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[00:00] So, two really crazy Mac laptops have come out in the past month. The MacBook Neo, which is one of the best deals in tech in a long time. $600 and more efficient and more capable and better built than almost every other laptop in that price range.

[00:17] And the new MacBook Pro, at the opposite end of the spectrum. I've been benchmarking a $6,000 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro, and the results are just getting ridiculous. It has multi-core CPU performance at the top of the charts for every Mac ever,

[00:32] and the GPU is now more powerful than the M2 Ultra in like $10,000 Mac Pro. And the new SSD's read-write speeds are upgraded, approaching 20,000 megabytes per second. It's just absurd. It's awesome. It's a creative professional's dream.

[00:47] Both of these computers are putting Windows laptops on notice. and by extension, Microsoft and Dell and HP and Asus and Lenovo and Razer, etc., all on notice.

[01:00] There was a quote recently from an Asus executive that described the new MacBook Neo as a shock to the industry. And yes, but it also got me thinking, what is actually happening with the rest of the industry? What is happening on the Windows side of the fence?

[01:14] So I started digging in. I started getting my hands on a bunch of these Windows laptops and researching and benchmarking. And it's become pretty clear, the more I think about it, that Windows versus Mac laptops is basically the same as iPhone versus Android.

[01:31] Because just like Android, the advantage of the Windows side is the variety and the choice. But there's also now both an advantage and a disadvantage that's getting kind of scary now. Take this. This is the new Dell XPS 14.

[01:45] I used to really like XPS computers back in the day. Some of my oldest computers are XPSs. Then Dell did this thing where they killed off the XPS, the Latitude, and Inspiron names, and rebranded them into Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max for some reason.

[02:00] Then they came back to the senses and brought back XPS, and I bought this one, and this thing is really nice. 14-inch 2.8K tandem OLED display. Thin bezels all the way around with a webcam and no notch.

[02:12] 120Hz variable refresh rate. And then there's this thin all-metal jacket with soft-touch finisher on the palm rest, which hides a massive force-touch trackpad. There's three Thunderbolt ports, there's a headphone jack,

[02:24] and then inside is an Intel Panther Lake processor. This one, a Core Ultra 300 series with their new integrated GPUs, plus 32 gigs of DDR5 RAM and a terabyte SSD. I liked a lot of the previous XPSs, like I said,

[02:36] but this one is in a lot of ways better than those But it also does have a couple ports Like the ports are all Thunderbolt 4 instead of Thunderbolt 5 And there no SD card slot or any other full ports

[02:48] which on a premium laptop like this is the choice. There's also no lip to open the lid for some reason. So it's always this little awkward pry to, like, get the laptop open every single time. And then the keyboard is probably its weakest point.

[03:00] It's a bit shallow. The layout is slightly wonky with these top menu buttons, which gets slightly more misaligned the further from the outside you get. But otherwise, I mean, yeah, this is really nice. So this is a $2,200 laptop as spec'd.

[03:16] So obviously it's a pretty premium option, but this is just one of many premium options you could pick. Now, why do I bring up this laptop? Well, in Windows land, this laptop being really good

[03:28] actually relies on a bunch of different companies all executing really well at the exact same time. So it relies on Dell putting a lot of effort into actually bringing back the XPS line and not cheaping out and doing the metal build quality and the nice display and the whole premium design.

[03:44] It also relies on Intel and this exact generation of Panther Lake chips being good and actually having good integrated graphics because they don't actually offer this laptop with a discrete GPU. And it relies on Microsoft to actually do a good job with Windows

[03:58] so that the software experience is worthy of a premium price tag and not riddled with ads or unnecessary AI features. And if it all happens, then together this laptop feels like it's worth the premium price.

[04:11] But you can probably see where I'm going with this. That doesn't always happen. And lately, Windows has felt like a weak link, and every single Windows laptop will have to suffer for it. Now, it's also a whole OS, like, fundamentally bad.

[04:25] It's not super buggy or anything crazy. It's still functional. But it's just lacking the super premium feel that wins everybody over. Like this XPS, the first time I booted this up to set it up, it took me like 45 minutes because of all the forced updates

[04:38] and then all these mandatory sign-ins. And it's asking me to use Microsoft 365 and then OneDrive and then all these other services, et cetera, et cetera. And even once I got in, I got ads.

[04:51] Like I got a pop-up ad for Mac SE security on this $2,000 brand new laptop. which, to be fair, is probably a Dell problem. But then that's not even mentioning all the other AI stuff that Microsoft is pushing,

[05:03] the co-pilot stuff, the infamous recall feature that everyone hates. There's generative AI in Microsoft Paint now, for crying out loud. Microsoft actually requires a dedicated co-pilot button on the keyboard of every new Windows 11 laptop now

[05:18] to be classified as an AI PC whatever that means So it just between that and the ads it just not really feeling like a totally premium experience

[05:30] And at that high end, when you're spending a lot, users will start to get deservedly really picky. You're spending a lot of money you deserve to, and that's where Apple has pretty much exclusively been playing for like the last decade.

