Except most Germans don't buy Surface Laptops, and there are much cheaper options with 8 GB, naturally they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.
It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.
And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.
I miss the glowing apple on my white polycarbonate MacBook. What I don't miss is the shitty Intel GMA X3100 iGPU and Apple not releasing a 64 bit driver for it.
Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.
what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly? The MacBook Neo is 60% from recycled materials and Apple offers free recycling for all their products.
> what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly?
Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.
The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.
Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.
20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.
15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.
10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.
nowadays macbook batteries aren't something i'd call "easy to replace" but it's not something a typical repair shop or meticulous individual wouldn't be able to do – most beater windows laptops don't have user-replacable batteries either fwiw
if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks
Being able to add RAM and replace storage with faster flash typically extend the useful life of a computer, even if the CPU is not replaceable as in desktops.
On my machines the limiting factor is not CPU, but memory and GPU speed. Low RAM and slow GPUs prevent me from running local AI models. These things will only get bigger over time. I wouldn’t expect a developer machine to still be useful 5 years from now with less than 16 or 32GB.
The Apple logo is on the wrong side of the screen to be concerned about. Apple's OS and user experience is miles ahead of the competition and so are the displays they use.
I disagree about Apple's OS and UI, I prefer the user experience of Linux :)
With a distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything basically "just works", and you have much more freedom with how you setup your computer. Plus, while Apple is generally better about not bloaring their OS with bothersome corporate BS ("log into your Windows account! Sign up for OneDrive! AI in your email!") then Microsoft, they're not exactly perfect.
The Mac OS is the thing that keeps me away from those computers. I really don't like when a piece of software tries to treat me like I have some kind of brain injury and needs to "help" me at every point.
The post that I commented on was arguing that what sets the Mac apart from other options with 8 GB RAM, and what makes them more expensive, is that they are seen as a status symbol. I made a point against that mentioning two areas in which Macs are truly superior.
To each their own. The OS is easily one of the most frustrating I’ve ever been required to use. It does some things very well, but many things absolutely infuriatingly.
Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.
It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.
And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.