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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If you think that you can compete with this with a bespoke Linux installation on a few old ThinkPads, you need to figure out a way to provide *all that other stuff* to the people who will be using them. And I wish you would! If you ran a charity campaign to raise money to scale up such an effort for a few local school districts in a particular region, I'd probably donate to it!
@glyph
Unfortunately, secondhand laptops now come with no SSDs or RAM as people pinch them now there's a shortage... -
@glyph Like, it was mostly doable - but also most of my classes were offline and involved literally 0 software. Papers were mostly fine to be handed in on actual paper, I only had one class that used the LMS (the other professors fucking hated it because it was new and barely worked), etc. -
So it was likely *easier* when I did it, before the big tech mnopolies got their tentacles into every educational orifice in the country.@miss_rodent yeah I agree with all that but if I start delving into that part of the problem domain, I will have to start thinking about "digital proctor software" and I will get so angry I will explode
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@miss_rodent yeah I agree with all that but if I start delving into that part of the problem domain, I will have to start thinking about "digital proctor software" and I will get so angry I will explode
@glyph Entirely reasonable thing to explode about, tbqh, but fair.
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@glyph honestly for average use cases (browsers, docs, spreadsheets) 8 GB is plenty. If memory hogs like browsers could just intelligently reset to avoid using swap there'd be no need to do the manual 'quit everything' cycle to free memory
@glyph Apple's in a unique position here: like on iOS, they could force app memory onto disk if they're in the background and using too much memory. they could even publicly shame the app, saying on screen what happened to explain slower access times as it's rehydrated into memory
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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 It’s always interesting that that Chromebook isn’t counted as a Linux laptop. It’s like Champagne- it only counts as a Linux laptop if you need at least three obscure terminal commands to get it working properly, otherwise it’s just a sparkling laptop.
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@glyph Apple's in a unique position here: like on iOS, they could force app memory onto disk if they're in the background and using too much memory. they could even publicly shame the app, saying on screen what happened to explain slower access times as it's rehydrated into memory
@seanlinsley earlier today I posted something similar, and I kinda hope it happens, but I don't want to get *too* far out over my skis imagining stuff like that because the fact remains that right now they *have not* done that, and an equally possible outcome is that they just make the experience of the Neo suck so that everyone is banging into its limitations all the time and starts lusting after an upgrade. Let's not give them too much credit that they haven't earned
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It's also going to give a TON more kids access to things like "a terminal". Kids will be encountering MacBook Neos in places where they've previously seen Chromebooks or iPads, devices which either cannot be used to write software at all, or implicitly have locks that most people will not bother to remove. This will not be 100% consistent (some schools will wall off MacBook Neo dev tools for "security", I'm sure) but it will still be a big enough population that it will be *interesting*.
@glyph
... I miss cheap PCs (especially when they were 32bit and thus still came with a built-in debugger (yes, even Windows 10 had this!)). For all the flaws of old Windows builds (and there are almost infinite of those), you can basically get almost anything to run decades down the line! -
@glyph
... I miss cheap PCs (especially when they were 32bit and thus still came with a built-in debugger (yes, even Windows 10 had this!)). For all the flaws of old Windows builds (and there are almost infinite of those), you can basically get almost anything to run decades down the line!@ddlyh I remember buying an Eee PC on day 1 and thinking it was going to change the world, so maybe my analysis is not entirely correct here either
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It's also going to give a TON more kids access to things like "a terminal". Kids will be encountering MacBook Neos in places where they've previously seen Chromebooks or iPads, devices which either cannot be used to write software at all, or implicitly have locks that most people will not bother to remove. This will not be 100% consistent (some schools will wall off MacBook Neo dev tools for "security", I'm sure) but it will still be a big enough population that it will be *interesting*.
@glyph
I worry they might segment the os market... Could we see an Lite MacOS? No terminal, limited AppStore only installs? -
@ddlyh I remember buying an Eee PC on day 1 and thinking it was going to change the world, so maybe my analysis is not entirely correct here either
@glyph
Netbooks did change the world *briefly*, until Apple managed to market a giant iPod touch better than any proper computer manufacturer had done for decades. "Technological progress" was supplanted by "marketing progress" once again... -
@seanlinsley earlier today I posted something similar, and I kinda hope it happens, but I don't want to get *too* far out over my skis imagining stuff like that because the fact remains that right now they *have not* done that, and an equally possible outcome is that they just make the experience of the Neo suck so that everyone is banging into its limitations all the time and starts lusting after an upgrade. Let's not give them too much credit that they haven't earned
@glyph true, but I think the iOS precedence does make it more likely.
If I were working at Apple in a leadership position and involved in this project, this would be the first step in a 20 year plan to take large market share from Windows. So it'd be pointless to kneecap the Neo; you'd want it work as well as it can so as people need more power they're happy to pay more b/c of the trust established
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But if you have people with zero tech experience in your life, who have a kid who doesn't really know what kind of computer they need… I'm not going to tell you that you should never recommend Linux to such a person. But at the *very least* you cannot be recommending that they go bargain hunting for mystery-meat laptops that will "probably work with Linux". You need to find a company like System76 or Framework that will actually help them out if the dang thing breaks.
@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.
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If you think that you can compete with this with a bespoke Linux installation on a few old ThinkPads, you need to figure out a way to provide *all that other stuff* to the people who will be using them. And I wish you would! If you ran a charity campaign to raise money to scale up such an effort for a few local school districts in a particular region, I'd probably donate to it!
@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.
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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"
