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 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
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@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.
@glyph this is a product category where the main selling point is Jr. gets to have an education without Mom having to get another part time job. it doesn't have to be The Most Advanced Shitbox Ever, it just has to be cheap and mostly work.
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@glyph this is a product category where the main selling point is Jr. gets to have an education without Mom having to get another part time job. it doesn't have to be The Most Advanced Shitbox Ever, it just has to be cheap and mostly work.
@aeva yeah, I am aware, and I have even advised on some purchases in this category. IME the overall experience in the shitbox category has degraded —mostly due to Windows—to the point where it’s actively interfering with the education part. maybe others have good recent experiences but from what I have heard from students stuck with these it seems pretty dire
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@glyph this is a product category where the main selling point is Jr. gets to have an education without Mom having to get another part time job. it doesn't have to be The Most Advanced Shitbox Ever, it just has to be cheap and mostly work.
@glyph like, it seems obvious to me that the Neo doesn't exist because of unprecedented visionary design genius, it exists because the people in charge seem to be paying attention enough to notice that we've been in a period of significant downward mobility that isn't going to be stopping any time soon, and they need to meet their customers where they're at if they want to keep having any
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@glyph like, it seems obvious to me that the Neo doesn't exist because of unprecedented visionary design genius, it exists because the people in charge seem to be paying attention enough to notice that we've been in a period of significant downward mobility that isn't going to be stopping any time soon, and they need to meet their customers where they're at if they want to keep having any
@aeva you are probably right about that. I have another story about market segmentation and device categories that I would like to tell myself but tbh that is probably self-soothing about the state of the world outside the margins of this discussion
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@aeva you are probably right about that. I have another story about market segmentation and device categories that I would like to tell myself but tbh that is probably self-soothing about the state of the world outside the margins of this discussion
@glyph it's pretty grim out there right now
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@aeva you are probably right about that. I have another story about market segmentation and device categories that I would like to tell myself but tbh that is probably self-soothing about the state of the world outside the margins of this discussion
@aeva I mean it *definitely* isn’t design genius, this is literally existing hardware crammed into a chassis that’s a slightly smaller copy of an existing chassis
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@glyph like, it seems obvious to me that the Neo doesn't exist because of unprecedented visionary design genius, it exists because the people in charge seem to be paying attention enough to notice that we've been in a period of significant downward mobility that isn't going to be stopping any time soon, and they need to meet their customers where they're at if they want to keep having any
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@vfig @glyph no contradiction detected. it's good marketing to present it as a classy product that just happens to be extremely affordable, as if to say "you won't look like a poor person carrying around this computer". lots of people in difficult circumstances have significant anxiety about these things. of course, i can't imagine apple marketing this any other way regardless of the intended audience
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@vfig @glyph no contradiction detected. it's good marketing to present it as a classy product that just happens to be extremely affordable, as if to say "you won't look like a poor person carrying around this computer". lots of people in difficult circumstances have significant anxiety about these things. of course, i can't imagine apple marketing this any other way regardless of the intended audience
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@vfig @glyph no contradiction detected. it's good marketing to present it as a classy product that just happens to be extremely affordable, as if to say "you won't look like a poor person carrying around this computer". lots of people in difficult circumstances have significant anxiety about these things. of course, i can't imagine apple marketing this any other way regardless of the intended audience
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@aeva @vfig it would be cool if they made a cut down version of windows for budget machines that actually just had all the useless bloat removed instead of setting some stupid registry keys that prevent you from having more than 1 NIC and 2 CPUs or whatever, and then we could just run it on every other windows machine too, but unfortunately I think you have extremely accurately described the state of management here
