I strongly disagree. The step from the F series to the G vehicles was big, quality improved a lot, specially for the 3 series (F30, F31 vs G20, G21) and the X3 (the G01 feels like a 5 series). The materials, assembly, noises during driving, but specially the driving dynamics and robustness are incredibly high.
It’s also true though that the last wave of G models has improved driving dynamics but cheapened out in interior materials. Peak BMW interiors happened between 2019-2022 with the G01, G30, G05 and iX, i4. Being my favorites the iX and the G01.
BMW also has the best infotainment system after Tesla. And it still integrates well with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
Mechanically, you're probably right, but the screen-centric controls of the newer generation are _awful_ by comparison to the F generation's physical buttons and dials (this isn't BMW though, it's the whole industry).
My wife and I both have F31s, which we will drive until we can no longer source replacement parts unless the industry comes to its senses first (unlikely). Any time we've ever looked at plausible replacements, the screen-based controls are an immediate hard no.
"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users "
cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions.
Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many interesting stories to share, but one that has always stayed with me is, his disdain for how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals. This was in the 90s, so definitely passed the West Germany glory days.
My take is, in the era of global competition, Germans didn't know how to strike the right balance and effective allocate resources. Where to compromise, and where not to. I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
>how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals
I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47018023
I feel like German companies know they lost the innovation race (I mean companies that aren't Zeiss), they lost the cheap manufacturing race "thanks" to Russian gas dependence and ideological denuclearisation before enough renewables were built, so all that's left for them now to stay afloat is reducing labor and operating costs by offshoring and pinching all the pennies they can find, but even that it not enough since from where I stand there's weekly corporate bankruptcies and layoffs and that's including the fact that the government has been speeding like crazy the last 3+ years to make sure the private sector industry doesn't completely collapse.
~46M employed (of which ~16M part time, usually related to child or elder care), ~84M total population, ~22M pensioners, avg age ~47, lots of SMEs, little natural resources. It's part of necessary consolidation. Considering all that, we're doing quite well...
I’m told that Germans in general are “cheap” and that this is an expected consequence of their economic policies designed to reinforce their industrial base.
I wish I could find the reference I’m thinking of, but the idea was that Germans buying absurdly cheap wine and their constantly underfunded trains were part of a pattern of deliberate domestic under-investment to keep exports competitive.
Dutch may be cheap at hospitality but they're savvy at running business, while Germans are cheap at running business and the economy in general, hence why austerity is their favorite word in the vocabulary, they're penny wise and pound foolish.
And unfortunately the focus on austerity post-2008 spearheaded by Germany only held the EU economy back compared to the US.
If they're planning to reduce labour with this BMW robot, I have interesting news for them: the Chinese showcased kung fu dancing robots that runs circles around their lame German humanoid robot who can't even pour a beer, let alone assemble cars.
I have long experience of multiple German car brands. The interface spectrum goes like this: driving and seats etc are close to perfect for me. As long as it's about buttons, they are really good. But once it goes to screens, it starts getting worse. And then, with mobile app, it's basically barely functioning at all.
I work on German cars on a daily basis, the “online diagnostic” of one of the top brands runs on a sort of remote desktop fashion complete with windows boot screen, I don’t need to tell you that speed is not one of its main features.
I like how the VW controls are laid out on older models but not the seats. They're too hard and not confortable. Even my Suzuki has better, more confy seats. The seats in the A1 I had were a diaster, especially the back seats, totally useless unless you put 10 year old kids in them.The fronts seats were hard, your butt would hurt after 3 hours. The engine was rattling new and the car is a pita to repair, something broke all the time. But it stuck to the road and was so much fun to drive that I skidded in a roundabout and nearly hit the lane separator. A Civic is probably better in every regard though. Newer Audi diesel models automotive eat up oil, adblue. You basically need to fill up at least 3 or 4 fluids all of the time, including screenwash. Just another extra reason to avoid diesels.
