposed

56:59to be the last one yeah did i say march 12th 1995 no no no you were right i am so 2015 yeah i said i am so confused i don't so it was march 12 1995 so it's 31 years ago right yeah i that's uh that's fairly obvious it wasn't six years ago right 10 years ago so yes i apologize for that so that was supposed so it was supposed to be macworld expo but it got canceled and that was the end of macworld expo

57:31essentially march 12 1995 um wait that can't be right no it's not no because of 2007 24 it was 2014 2015 2015 yeah all right it was 10 years i had it right yeah so right uh i think you've been running this forever i don't know what i'm talking about you had you could just cut this whole it's just had the right year since the type it's 2014 2015 i might have to edit that all out

58:02why don't you start over again so yeah why don't we start over again because that's it's just so confusing to start this week in apple history all right all right this week in apple history our macbook neo so this week in apple history on march 12 1995 was supposed to be no it's not 95 2015 fuck what why do i keep doing that i don't know what what the hell is wrong with me we have to

58:38leave all i'm not letting you cut i don't know what the hell is wrong with me all right this is the problem with taking notes because if the notes are wrong you you've slavishly followed them i don't know what the hell am i doing i know they announced the iphone at yeah yeah okay here we go again on march 12 2015 it was supposed to be the opening of macworld eyeworld for that year but the previous october idg the company that owned uh the expo used to own us not anymore uh decided

59:14that the show needed to go on hiatus and it never came back right so yeah the last macworld expo was march 27 2014 right um and now the the thing it was kind of a big deal because years before apple withdrew from the show they used to do the keynotes at macworld expo great uh then they withdrew and then it went on for a few more years but eventually it just kind

59:47of petered out with waning interest yeah yes so yeah the uh so the the rumor maybe it's not a rumor i don't know but like steve jobs hated that he had to come up with something new like three or four times a year for these expos because you know apple wanted to get onto its own kind of like release schedule but they would january was macro san francisco june was macro new york march was was um tokyo whatever so i think that's that's kind of was like it wasn't that he didn't like us anymore or didn't like macros anymore it's that they just wanted to get to like more of a like

1:00:22we control when things are released schedule and you know right apple pulled out nobody cared about macro i mean in retrospect they weren't nearly as much fun yeah part of it was that part of it was the pat mcgovern who was the the founder of idg and and he was a big proponent of these events that idg ran and in particular macworld he was very proud of how apple announced things that be important things at macworld and stuff like that he died the year before so he we didn't have that guy at the top

1:00:55who was a proponent of like no we have to keep doing macworld like that wasn't really a thing so all of that kind of happened together i was at idg at the time i was not at macworld but when all that happened yeah yeah in a way apple withdrawing and doing its own thing i mean it's kind of yeah in retrospect i mean that's what apple does you know they did the same thing they've done the same thing with all their products and like the chips and everything so it was almost it's in retrospect you kind of go yeah that's what apple does it's yeah so it's surprising that they kept

1:01:30up the the game for so long quite frankly yeah that they played ball for for that long so yeah yeah um it's a cool thing just personally to work here and to have that history that you know like some of the greatest products they ever made were released at you know our event it's pretty cool yeah but i never worked here while it while it was exist i used to go to the one in new york and just kind of you know go to like the javits center and like walk around the expo hall but i was i was never cool enough to be a macworld employee while macworld existed

1:02:00and now apple does its own events and mike you just went to one so yeah yeah we'll talk about that in a future show because we're running out of time but i wonder if that's going to be the new way they do things but we'll we'll talk about that yeah yeah i don't think for september it will yeah it's a good probably right right but but yeah yeah we'll talk about it in a later event yeah all right comment sure comment corner we'll do a couple quick uh milos on instagram said i feel like in 2026 all laptops should be made of aluminum and apple just

1:02:38proved that it can regardless of price range yeah well here's the thing about that i don't think any not any but i don't know if there's another windows pc maker that could do that at that price like we've heard reports that apple figured out a whole new way to do aluminum machining and whatever it else because it's expensive to do that stuff yeah yeah and they do so many products they have all these they have companies they've invested in have all these special milling machines and stuff like

1:03:10that um maybe maybe not but also i would say any laptop man there are some 299 laptops out there and i don't think even apple could make that aluminum but um yeah it really ups the game for sort of just the quality of the whole sort of body and experience and uh one more comment jeff w via facebook said people seem to put this machine down this macbook serves a purpose that is not necessarily junk and is not necessarily junk people need to do their research to determine what their needs are

1:03:45obviously the person with certain needs will put this machine down don't listen to naysayers for what i do i am considering this machine as my first mac yeah yeah you know what i like that apple is people are having this conversation now like no one ever did this for an hp whatever it's called but now this is an apple thing apple's doing it so people talk about it yeah that's the thing no it's great um but yeah absolutely you know if you think that the specs are bad or whatever

1:04:15or or for the price i encourage you to go try a windows laptop that costs 599 yeah for sure and just deal you do have any idea how much crapware is on a 599 windows laptop how much junk is in your system tray it is a nightmare go try it and feel how crappy and loose and plasticky and flimsy it feels oh it's got a 15 inch display and 16 gigs of ram cool you use that it's gonna be terrible just just try it honestly yeah that does it for comment corner this week

1:04:50all right and that does it for this episode of the macro podcast episode number 90 and that's not right why did i did this again yes yes for a second there you were going 1995 you were launching into it and i thought oh man he's gonna get it right this time i did i was so i was rolling for the first five words 974 thank you jason thank you and thank you roman thank you sir and thank you listeners and viewers for tuning in you can subscribe to the macro podcast and the

1:05:24podcast app on spotify on youtube at the macworld podcast channel or through any other podcast app um comments or questions contact us on blue sky facebook threads search for macworld look for the blue mouse logo send us an email roman what are you doing he's doing it oh he's trying to get the reaction he's not working all i see is you're making a hand i don't know that's because the background is all messing messing it up all right uh uh uh send us an email at podcast at macworld.com send us a

1:05:58personal email comment on comment under a video a post send us a message in some way and we will talk about it in a later show join us next uh join us join us join us in the next episode of the macro podcast that we saw as we thinking about it too much now join us in the next episode of the macro podcast as we talk about uh as we talk about the latest in the world of apple see you next time slow draining sinks a foul kitchen odor standing water in the shower it's time to get your dreams

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