GlyphMar 15

"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.

Show threadGlyphMar 15

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.

Show threadGlyphMar 15
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
Show threadJoe 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.)
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@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
Show threadJoe 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.
Show threadGlyphMar 15

@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.

Show threadGlyphMar 15

@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

Show threadGlyphMar 15
@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
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@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
Show threadGlyph
@swelljoe in closing, I could beat Casey Muratori in a fist fight
Mar 15 at 5:53pmWeb