Our (~2015) 3-series controls are just about perfect. Where they differ from Honda/Toyota's controls that I am also very familiar with, they're noticeably better now that I'm familiar with them. Everything is really well thought-out.
Of course, now they (and almost every other manufacturer) have followed Tesla off the cliff and made everything a screen, so the current generation cars have abysmal controls.
I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
There is no long-term strategic thinking anymore, only feel-good policies and short-term cash burning for their respective clientele.
As a young person it infuriates me but there is nothing we can do.
The is always something you can do. Sometimes it's hard or uncomfortable but you can still have an impact on the things you care about if you're willing to do enough.
>As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore
However bad Germany is in this regard, I suspect the US is far worse. There is no cohort in the US who remembers living in "East US" to temper the excesses of the people who've only known ease and comfort (though of course those people will tell you they worked hard to <insert career/prosperity path that no longer exists).
Actually Kansas is doing the opposite of East Germany.
East Germany introduced the Transsexuellengesetz in 1980, which allowed people to change their first name or gender, as long as they provided, among other things, two psychiatric evaluations to ensure the condition was permanent, and not some decision driven by some temporary influence or fashion, but a full diagnosis of transsexualismus.
You are right about the issue, but wrong about the action. There are things you can do. Vote for candidates and parties that genuinely want a different future. Become politically active yourself. Run for office. Work with your local community. Every bit of action helps.
There is no party in German political landscape interested, capable of solving or even understanding the problems that needed to be solved. We have lost political center to groups of special interests and medieval guides. The state sponsored tool for informing about political programs (Wahl-O-Mat) is biased towards political issues of the mainstream. E.g. nobody is talking about the suffocating monopoly of notaries or increasing the property ownership by any significant margin. Running for office is an interesting idea, but in party-dominated politics to achieve anything is a decades-long adventure.
The wahl-o-mat is not biased, it's based on the respective election programs. If one party decides to put something "about the suffocating monopoly of notaries" in it, it's not enough to be mentioned. There have to be some parties at least to make it comparable.
Also feel free to peruse election programs yourself. Most parties put out short versions.
You also don't need to run for office to have an effect on party lines. I'm a member of a party. There are congresses on a regional (Bundesland) and national level. In my party the process is voting for proposals before the national congress due to the huge amount of proposals, but usually every proposal on regional level is discussed and voted on. It does not take much time to prepare a proposal, but it shapes the discourse.
> The wahl-o-mat is not biased, it's based on the respective election programs.
That’s exactly my point. If a problem exists or a solution to a problem is possible about which no party is willing to talk about, it will not show it. The choice of topics is based on party opinions, not on voter surveys. This is called bias.
> Also feel free to peruse election programs yourself.
I read the full programs. This is the main reason why I think German political system is in the state of crisis.
> I'm a member of a party.
You surely know some examples when a party member shaped the discourse and set the course of institutional reforms. How long did it take for that person to achieve such results?
> That’s exactly my point. If a problem exists or a solution to a problem is possible about which no party is willing to talk about, it will not show it. The choice of topics is based on party opinions, not on voter surveys. This is called bias.
It's not a bias. I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of the word. We vote for parties and the wahl-o-mat compares the opinion of these parties. It would be biased if it would give an unfair advantage or disadvantage to one or some parties. The parties' opinions not being a good representation of the important challenges we face is not a bias of the wahl-o-mat. You can question its usefulness but calling it biased is calling it dishonest.
And honestly? That sucks. You can question its usefulness but please don't call an initiative that aims to give the populace a better political overview biased for no reason. You're not helping shape political discourse for the better here. I just checked: There weren't any no google results for "wahl-o-mat bias" yet. Now there are.
