Macbook Neo Hot Take™, take 2. Earlier I was annoyed at tech reviewers who should *really* know better giving a *really* myopic assessment of its gaming potential.
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@glyph
I worry they might segment the os market... Could we see an Lite MacOS? No terminal, limited AppStore only installs?@thomasdorr I understand why people would worry about this, but I doubt it. They tend to make changes like this very deliberately, synchronizing hardware product releases with software changes to cement "this is the New Product Category thing, which works Fundamentally Differently because it's got New Product Software". Dozens of randomly different SKUs with weird per-device capabilities, and education-focused software reskins was a dysfunction of 1990s Apple and those scars run _very_ deep
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@glyph If I were going to get them on Linux, I'd tell them to get a used business thinkpad, specific model. Hardly "mystery meat". But I wouldn't do that to begin with unless I wanted to do support or knew they could handle it themselves.
@dalias mystery meat laptops might be *even cheaper* though! but yes, you've got my point, the important bit is *you gotta account for the support*. and more importantly you gotta understand that *other* people really understand, either through deep experience or even just intuitively, that they gotta account for the support too
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@glyph I spent 6 months, starting May 2025 figuring out solid list of distros and configs that work on Core 2 Duo. Anything newer is even easier and more powerful. I was wanting to help people that needed/wanted computer but didn't have one get something solid. I have yet to find one person that was interested. They only want phones, tablets, or gaming consoles.
@CliffsEsport Start installing Bazzite on old Lenovo Yoga models?
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@thomasdorr I understand why people would worry about this, but I doubt it. They tend to make changes like this very deliberately, synchronizing hardware product releases with software changes to cement "this is the New Product Category thing, which works Fundamentally Differently because it's got New Product Software". Dozens of randomly different SKUs with weird per-device capabilities, and education-focused software reskins was a dysfunction of 1990s Apple and those scars run _very_ deep
@thomasdorr the fact that they released this new product in this "it's a regular mac" configuration implies a pretty long-running future commitment to "it's a regular mac" as branding. there are other clues in the marketing; I mean they don't show Xcode running but almost every screenshot is multitasking, it's running scads of different apps, they clearly don't appear to be making a "simplicity" pitch
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What is interesting about the device is not that you *should* buy it—the whole value proposition is that it is a very cheap, but also kinda bad, MacBook—it's that people *will* buy it. A lot. It fills a market gap. The only products that this is positioned against are Chromebooks and iPads; cheap refurb Linux machines are not in the same product category for most potential buyers, and I think the fact that Linux fans do not understand the different categories are endemic to why Linux struggles.
@glyph so i'm not asking to advocate for any particular Should in this situation (i simply don't care what people do anymore), i just don't know and people talk about this subject like the student shitbox laptop is not a product category anymore: does hp not make cheap shitbox laptops anymore?
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@glyph so i'm not asking to advocate for any particular Should in this situation (i simply don't care what people do anymore), i just don't know and people talk about this subject like the student shitbox laptop is not a product category anymore: does hp not make cheap shitbox laptops anymore?
@glyph honestly i'm very happy for the apple congregation rediscovering the joy of the shitbox
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@glyph so i'm not asking to advocate for any particular Should in this situation (i simply don't care what people do anymore), i just don't know and people talk about this subject like the student shitbox laptop is not a product category anymore: does hp not make cheap shitbox laptops anymore?
@aeva I'm far from an expert over the entire domain, but from my casual interest in it… I don't really think so? The student shitbox laptop has largely been replaced by the "gaming laptop" category, which has a ton of problems right now. The two biggest being "Windows" and "Intel"
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@aeva I'm far from an expert over the entire domain, but from my casual interest in it… I don't really think so? The student shitbox laptop has largely been replaced by the "gaming laptop" category, which has a ton of problems right now. The two biggest being "Windows" and "Intel"
@aeva x86_64 windows laptops are still kinda heavy, kinda hot, unreliable, sluggish, but most of all the main thing I hear from actual Windows users is that sleep just doesn't work at all? Among mac users "my laptop got hot in my bag and it was dead when I got to work" does happen but it's the kind of problem that would make one suspect a hardware problem and bring it in for repair, on Windows it seems to be a weekly occurrence on most machines, particularly those priced in the shitbox category
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@glyph so i'm not asking to advocate for any particular Should in this situation (i simply don't care what people do anymore), i just don't know and people talk about this subject like the student shitbox laptop is not a product category anymore: does hp not make cheap shitbox laptops anymore?
