Everyone has a MacBook Neo take, so here's mine.
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@joXn Yeah, it's why I pluralized vendors. Electron sucks, but I can at least target it as a platform much easier than I can target the platforms tied to macOS. Individual vendors may have their own platforms, but as you note, Apple has no interest in making theirs cross-platform platforms.
@xgranade I _kind of_ like the Diet Electron approach of something like Dioxus, but with Dioxus I think the AI slop exposure risk factor is super-high, making the nominative similarity to “dioxin” bitterly apt.
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@xgranade @SnoopJ I actually think there's a nuance that may emerge later: these machines *do* have swap configured, and that internal storage isn't *too* bad in terms of speed, which means there's still an angle for app devs to not care where their app chugs along but is absolutely murdering the write cycles on the poor user's storage, shortening the device lifetime by years
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@xgranade it's still absurd to me that this industry has found a way to make *8GB* of ram a 'modest limit'.
Part of that is just... I'm old and remember having a whole... 128MB of ram on my first computer (after we upgraded the ram).
but also just... I have a few old comps with 512MB-1GB that run fine still under slackware or debian (not "light" distros)
.... as long as you don't open a modern browser without a bunch of blockers of various things.@miss_rodent Very much agreed.
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@xgranade @SnoopJ I actually think there's a nuance that may emerge later: these machines *do* have swap configured, and that internal storage isn't *too* bad in terms of speed, which means there's still an angle for app devs to not care where their app chugs along but is absolutely murdering the write cycles on the poor user's storage, shortening the device lifetime by years
@xgranade @SnoopJ maybe app devs respond to the incentive and don't want users to see multi-second pauses in their UIs, but, I think there is a possibility that if this starts happening, Apple has a potential future lever: ship an OS feature that gives app store apps a swap quota. start trashing the internal SSD by being profligate with RAM use, and you get crashed by the OS or paused with a "this app dev sucks" modal until the user quits some other stuff
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@cthos @xgranade @SnoopJ when they did it with those models I just thought it was kinda negligent and *strongly* advised most customers (except those whose usage I knew would be unusually light) to avoid those spec levels even though they looked cheap. The neo's aggressive market segmentation actually makes me _way_ more confident that we will see mitigations and incentives that address that problem more broadly
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@miss_rodent Very much agreed.
@xgranade when I was first learning to program, 8GB might as well have been infinite RAM.
(says the squirrel who started with C & asm, and then moved to gameboy asm... and various other old consoles/comps, I def spent a lot of time in contexts where managing memory use is mandatory.
I imagine that's not super common nowadays.) -
@xgranade I _kind of_ like the Diet Electron approach of something like Dioxus, but with Dioxus I think the AI slop exposure risk factor is super-high, making the nominative similarity to “dioxin” bitterly apt.
@joXn Tauri is another interesting one along those lines... I think there can be some interesting examples of shipping web view components along with an application, but there has to be some way of making sure that the whole UI isn't running in a full-fledged browser.
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@xgranade it's still absurd to me that this industry has found a way to make *8GB* of ram a 'modest limit'.
Part of that is just... I'm old and remember having a whole... 128MB of ram on my first computer (after we upgraded the ram).
but also just... I have a few old comps with 512MB-1GB that run fine still under slackware or debian (not "light" distros)
.... as long as you don't open a modern browser without a bunch of blockers of various things. -
@xgranade when I was first learning to program, 8GB might as well have been infinite RAM.
(says the squirrel who started with C & asm, and then moved to gameboy asm... and various other old consoles/comps, I def spent a lot of time in contexts where managing memory use is mandatory.
I imagine that's not super common nowadays.)@miss_rodent Yeah, absolutely. I do think it's good to get a bit away from such tiny amounts of RAM that manually managing all of it is mandatory, and modern displays definitely push higher RAM requirements all the way up the stack, but we never should have landed at 8 GB being moderate.
Hell, even late 90s early aughts JVM applications managed similar latencies to what we have now, but on systems with ~128 MB of RAM. I don't want to go back to the JVM, not by a long shot, but still.
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@miss_rodent Yeah, absolutely. I do think it's good to get a bit away from such tiny amounts of RAM that manually managing all of it is mandatory, and modern displays definitely push higher RAM requirements all the way up the stack, but we never should have landed at 8 GB being moderate.
Hell, even late 90s early aughts JVM applications managed similar latencies to what we have now, but on systems with ~128 MB of RAM. I don't want to go back to the JVM, not by a long shot, but still.
@xgranade Yeah, I don't think being stuck at 'every byte is precious and must be monitored carefully' would be great ...
