Yeah, and using macOS fresh is 100x better than the out of box experience for Windows Home. It took me nearly two hours to get that in what I’d call a usable state, disabling “world polar bear day” logos on the search bar and dumb stuff like that.
macOS is much better than any alternative and Tahoe and iOS 26 seem perfectly fine?
The icons in the menu bars are rough, the spacing isn’t great and the inconsistent window borders aren’t great.
I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
To be fair MacOS (and all apple software) is so heavily optimized for their current hardware. It is unfortunate that Intel macs are left behind, but my 2019 intel mac was capital-S Struggling with macos already in 2022. The M-series was such a leap forward. It’s a server under my desk now.
Compared to Windows? Tahoe is probably fine. Compared to previous versions of macOS/OS X? Nothing deal-breaking for me, but there are all kinds of little things that just don't have the polish long-time macOS users are accustomed to. Sibling comments have already listed a few things, but take the grab points of the window corners, which don't actually match the window borders. A minor thing, IMO, but not very "Apple-y" to let something like that ship. The menu icons are another: they add clutter, they don't add a lot of value, and they look like crap. Again, not a huge deal, but c'mon, Apple, UI is supposed to be your thing.
I don't hate Tahoe myself, but I don't particularly love it, either. I can still get done what I need to do with an OS, but along with a bunch of other paper cuts in recent macOS versions (looking at you, System Settings) on top of Liquid Glass, I can see why folks are upset.
I wonder if it’s time to try this again. Last time I tried it, it was intensely buggy, not to mention almost every feature I wanted.
The concept is great, and I would love to ditch OrbStack for it. (OrbStack is slick. But their everything-shares-one-kernel-and-they-don’t-give-privileged-access model falls apart as soon as you try to do anything that doesn’t fit in their not-amazing sandbox. Even user namespaces don’t appear to work.) But, other than the actual core mostly working, Apple Containers was a buggy mess, and it was the only thing that made me frequently reboot the whole machine.
Buggy as well as severe UX regressions. It is so unfortunate that their software division is underperforming when their hardware team is outperforming. Craig Federighi, get your act together!
Such as new screenshot dialog in iOS, where one click has now become three, because we've hidden the primary controls under two pointless single-fold menus.
I like the new dialog? I basically always crop the image when screenshotting so the new UI results in less button pressing for me. How often do you need to capture your entire screen? I almost always want to focus on something.
The new screenshot flow is mostly to provide extra surface for Visual Intelligence. I've found it extremely useful for stuff like ingesting event details and doing Google Lens-esque searches.
What are you talking about? How is breaking sales records chickens coming home to roost? Does that phrase not mean the consequences of a bad decision are being realized? If anything isn't this story the opposite, and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
> and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
People weren't that mad about the butterfly keyboard or the 16" Macbook Pro that idled near it's junction temp. That doesn't mean they were good products, it means that the majority of Apple customers fail to evaluate the products they're buying based on quality.
Cook: "Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers."
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
isn’t what cook is pointing out actually the most important thing?
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
Relatively well-founded estimates will start to appear in a month or so. It's unfortunate they don't give exact model breakdowns, but everyone knows that the Mac is a hobby for them.
This was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows
Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
Plastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
Also Apple are masters of the up-sell. Someone who knows $600 windows laptops are crap might just buy a cheaper Chromebook because crap is crap, but they might spring for another few hundred bucks for something they have confidence is actually pretty nice and has brand Caché.
My M4 Air was $750 on black friday 2025. I bought it after I cracked the screen on my M1 and the cost to repair was half the cost of the much newer computer.
The problem has always been no direct "I want a Mac but Windows" laptop - before the switch to the M1 the best way to get a "Mac quality laptop" that ran windows was to put windows on a Mac.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
Microsoft could probably put Windows on the M series macs if they wanted to. Windows for ARM exists, and Apple very specifically made the bootloader unlockable on the Apple Silicon laptops.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
Microsoft Surface laptops are the closest you can get to a "Mac with Windows" in quality/thought (that I've found) and the ARM CPU not being able to use x86 printer drivers is infuriating.
> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers"
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
Neo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.
Huh the neo can't really be the driver of this right? As it's barely out and I think not yet physically available in most places.
The headline hints at a causation that I don't think exists.
Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created. I counted 0 net improvements and countless new bugs.
Apple is having their Windows ME moment.
It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's all about the software they would say. The chickens have come home to roost.
To a new customer it doesn’t matter how Tahoe compares to previous MacOS, it matters how it compares to current Windows.
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
> Apple Announces New Mac Sales Record Following MacBook Neo Launch
Yeah, it apparently matters at least a little
This.
Maybe it's not the cheap hardware? I don't know?
But when you put the following assertions out there:
>Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created
and
>It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses
with the market data being what it is.
I guess I'm just saying those statements definitely go under the old Abe Lincoln admonition that at times "Both may be, but one MUST be, wrong."
