The MacBook Neo is such an interesting machine that it coaxed a thousand-word-essay out of me: https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/

[ipg@wetdry.world]

@samhenrigold this post resonated with me so much and reminded me of using a family iMac as a kid. it was a core 2 duo with a pretty pedestrian AMD graphics card and 4GB RAM, and i was 100% running very hard against all of those limits (that i just did not understand yet). so many memories brought back. thank you

[albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz]

@samhenrigold

My 2001 iBook G3 600 MHz with 128 MB of RAM agrees with this. Remarkably it wasn't that much more expensive than the Neo, despite the 25 year difference.

[sn@social.josko.org]

@samhenrigold when I was a young Pole wanting to be a sociology researcher but not wanting to work for free the next two years I decided I will do some stuff on the internet and people will pay me.

I started a freelance on a netbook. I didn’t have any budget. It was a 10 inch netbook. I used to do 10m print designs on it on Inkscape. And I earned some money. Then I found a job thanks to what I learned on that MSI intel atom device.

It’s never about the best tool.

[puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social]

@samhenrigold@hachyderm.io I really appreciate this essay. It fully encapsulates what it was like for me as a child too, (I didn't have mac hardware, instead i had a dell prebuilt and then my own computer i made after saving up my money from christmas + birthdays for 2 years for an i7-4790k & a GTX 960...). I am someone who still to this day views "minimum specs" as a challenge. I actually had a chromebook (I believe it was the Asus Chromebook C200). I remember when I found out about mrchromebox and released that I could remove the r/w screw. I remember fucking around with the hardware, installing galliumOS (I also tried things like Manjaro I3 edition which didn't have keyboard drivers since none of the galliumOS driver work had been in mainline kernel). I remember the pure excitement I had from getting Minecraft to run natively on my chromebook and the fact that my frames were actually decent (I mean it wasn't like 4000fps but it wasn't bad either, ~40fps). I have always been one to try to push the boundaries (before chromebook "hacking" I was into jailbreaking before crapple made that less and less possible. I grew up with Pangu's semitether for iOS 9, past the peak of untethered). Not very many of my peers followed and it irks me to hell knowing what these platforms are capable of when not restricted.

[kouett@soc.kouett.net.eu.org]

@samhenrigold ough that's a fucking mood. my first computer was a miserable Acer brand supermarket PC. I installed ubuntu on it, blender, code::blocks, handbrake... finished my telecommunications engineering degree 3 years ago and now I work in IT.

[vorsos@beige.party]

@samhenrigold Young me using an iBook G4’s built-in tools to make it a WiFi router for a dozen people while I was using it, and unlocking the external display driver from mirrored to extended.

[sboots@mastodon.sboots.ca]

@samhenrigold This is fantastic. Thank you for writing it.

[vasta@phire.place]

@samhenrigold That is by far the best product review I have ever read. Thank you.

[lhauser@mefi.social]

@samhenrigold Bravo!

[quarterswede@noc.social]

@samhenrigold And then go and watch https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ncubg00Wbd0 and see that the Neo is WAY better than you think.

[brianbuck@mastodon.world]

@samhenrigold Thank you for this heartfelt post. Brings back memories of my early childhood experiences with TRS-80, Commodore 64, first IBM PC, and Apple IIe

[chrisdejabet@mastodon.social]

@samhenrigold Thank you for writing this, Sam. Your words took me back 30 years to growing up in the 90’s doing similar things on the family Mac. I’ll admit I even teared up a little as I reminisced.

[samhenrigold@hachyderm.io]

@zanchey the primary reason to disable SIP these days

[jessamyn@glammr.us]

@samhenrigold Awww, me and my old Mac Plus. And now I work in a library helping people who, sometimes, are getting their own first computer.

[safigo@c.im]

@samhenrigold Iv'e never thought about editing a version, it's really fun.

In terms of kids as the main customer, I think it will be hard. Kids use a lot of resource intensive tasks, even at school.

I'd think it more for a regular person who just watches movies there, writes some text and uses small spreadsheets.

In my mind, it's more than half of regular population.

[bdatlrides@social.ridetrans.it]

@samhenrigold Love the article. Exactly like the P133 I used to have!!

[tedric@dads.cool]

@samhenrigold this is beautifully written and my inner 12 year old discovering telnet and Hypercard and ResEdit and TurboGopher on the family PowerMac feels very seen

[haste@mastodon.social]

@samhenrigold I’m glad you wrote this. It was really touching.

Somewhere around the midpoint I thought, that was me, too. Except you were probably a little cooler. Lol

[stevenlawsonphotography@mastoart.social]

@samhenrigold A fabulous piece of writing. I'm not that kid - I dabble with Linux but I don't have a technical mind - but I heartily support anyone who is that kid.

[ljrk@todon.eu]

@samhenrigold Incredibly well-written (and also I didn't learn about the Neo until now). The only doubt i have is, ironically, the IMHO hefty price.

I never paid more than ~500€ for a laptop. I bought a brand new 8GB RAM laptop in 2015 (yes, inflation, slower memory, AI-Slop price hikes) for that price. And that was *a lot* of money back then. While nowadays I have a well-paying job and my Air is paid for by my employer, I do know how it is to not have that kind of money to spare. I have friends who still don't.

And what we do if I help them buy something is buy refurbished. You can easily beat the Neo price tag buying a refurbished or "used but new" Air, getting more for it. And then I'm honestly not sure who this laptop is for... . In theory, the Neo refurbished should of course be even cheaper, but only, if people buy it in the first place. And the outlined target group, students, even if they get one – they're the kind of person to hold onto it until the updates run out. So even more limited refurbished options.

So I worry whether the Neo will actually ever be the budget laptop it sets out to be. I would never have been able to spend that much money. I mean, yeah, I come from a kinda poor household, maybe I was just too poor even for that. But mostly the cap was/is about 300€ ....