... but I think the experience of learning how to program in a resource-conscious way is valuable, and treating ram as something to be utilized *reasonably*, and having *some* effort put into using it frugally would be a dramatic improvement over where we are now. -
@kevingranade @glyph @darby3 I think that's a little different, though, in that a Chromebook is restricted to being just a browser *by design*. That wouldn't even be the worst if local-only PWAs were more popular, but browser UIs do a piss-poor job of surfacing dependencies on remote services.
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@xgranade Yeah, I don't think being stuck at 'every byte is precious and must be monitored carefully' would be great ...
... but I think the experience of learning how to program in a resource-conscious way is valuable, and treating ram as something to be utilized *reasonably*, and having *some* effort put into using it frugally would be a dramatic improvement over where we are now.@xgranade but it seems like basically only embedded devs, real-time systems, and those who go into certain niche hobby spaces like retro console systems really bother most of the time...
... and web dev has gone completely off the rails in the opposite direction. -
@xgranade but it seems like basically only embedded devs, real-time systems, and those who go into certain niche hobby spaces like retro console systems really bother most of the time...
... and web dev has gone completely off the rails in the opposite direction.@miss_rodent Yeah, like I tend not to go "the truth is in the middle," but I think that's the case here... we shouldn't all have to be retro console devs to make things (though that should still exist, not shitting on it!), but we shouldn't need to have web dev–scale devices to *use* software, either.
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Anyway, I still don't like Apple, I still think that *on the whole* they're net negative for computing, and severely so. But I try to also be intellectually honest and hold ~~nuanced views~~.
@xgranade
Intellectual honesty? In this economy?? -
@miss_rodent Yeah, like I tend not to go "the truth is in the middle," but I think that's the case here... we shouldn't all have to be retro console devs to make things (though that should still exist, not shitting on it!), but we shouldn't need to have web dev–scale devices to *use* software, either.
@xgranade Yeah, I am not generally a 'moderate' by default (... I'm more a mouthy opinionated idealogue, and in some areas even I'd describe my positions as 'extremist' just not in a bad way...)
... but for this case in particular, I think "Just show some reasonable restraint and moderation" is actually a good place to aim for; some things like high-end 4k gaming can have absurd requirements still, a word processor should prob be fine on like 1GB-2GB though - it's just formatted text!
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@xgranade Yeah, I am not generally a 'moderate' by default (... I'm more a mouthy opinionated idealogue, and in some areas even I'd describe my positions as 'extremist' just not in a bad way...)
... but for this case in particular, I think "Just show some reasonable restraint and moderation" is actually a good place to aim for; some things like high-end 4k gaming can have absurd requirements still, a word processor should prob be fine on like 1GB-2GB though - it's just formatted text!
@xgranade And websites... like... why the fuck is my browser choking on a news site text article? [Rhetorical; the answer is tracking and metrics and ad serves and shit, and blocking them makes it a lot less miserable - my point is, it's excessive and wasteful though]
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@glyph made the point that the Neo is an implicit promise from Apple that macOS will run just fine on 8 GB of memory for the next 8 years.
But I think it goes farther than that: Apple made a reference device for application developers. They've never been shy about enforcing requirements on developers, and this is an interesting positive side to that: developers now have a huge incentive to make applications that fit within modest memory limits.
@xgranade @glyph my first thought about the Neo was that Apple is using an iPhone chip and amount of RAM/storage it can squeeze into an iPhone for a laptop: there’s no reason other than siphoning money out of its users not to make the iPhone a primary computing device.
Instead of the Neo they could just let the iPhone do double-duty as a desktop. Sell a USB-C Dock to connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, let the phone run full applications.
The Neo is just proof that the iPhone is artificially hobbled as a device.
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@dalias @xgranade Yeah, emacs has always been ... heavy.
But it's also basically just a lisp OS. I've literally used it as a terminal emulator, browser, text editor, word processor, spreadd sheet, and email client... simultaneously.
And it doesn't seem to have gotten noticably heavier in the last couple decades, it's gotten to the point where I can't even really make fun of it for bloat anymore. -
@xgranade @glyph my first thought about the Neo was that Apple is using an iPhone chip and amount of RAM/storage it can squeeze into an iPhone for a laptop: there’s no reason other than siphoning money out of its users not to make the iPhone a primary computing device.
Instead of the Neo they could just let the iPhone do double-duty as a desktop. Sell a USB-C Dock to connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, let the phone run full applications.
The Neo is just proof that the iPhone is artificially hobbled as a device.