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@aeva x86_64 windows laptops are still kinda heavy, kinda hot, unreliable, sluggish, but most of all the main thing I hear from actual Windows users is that sleep just doesn't work at all? Among mac users "my laptop got hot in my bag and it was dead when I got to work" does happen but it's the kind of problem that would make one suspect a hardware problem and bring it in for repair, on Windows it seems to be a weekly occurrence on most machines, particularly those priced in the shitbox category
@aeva there are also ARM windows laptops which are… okay, I guess, and their battery life while still markedly worse than a macbook is "fine", but have terrible graphical performance and tons of weird compatibility issues where most stuff works but some software just randomly won't launch
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@aeva x86_64 windows laptops are still kinda heavy, kinda hot, unreliable, sluggish, but most of all the main thing I hear from actual Windows users is that sleep just doesn't work at all? Among mac users "my laptop got hot in my bag and it was dead when I got to work" does happen but it's the kind of problem that would make one suspect a hardware problem and bring it in for repair, on Windows it seems to be a weekly occurrence on most machines, particularly those priced in the shitbox category
@glyph again, i'm not advocating for any particular Should here, i'm just wondering if a product category that was a thing when i was a student is still a thing or if it got devoured by ipads or google or whatever, not whether it is or ever was Worthy
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@glyph again, i'm not advocating for any particular Should here, i'm just wondering if a product category that was a thing when i was a student is still a thing or if it got devoured by ipads or google or whatever, not whether it is or ever was Worthy
@aeva I mean, technically, yes, the devices do still exist, but I don't know anyone who uses one willingly, even *very* budget-conscious folks. 15 years ago a windows shitbox was largely the same experience as an iPad or a chromebook at a competitive price point with some bonus ability to run older casual games and entirely serviceable. Nowadays it's a hideous albatross that can barely boot Windows 11 and is nowhere close to what you can get in other categories for about the same price.
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@glyph again, i'm not advocating for any particular Should here, i'm just wondering if a product category that was a thing when i was a student is still a thing or if it got devoured by ipads or google or whatever, not whether it is or ever was Worthy
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@aeva @glyph like if access to macOS specifically is the revolutionary thing, then sure, this is pretty revolutionary. But that is a pretty weird take when you put it that way!
If access to a reasonably capable general-purpose computer is the revolutionary thing, then at best this is a new point on the price-performance Pareto frontier, but it sure ain't the bottom of the price curve.
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@thomasdorr the fact that they released this new product in this "it's a regular mac" configuration implies a pretty long-running future commitment to "it's a regular mac" as branding. there are other clues in the marketing; I mean they don't show Xcode running but almost every screenshot is multitasking, it's running scads of different apps, they clearly don't appear to be making a "simplicity" pitch
@glyph @thomasdorr in case it’s helpful I found this leaked screenshot of the next MacBook Neo OS:
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@glyph @thomasdorr in case it’s helpful I found this leaked screenshot of the next MacBook Neo OS:
@scott @thomasdorr yeah I was thinking about this software but I dare not speak its name lest I break the seals on the nightmare dimension it was sealed away in in the late 90s
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@scott @thomasdorr yeah I was thinking about this software but I dare not speak its name lest I break the seals on the nightmare dimension it was sealed away in in the late 90s
@glyph @thomasdorr
same! That’s why I only pasted a screenshot. I guess I am old enough to have attempted to administer machines running this software that shall not be named
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@dotstdy @aeva are there chromebooks at that price point which are actually capable of doing anything useful though? like I have seen some $200 chromebooks which I would describe as "regulatory arbitrage" devices; computers which in the most technical sense do work, but exist mostly to soak up school district budgets, whose hardware specs are literally based on running *earlier* versions of google docs and are visibly sluggish to run the current one to the point where it's distracting
