Mastodawn

Pete Wildsmith Mar 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.

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.

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

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.

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!!!"

Cliff'sEsportCorner Mar 15

@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

@glyph
I want to add that the larger the brand of the reviewer (of themselves or a company they do it for) is, the farther they are from their audience, the less they understand what's important and what's not. Thus "the content" moves away from daily needs and budgets, like those who stream their competitive gaming with a rigs mire expensive than an average car.
And that goes about anything - phones, laptops, shoes, furniture, leisure, whatever.

cthos 🐱Mar 15

@glyph I’m just slightly shocked at how replaceable the battery is.

Also global supply chain collapse something something.

@cthos the shocking level of repairability also makes sense for a K-12 device. half of these things are going to be christened by a curious first grader pouring an entire bottle of coca cola on them to see what happens

@cthos honestly that's the one thing I expected but did not see; I really thought that they'd give it an IP rating

Dan Sugalski Mar 15

@glyph @cthos I haven’t looked at the tear downs yet but I remember finding out that apple had, in fact, considered the “what happens if some dolt spills half a cup of coffee in his keyboard” case with the old white plastic MacBooks (the ones you could drop down stairs) and designed it so that the keyboard sat in a little water tight tray with the cable hole at the front top — coffee would pool in and if you lifted it up it’d just spill out safely. I suspect they’ve done the same with this one.

Dan Sugalski Mar 15

@glyph @cthos not that I spilled multiple coffees on that machine. Or dropped it down stairs while in a backpack definitely not.

Dan Sloan Mar 17

@cthos @glyph This is on brand for apple; they’ll lobby to fight regulations like any other big tech, but once it passes or if it’s clear where things are going, they’ll get out ahead of it and turn it into a virtue (and then usually start telling people how great they are for adding this thing they were legally required to 😁). The European Union Batteries Regulation comes into effect in 2027.

Joe 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.)

@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

Joe 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.

@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.

@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

@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

@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

@swelljoe in closing, I could beat Casey Muratori in a fist fight

⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️Mar 15

@glyph they've promised the kernel might. If not, they pay off the law suit. Meanwhile if they need Foo and it's 16 gig footprint, will just fork the OS

Dan Sloan Mar 17

@glyph As a former product manger, some of the most impressive outcomes I saw in software dev work was under significant limitations - there’s at least some research out there backing this up, that constraints drive innovative thinking and designs.

So I’m cautiously hopeful that at least some software vendors might improve their apps quite a bit if they set this as their min spec (which I suspect they’re going to need to do if they want that education market share)

liz ten eleven Mar 15

@glyph also like, it’ll probably play minecraft just fine. and that’s what counts for a LOT of people lol

Cassandrich Mar 15

@glyph I mean you can get a very-decent-for-gaming Asus laptop with minimal crapware on it for half that price still. I do agree it's a big deal tho, and expect you're right.

@dalias yeah my point is not that the $300 laptop segment is going away, or that you can't squeeze more FPS out of a cheaper rig with some bargain hunting. my point is that "$300 asus laptop" is not a sufficiently homogenous platform target that developers will bother testing against it, but "macbook neo" is going to be a spec floor that developers care a LOT about for economic reasons, and will test on directly

Cassandrich Mar 15

@glyph I think that's a very solid take.

@glyph I, and many other people, predicted this. I for one am happy to see the rise of the potato computer. Let’s hope developers get smarter about resource usage.

(I say as many developers are getting demonstrably stupider.)

Rachael L Mar 15

@glyph I hadn't looked into this at all till you toot about it. So omg a laptop that (a) isn't windows and (b) relatively inexpensive?! My school exposure to PCs was ... Apple. The schools now it's all Windows and EVERYTHING is cloud stuff and in your face MS shit (including "AI" all the things). This at least looks like it's a "normal" macos machine really?

