Mastodawn

"Is the macbook neo good for Gaming" the Influencers howl, looking at multivariate equations including the price of RAM and the number of teraflops that a GPU can produce

you dolts, this machine is about to be in the hands of like ten million children. its price point means it is highly likely going to be The Computer for an entire generation. it already plays a huge catalog of casual games just fine. the demo units in the apple stores are all playing Apple Arcade titles with no difficulty.

the entire video game industry rested on the Nintendo Entertainment System for an entire decade, a computer with 2 kilobytes of RAM when price-competitive home computers had megabytes.

the macbook neo is not a good choice if you are a competitive Valorant or a Cyberpunk 2077 streamer with a million dollars of annual brand deal revenue on the line. but it is going to change what "gaming" *is* for the actual public where game studios make their money.

unrelatedly, as an owner of a Macintosh Computer Book (Professional) with 64GB of RAM, I am _psyched_ that Apple has implicitly made a promise that its operating system will be usable with only 8GB for at least 8 more years. this is absolutely my favorite computer that I will never ever use

the reason that this makes me annoyed enough to post about is not that I have any particular animus for "tech review" people. it's just that it's a very small but egregious example of the omnipresence in our culture of "analysis" that looks at metrics but ignores systems.

I guess what bugs me the most is that I am not _good_ at this. I don't have any resources to analyze markets. Spreadsheets make me tired. I should not be routinely able to glance at what passes for "professional" product reviews or market analysis and be yelling at the screen "you forgot that more than one person is going to buy a computer this year!!!"

@glyph also just... a lot of them missing the point about who it's targeted at, entirely.
The new apple device is clearly targeted at the 'exploiting children, who are vulnerable and have no choice in the matter' market - not gamers. Maybe businesspeople as a secondary market, but, unclear on that.

cthos 🐱Mar 15

@miss_rodent @glyph they are definitely targeting kids who would otherwise get a chromebook, definitely. That might be a net positive if more kids get an actual computer rather than a google surveillance machine.

But that necessitates being better at fleet sales which Apple is not great at.

@miss_rodent that's part of my point though. people of all ages play games but there's a reason that children were the original market for video games: they have more time to play, and more interest in new titles because they have less attachment to old brands. Game studios are going to *lead* with the question "what hardware do our potential buyers have", not insist on a particular set of specs.

@miss_rodent now if the hardware in question is literally unsuitable to make entertaining content, sure, they'll have to look elsewhere. but the macbook neo is absolutely sailing miles above that bar, it's like 10x more powerful than the Switch 2, which is nominally a current-generation console.

@miss_rodent re: a secondary market in business… I mean, maybe? people find all kinds of weird uses that I'm not aware of in advance and so there may be a market somewhere, but having seen the device in person now I'd be pretty surprised. just physically in terms of the size of the display and keyboard, the physical chunky clickable trackpad, the color-matched tinted keys, everything about it reads as "for kids"

@glyph yeah, it definitely reads as 'for kids', but, I've known people who use chromebooks as their 'my job is email' computer, so, I could see it getting a secondary usecase there (esp if they release a model with a more drab 'modernist grey/white' palette and such)

@miss_rodent The blue one is already pretty sedate and would not look out of place in a highly businessy-business context. There are definitely jobs where I could *imagine* it would be a winner. Like if you're a caseworker and you need something ultra-portable which can browse a single web page that can fill out a form on the go. Maybe a repair tech or something.

@miss_rodent But it starts to disappear into this weird niche with better options on both sides. Like you'd have to be an an industry that cares a ton about margins and is looking for a bargain. But doesn't care SO much about margins that they'd send their people out with a beige shitbox from some bulk Windows or Chromebook vendor.

@miss_rodent You'd have to care about portability but not that much about ruggedness. You'd have to care about a "laptop" form factor, but not be bothered by the fact that if you had Thunderbolt hot-desking gear at your headquarters it wouldn't work with any of that and you'd need to carefully make sure everything was USB-C/USB-3.0 compatible.

@miss_rodent You'd need to care about the versatility of having full-fat macOS but not *so* much about versatility that you need your employees to do anything with >4GB of RAM.

K-12 schools hit every single one of these points and I could *imagine* a business that also does but I don't know anyone who *actually* works for one

Matt Campbell Mar 15

@glyph @miss_rodent

> Like if you're a caseworker and you need something ultra-portable which can browse a single web page that can fill out a form on the go.

How sad that we now deem 8 GB of RAM suitable only for browsing a *single* page. Or did I misread that?

@matt @miss_rodent I didn’t mean to say that if your job involved *two* web pages that it wouldn’t work, but rather that there are definitely jobs that involve interacting with only a single web page over and over again because the actual work is not on the web page.

but also: kiiiiinda 😬

@miss_rodent @glyph I might have missed it in the summaries but odd omissions for classroom durability are liquid/dust resistance and fold flat screen. I expect Apple will try to keep the color as a market segmentation vs the Air, which itself isn't that much more expensive but likely is a more profitable sale.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116234516244087521

@mirth @miss_rodent haha jinx

@mirth @miss_rodent I agree that fold-flat screen would have made sense, but (A) that's a new type of engineering that would probably have been cost-prohibitive here (the hinge is already surprisingly high quality but that's a manufacturing cost; it's a clone of the existing macbook hinge and apple has not done fold-flat hinges on anything else)
(B) probably would have been unpopular internally, just culturally, as looking like iPad cannibalization

@glyph @miss_rodent My guess is at their volumes, and given the wide precedent in other laptops, a fold flat would be no more expensive than what they do. I'd give it good odds it's more of their aesthetics-over-functionality hubris, the survivability benefit is pretty high and after decades they have to know that.

