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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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 -
@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@glyph @xgranade @aeva for the one I actually use - I had to fiddle with wireless drivers like it was 2006 again,
the fan stopped being a problem once I installed linux for... Reasons?
Like, legit might just be a windows issue, even with games running it's fine now. No fucking idea why.
The monitor resolution is... awkward, and colour is the worst I've ever seen on a monitor.
I still worry about the battery.
That the plastic has not broken yet is largely due to caution -
@glyph @xgranade @aeva for the one I actually use - I had to fiddle with wireless drivers like it was 2006 again,
the fan stopped being a problem once I installed linux for... Reasons?
Like, legit might just be a windows issue, even with games running it's fine now. No fucking idea why.
The monitor resolution is... awkward, and colour is the worst I've ever seen on a monitor.
I still worry about the battery.
That the plastic has not broken yet is largely due to caution -
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. Now I'm seeing another bad take on Fedi, which is "all you Apple shills love this stupid thing, but a cheap Linux laptop would work better, don't buy it". I am much more sympathetic to this but it appears to be missing what is interesting about this device and why people are talking about it at all.@glyph I appreciated this take. On the Neo and also tech reviewers.
“This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold
Sam Henri Gold is a product design engineer building playful, useful software at Tavus. Previously at Lickability.
(samhenri.gold)
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@glyph @xgranade @aeva for the one I actually use - I had to fiddle with wireless drivers like it was 2006 again,
the fan stopped being a problem once I installed linux for... Reasons?
Like, legit might just be a windows issue, even with games running it's fine now. No fucking idea why.
The monitor resolution is... awkward, and colour is the worst I've ever seen on a monitor.
I still worry about the battery.
That the plastic has not broken yet is largely due to caution@miss_rodent @xgranade @aeva yeah these are consistent with my experience but also some of these problems have always been around to some degree? but on ~2015 era laptops the cheap plastic was thick enough to withstand breaking, now it’s trying to emulate milled aluminum so it’s way too thin. old shitboxes would overheat sometimes but it would just throttle the CPU, now it fries the RAM and erases the SSD. all the problems seem worse.
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@miss_rodent @xgranade @aeva yeah these are consistent with my experience but also some of these problems have always been around to some degree? but on ~2015 era laptops the cheap plastic was thick enough to withstand breaking, now it’s trying to emulate milled aluminum so it’s way too thin. old shitboxes would overheat sometimes but it would just throttle the CPU, now it fries the RAM and erases the SSD. all the problems seem worse.
@miss_rodent @xgranade @aeva the experience in both software and hardware has been degrading for decades but for a long time it had a sort of janky DIY charm. now it’s just broken and kinda ruining people’s lives with faulty-from-factory parts
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@miss_rodent @xgranade @aeva the experience in both software and hardware has been degrading for decades but for a long time it had a sort of janky DIY charm. now it’s just broken and kinda ruining people’s lives with faulty-from-factory parts
@glyph @miss_rodent @aeva I miss netbooks. Like, yeah, I know they still exist, but not like circa 2008, when they were cheap and low-powered but well-designed and filled a very particular niche.
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@glyph @miss_rodent @aeva I miss netbooks. Like, yeah, I know they still exist, but not like circa 2008, when they were cheap and low-powered but well-designed and filled a very particular niche.
@xgranade @glyph @miss_rodent @aeva every now and then I dig out my EeePC 901 for a thrill of nostalgia. About 90 seconds of typing is all it takes for me to wish to put it away again. But what a great little device it was/is.
Best netbook trick I ever pulled with it was loading some offline'd pages from WikiTravel onto it while romping around in Europe for the first time. City guides and language guides, mostly. But it felt truly futuristic, especially in an era when offlining stuff like that was more of a pain in the ass.
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@miss_rodent @glyph @aeva I got my current XPS 13 towards the start of the pandemic, and... it's beginning to show its age. There's basically nothing out there that can replace it, though.
There's other product categories, but that niche of "professional machine with mid-tier specs in a solid case" has just vanished. Now you tend to either find absolute shit for inflated prices or super-premium machines at outrageous prices.
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@miss_rodent @xgranade @aeva the experience in both software and hardware has been degrading for decades but for a long time it had a sort of janky DIY charm. now it’s just broken and kinda ruining people’s lives with faulty-from-factory parts
@miss_rodent @xgranade @aeva like I had a shitbox that barely worked in ~2007 and I loved it, I even named it “trogdor” because it had a rear vent that would just blow SCALDING hot air that you absolutely did not want to touch. if I ask someone of a similar age and laptop budget how they feel about their current budget windows box now, well, at best it sounds much like your story, at worst they just get a thousand yard stare and say “can we talk about something else”
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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?The bigger risk is that some school districts may buy these for kids, and then lock them down in the name of child safety, eliminating the possibility of discovery and curiosity.
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@miss_rodent @glyph @aeva I got my current XPS 13 towards the start of the pandemic, and... it's beginning to show its age. There's basically nothing out there that can replace it, though.
There's other product categories, but that niche of "professional machine with mid-tier specs in a solid case" has just vanished. Now you tend to either find absolute shit for inflated prices or super-premium machines at outrageous prices.
@miss_rodent @glyph @aeva 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, hi-dpi screen, and a reasonable processor for like $1400 at Costco. I can't imagine something like that now.
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The bigger risk is that some school districts may buy these for kids, and then lock them down in the name of child safety, eliminating the possibility of discovery and curiosity.
@joelle @thomasdorr the reason that I don’t see this as a risk is that it’s the current state of affairs pretty much everywhere, except with iPads and chromebooks. Famously, one of the big trends among middle school kids right now is having conversations in comments sections on barely visible objects in homework google docs because there’s no other messaging software permitted on their egregiously supervised school devices
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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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@miss_rodent @glyph @aeva 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, hi-dpi screen, and a reasonable processor for like $1400 at Costco. I can't imagine something like that now.
@xgranade @miss_rodent @aeva I can, it’s a macbook air
one of the reasons I am even peripherally aware of this mountain of defects (honestly, *my* lightly used no-copilot Windows VM kinda works fine) is that for an ever-lengthening list of reasons, I *REALLY* do not like recommending exclusively Apple products. but the alternatives remain so dramatically worse for most people that it’s hard for me to get away from.
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@xgranade @miss_rodent @aeva I can, it’s a macbook air
one of the reasons I am even peripherally aware of this mountain of defects (honestly, *my* lightly used no-copilot Windows VM kinda works fine) is that for an ever-lengthening list of reasons, I *REALLY* do not like recommending exclusively Apple products. but the alternatives remain so dramatically worse for most people that it’s hard for me to get away from.
@xgranade @miss_rodent @aeva You can get *pretty* close with Framework, I guess? $1700 not $1400, to compare to Apple’s $1500 with similar specs
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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 Hey I agree and have run school fleets of Macs and Chromebooks. I also once converted a school to Ubuntu. AMA.
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@xgranade @miss_rodent @aeva You can get *pretty* close with Framework, I guess? $1700 not $1400, to compare to Apple’s $1500 with similar specs
@glyph @xgranade @miss_rodent framework has it backwards you're not supposed to sell the shitbox for the price of a good computer
