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.
@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.
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.
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.
@xgranade I wish there was something _like_ Electron that wasn't Electron; something like the promise of Java, where we can write one interface, and use it in the browser and multiple OSs.
I see two things that make Electron such a sodding nightmare:
1 - HTML is not good for UIs - a lot of weight is in that pile of JS that makes SPAs viable in a document format.
2 - One browser per app, and browsers are now heavy. They'd be way lighter if transparently, they could use one browser instance.
Cassandra is only carbon now
lachlan slowly taming rust