Marco Arment

You have to log in as a user.

Oh, I see what you mean.

Yeah, I guess I don't know how they do that.

You know what I mean?

And it's like, okay, well, if I just give you a blank one, what's the user account?

And if there is no user account, how long does it take?

Even if there's like a network thing that just sets it up, like you just, it's single sign-on, you enter in your school email address, like the time taken to just set up the home directory or whatever, I'm not saying it's going to take forever, but I just feel like Chromebooks have an advantage here in that they can probably let you do a Google ID, you know, log in with the Google type thing to a Chromebook faster than you can do the equivalent on the Mac.

I'm guessing people can write in and tell me.

The second thing is...

The repair.

And that's where I think a lot of the teardowns in the Neo come in here.

They're saying like, oh, well, we have students replacing the screens on the Chromebooks because it's easy enough to do that a student can do it and we have the parts and so on.

And here I think Apple has come a long way.

So first of all, as of several years ago, Apple will supply you with parts and instructions on how to do it for lots of its products, including the Neo.

Second, as we've covered the other teardowns, the Neo is way easier to take apart than all the other Mac laptops.

There's this stuff glued in there.

You don't have to like, you know, take a heat gun to any part of it and break any seals and do all this other stuff.

A student with the appropriate weird

you know, iFixit, Pentalobe, whatever things, can in fact take apart a MacBook Neo and replace, maybe not the screen, because I think all the teardowns were like, well, we don't know how to get the screen off of the top lid, but if you've got the screen and the top lid, I think a student could replace it.

So although Chromebooks still have a lead here, I think the Neo is closing the gap by making it feasible to have a bunch of students whose job it is to grab from the bin of