>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.
stodor89
I'd say my Thinkpad X9's glass haptic touchpad is as good as my Macbook Pro's. Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen13 has a great optional haptic touchpad at almost no added cost, which makes the years of negligence even more insulting.
"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!"
euroderf
In my decades on teh interwebz I've never read a good in-depth look at the Mac trackpad. It intrigues me always, how it pops back at your finger on a click, until one of those rare times that the machine locks up completely and then... the trackpad is... dead as a doornail. Intriguing.
varun_ch
The new Framework Pro laptop is supposed to be pretty good. Anyone have any experience with it yet?
collabs
I have not tried it myself and I'm skeptical of reviewers on the topic of touchpad. I remember sitting next to someone who seemed to be using Photoshop in a MacBook professionally like literally making fine edits with a cursor more than ten years ago.
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.
NuclearPM
You work for Framework?
Peanuts99
This is mostly a solved problem. My ThinkPad track pad is as good as any Mac.
auggierose
> mostly a solved problem
> 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.
televisionsaval
I think the whole trackpad idea is stupid and unusable (like anything that needs software correction for physical layout idiocy) and I blame Apple for its prevalence. Apple could make an entirely worthless product and within 4 years everyone would have to copy it.
bschwindHN
That's like, your opinion man.
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.
dd8601fn
Agreed… but really only for macs. That’s where it’s beautiful.
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.
card_zero
Hmm, a novel style. What determines which you use at any given time? Do you just switch back and forth at random to keep things interesting?
bschwindHN
The mouse is better for precise pointing, and the trackpad is better for scrolling (especially horizontal), and multi-touch gestures.
nsonha
Not to support the idea that good touchpad is apple’s monopoly, but I and most people I know stop having wrist pains by giving up the mouse. If we’re talking about a stupid idea that’s both inefficient and a health hazard, the mouse is it. All the other pointing devices (trackball, trackpoint, rolling mouse etc) make sense one way or another
televisionsaval
Needing a 3rd hand for a peripheral is naturally a flawed idea. The only
reason I prefer the mouse over the palm trackpad is because it can't interfere
while probably still having to use it occasionally. The track point and
trackball were better interfaces than both but they weren't a great platform
for making Apple look innovative.
fogx
Yea, moving the burden from your wrists to your finger joints is surely a genius idea and the epitome of health
cyanydeez
you guys are talking about a trackpad.
odiroot
It's the opposite feeling for me.
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.
LoganDark
It's hard to replicate the R&D that went into Apple's trackpads. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that most laptop companies do not actually engineer their hardware as much as cobble together existing hardware. Even among those that do engineer their hardware, they don't pay as close attention as Apple. (Also they might not engineer on a low enough level in the first place)
There are some haptic trackpads popping up that are okay.
BoingBoomTschak
Don't agree here, I dislike my work M2 MBP's keyboards/trackpad.
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).
makeitdouble
> nobody
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.
ezst
My ThinkPad's touchpad has been good enough for 10+ years (and I got a trackpoint!), to the extent I stopped caring altogether. Perhaps a MacBook Pro's is better, but however better it may be, that won't swing me towards Apple. "The best touchpad in the world" is some street creds I'm not interested in.
pizza234
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.
alexpotato
> 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.
codingisfreedom
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.
Mashimo
> Spending a full day looking at a dim, washed-out screen is just the worst experience ever.
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.
onoesworkacct
Using a laptop outside is fantastic. I love to sit on my balcony and work there instead of inside. My work laptop is an HP with zero ability to do this.
ndiddy
The Neo is $250 more than the Chuwi laptop in the article. Obviously you're going to need to make sacrifices to hit that price point.
markvdb
This looks like not too bad a little budget machine. The hardware is just very recent, with Linux kernel support caught up so recently that it hasn't shown up in distros yet. Not a perfect screen or trackpad is to be expected at this price level.
greatgib
It breaks my heart how Dell messed up totally with it's XPS 13 since the good time of the Ubuntu dev edition.
It was the almost perfect laptop, high end, classy, and even more awesome with everything needed to have a smooth linux experience.
And then, generation after generation they made the XPS worse and worse. Keeping the brand but destroying the value. And when I see now this new "cheap" 600$ XPS 13 with 8gb ram, everything basic and a core 3, it makes no sense to me at all...
voakbasda
Enshitification may not make sense to you, but it makes sense to their bottom line for a few quarters… right up until all of the good will has been extracted from the brand.
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.
jrm4
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."
fifticon
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.
pizza234
Difficult to asses whether it's overall a good or bad thing, but operatively speaking, WSL basically makes any machine a working Linux machine. The year of the linux machine arrived :)
pizza234
Can the downvoters elaborate?
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.
bschwindHN
> Non-inverted-T arrow keys
Disgusting.
ksec
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.
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.
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.
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.