Marco Arment

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

you know, spare lids to the Neos and take a broken screen and put it in the recycle thing and put the new one on.

So, you know, I agree with Henry that it's still not quite the same, but I do think the Neo is actually making some progress in the direction of the Chromebook advantages here.

That's straight from Apple.

They're making a straight-up claim for what we're calling the medium core, just because it makes more sense.

They're saying it's actually more efficient than the old efficiency core, which kind of leans towards maybe the M6 will use these cores instead of the old efficiency cores, but we'll see.

It remains to be seen if they're even going to use the Chipotle architecture for the plain, no-suffix M6 architecture.

But that's a bold claim.

Don't worry about the medium cores not being as efficient as the efficiency cores.

They're actually more efficient, claims Apple.

Yeah, usually Apple doesn't talk about these things, like what standards does it use or whatever.

PCIe 5, I think, is a standard from 2019 or something, so there are later standards that are still in progress, but