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/

[gandalfdg@indieweb.social]

@samhenrigold love this feeling. I'm having it myself with a $200 secondhand #Pinebook Pro that I got to see what I could do with my intermediate Linux knowledge on a bare bones #ARM machine.

I've been running a tiling window manager, managing all of my homelab servers over SSH, using #GnuIMP just like I did on laptops from ~15 years ago to make wallpapers for my jailbroken #kindle

Not every machine needs to be able to do everything. Especially now with prices on the rise.

[jillian@sleepy.cool]

@samhenrigold saaaaaaam this is beautiful

[samhenrigold@hachyderm.io]

@jillian 🥺️

[groupnebula563@mastodon.social]

@samhenrigold this is a great essay! /gen

[praetorianpi@sunny.garden]

@samhenrigold this brought me back to a time long-forgotten when I used to play World of Warcraft on my 12” G4 PowerBook that took me many summers to save up and buy. If I didn’t put it on the laptop cooling pad, the fans couldnt keep up and it would run like a Keynote presentation. I should dig that thing out of storage.

[djwtwo@mastodon.social]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/116216357692725093

@samhenrigold I am internally workshopping how to work "ceiling made of web browser" into a work conversation.

[justmedevin@mastodon.social]

@samhenrigold this is lovely! Totally agree.

[reftonull@hachyderm.io]

@samhenrigold this is awesome
i remember hackintosh-ing my $500 Asus laptop because I wanted to run OSX and couldn’t afford a Mac. I’m very excited to see the Neo power the next generation of kids. I only hope it inspires them the same way it did me.

[sorro@woof.tech]

@samhenrigold if my old laptop from 2017 didnt have a pretty underpowered APU, i wouldnt have spent so much time learning to optimize windows 10 to its maximum efficiency (knowledge that i still apply on linux DEs, even in much more capable hardware).

if it wasnt because of its slow HDD, i wouldnt have been able to have a triple-boot setup to known if linux was right for me (the HDD was very slow, but it was 1 TB, at a time when similarly priced alternatives with a much faster SSD were 250 GB. Would have worked better, but wouldnt have given me space to experiment with partitions and linux)

if it wasnt because of my first tablet being a dual-core with 1 GB of RAM in 2017, i would likely not bother completely closing the apps as opposed to just getting out of them today, like everyone else i know does, because i would assume it doesnt make an impact on performance nor battery life

the best way to learn about computers is having hardware restrictions. Not software, those prevent you from learning. Hardware restrictions, which instead teach you. And then there's also the needs of each person; not everyone needs a supercomputer for their use case (my dad's intel celeron computer from 2019 with 8 GB RAM is still pretty good for his use case)

the macbook neo is surprisingly the first apple product in my life that i would unironically recommend to some people

[snaums@toot.kif.rocks]

@samhenrigold what an amazingly thoughtful text.

[xyhhx@social.treehouse.systems]

@samhenrigold > I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny.

i lol'd

[dogo@pounced-on.me]

@samhenrigold i love this, the first review or such on a piece of tech that I feel touches on what computing's supposed to feel like.

Reminds me of when I was that age, messing around with Windows 98 dll's. Countless reinstalls from mom until I learned what I shouldn't touch. Finding tools to burrow around in said dll's. Finding random little apps in the system folders. Editing bitmaps inside the system with mspaint just because I could.

[xyhhx@social.treehouse.systems]

@samhenrigold after finishing reading i can say this was a wonderful journey down nostalgia lane. i never used a mac as a kid, but the feelings ring true for any little computer kid

[mdreid@mastodon.social]

@samhenrigold @timixretroplays Great essay! This resonated a lot with me.

I learnt how to program on a Commodore 64 and Amiga – extremely limited machines by today’s standards. When I hit the limits of what I could do tinkering in BASIC on them in high school I popped the hood and taught myself how to code in assembler to make things run faster.

Fast forward 35 years and I now have a PhD in computer science and work at Apple.

[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.