@r343l it is indeed a fully normal mac. 8GB of RAM is a bit constrained for the things that I generally want to do, but I stopped by an Apple store last night and had to practically pry my 8-year-old's hands off its demo version of Angry Birds Bounce with a crowbar to get them out of there after the store was already closed. (This kid has a far more powerful computer already but they did not care because theirs is not yellow.)

Rachael L Mar 15

@glyph Also as noted in other replies, having a constrained mac might induce some discipline on developers. I conspiratorially sometimes think that the entire reason the industry is allowed to be so flagrantly inefficient is just so chip makers can be propped up by ever bigger CPUs and memory "minimum requirements". 8GB is SO MUCH.

But definitely get kiddos liking their colors! Kiddo recently got new devices and she spent a lot of time caring about colors. 😂

@r343l I have a distinct memory of standing around in a room of IT staff when I was about 15, listening to them talk about how Solaris 2.5 required 96 megabytes of RAM to run, and how this was a _ridiculous_ imposition that would require them to turn hundreds of perfectly usable Sparc IPCs into e-waste. Literally laughing about the poor engineering on display, talking about how this would be the decision that killed Sun Microsystems.

(This is not the decision that killed Sun Microsystems.)

@r343l In retrospect, "what a bunch of dummies, this stupid decision is going to require us to buy millions of dollars of new hardware from them and throw out the old ones" is not a take that aged super well, but certainly *at the time* it seemed super reasonable to everyone involved, myself included

Rachael L Mar 15

@glyph Insert long discourse on how people who deal with tech at a direct level are pretty bad at seeing non-technical aspects ...

@glyph
Ya, I was talking to a friend about this and basically said, "Sure, if you can afford thousands of dollars for a top spec Macbook Pro, get that, but for everyone else this is amazing because it's a *REAL COMPUTER* that can do basically everything."

Hynek Schlawack Mar 15

@glyph so is it good or not

@hynek gaming was dead the whole time

jacobian Mar 15

@glyph It’s so hilarious how out of touch they are. Right now my only question is how many I’m going to buy - at least two! They’re going to sell millions.

@jacob Agreed! But on a personal level, I am really curious—will those be for kids or do you have another use case?

jacobian Mar 16

@glyph One for me to replace my iPad (I have a desktop for most work, the iPad was an experiment to see if I liked it for travel and I sort of do but miss a laptop I can use on my lap), one for my dad to replace a Chromebook that he hates, and then probably one for my wife to replace her current computer (an Intel MacBook that’s doing ok but getting pretty beat up)

@jacob thanks, those are all interesting data points! I would have figured an Air would have slotted into those use-cases more neatly but I guess the Neo is a *little* cheaper & more portable

jacobian Mar 16

@glyph Yes and also - colors!

Nik Kantar Mar 16

@jacob @glyph The colors alone have me wondering if I could eventually replace my Portable Star Destroyer (16" M1 Pro Max w/ 64GB) with one! 😍

(I’ll probably chicken out and get at least an Air if not a smaller, lower spec Pro, but it’s nice to dream.)

Sebastian Lauwers Mar 16

@jacob @glyph Yeah, I’m most likely not replacing my iPad when it kicks the bucket. I simply don’t have enough use for it.

tbf, I got it when I didn’t have a laptop, and it was a great note taking and productivity/slideshow device at clients.

@glyph this means m1 MacBook airs will not go obsolete for well over a decade

@Nfoonf here’s hoping!

Don Whiteside Mar 15

@glyph I cut my teeth on an Atari 2600 and now that I am in my 50s I have gear in my house to play games I could never have dreamed of. There's a PS5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Oculus Quest 2 in our family room that are more gaming capable than anything I could wish for and render video that beats things I watched in the theater in my 20s.

My 13 and 8 year old would rather play stuff on their ipads which is outclassed by the old Reboot tv show.

The neo will satisfy most modern game players.

Andrew Godwin Mar 15

@glyph I got one just for fun (I need at least one Mac around after the old Mini died) and it's just... a very reasonable computer. Even ran a little Linux VM just fine.