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 threadCliff'sEsportCorner
@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
Mar 15 at 6:41pmWeb