What was that sales record?
> Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created.
What is everyone seeing that I'm not? I like Tahoe/iOS26, I haven't noticed regressions with it.
Yeah, and using macOS fresh is 100x better than the out of box experience for Windows Home. It took me nearly two hours to get that in what I’d call a usable state, disabling “world polar bear day” logos on the search bar and dumb stuff like that.
macOS is much better than any alternative and Tahoe and iOS 26 seem perfectly fine?
The icons in the menu bars are rough, the spacing isn’t great and the inconsistent window borders aren’t great.
I’m not that opinionated though - I don’t really care that much. But the part that sucked was installing it on a 2020 intel MacBook Pro. It basically made it unusable to the point of being ready to throw it out. Going back from Tahoe breathed so much life into it that it was fairly upsetting to see Apple release it. It reminded me of early iPhone updates that would basically brick older devices due to the performance impact.
To be fair MacOS (and all apple software) is so heavily optimized for their current hardware. It is unfortunate that Intel macs are left behind, but my 2019 intel mac was capital-S Struggling with macos already in 2022. The M-series was such a leap forward. It’s a server under my desk now.
My Mac is staying releases back, but iOS26 no longer respects light mode. Since I see astigmatic halation, this will be my last iDevice.
Its slightly worse in my opinion but I don't have huge issues with it. Still way better than Windows 11 on my work computer.
Compared to Windows? Tahoe is probably fine. Compared to previous versions of macOS/OS X? Nothing deal-breaking for me, but there are all kinds of little things that just don't have the polish long-time macOS users are accustomed to. Sibling comments have already listed a few things, but take the grab points of the window corners, which don't actually match the window borders. A minor thing, IMO, but not very "Apple-y" to let something like that ship. The menu icons are another: they add clutter, they don't add a lot of value, and they look like crap. Again, not a huge deal, but c'mon, Apple, UI is supposed to be your thing.
I don't hate Tahoe myself, but I don't particularly love it, either. I can still get done what I need to do with an OS, but along with a bunch of other paper cuts in recent macOS versions (looking at you, System Settings) on top of Liquid Glass, I can see why folks are upset.
[dead]
0 improvements is unfair
https://github.com/apple/container
I wonder if it’s time to try this again. Last time I tried it, it was intensely buggy, not to mention almost every feature I wanted.
The concept is great, and I would love to ditch OrbStack for it. (OrbStack is slick. But their everything-shares-one-kernel-and-they-don’t-give-privileged-access model falls apart as soon as you try to do anything that doesn’t fit in their not-amazing sandbox. Even user namespaces don’t appear to work.) But, other than the actual core mostly working, Apple Containers was a buggy mess, and it was the only thing that made me frequently reboot the whole machine.
I certainly haven’t done anything outside of general happy path but i swapped out docker for it and it “just worked” - and i got more battery life
Maybe we can go back to a world where we decouple new under-the-hood features from complete UI fuckery.
You shouldn't have to cope with one to get the other.
This doesn’t excuse the issues, but the mainstream alternative, Windows 11, is infinitely worse imho.
Buggy as well as severe UX regressions. It is so unfortunate that their software division is underperforming when their hardware team is outperforming. Craig Federighi, get your act together!
Such as new screenshot dialog in iOS, where one click has now become three, because we've hidden the primary controls under two pointless single-fold menus.
I wonder if someone got a raise for that.
I like the new dialog? I basically always crop the image when screenshotting so the new UI results in less button pressing for me. How often do you need to capture your entire screen? I almost always want to focus on something.
The new screenshot flow is mostly to provide extra surface for Visual Intelligence. I've found it extremely useful for stuff like ingesting event details and doing Google Lens-esque searches.
This can be changed back to the old version. Just search screen capture in settings and disable Full-Screen Previews.
What’s so bad about it? I haven’t noticed anything different.
I only need Apple ecosystem integrations, Docker, a bunch of CLI tools, Homebrew, and VSCode with Claude.
Well, I remember a time where I had to restart my PowerMac 7200 a lot because of some bug in MacOS 8...
Edit: Apple turns 50 this year
> It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses. > It's all about the software they would say.
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is even worse in this regard.
> Tahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created.
Someone hasn't been around for very long in the Apple era, not even counting things before NexT took over.
Indeed. In the NT 4.0 era, pre-Mac OS X, it was fun to watch Mac fans extoll the virtues of their OS while rebooting multiple times per day :)
What are you talking about? How is breaking sales records chickens coming home to roost? Does that phrase not mean the consequences of a bad decision are being realized? If anything isn't this story the opposite, and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
> and people aren't that bothered by the software regressions you're concerned about?
People weren't that mad about the butterfly keyboard or the 16" Macbook Pro that idled near it's junction temp. That doesn't mean they were good products, it means that the majority of Apple customers fail to evaluate the products they're buying based on quality.
"Just avoid holding it that way." - Steven Jobs
It’s the customer who is wrong… for being happy with their purchases!
