Ask Paul: March 6 ⭐

Happy Friday! It was a week of Apple news, so I’m not surprised that this was top of mind for readers. Let’s dive in. The post Ask Paul: March 6 ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Happy Friday! It was a week of Apple news, so I’m not surprised that this was top of mind for readers. Let’s dive in. “Everyone Expected Apple to Raise Prices on Its New Macs. What It Did Instead Was Much Smarter” They say on all the blogs that is Apple way of competing with Google and Microsoft in K12 market. But they are already doing that with iPad. I see the MacBook Neo as a confirmation that the iPad has failed in education use cases.

What these institutions want are not so much “real” computers but rather less distracting devices with a dedicated keyboard and pointing device. The iPad just screams casualness and entertainment, and not learning. And the software it runs is too different from the software one will run as an adult getting work done in the future. But regardless of where anyone lands on that, I don’t see the MacBook Neo making big inroads in schools per se.

I see it as targeting mainstream users, many of whom will be students. But the purchase point there is them or their parents, not schools. Or, as Apple puts it, the MacBook Neo is “for students, families, small business owners, new Mac users, and more.” I also see the MacBook Neo as a confirmation that its “iPhone halo effect” has not extended to the Mac to the degree that Apple had hoped.

If you look at Mac market share today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago, the needle hasn’t moved much at all. The Mac had 9 percent market share in 2025 compared to 7.9 percent five years earlier. The iPad dominates the tablet market. Apple’s customers are buying Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple TV, and whatever else, which helps lock them into the ecosystem. Why hasn’t the Mac benefitted as well? This is a bet on Apple’s part that the problem is a combination of the price and the value it provides compared to the PC side.

The MacBook Air at $999 and up (now $1099 and up) is a great value, but that’s still the premium part of the laptop market. And with Snapdragon X-based laptops like the HP OmniBook 5 significantly raising the bar in the $500 to $800 range, that $1100 MacBook Air seems even further away from the mainstream. It made some sense when $600 to $800 PCs were all crappy. But now they’re not. People are also saying that Apple being behind on AI is really hurting them as they are putting off release new products because of the behind ai.

I don’t see Apple being behind in AI hurting them at all. It just had its best quarter, ever. As important, Apple isn’t throwing money at AI like the rest of Big Tech. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will all spend $200 billion, $185 billion, $150+ billion, whatever on AI this year. Apple spent $12 billion last year and that was less than the previous year. Sitting this out, purposeful or not, seems to have paid off.

I wanted to hear your perspective on the MacBook Neo (although I think I saw in one of your comments that it’s not positive, unless I misunderstood). 8 GB of RAM is a non-starter in 2026, as is 256 GB of storage, so the MacBook Neo is not interesting to me. That you can’t even upgrade the RAM is bizarre, as are some of the other weird cost-cutting moves here, like not getting TouchID unless you spend $100 more on the 512 GB configuration.

There are just too many compromises here. More subjectively, and this is a problem with low-end phones like the Pixel 10a and iPhone 17e, too, is that Apple isn’t providing screen size options either, and I don’t get that. It offers two screen sizes on MacBook Air and Pro, there are two sizes of every iPad (basically, the mini and base iPad are sort of that) and it usually has two screen sizes on every non-budget iPhone model.

For the Pixel 10a, for example, Google used to make XL versions of its A-series phones. I miss that. And the 13-inch screen on the MacBook Neo is just too small for me. Personally I think, looking at it from a marketing strategy perspective, not in terms of how good it is for the buyer, it’s a masterpiece. A MacBook at under $500 for students (and in the future for everyone else with discounts) will sell millions of units as most potential buyers of this device don’t even know what RAM is and it will be a gateway into the Apple’s ecosystem, as currently one of the main hurdle for non tech people to buy a Mac, other than price, is the fact that they are used to Windows and are scared to learn a different OS (thinking of my family for instance, for adults it may be too late, but for the younger ones who already want an iPhone because all their classmates have one, this could be their first laptop).

I don’t see it that way. I see it as a non-future-proof laptop that the user will quickly outgrow and even more quickly become annoyed by its limitations. If the goal is to frustrate, this is ideally configured. The HP OmniBook 5 I mention above isn’t just a better computer—and one that comes in 14- and 16-inch screen sizes—it can be upgraded with more storage by anyone and is more viable now and in the future as a computer.

There are no compromises. Whether Apple will sell millions of these things or not is open to debate, and we’ll see whether the Neo can move the needle on Mac market share or revenues. My bet, which admittedly may not age well, is that it will do neither to any meaningful degree. The bigger problem with this laptop, and this is also subjective, is that macOS sucks. I love Apple’s hardware, and the iPad has turned into something special thanks to the software, but the Mac is terrible.

There’s more than one reason the Mac hasn’t ever broken out of single digit market share, and I think that factors into it too. If this system were even just middling to good, Apple’s eager fan base would have pushed those numbers much higher already. Anyway, we’ll see. But this looks like a non-starter to me, with the type of compromises Steve Jobs would have never made. Apple only lands on something like the MacBook Neo—and the iPhone 17e—when everything else it’s tried fails.

This isn’t a strategy, it’s throwing spaghetti on the wall. Maybe this time, it will work. But I don’t see it. Quick follow-up. After getting ready to post this, it occurred to me to look at the Apple Refurbished Store and see what one could get in a MacBook Air these days. And what’s there is a much better value than a MacBook Neo: You can get a 13-inch MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage for $759.

That computer will last a lot longer and do more now than a Neo. It has better ports, a better display, MagSafe charging, TouchID, and a much better processor. It’s no contest. Hi Paul, I was wondering what you’re currently using as a Markdown editor. I’m trying to transition away from Word and am evaluating different options. One of them is Zettlr — a cross-platform, open-source editor that looks very promising.

Have you had any experience with it? No. I use and recommend Typora. It’s inexpensive, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is the best overall Markdown editor. There is nothing else. One of my main concerns about making this switch is collaborative editing. I rely heavily on Word’s collaboration features, particularly comments and track changes, and I’m not sure whether a comparable workflow is achievable in Markdown.

Word has been increasingly unstable and sluggish for me lately, and feels bloated with features I never use — so the motivation to move on is real. If you need Word-style collaboration functionality, Markdown won’t cut it. Markdown is just plain text that uses simple XML/HTML-like markup code for formatting. Markdown editors vary in how they handle that, but one of the appealing things about Typora is that it supports word processor-like keyboard shortcuts (like Ctrl + B for bold instead of using markup code).

But there’s no collaboration functionality in this or any other editor. If someone did work up something like that, it would be specific to the editor and wouldn’t translate to other editors. Have you gone through a similar transition, or do you have a tool you’d recommend? Any thoughts on how to handle collaborative editing outside of Word (Google Docs is not allowed by my employer) would be especially welcome.

Notion. It supports Markdown syntax and has excellent collaboration capabilities. Plus it works everywhere, including mobile. I have less experience with this, but there are many, many Notion alternatives that store your content in standard Markdown files in the file system, which means you can sync that through OneDrive or whatever service if desired. These things tend to be more complex and will require some work on your part.

But there are many to consider, like Joplin, Obsidian, AnyType, AppFlowy, and others. Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

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This report covers the latest developments in iphone. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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