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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@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
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@aeva @adrake all my beliefs in this area are extremely weakly held, and if you have recent experience of viable windows budget laptops then perhaps I am simply full of shit. but it is notable that they’re definitely doing some algorithmic pricing shenanigans because when I did a low-to-high price search on HP’s site, the cheapest thing I saw was $500, with a worse processor and similar specs to the neo, with a supposed MSRP of $950
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@aeva x86_64 windows laptops are still kinda heavy, kinda hot, unreliable, sluggish, but most of all the main thing I hear from actual Windows users is that sleep just doesn't work at all? Among mac users "my laptop got hot in my bag and it was dead when I got to work" does happen but it's the kind of problem that would make one suspect a hardware problem and bring it in for repair, on Windows it seems to be a weekly occurrence on most machines, particularly those priced in the shitbox category
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@glyph @aeva I am a certified Apple hater, and so I'm perfectly fine saying that while I think some Apple hardware is catastrophically badly design (e.g.: plugging the mouse in from the bottom, or Antennagate), I don't think they tend to fall into "made so poorly that it's manifestly unfit for purpose." That's more than I can say for bottom-rung HP laptops, sadly.
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@xgranade @aeva it’s hard to pin down exact spec problems because most people relaying these stories to me are not particularly technical and not interested in reliving them, but literally every story I have heard in the last 5 years involving a budget windows laptop had a punchline that was something like “and then it stopped working completely, to the point where even Notepad would crash after 3 minutes”. completely unfit for purpose to a previously unheard-of degree
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@xgranade @aeva it’s hard to pin down exact spec problems because most people relaying these stories to me are not particularly technical and not interested in reliving them, but literally every story I have heard in the last 5 years involving a budget windows laptop had a punchline that was something like “and then it stopped working completely, to the point where even Notepad would crash after 3 minutes”. completely unfit for purpose to a previously unheard-of degree
@glyph @aeva Have I ever told you about when Windows started blinking? Like, every menu, taskbar, everything... just started blinking.
I even knew folks on the Windows team and tried to ask, screenshots, videos, and all, but they were completely stumped.
The degree to which Windows installs accumulate weird and nondeterministic shit is hard to overstate. Put that on a restricted machine and weird shit happens.
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Potential customers for this fall into a few categories, including:
1. Parents who don't know a lot about tech, but whose kids need "a laptop" for school.
2. Kids & young adults who want a macbook to run something like GarageBand but have a very limited budget *and* also don't otherwise know much about tech.
3. Schools.
4. School-like programs, like software dev clubs & summer camps.These customer types need a low price, but they also need A LOT of *support*. The support is the product here.
@glyph there’s also a ton of people who are getting this as a cheap secondary laptop for travel and as backup just in case their primary machine fails; or for around the house if they have a desktop but would also like something for sitting down on the couch (and they don’t want or like iPads)
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@xgranade @aeva it’s hard to pin down exact spec problems because most people relaying these stories to me are not particularly technical and not interested in reliving them, but literally every story I have heard in the last 5 years involving a budget windows laptop had a punchline that was something like “and then it stopped working completely, to the point where even Notepad would crash after 3 minutes”. completely unfit for purpose to a previously unheard-of degree
@glyph @xgranade @aeva Having had to interact with a few low-end HPs (including having one I got free that I use as my 'going out somewhere I need a computer' laptop) - most of the problems seem to come down to:
- Cheap unreliable fan leads to severe overheating
- They removed a whole piece of this device for ... reasons?? (eg., removing one antenna on wifi cards)
- The battery is more like a bomb
- "They make monitors in this resolution??"
- Everything is cheap plastic forever