Cook: "Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers."
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
isn’t what cook is pointing out actually the most important thing?
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
it doesn't give a sense of how much the Neo moves the needle or grows the pie though. Mac and iPad are each 8% of Apple's business. iPhone is 50%.
for Apple to focus on fixing things in macOS again (as opposed to just backporting stuff from their other lines) Mac would need to grow by a lot.
I agree - I just would like to know what a "best launch week ever" means in numbers
Relatively well-founded estimates will start to appear in a month or so. It's unfortunate they don't give exact model breakdowns, but everyone knows that the Mac is a hobby for them.
The reporting and headline are even worse. “Best launch week ever” says nothing about sales.
This was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows
Who knew, people just wanted Apple to make cheaper products.
People have been asking for iPhone SE to come back for what feels like decades, maybe they will do that next.
This is how you extrapolate one fluff marketing tweet into a full article, watch and learn. I also had the best sales this season
Uh yes generally corporations emphasize their success.
Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
Apple also gets to fund their manufacturing investments using phone and other revenue
Oh I think Microsoft got the memo:
This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11 https://www.theverge.com/news/897834/microsoft-windows-11-qu...
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
Yep, they could literally have done nothing with their Windows 10 codebase and it would fulfil most if not all of their targets.
They SAY they got the memo. Colour me very skeptical, but we'll see.
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
I hope Apple eats into their market share hard.
Plastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
No, but the $600 MacBooks are coming straight for the $600 plastic shitbox windows laptops.
The competition at this price point is weak.
> The competition at this price point is weak.
Is it though?
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
All of those specs are orthogonal to the gripes people are referring to when they call a laptop a "plastic shitbox"
Do note that in current economics 32GB of RAM alone will cost something like $400
What you just described is not better than Macbook Neo.
Also Apple are masters of the up-sell. Someone who knows $600 windows laptops are crap might just buy a cheaper Chromebook because crap is crap, but they might spring for another few hundred bucks for something they have confidence is actually pretty nice and has brand Caché.
Which was formerly challenged by the $700 Macbook Air, to little avail.
One of my kids had a college visit recently. Everyone had Macbooks.
At $950 it has historically been pegged at the #1 spot on Amazons best sellers in the laptop category. It has been recently unseated by the Neo.
Wait until retailers start discounting the Neo.
What $700 MacBook Air?
My M4 Air was $750 on black friday 2025. I bought it after I cracked the screen on my M1 and the cost to repair was half the cost of the much newer computer.
Costco and other in-person retailers marked down the M1 MBA to $799 and then $699 while reducing their stock.
It doesn’t make sense to compare MSRP of one product to sale prices of another. I’m sure the Neo will see similar discounts in those situations too.
I have a company-issued plastic shitbox. It’s $1100 and made by dell.
I have a semi-decent Lenovo Thinkpad T14 and its still meh. Prefer my M4 air.
Case in point, your company could have afforded a Mac but chose otherwise.
The problem has always been no direct "I want a Mac but Windows" laptop - before the switch to the M1 the best way to get a "Mac quality laptop" that ran windows was to put windows on a Mac.
Go to Best Buy or walmart and fondle the Neo and then do the same with the other Windows laptops. Even though they may perform better (nay, even be better), they certainly do not feel like a premium product.
Phones got this right; there are shitty Android phones, but the premium models feel like an iPhone.
Microsoft could probably put Windows on the M series macs if they wanted to. Windows for ARM exists, and Apple very specifically made the bootloader unlockable on the Apple Silicon laptops.
I guess they might have to write a lot of the device drivers (including the GPU driver) themselves though, and there probably isn't much incentive for them to do that.
Microsoft doing that would be wild.
You used to be able to put it on Macs yourself, i.e. just install it the way you would on any computer, or equivalently put Linux on it. Now, see (all the work that has to be done by the team of) Asahi, except there's no Windows equivalent.
If MS did 'Asahi-Windows'... I don't know whether I'd expect Apple to sue or to make ads making fun of it, but it would be a wild time.
Microsoft Surface laptops are the closest you can get to a "Mac with Windows" in quality/thought (that I've found) and the ARM CPU not being able to use x86 printer drivers is infuriating.
Otherwise, decent.
maybe, but performance wise they seem far ahead of typical Chromebooks in same , and with a real OS!
> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers"
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
It's a fitting analogy as macOS has since become bloated beyond belief.
Neo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.
The profit margin is probably better than you think. The iPhone 17e sells for the same price, and the neo is certainly less expensive to manufacture.
The talk for 20+ years has been about "halo" products - people buying iPods would be introduced to the Mac, same with the iPhone, etc.
I think this may actually be the first real Halo product they have that will do this for Mac, because it is a Mac.
I wonder if this move is to grab customer base as much as they can before the supply chain crunch dents Apple manufacturing for the first time ever
I don't think that apple will be affected more than their peers.