> No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays
Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.
No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.
My only real issue with this design is as far as I can tell there is no markings on exterior explaining which USB-C port is "the good one" - an important point given one port is dramatically slower than the other.
I suspect many users will probably accidentally plug stuff like external SSDs into the slow port without realizing. It's maybe too much to hope for at this price point, but would have been nice for a machine with only two ports to be able to offer the same spec USB on both ports.
My instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port - it's closest to the corner - but in doing so you use up the "good" USB-3 port leaving you with only USB2. It's not a huge deal, but charging in the other port to free up the USB3 one feels slightly weird to me. I suspect most users will charge off the USB3 port given its location.
Reading the spec sheet, it also looks like DisplayPort is only supported over the USB3 port too - again there appears no way to know just by looking at the ports. This has never been a problem on any of the Apple Silicon 2-port MacBook Airs, as those have always had the same specs on both ports and could drive a display over DisplayPort from either.
> ...instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port...it's closest to the corner...charging in the other port...feels slightly weird...I suspect most users will...
Ah, but, as I recall some vintage of 2016-2018 Macbook Pro users will remember that using the "backmost, corner" USB-C port for charging could cause the MBP to overheat and fans to sound like a helicopter.
Thus, the (admittedly probably vanishingly tiny minority of) MBP veterans with "back charging USB port PTSD" who learned to use the foremost USB port for charging, will know full well to stay away from using that backmost USB port, if all they need is power!
My guess is that if you plug a fast medium on the slow USB port the OS will give you a pop up letting you know. I have seen something similar in windows 11.
> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.
While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s.
> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.
Normally I'd agree with a statement like this. Except this is a very specific case.
That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.
The Apple Silicon fanless MBAs are great until you end up in a workload that causes the machine to thermal throttle. I tried to use an M4 MBA as primary development machine for a few months.
A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating.
I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.
While I agree that the slowdown is very noticeable once the MBA gets hot to the touch, I joke that it's a feature, encouraging you to take a cooldown break every once in a while :-)
More seriously though I agree it depends on workload. If you've got a dev flow that hits the resources in spikes (like initial builds that then flatten off to incremental) it works pretty well with said occasional breaks but if your setup is just continuously hammering resources it would be less than ideal.
All through the 2000s Apple developed non-integer scaling support in various versions of MacOS X under the banner of “resolution independence” - the idea was to use vectors where possible rather than bitmaps so OS UI would look good at any resolution, including non-integer scaling factors.
Some indie Mac developers even started implementing support for it in anticipation of it being officially enabled. The code was present in 10.4 through 10.6 and possibly later, although not enabled by default. Apple gave up on the idea sadly and integer scaling is where we are.
Here’s a developer blog from 2006 playing with it:
There was even documentation for getting ready to support resolution independence on Apple’s developer portal at one stage, but I sadly can’t find it today.
Here’s a news post from all the way back in 2004 discussing the in development feature in Mac OS tiger:
Lots of of folks (myself included!) in the Mac software world were really excited for it back then. It would have permitted you to scale the UI to totally arbitrary sizes while maintaining sharpness etc.
Yep, I played with User Interface Resolution app myself back then in uni. The impact of Apple's choice to skip non-integer scaling didn't hit me until a few years ago when my eyes started to fail...
This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off.
An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.
Disagree. Explaining that they can't fix Apple's Samba implementation isn't "treating Mac users this way" such as to be called a "bad IT team." Or the rest of the laundry list of bugs in the post. How do you recommend an IT team should handle Apple's inability to function for basic business file sharing so that the user's boss doesn't think less of the end user or the IT team?
They are being friendly, and objective. Their job is to fix problems so that employees can be productive. It's not to lie for them, or to them. It's Apple's marketing team who has that job. You'll notice they don't do much in the way of advertising to IT directors and business decision makers. Their focus is college kids, specifically graphic designers and iOS app developers. It's definitely not businesses.
