Cassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

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.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

@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.

Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

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.

Show threadSnoopJMar 15
@xgranade do you mean 8 GB or *more*?
Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15

@SnoopJ No, meaning that application vendors are just fine shipping things that completely fail at the low end of tech specs.

Sorry for not being clear about that.

Show threadSnoopJMar 15
@xgranade ah, my mistake, I had your point backwards I think
Show threadCassandra is only carbon nowMar 15
@SnoopJ No worries, I didn't express it as well as I could or should have!
Show threadGlyphMar 15

@xgranade @SnoopJ yeah it's like a question of emphasis. just over-explaining for any passerby since this whole exchange is confusing :)

not "when PCs ship with 8GB *or less* of RAM…"

but "when *PCs* ship with 8GB or less of RAM…"

i.e. some random commodity vendor ships an 8GB machine, all the apps break on it, nobody cares, caveat emptor

whereas when *apple* builds a product with 8GB of RAM that is going to move 100 million units, app devs have to actually pay attention

Show threadGlyph
@xgranade @SnoopJ I actually think there's a nuance that may emerge later: these machines *do* have swap configured, and that internal storage isn't *too* bad in terms of speed, which means there's still an angle for app devs to not care where their app chugs along but is absolutely murdering the write cycles on the poor user's storage, shortening the device lifetime by years
Mar 15 at 6:44pmWeb
Show threadcthos 🐱Mar 15
@glyph @xgranade @SnoopJ 8 GB Macbook airs (M1, M2, etc) definitely exhibit this trait.
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@cthos @xgranade @SnoopJ when they did it with those models I just thought it was kinda negligent and *strongly* advised most customers (except those whose usage I knew would be unusually light) to avoid those spec levels even though they looked cheap. The neo's aggressive market segmentation actually makes me _way_ more confident that we will see mitigations and incentives that address that problem more broadly
Show threadGlyphMar 15
@xgranade @SnoopJ maybe app devs respond to the incentive and don't want users to see multi-second pauses in their UIs, but, I think there is a possibility that if this starts happening, Apple has a potential future lever: ship an OS feature that gives app store apps a swap quota. start trashing the internal SSD by being profligate with RAM use, and you get crashed by the OS or paused with a "this app dev sucks" modal until the user quits some other stuff