It gives unfair advantage to incumbent parties by shaping the political agenda and manipulating public opinion. When you look at the housing crisis in big cities and what Wahl-O-Mat displays as the options on the table based on political programs, it is very easy to think that the selection of options is exhaustive. Public is effectively pushed into discussing only those options, none of which is a good solution. Yet solutions exist, the only problem: political center is dead and they do not fit into populist right or populist green/left platforms. At least half of the items on Wahl-O-Mat is feel-good populism scoring points for one or another party, not least because scoring points, not real change is for most of them the primary objective. And the tool simply reflects that, because German political system is designed to stabilize status quo, not to challenge it.
Edit: the word „Bias“ may not exist in Google search, but this topic is certainly discussed in German language space and it is easy to find:
I did do a German search as well. And bias in that case would be something like "parteiisch" "bevor-/nachteilen". In 2019 a court did say it gives an advantage to incumbents because you had to limit your results to 8 parties. They've changed that since. The article you've linked is talking about its usefulness in general and not that it gives unfair advantages to anyone.
Honestly, I'm not a big fan of the thing myself and I agree that most of your proposals would improve the tool. But calling it a tool that compares political parties biased makes it sound deceptive. And I don't believe that it's deceptive. It's just ineffective.
The fact that it gives an "unfair advantage to incumbents" also isn't really a bias of the tool. It really just is the most obvious fair way to structure it. Large parties are large because a large amount of people vote for them. So they obviously have more visibility.
But I also agree that the majority rule of an ageing population in Germany is problematic. With most incumbents seemingly agreeing to not talk about the future.
Bias: A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment.
Let’s say there are parties A, B and C. A and B offer something populist solutions Sa and Sb to very important problem X, C does not promise anything on it, but offers solution for less important problem Y (single issue party). If voter thinks that Sa and Sb are the only choices, they may choose A or B, because it feels right. If voter was informed that neither Sa, nor Sb solve the problem, but some other solution Sx not supported by any party would do it, party C could become a reasonable choice - at least you get something done this way. This would be impartial judgement. Wahl-O-Mat inhibits this scenario, so yes, it is biased, it is deceptive.
That's not true. I just now went through the Wahl-o-Mat for Baden-Württemberg (because there are elections there this Sunday, March 8). From the 38 questions, there are two that directly address the housing crisis:
> Die Mietpreisbremse in baden-württembergischen Städten und Gemeinden soll abgeschafft werden
> Länger leerstehende Mietwohnungen sollen ihren Eigentümerinnen und Eigentümer konsequent entzogen und vermietet werden.
Why do you think those options are not good options to address the housing crisis? Are there other levers? Of course, but Mietpreisbremse (freezing rents) and Leerstand (empty houses) are certainly key levers. And the point of the Wahl-o-Mat is to give you an indication over overlap, not to list and let you decide on single political initiatives.
> Are there other levers? Of course, but Mietpreisbremse (freezing rents) and Leerstand (empty houses) are certainly key levers.
They are not the key levers, which everyone with basic knowledge of economics should understand immediately.
Regardless of whether certain segment is operated by market, by regulation or by combination of two, it is always about supply matching the demand. If you have more demand than supply, either prices will increase or you enter the state of deficit, where non-market mechanisms will decide who will get home and who will not. In either case prolonged state of reduced supply leads to crisis. Neither of those levers does solve problem of supply reliably. There’s simply not enough empty homes on the market to consider efficient management of them a solution. Rent controls also do not help here, because they actually reduce supply, by creating black market of subleases and reducing mobility (people stick to their regulated contracts).
The solution to the problem requires multiple reforms at once, which will fix short term and long term supply:
1. Dramatically deregulating supply side and reducing NIMBY influence. Project approvals should not take 7 years as in Berlin Friedrichshain and should not be blocked by survival of some rare toads like in Berlin Pankow.
2. Streamlining microdistrict planning, where one project includes construction of thousands of homes along with the necessary infrastructure. May include rapid construction tech (Plattenbau 2.0). It is not enough to build one building here and there, we need to build a lot more.
