@samhenrigold Yes. This. So

much

this.

Beautifully written!

I, too, have written way too much Java on a machine that had no business running a Java IDE. It was the first computer that I had entirely to myself. It had an Intel Celeron and 128 MB of RAM, in the late 00s. This thing was begging for mercy running Borland JBuilder and couldn't handle NetBeans at all. I also had WindowBlinds on it with all kinds of strange themes.

@samhenrigold love this feeling. I'm having it myself with a $200 secondhand #Pinebook Pro that I got to see what I could do with my intermediate Linux knowledge on a bare bones #ARM machine.

I've been running a tiling window manager, managing all of my homelab servers over SSH, using #GnuIMP just like I did on laptops from ~15 years ago to make wallpapers for my jailbroken #kindle

Not every machine needs to be able to do everything. Especially now with prices on the rise.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/116216357692725093

@samhenrigold I am internally workshopping how to work "ceiling made of web browser" into a work conversation.

@samhenrigold if my old laptop from 2017 didnt have a pretty underpowered APU, i wouldnt have spent so much time learning to optimize windows 10 to its maximum efficiency (knowledge that i still apply on linux DEs, even in much more capable hardware).

if it wasnt because of its slow HDD, i wouldnt have been able to have a triple-boot setup to known if linux was right for me (the HDD was very slow, but it was 1 TB, at a time when similarly priced alternatives with a much faster SSD were 250 GB. Would have worked better, but wouldnt have given me space to experiment with partitions and linux)

if it wasnt because of my first tablet being a dual-core with 1 GB of RAM in 2017, i would likely not bother completely closing the apps as opposed to just getting out of them today, like everyone else i know does, because i would assume it doesnt make an impact on performance nor battery life

the best way to learn about computers is having hardware restrictions. Not software, those prevent you from learning. Hardware restrictions, which instead teach you. And then there's also the needs of each person; not everyone needs a supercomputer for their use case (my dad's intel celeron computer from 2019 with 8 GB RAM is still pretty good for his use case)

the macbook neo is surprisingly the first apple product in my life that i would unironically recommend to some people

@samhenrigold > I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny.

i lol'd

@samhenrigold i love this, the first review or such on a piece of tech that I feel touches on what computing's supposed to feel like.

Reminds me of when I was that age, messing around with Windows 98 dll's. Countless reinstalls from mom until I learned what I shouldn't touch. Finding tools to burrow around in said dll's. Finding random little apps in the system folders. Editing bitmaps inside the system with mspaint just because I could.

@samhenrigold @timixretroplays Great essay! This resonated a lot with me.

I learnt how to program on a Commodore 64 and Amiga – extremely limited machines by today’s standards. When I hit the limits of what I could do tinkering in BASIC on them in high school I popped the hood and taught myself how to code in assembler to make things run faster.

Fast forward 35 years and I now have a PhD in computer science and work at Apple. :)

@samhenrigold

My 2001 iBook G3 600 MHz with 128 MB of RAM agrees with this. Remarkably it wasn't that much more expensive than the Neo, despite the 25 year difference.

@samhenrigold when I was a young Pole wanting to be a sociology researcher but not wanting to work for free the next two years I decided I will do some stuff on the internet and people will pay me.

I started a freelance on a netbook. I didn’t have any budget. It was a 10 inch netbook. I used to do 10m print designs on it on Inkscape. And I earned some money. Then I found a job thanks to what I learned on that MSI intel atom device.

It’s never about the best tool.

@samhenrigold Iv'e never thought about editing a version, it's really fun.

In terms of kids as the main customer, I think it will be hard. Kids use a lot of resource intensive tasks, even at school.

I'd think it more for a regular person who just watches movies there, writes some text and uses small spreadsheets.

In my mind, it's more than half of regular population.

@samhenrigold I’m glad you wrote this. It was really touching.

Somewhere around the midpoint I thought, that was me, too. Except you were probably a little cooler. Lol

@samhenrigold Incredibly well-written (and also I didn't learn about the Neo until now). The only doubt i have is, ironically, the IMHO hefty price.

I never paid more than ~500€ for a laptop. I bought a brand new 8GB RAM laptop in 2015 (yes, inflation, slower memory, AI-Slop price hikes) for that price. And that was *a lot* of money back then. While nowadays I have a well-paying job and my Air is paid for by my employer, I do know how it is to not have that kind of money to spare. I have friends who still don't.

And what we do if I help them buy something is buy refurbished. You can easily beat the Neo price tag buying a refurbished or "used but new" Air, getting more for it. And then I'm honestly not sure who this laptop is for... . In theory, the Neo refurbished should of course be even cheaper, but only, if people buy it in the first place. And the outlined target group, students, even if they get one – they're the kind of person to hold onto it until the updates run out. So even more limited refurbished options.

So I worry whether the Neo will actually ever be the budget laptop it sets out to be. I would never have been able to spend that much money. I mean, yeah, I come from a kinda poor household, maybe I was just too poor even for that. But mostly the cap was/is about 300€ ....