Mastodawn

Cassandra is only carbon now 3d ago

Everyone has a MacBook Neo take, so here's mine.

Apple has, in my opinion, been a net negative for computing, and to a stunning degree. They've normalized DRM for software so completely that it will possibly take decades to get back the rights that we lost. They've used that power to make life worse for queer folks and to cozy up to the Trump administration.

But. There's something fascinating about the Neo.

Cassandra is only carbon now 3d ago

@glyph made the point that the Neo is an implicit promise from Apple that macOS will run just fine on 8 GB of memory for the next 8 years.

But I think it goes farther than that: Apple made a reference device for application developers. They've never been shy about enforcing requirements on developers, and this is an interesting positive side to that: developers now have a huge incentive to make applications that fit within modest memory limits.

Cassandra is only carbon now 3d ago

Put differently: this is the Electron killer, for better or worse, and not in the way that Apple killed Flash.

When PCs ship with 8 GB or less of RAM, application companies don't give a fuck, and so we get a proliferation of Electron and Electron-like platforms that consume gigantic amounts of RAM. That won't fly on something like the Neo.

Cassandra is only carbon now 3d ago

It was never sustainable to keep acting like there'd always be more RAM, some Moore's Law style kind of truism. AI vendors have forced the issue by engineering an artificial components shortage.

Apple has, to my outsider view as a non-Mac user, thrown down the gauntlet and said that developers *will* stop munching RAM, or else.

Maybe that's not fair, maybe developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of OS vendors' failure to build platforms. But users shouldn't bear it either.

Darby M. Dixon III

@xgranade my counter hot take is that it’s Apple saying “well may as well get money out of people who want nothing more than a browser to talk to chatbots through” but my brain is pretty cooked on ai paranoid takes

@darby3 @xgranade I totally disagree with this conclusion but wow can I ever sympathize with the environmental pressures which might cause one to arrive here

Cassandra is only carbon now 3d ago

@glyph @darby3 Same, I don't agree at all, but wow I see how you get there, and would absolutely have that take on my more pessimistic days.

Darby M. Dixon III 3d ago

@xgranade @glyph I mean to be clear if there’s any multi bazillion dollar company I’d like to believe wouldn’t feed into this it’d be Apple. but.

Kevin Granade 3d ago

@xgranade @glyph @darby3 this is very much my opinion of chromebooks. I do think this is different in large part due to it being apple doing it and the implicit support for the, "this should be enough RAM, deal with it" position, but I don't have a particularly grounded or nuanced backing for it.

Cassandra is only carbon now 3d ago

@kevingranade @glyph @darby3 I think that's a little different, though, in that a Chromebook is restricted to being just a browser *by design*. That wouldn't even be the worst if local-only PWAs were more popular, but browser UIs do a piss-poor job of surfacing dependencies on remote services.

David Gerard 3d ago

@xgranade @kevingranade @glyph @darby3 a loadbearing thing about Chromebooks is they also do Android apps. I like Chromebooks a lot, they have one job and they do it well. Interesting to think of this as Apple's answer to Chromebooks. (At a much higher price.)

@davidgerard @xgranade @kevingranade @darby3 do they all do this? I have been a bit confused by capabilities being inconsistent across the lineup. I was briefly excited about chromebooks when I found out about Crostini, but I don’t really understand if it’s always available from all vendors, or frequently disabled by policy, or what

David Gerard 3d ago

@glyph @xgranade @kevingranade @darby3 pretty standard with chromebooks as far as i know, not included in chromeos flex

@davidgerard @xgranade @kevingranade @darby3 huh I was about to start grumbling about bifurcated OS SKUs but it looks like ChromeOS Flex is specifically dedicated to reducing e-waste by repurposing old under-specced computers, *including* macs? I might have some hardware I want to throw this at

David Gerard 2d ago

@glyph @xgranade @kevingranade @darby3 as an internet terminal, it does the job as long as whatever you want is a web page or a chrome extension!

cthos 🐱2d ago

@glyph @davidgerard @xgranade @kevingranade @darby3 There's also FydeOS which is a paid ChromiumOS fork.

LP🔸Light up the night 2d ago

@glyph @davidgerard There's a few limitations; see the end of https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en (which also has a link near the start to which devices are supported).

It's cool, but depending on what you want, lack of 3D acceleration passthrough for example might be a killer (that's not just a thing *games* demand any more). Plus you have to live with the ChromeOS desktop environment, which may be a gruntle for some.

Set up Linux on your Chromebook - Chromebook Help

Linux is a feature that lets you develop software using your Chromebook. You can install Linux command line tools, code editors, and IDEs (integrated development environments) on your Chromebook. Thes

David Gerard 2d ago

@LionsPhil @glyph the linux env that comes with chromeos? is ass

@davidgerard @LionsPhil @glyph It has gotten much less ass over recent years, but yeah booting any real Linux distro on the same hardware is still generally a much nicer experience for GUI apps.

Chris Adams 3d ago

@xgranade @kevingranade @glyph @darby3 I note that Apple clearly put a lot more work into optimization: I developed on an 8GB M1 for years and it was fine as long as you didn’t use Chrome. Safari or Firefox used under half of the RAM and performed just as well, and the rest of the apps were better. The main constraint I hit were containers, which normal users won’t hit.

I don’t like a price increase but, like iPhone, it might be what it takes to get developers to be less cavalier about waste.

Darby M. Dixon III 3d ago

@acdha @xgranade @kevingranade @glyph I’ll also admit to being worried about what apps look like when cool devs yolo vibe code garbage apps into existence, I feel like there’s a real, uh, something here on the horizon

Darby M. Dixon III 3d ago

@glyph @xgranade I mean at some point it’s like that implicit promise becomes broken when they can ship macOS Lite that affords users even less potential control over their devices, but again this is me telling a story to myself that I don’t like

Franklin Delano Stallone 2d ago

@darby3 @xgranade it can edit 4k video. Imo, the problem is companies not caring about quality or performance. The embarrassing thing is most electron apps are just displaying text. Something that some times feels worse than on my pentium 75mhz pc with 8mb of ram.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1rqv5sd/i_tried_editing_4k_video_on_the_599_macbook_neo/

Franklin Delano Stallone 2d ago

@darby3 @xgranade hopefully it will make companies think more about performance but I’m not sure it’ll happen. Maybe if the Neo is big in the enterprise. Otherwise it’ll just be seen as a bonus if their app is the only that can run.

Darby M. Dixon III 2d ago

@fds @xgranade I mean we’ve known about the existence of People Having Not Fast Internet forever and we still have a totally bloated web experience out there so I’m not optimistic