3. Shifting from majority rental to majority ownership model in which mobility is supported by market, low commissions (remove notaries, reduce taxes) and fast registration of property rights. It must be possible to sell and buy in 2-3 weeks maximum. The large landlords should be re-privatized: first, state takes over, then rentals are converted to subsidized lease deals with tenants with transferrable rights, in which tenants will effectively own their homes, while continuing to pay the current, never increasing amounts.
4. Progressive tax on property ownership kicking in from 0% on 3-5 apartments to significant percentage of rent value on 50+ apartments. The for-profit landlord business model must become unattractive, while not putting too much pressure on small landlords which are more market-friendly.
This kind of reform is neither left, nor right. It’s anti-capitalist, because it prevents concentration of capital and negative redistribution, but it is also pro-market, because it hands over the ownership to millions of people which can then freely sell and buy for their own use.
It seems to even get the compass needle pointing in the right direction would require immense personal sacrifice. This brings to mind a line I heard recently: “I burn my life to make a sunrise I will never see.”
>who only saw rising prosperity their entire life.
Their prosperity has been artificially inflated and not earned for the last years, as the government adjusted their pensions according to inflation, not according to actual economic growth/fall of the nation. It's a cheat code that shouldn't be used if you wish for economic reality but it's used to buy votes.
>They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
To be fair, this is a similar issue with Boomers versus Gen-X in the US and most of the west.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.
Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.
This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
Yes it does. I was clarifying what the commenter was saying; not making his statement myself.
akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
correct, I thought he meant that the Neo does not support it, since his M1 Macbook does support Apple Intelligence but perhaps he's not aware of that or hasn't updated yet.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
That's good info thanks and you are right I didn't take that into account. I do however think that 8GB may be basically usable now but I'd like to see students able to use these machines for a decent length of time and to be able to become digital creators using them. I get it won't edit video or do 3d modelling the same way a Macbook Pro can but it needs to do enough to get students interested.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
$200 price bump across the board. The cheapest 16" is now $2699 and 14" Pro $2199. I think it's a fair price considering M2Pro 14" was $1999 (though it was discounted) only had 512GB and 16GB RAM.
It's not $200 across the board. M4 MacBook Pro and M5 MacBook Pro started at $1599 with 512GB SSD.
Now it starts at $1699, a $100 bump but comes with a 1TB SSD. Previously it would have cost $1799 for the 1T SSD, so it's a $100 bump on base price but you are also getting 1TB SDD for $100 less than before.
To clarify, I meant, model with Pro chip, not just Macbook Pro name.
For example, up until MacBookPro M2, MacBookPro M2 came with M2 Pro chip.
However, starting with M3, Apple lowered the MacBookPro MSRP to $1599, but its base configuration was downgraded to M3 chip from M3 Pro. To get the M3 Pro, you had to pay $1999. There's substantial performance between the two.
Same with M4. To get the M4 Pro chip, you had to pay $1999.
Now to get M5 Pro chip, it's $2199. Still a good value, but just saying it's a deviation from the trend.
What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning
With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare.
I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.
With System 7 or Mac OS 8/8.5/9, if one used it for long enough with a stable software setup you'd eventually get a gut feel for what programs, extension sets, etc were most likely to invite a crash (it wasn't a terrible idea to reboot after a long web browsing session with Netscape for instance). It wasn't surefire, but one could get it into a somewhat stable state. You never stopped hammering ⌘S, though.
Windows 2000 was incredible. Running it after having wrestled with 98SE was like getting teleported from a garbage dump to sunny meadow with a fresh ocean breeze. I've never seen machines transform quite as radically as they did when upgrading from something earlier to 2000.
I once proved to my boss that a font was crashing System 7. And we always unplugged the network when we didn’t need it because a crash on one Mac could bring down every other Mac on the network.
I couldn’t do it. Much respect for them. In the 80s when Korea was under quasi military regime, there were many street protests. Molotov cocktails and tear gas being exchanged. Some killed, many beaten down by riot police. Most were led by students.