[05:42] The cheapest new MacBook was always $1,000, and then it went way up from there. And they're so vertically integrated with their Apple Silicon, and so the hardware is designed for the software, and the software is designed for the hardware, and it's always felt so efficient and clean and performant,

[05:57] and people just love their expensive MacBook Pros. Now, there's obviously still reasons why people buy high-end Windows laptops. It's still a lot of the choice and the variety, and there are certain things you still can't get in Mac land.

[06:10] Like, if you want a high-end gaming laptop, you know, that's one of those common things. you can go get a Razer Blade with a 5070 and a 240Hz display. That's an option. So there are still those things,

[06:23] but every one of those relies on all of the parts from all those different companies, again, being good at the same time. And that is a tough challenge. So now I'll flip it to the low end. This is where it gets really interesting,

[06:36] because it turns out, as we're learning, a lot of these efficiencies that Apple's been using to dominate the high end are also very effective in the low end. Because to be clear, people are absolutely willing to accept

[06:49] some more shortcomings in lower-priced laptops. Like, that's a trade-off. It's a part of the game. You know, if you shop around, hey, maybe you'll be able to find a laptop with just the right set of trade-offs that you don't mind while still being decent at the stuff you care about.

[07:02] Like, this is the Acer Aspire 16. Super popular laptop in this segment. It's actually discounted recently, so I got it for $5.50 from Amazon. and there's a few more stickers on it, yes. And there's a little more plastic,

[07:15] and the keyboard deck flex is just a little bit lacking in build quality, yes. And the Snapdragon chip that powers it, you know, it's not going to have the highest end performance, but it's efficient, so it has good battery, and then there's a nice big 16-inch screen

[07:27] and a bunch of full-size ports here. So if I'm just going to be writing or web browsing or watching videos on this thing, it looks like a pretty good value. So look, laptops like this have been, you're fine. They've been thriving at these price points,

[07:39] but here's the problem. Here's the brand new Gatorade-colored MacBook Neo shapes problem. The starting price for a MacBook has been $1,000 for a new machine for the past couple years.

[07:52] Now it just dropped to $600, and actually $500 if you have a student discount. And if you've seen the reviews, you already know it turns out that they did a great job with the Neo to making it feel just like the more premium Macs Same clean software same metal build same keyboard and more importantly the same tight vertical integration where the hardware and the software are designed for each other

[08:14] and work super efficiently with each other. So it's like unless you have a Windows-specific need, like a certain app you need to use software-wise or a certain game you want to play, most people crave the premium experience

[08:28] that's been associated with the Macs that are more expensive for all these years. And so the Neo coming along for $600 represented that premium, well-integrated, efficient experience that is going to be incredibly hard to compete with.

[08:42] In Windows 9, you're not only relying on all these different companies making their parts to all make them well at the same time, you're also paying them all who need their own profits to survive.

[08:54] And so that makes it really hard to make good, cheap laptops and actually profit from that. So the nature on top is not only does Apple basically print A18 Pros for cheap,

[09:06] but also Apple's not even necessarily concerned with making a huge hardware profit on selling Neos because this is more of a Trojan horse to create a bunch of new first-time Mac buyers

[09:19] who then become Apple services subscribers. So Apple can make this computer even cheaper than they ordinarily would to effectively acquire new Mac users who will then go subscribe to TV Plus or AppleCare or iCloud

[09:37] or whatever other services. And that's worth more than the hardware margin would be. And it already seems to be working. There was just a Tim Cook tweet this week about how Mac just had its best launch ever for first-time Mac customers.

[09:50] So yeah, Guilty is talking about Apple a lot in this video, but it turns out the shock to the industry is very real. And it's going to be so fascinating to see what sort of responses we actually get from Windows laptop makers in the next couple months and years.

[10:06] And what sort of strings they try to pull? Because if they aren't able to do anything about it, then Neo's just going to keep eating their lunch, and they can have a bit of a market share crisis on their hands. Also, one more quick thing. We just came out with these stickers that we're adding to our merch store.

[10:20] I love the way it just turned out. The team cooked on these. This one is a color picker sticker, which is so fun. So it's kind of an if-you-know-you-know design, but you can put them on anything colorful for fun. At least that's what I've been doing.

[10:33] You get a bunch of stickers in a pack. So go get some for yourself and send me pictures of what you stick them on. Tag me on Twitter and threads and stuff. All right. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.