>The Unibook’s keyboard is pretty good, and its trackpad is pretty bad.

Just like 98% of non-Apple laptops. Amazing how after all these years nobody could replicate the feel of macbook's trackpads.

As a previous owner of a Chuwi laptop, I think Chuwi is a wasted opportunity. They essentially make product bottom-quality knockoffs, at the lowest possible price.

If they just decided to invest, say, 20% more on quality, they'd have very competitive products - but they just don't.

> Some others have had some success getting this stuff working, but it wasn’t something I spent much time on for this review.

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 will never buy another laptop with less than a 500 nits display, no matter its specs/price.

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.

This looks like not too bad a little budget machine. The hardware is just very recent, with Linux kernel support caught up so recently that it hasn't shown up in distros yet. Not a perfect screen or trackpad is to be expected at this price level.

It breaks my heart how Dell messed up totally with it's XPS 13 since the good time of the Ubuntu dev edition.

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...

To go a bit broader -- has anyone else developed something like the following reaction: When I see reviews of anything that points at taking shots at one of the big boys, and the reaction is dismissive and negative -- I immediately doubt that reaction?

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."

this is another data point in my "year of the linux desktop"; linux is slowly becoming a decent option, not so much because of linux improving leaps and bounds, so much as what happens on the windows side collapsing on its own. 10 years ago, I was used to that windows "of course" would have drivers available for stuff.

> Non-inverted-T arrow keys

Disgusting.

[dead]

Sorry but this is a rantish posting.

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.