$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.
These are probably gonna have a decent resell value. Macbook products have a very higher resell value compared to say chromebooks/normal laptops.
I can imagine schools buying them for their students and then taking them after the semester is over and then giving to next but also reselling it at a very nice value if they might want the next line of product at a decent price.
Also this not only applies to school but normal people who buy the Macbook Neo too
My understanding is that students are very hard on school provided laptops, I don’t think many of them that have been in use for a year will be in good resale condition.
My mother is a teacher and the idea there is that if students break/damage the school provided (tablets in that case), the students have to pay the fine.
And even after that, yes, children are absolutely hard on their tablets I agree but they operate and the resale value of those could be decent aside from a very few IMO. There is a way to create a culture of preservation or atleast steer things that way but yeah I agree it can be hard.
Only the smallest or independent schools are bellying up to the Apple Store to buy 250 laptops on educational discounts; almost all of them go through companies that handle the details; and it can be structured as a lease or a purchase, depending on where they want to allocate capital and expense.
The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.
This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.
I have an Alienware AW2721D and my M series Macs have no problem driving it at 240hz. macOS picks up that it’s a GSync display and supports VRR on it too.
My MacBook M3 Air & Pro laptops can run two QHD displays with one at 240 Hz and the other at 120 Hz. What it can't do is run either above 60 Hz with HDR enabled. But for my use cases, I've never need more than 60 Hz anyway.
How many 27” 5k 120hz+ high PPI are shipping right now? Reddit is particularly clowning on this for the refresh rate and completely ignoring the resolution.
This is a workstation-class monitor for people using these machines to make money. It's not a gamer toy monitor. People on Reddit don't get this. Apple's monitors are fantastic for those of us who use our computers to make money and need high quality. I am not playing video games on the same machine I use to make money.
(I think) what you are thinking of was something introduced around the Catalina>Big Sur transition, when the Pro Display XDR was introduced.
At the time, people were "marveling" at the magic of Apple, and wondering how they did the math to make that display work within bandwidth constraints.
The simple answer was "by completely fucking with DP 1.4 DSC".
I had at the time a 2019 (cheesegrater) Mac Pro. I had two Asus 27" 4K HDR 144Hz monitors, that the Mac had no problems driving under Catalina.
Install Big Sur. Nope. With the monitors advertising DP 1.4, my options were SDR@95Hz, HDR@60Hz. I wasn't the only one, hundreds of people complaining, different monitors, cards, cables.
I could downgrade to Catalina: HDR@144Hz sprung back to life.
Hell, I could on the monitors tell them to advertise DP 1.2 support, which actually improved performance, and I think I got SDR@120Hz, HDR@95Hz (IIRC).
So you don't deserve downvotes on this. Apple absolutely ignored standards and broke functionality for third party screens just to get the Pro Display XDR (which, ironically, I own, although now it's being driven by an M2 Studio, versus the space heater that was the Xeon cheesegrater).
Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.
A much more real issue is actually age limits. If someone starts in the Senate at 40 and serves for 24 years, term limits hardly seem to be the big issue. They are retiring at a normal time, and they should still be functioning at a high level.
Conversely, someone who gets elected at 70 and then gets term-limited at 82 is still over a normal, reasonable retirement age. The typical 82 is not in the physical or mental condition to be taking on such an important, high-stakes role.
Both of my parents are in their mid-70s and are in very good mental health for their age. They are very lucid, and my Dad still works part-time as a lawyer. They are also clearly not at the same intellectual powers they were a decade or two ago. Some of it can even just come down to energy levels. I have to imagine being a good legislator requires high energy levels.
Many public companies have age limits for board members, and they even have traditional retirement ages for CEOs. In the corporate world where results matter, there is a recognition that a high-stress, high-workload, high-cognitiative ability job is not something that someone should be doing well past their prime.
Al Gore had to leave the Apple board because he turned 75. In the U.S. Senate, there are 16 people 75 and older.
I don't really see why age limits would be exempt for "voters need to take responsibility for their voting".
IMO, the real issue is that voters are coerced to accept candidates put up by the parties due to FPTP. The threat of the wrong side winning gets people to accept someone they don't want. The primary process does not need to be democratic, and the results are pressured by the future threat of losing to the other side in a head-to-head.
This is true: in general the best fix for US democratic systems is to learn from more functional systems from overseas.
US is running on beta version democracy; it was wonderful for a trial run and we learned a lot from it, but unfortunately the country has been stuck without upgrades for a while. It'd be like trying to connect a Xerox PARC desktop to the modern internet.
Obviously it's absurdly nontrivial to shift it at this point but I do agree that age and term limits both seem to be stopgap solutions due to the challenge of implementing more effective strategies.
Consider Australia: of 226 parliamentarians, there's one aged 75+: Bob Katter.
I'd say there's three features of the au system that keep us relatively free of the absurd incumbency advantages in USA:
1. Compulsory voting makes it harder to solicit votes from a subset of the populace.
2. The Australian Electoral Commission is highly trusted as a neutral body, so Gerrymandering is rare.
3. None of our voting systems use First Past The Post; it's all ranked choice, babes!
> Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.