IBM? These are software issues. IBM doesn't make desktop operating systems for end users. Do you mean Microsoft? Apple never was and still isn't the Microsoft of business OS. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
Of course I mean IBM - my point is the sheer volume of hardware Apple have sold to enterprise markets in the last 10 years. If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case. IDC and others have Apple's marketshare in US enterprise markets at 23-25 percent as long ago as 2021 - using a Mac has long ceased to be an unusual or troublesome choice in business environments and I would be extremely unimpressed by any IT staff making these arguments today.
If familiar with Apple's history, the IBM example was deliberately chosen. Once upon a time one would have seen an army of IBM desktops in the enterprise, much like the MacBook today...
IBM is not a good comparison, as I mentioned, because we're talking about Apple's OS software being bad for its users' careers. I don't think that's ever been the case for IBM or Microsoft. Anyway, the hardware is irrelevant.
> If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case.
Selling stuff means you have good marketing, not good products. Microsoft isn't better than Apple because they sell more software, right?
So, I don't follow your logic on that point at all. I have 20% of my current employee base running Mac OS. Why would that imply that they are a good career choice for the end user to make in a desktop OS? It implies they are the 1 in 5 who will be left out of the discussion and then complain that their computer wasn't working.
That 20% accounts for much more than their fair share of help desk interactions. And their boss still sighs when they come up in conversation. Why would you advise anyone to shoot themselves in the foot like that?
And more importantly, how dare you judge my IT department (friendly joking tone here)? But seriously, do you have a solution to make Apple's Samba implementation work?
That's kind of a critical component for business if you're going to say that Apple is so good for business like IBM/Microsoft. Wouldn't you say?
Given one can only run Apple's software on their own machines, whether we talk about OS sales or hardware sales, we are talking about the same thing. Are you really prepared to argue 25 percent of the corporate computer market userbase are sabotaging their careers? I'd argue thats absurd, personally.
I'm not responding to the Samba critique because millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs, every day, just fine. Would I like Apple's Samba implementation to be better? Sure.
There are many studies that prove the opposite of your point, including one from IBM, and find the modern Mac significantly cheaper to support than Windows machines in business environments with less helpdesk tickets to boot:
Also this IBM article predates Apple's abandonment of AFP. That's a huge kick in the argument. At this time, Apple worked for file sharing, at least. It had many other problems for businesses at the time, though. But less so for medium ones, more for big ones. So I'm still surprised to read that from IBM.
I don't go by any of this stuff, though. It's all marketing. I have my own data and experience to work with. And I've given some hard to debate examples where it's a problem for one's career, and it's not one their IT department, or whomever I'm talking to here can help them with.
The depracation of AFP (first announced in 2013) has no real impact on subsequent studies. Here's a more recent one from Cisco with a 130k Mac deployment:
They had deprecated, but still supported it for several OS versions afterwards.
Big deployment in that article. I would guess we can find similar size deployments from Microsoft to the contrary. Again, it's all marketing. I wouldn't make decisions based on that. You should be looking at your data as an organization and making decisions based on the entirety of your infrastructure.
And the same goes for individual employees. If you work in a company where most people are on Macs, where you're not the odd duck with problems, maybe it's a smarter move for you.
But most people aren't at those companies. And for those people, being the odd duck with problems that can't get to the file share, or the guy with slower access to files than the coworkers you're competing with, might be the difference between "That guy always nails it. What's his name?" and "Omg, this dude always has problems sharing files. Just go up and present it for him. This is embarrassing. In front of clients? Next time John should present."
Trust me, you would rather be John in that situation. And as a non-technical user, you're likely going to find yourself in made for Windows presentation situations more often. There are simply more of them.
Mac OS X Server is discontinued. Mac is just not for business, and Apple agrees, it seems. Unless of course your business is entirely cloud operated. That might be okay if your company is so big that you get Apple products and theirs or someone's cloud offerings for nearly free. But it's not practical for most companies of any size. Especially when you consider the delays caused by opening large files over the internet.
