Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo(arstechnica.com) |
Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo(arstechnica.com) |
Just like 98% of non-Apple laptops. Amazing how after all these years nobody could replicate the feel of macbook's trackpads.
"Yeah, we can do it. No, it's not expensive. But we had to choose what to copy-paste from Apple this time around, and a haptic touchpad was $2.93, whereas hating our customers was free!"
While I'm sure our track pads have gotten better, I doubt we have reached the level of Apple's track pads.
I don't know how much of an accolade I can give a USD 2k+ device for having almost the same trackpad experience as a USD 999 MacBook.
> as good as any Mac
Yeah, no. If you don't feel or care about the difference, good for you. The rest of us will have to use a mac.
Not sure about other brands but pretty much any ThinkPad I use, the touchpad just feels right. Whereas on Macbooks it's just off, at least ever since the first Retina generation (my first contact with it).
Macbooks' touchpads are usually also way too big and, sadly, even Lenovo follows this bad trend in some of their models.
There are some haptic trackpads popping up that are okay.
The keyboard is bad because I have mostly known non-chiclet keyboards on old Thinkpad/Latitude so nothing against Apple per se, all current laptops are simply crap on that point.
But the trackpad, while quite smooth in tracking, can be infuriating when its Force Touch system has trouble registering clicks. Sure, it's better than clickpads, but compared to proper buttons? No thanks.
I guess coming from x61s, x200s and the like would make anyone a bit snobbish concerning laptop input devices (the only laptop I kept is an e6440).
You're saying there's 2% of non-Apple laptops with good trackpads. Apple laptops are below 10% share, so by your own account that 2% is nothing to sneeze at.
Yes, there's a pretty decent number of good trackpads out there. If you really care, you'll find them, same way a few decades ago only people who really cared were buying macs.
If they just decided to invest, say, 20% more on quality, they'd have very competitive products - but they just don't.
One of the unexpected benefits of LLMs is that they make figuring out random Linux issues a breeze.
Personal story:
- I have a separate /home partition
- This means I can just re-install to the main / partition when I OS upgrade
- Re-install some packages and all of my configs from /home/.local, /home/.config etc all come back
This worked great for years but my Firefox kept using lots of CPU. Fire up a free LLM from OpenCode and it immediately figured out that I had a "blacklisted" GPU rendering FF config. This was most likely from when I had a non-GPU laptop. The LLM made a script to back up my config, remove the blacklisted config and then I was back up and running.
I can’t believe virtually every other manufacturer is still making laptops with 250-300 nits.
Spending a full day looking at a dim, washed-out screen is just the worst experience ever. The fact that out of all manufacturers, Apple, which is considered the “expensive” and “premium” brand, made the Neo with 500 nits at that price point is just amazing to me. The rest have no excuse for putting these displays in laptops anymore.
Odd, I set my desktop monitor to under 200 nits a few years back (25%) and I have no trouble. Only when the room is extremely bright I turn it up.
Why is it the worst experience ever?
I do want the option for more though.
It was the almost perfect laptop, high end, classy, and even more awesome with everything needed to have a smooth linux experience.
And then, generation after generation they made the XPS worse and worse. Keeping the brand but destroying the value. And when I see now this new "cheap" 600$ XPS 13 with 8gb ram, everything basic and a core 3, it makes no sense to me at all...
Short-sightedness makes logical sense as a tactic for giving the appearance of “stock goes up”, but it is dumb as dirt in the long run. I and many others will never buy Dell again, and that will eventually come back to bite them in their stock price.
Like my near first instinct is "oh, you've scared high-industry big money players like Apple, such that they feel the need to put this down, I'm now curious that this thing might be -- and actually probably is -- pretty good? I will read further."
1. WSL is effectively Linux. 2. Most importantly, Linux support is mediocre at best (I owned 10+ laptops) - for developers who don't want to pull their hair on hardware incompatibilities, or want to be bound to a small part of the laptops/desktop parts, it's either that, or a Windows-only machine.
Fun (in a sad way) stuff: even the Ubuntu certification is a joke - Canonical is allowed to use customized versions of Ubuntu that they aren't required to release to the public; as a consequence, even hardware certified by Canonical as Ubuntu-compatible, can effectively be incompatible. I've been bitten by this twice.
Disgusting.
I read mirror MacBook Neo and I was expecting something.
2026, So this marks close to 40 years of reading PC reviews, before it was online and in magazines. And they have been the same all these years.
It is all numbers, numbers of port, how fast it runs, SSD / Hard Disk speed. CPU numbers comparison. Screen resolution etc. They are doing exactly the same, reading off spec sheet. And how these spec is better than another spec.
Thanks to Youtuber, or enthusiast who now have wider audience thanks to the internet. Keyboard actually got shouted out, screen details other than resolution matters. Speakers got improved because they keep mentioning it. Trackpad, laptop screen opening. WebCam, cooling. All these small things that no one mention but thanks to those with online influence keep demanding and shouting about it has a lot of these been improved on the PC side. And they all happened in the past 6 to 8 years.
If online publishing thinking why you guys are not getting views and losing perhaps it isn't just the medium alone.
This year also marks 25 years of Apple Store, perhaps worth reminding why Steve wanted to open the store in the first place. For people to experience their products. Something can't be said in words or in advertising. It is best for the customer to feel it.
The trackpad is a fantastic input device. I use it exclusively when on a laptop, and on a desktop I'll use both a mouse and a trackpad.
I even use their larger external trackpad with the mini. But on work supplied machines and such I use a conventional mouse.
It’s not even because everyone else's trackpads are fucking garbage (they are). It’s that systems that aren’t macs just weren’t built around using one.
Some of the slightly-less-trashy bits of 3rd party software try to bridge the gap, but it’s not the same.
Great news for users depending on accessibility