That is one aspect, but not the important one. The most important element is anti-corruption. Legal bodies can always entrench themselves and their own interests. Term limits significantly weakens entrenchment...excepting when the same legal bodies inevitably gut it.
That's in fact not at all what the research says. There's a decent amount of research that suggests that they actually increase corruption. There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
This is a classic one of those ideas that many people intuitively "feel" makes sense but is actually just terrible policy.
> That's in fact not at all what the research says.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
There are a lot of factors beyond term limits that influence this kind of research. The most important detail is to remember that corruption spans more than external influence. Institutional ossification has benefits and drawbacks. The drawbacks have outweighed the benefits, historically in the US and England. It was literally baked into the US Constitution to ensure this would not repeat for the US head of state. Notably the Supreme Court was baked in as a lifetime appointment. Granted, the remaining political bodies have not followed suit, I think it's clear that this has had a negative consequence due to the aforementioned entrenchment of the political parties.
> There's overwhelming evidence that they increase the power of lobbyists and interest groups.
It is incorrect to claim that is the only effect. I also don't believe that the conclusion is correct. I do believe it's closer to your initial statement.
> it's just a way for [legislators] to not take responsibility for their voting.
ie It shows a lack of care in executing the responsibilities of the elected position, which is why they barely do anything but campaign at the federal level.
It seems logical to me that a term limit could increase vulnerability to corruption in your last term. If you can't be re-elected, there is less incentive to be loyal to the people you represent.
The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.
Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before.
I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.
One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference.
What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made.
1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
> Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
> people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
What backslash? Only backslash I remember is when flat design was introduced. The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
> The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
You're just proving my point. Notice how all of these were posted after Zune/Metro/Windows Phone/8/whatever it's called flat design craziness started.
Just look at this quote from Gruber's blog post:
...these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print...
No shit, guess what also wasn't needed in print: Buttons to be pressed and radioboxes to be selected. The whole fad just built on "old design is old and designers need to be employed".
Apple had an internal clash over which design direction they should go after the release of Windows 8 but every user rightfully hated Windows 8 flat design. The resonance to skeuomorphism was very positive back then.
I don't know when Windows 8 was released, but by 2012-2013, skeuomorphic design had become very unpopular, tacky even. See the links I included in response to sibling comment.
The pitch from Bezos -- and it's a dumb pitch -- was basically just to make checking out faster by avoiding interacting with humans (but this can be achieved by increasing the number of cashiers and baggers). The pitch was never lower prices. The combo of all the tech and the army of Indians watching video was not cheap.
And because they were relying on computer vision and Indian vision, they had to get rid of all their fresh meals because they were too hard to calculate prices for. So, it ended up being a half-assed 7-Eleven concept. The whole concept was made by someone who hates humanity.
I personally prefer stores with actual cashiers. What I don't like are lines, but that is very solvable. The organic grocer near me is super fast to check out.
There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS.
Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.
How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.
Yes, provided it's not dead because it didn't actually sleep or you have to boot it up because it decided to shut itself down at some point (windows update?)
Sleep on windows is a hot mess, I've never had an experience I had any amount of confidence in.
It's become unreliable under linux as well. It used to work fine. The whole UEFI including the new si0x or whatever that word is again destroyed a perfectly fine experience all because it seemed like a good idea by microsoft.
They just need to feel superior about their Macs.
My experience is that Windows wake just as fast if not faster.
But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.
Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).
Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.
> There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster?
As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.
If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.
I'm a Mac user, but I recently played around with a beefy laptop at work to see how games ran on it, and I was shocked at how bad and user-hostile Windows 11 is. I had previously used Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, but 11 is just so janky. It's feestoned with Co-pilot/AI jank, and seems to be filled with ads and spyware.
If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick up a dedicated PC for gaming, it's going to be a Steam Machine and/or Steam Deck. Microsoft is basically lighting Xbox and Windows on fire to chase AI clanker slop.
(I've been a cross platform numerical developer in GIS and geophysics for decades)
serious windows power users, current and former windows developers and engineers, swear by Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility.
It's an open powershell suite collaboration by hundreds maintained by an opinionated coordinater that allows easy installation of common tools, easy setting of update behaviours, easy tweaking of telemetry and AI addons, and easy creation of custom ISO installs and images for VM application (dedicated stripped down windows OS for games or a Qubes shard)
It's got a lot of help hover tooltip's to assist in choices and avoiding suprises, you can always look to the scripts that are run if you're suspicious.
" Windows isn't that bad if you clean it out with a stiff enough broom "
That said, I'm setting my grandkids up with Bazzite decks and forcing them to work in CLI's for a lot of things to get them used to seeing things under the hood.
Bazzite is nice but its not very CLI centric I think because of the immutability. Its a great OS, but I found Cachy a lot better if you want to work from CLI in normal ways
Fascinating how this got leaked. A TV station in Canada accidentally ran the original episode version, implying that this was pulled super late and the episode was completely in the can.
It was completely finished. There's an article out today that says the main reporter on the story complained that the censor Bari Weiss had not bothered to appear at the previous five earlier screenings and reviews by the editorial team.
Probably as accidental as the people doing the censorship of the latest Epstein files released today that had "accidents" about how they censured stuff.
Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
reply