Non-technical Apple users think Mac is better for graphics. That's Apple's marketing. We're talking about large files.
I don't think it's absurd. I've watched as they get skipped over for the graphics guy that uses Windows, can share files in meetings, and quickly interacts with their coworkers. And, honestly, why would you promote the guy that can't do that? I can't disagree with it. We should be promoting pragmatic thinkers that get stuff done, not people that intentionally choose machines with problems or make other such bad choices in life and in business.
Again, tell me about Samba. How do you call a machine with major problems interacting with a business network, a business computer?
(Should I answer that question? You blame the IT team, and say it's a business computer based on the sales data. It's all very illogical.)
>millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs
Right. Using cloud solutions. That's not practical in many applications, especially where medium and large businesses are concerned. You're going to make them download large files from the cloud every time they want to open them while their Windows counterparts are streaming those same files over a 10G fiber drop to the server?
Which one makes more sense here? One of these users is getting promoted. It's not the guy working the slowest, usually.
Anyway, the request to make Samba work comes from the users. I didn't go looking for a problem to solve, right? I prefer it when my phone doesn't ring, my pay being fixed and all.
The Wayfarer style was always bulky, they have been a fashion staple for decades at this point. The Meta gen2 ones aren't really that noticeably larger than "normal" Wayfarers - probably why they latched on this style as it gives the most room to stuff electronics while remaining similar sized to the original Wayfarer design.
I still see folks wearing Wayfarers almost every single day, and have owned various (non-Meta) pairs of them for most of my adult life. It's literally one of the most popular sunglasses designs of all time.
Meta have a minority stake in Ray Ban and Oakley's parent company, EssilorLuxottica. The investment was largely to support development of future AI glasses. It does make me a little sad to see Wayfarers end up this way too.
I genuinely view Time Machine as abandonware at this stage, Apple haven't really invested in it for many years and I would recommend a lot of other third party backup solutions first.
It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment.
Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.
I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc.
I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!
This is a very common error case, more common with storing the backup on a network share (Wifi / Ethernet doesn't matter). If you look for "Time Machine must erase your existing backup history and start a new backup to correct this." you'll find a lot of references for this problem.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.
Did you only set up Time Machine? Or did you continue supporting all those users for years and years. If the issue is that eventually the backup store becomes corrupted then you may not see it at all if you're only setting up backups but never dealing with users who actually need to restore something from backup years later.
For me, it's backing up over a network share. My Synology NAS works perfectly and flawlessly for literally everything else. It's RAID 1. It supports Time Machine. But somehow it would get corrupted every few months and I'd have to start it all over.
Tons of people complain about this. I suspect it's some subtle bug with sparse bundles and SMB.
I think they think of time capsule as a done deal. It doesn’t bring any extra money for them, and even though it’s broken, it exist to a point that when they’re selling a Mac they can say that it comes with a backup software as well. Just like a shady landlord tells you that the apartment facing a wall has a nice window.
I don’t know what these engineers are doing at Apple, but it surely isn’t making the ecosystem better, they’re just chasing hypes and shinny useless UI changes.
The cynic in me thinks Apple more or less gave up on Time Machine while ramping up on selling iCloud storage as a backup solution for macOS as well as iOS/ipadOS devices.
I also ended up doing this. With HDMI-CEC powering up the TV and the receiver automatically, then switching to the correct input on any AppleTV remote button press, this is actually a really friction free option if you can stomach buying two devices for the same purpose. I put the remotes in different colored rubber cases (red and blue) to make clear which device is being operated.
At one stage I even had a third AppleTV, that was hooked permanently to a VPN exiting in a foreign country, so I could get TV content and applications restricted to another region I watch a lot of content in. It was so nice to just pick up a remote and instantly have the foreign appleTV experience, rather than juggle VPN apps and foreign Apple Store accounts on the same device.
There are other potential issues as well not listed on that page. Apple could address all of these though if they really wanted to roll the feature out broadly.
Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.
No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...
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