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 threadGlyphMar 15
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.
Show threadGlyphMar 15
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!!!"
Show threadVMar 15
@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.
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@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.
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@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.
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@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"
Show threadVMar 15
@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)
Show threadmirthMar 15
@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.
Show threadGlyphMar 15

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

@mirth @miss_rodent haha jinx

Show threadGlyph
@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
Mar 15 at 6:09pmWeb
Show threadmirthMar 15
@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.