@miss_rodent @glyph I’ve absolutely worked places who assign Chromebooks to certain categories of employees. It’d be interesting to see if this replaces that, and if so whether it opens up things for those employees to do that wasn’t practical when they were assigned Chromebooks.

@misty @glyph Yeah, I'm not sure if this is actually more useful in that context than a chromebook - but it seems like it *could* be, without being much more expensive.
So, not sure if it will happen, but, seems like a potential market for them outside of the 'child exploitation' market they seem to be aiming for in particular.

Andromeda Yelton Mar 15

@glyph @miss_rodent oooh yeah, the non-devs at my workplace by and large have windows laptops for cost reasons but I bet a lot of them would prefer macs and....suddenly the cost reasons are kinda not there?

Cliff'sEsportCorner Mar 15

@glyph Um Influencers are in it for clicks not objective reality. I actually changed my perspective on it after seeing how modular it is and verifying the benchmarks. One thing I noted right away that I haven't seen mentioned is it will be trivial to swap the A18 mobo for A19 or A20 if they keep furture ones same size, like as easy as doing RAM or battery on older machines. My only complaint is no backlit KB & I'd prefer magsafe charging to C https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years

MacBook Neo Is the Most Repairable MacBook in 14 Years

Is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever also one of its most repairable? We’re loving the screwed-in battery.

iFixit

@glyph
I want to add that the larger the brand of the reviewer (of themselves or a company they do it for) is, the farther they are from their audience, the less they understand what's important and what's not. Thus "the content" moves away from daily needs and budgets, like those who stream their competitive gaming with a rigs mire expensive than an average car.
And that goes about anything - phones, laptops, shoes, furniture, leisure, whatever.

cthos 🐱Mar 15

@glyph I’m just slightly shocked at how replaceable the battery is.

Also global supply chain collapse something something.

@cthos the shocking level of repairability also makes sense for a K-12 device. half of these things are going to be christened by a curious first grader pouring an entire bottle of coca cola on them to see what happens

@cthos honestly that's the one thing I expected but did not see; I really thought that they'd give it an IP rating

Dan Sugalski 6d ago

@glyph @cthos I haven’t looked at the tear downs yet but I remember finding out that apple had, in fact, considered the “what happens if some dolt spills half a cup of coffee in his keyboard” case with the old white plastic MacBooks (the ones you could drop down stairs) and designed it so that the keyboard sat in a little water tight tray with the cable hole at the front top — coffee would pool in and if you lifted it up it’d just spill out safely. I suspect they’ve done the same with this one.

Dan Sugalski 6d ago

@glyph @cthos not that I spilled multiple coffees on that machine. Or dropped it down stairs while in a backpack definitely not.

Dan Sloan 5d ago

@cthos @glyph This is on brand for apple; they’ll lobby to fight regulations like any other big tech, but once it passes or if it’s clear where things are going, they’ll get out ahead of it and turn it into a virtue (and then usually start telling people how great they are for adding this thing they were legally required to 😁). The European Union Batteries Regulation comes into effect in 2027.

Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉Mar 15

@glyph I'm hoping the RAM crisis has the side effect of pressuring desktop app developers to be more responsible in their memory use. Electron apps, and so forth, are just unhinged in their memory usage. (This is probably wishful thinking.)

@swelljoe yeah I don't think we are going to see a lot of silver linings from this. like you'd think oil on its way to $200/barrel would result in immediate mania for EVs and electrification of all kinds. and yet

Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉Mar 15

@glyph a lot of developers seem to lack empathy. They have monster machines, current gen Macbook pro or whatever, and never consider the average user with a four year old budget device. So, CPU, memory, and battery usage just don't get much consideration...and Slack grows ever larger.

@swelljoe I agree but I think it is a mistake to attribute this to "developers" and "empathy".

The issue is that executives don't allocate budget to optimization. it's not that none of the developers at slack know that the app is big and clunky and consumes too many resources. I have no direct knowledge of that particular app but having seen plenty of similar situations, I'd bet money that they are discussing it daily over at Slack HQ.

@swelljoe every dev gets a beefy macbook because

A) that's a cheap employee-retention trick, it's a very small cost to the business relative to the whole employee, and the engineers are going to be absolutely miserable without it, and

B) they'll be miserable without it because every time a dev adds a user-impacting "feature" they're rewarded, doubly so if it gets revenue; every time they optimize a few megabytes of RAM usage they get told that they should really focus on impact next quarter

@swelljoe so the systemic effects make the app slow which makes it slow to develop and thus giving slow computers to your devs just wastes their time without creating any appreciable pressure to improve anything

@swelljoe also, not for nothing but giving developers slow computers doesn't really help them focus on optimization that much because developers spend more than half their time running (also slow) dev tools that they have no control over. giving them a computer that runs their tools slowly so that it will *also* run their output slowly in the hopes that they'll get *so* upset that they will torch their employment by yelling at their management is not a recipe for success

@swelljoe in closing, I could beat Casey Muratori in a fist fight

⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️6d ago

@glyph they've promised the kernel might. If not, they pay off the law suit. Meanwhile if they need Foo and it's 16 gig footprint, will just fork the OS

Dan Sloan 4d ago

@glyph As a former product manger, some of the most impressive outcomes I saw in software dev work was under significant limitations - there’s at least some research out there backing this up, that constraints drive innovative thinking and designs.

So I’m cautiously hopeful that at least some software vendors might improve their apps quite a bit if they set this as their min spec (which I suspect they’re going to need to do if they want that education market share)

liz ten eleven Mar 15

@glyph also like, it’ll probably play minecraft just fine. and that’s what counts for a LOT of people lol