Mastodawn

Cassandra is only carbon now

@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.

Anyway, I still don't like Apple, I still think that *on the whole* they're net negative for computing, and severely so. But I try to also be intellectually honest and hold ~~nuanced views~~.

josh g.Mar 15

@xgranade
Intellectual honesty? In this economy??

lachlan slowly taming rust Mar 15

@xgranade But, but, but, my experience had been that nuance is dead! Everything is either all good or all bad!

Yikes, it's refreshing to see somebody else whose vision has more than 1 bit colour.

Darby M. Dixon III Mar 15

@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

@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 Mar 15

@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 Mar 15

@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.

@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.

@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

@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

@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 🐱Mar 15

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

LP🔸Light up the night Mar 15

@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

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

keithzg Mar 15

@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.

Darby M. Dixon III Mar 15

@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 Mar 16

@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 Mar 16

@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 Mar 16

@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

a wandering happenstance Mar 15

@xgranade Apple ʜᴀꜱ built a platform⸺one can build complex functionality on top of SwiftUI for a really low net cost in RAM usage (because SwiftUI is all shared code). It’s just not a cross-platform platform. That’s not their problem, though.

@joXn Yeah, it's why I pluralized vendors. Electron sucks, but I can at least target it as a platform much easier than I can target the platforms tied to macOS. Individual vendors may have their own platforms, but as you note, Apple has no interest in making theirs cross-platform platforms.

a wandering happenstance Mar 15

@xgranade I _kind of_ like the Diet Electron approach of something like Dioxus, but with Dioxus I think the AI slop exposure risk factor is super-high, making the nominative similarity to “dioxin” bitterly apt.

@joXn Tauri is another interesting one along those lines... I think there can be some interesting examples of shipping web view components along with an application, but there has to be some way of making sure that the whole UI isn't running in a full-fledged browser.

lachlan slowly taming rust Mar 15

@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.

I’m fine with this

@xgranade do you mean 8 GB or *more*?

@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.

SnoopJ Mar 15

@xgranade ah, my mistake, I had your point backwards I think

@SnoopJ No worries, I didn't express it as well as I could or should have!

@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

@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

cthos 🐱Mar 15

@glyph @xgranade @SnoopJ 8 GB Macbook airs (M1, M2, etc) definitely exhibit this trait.

@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

@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

Scott VE3QBZ Mar 15

@xgranade I agree in principle, but in my head the dialogue at Apple goes more along the lines of "_our_ apps and the services they consume will run fine in 8 GB, but Spotify? _that's_ gonna run like a dog, heehee".

But it's been so long since I've been in the orchard I don't even know if that's the case... But I would expect Apple Music to be a native app relative to the competition as an example.

I think most will simply suffer..given social and tech inertia and barriers to switching.

@scott I don't even entirely disagree, but I have complex feelings on that. I don't think Apple for one moment is doing any of this out of users' best interests — if this makes it harder for 3P services like Spotify, so much the better for Apple, as you say.

At the same time, I have zero sympathy for Spotify and others in a similar spot — they made the problem for themselves by making an incredibly inefficient app in the first place.

Scott VE3QBZ Mar 15

@xgranade Oh yeah, for sure! I have no sympathy for Electron nation, none at all.

Óscar Morales Vivó Mar 15

@scott @xgranade things can happen for more than one reason and in this case it’s probably “all of the above”

wyatt Mar 18

@xgranade i run electron stuff on a 8gb ram core 2 duo
it runs like shit but it does run, they needed to give it less than 8

Joe Brockmeier Mar 15

@xgranade @glyph my first thought about the Neo was that Apple is using an iPhone chip and amount of RAM/storage it can squeeze into an iPhone for a laptop: there’s no reason other than siphoning money out of its users not to make the iPhone a primary computing device.

Instead of the Neo they could just let the iPhone do double-duty as a desktop. Sell a USB-C Dock to connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, let the phone run full applications.

The Neo is just proof that the iPhone is artificially hobbled as a device.

@jzb @glyph I don't even entirely disagree, but I think it's also worth playing the ball where it lands: regardless of why Apple did this, what are the implications of them having done so?

Joe Brockmeier Mar 15

@xgranade @glyph I hope it does encourage app developers to think about constrained resources, of course. That would be all to the good.

The current RAMpocylpse should be an incentive as well… I’m so glad that I maxed out my main systems more than a year ago.

@jzb @glyph The problem with the RAMpocylpse (a wholly manufactured crisis, I hasten to add) is that there's still a bunch of machines out there with a lot more RAM, so developers can keep kicking the can down the road. If Apple moves a whole bunch of Neos, though, that winds up pressing the issue.

kouhai, of the health issues Mar 15

@jzb @xgranade @glyph the relevant iPhone has just 8GB of RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A19

adding more ram would increase cost by adding another sku etc etc

Apple A19 - Wikipedia

Joe Brockmeier Mar 15

@kouhai the Neo also only has 8GB of RAM.

kouhai, of the health issues Mar 16

@jzb yeah, that's my point. it's a ctrl-x ctrl-v from the A19 iPhone SOC stockpile

Glyph Mar 16

@jzb @xgranade I have mixed feelings about this. You're not *entirely* wrong, but, you kinda can hook up an iPhone to a USB dock, including keyboard, mouse, and external display, and get something sorta working. Making it work smoothly without hard-coded assumptions like "home screen is always in portrait orientation" and "biometric unlock is always FaceID" would require a ton of nontrivial software and hardware engineering to make a different device, which is… just kinda what the Neo is?

Joe Brockmeier Mar 16

@glyph @xgranade it would require nontrivial engineering, but they’re doing some of that for iPadOS already, and let’s face it: Apple is not operating on a shoestring. It can afford to do the work, it just doesn’t want to. It wants its users buying a laptop and phone.

I mean, if you polled Apple users whether they wanted a dockable phone that could run desktop apps or Liquid Glass UI refresh and Apple AI, I bet I can guess which one would win.

khm Mar 15

this is the company that sabotaged older phones with newer software releases. I have no reason to believe they won't spend a few years (re-)penetrating education and low-end markets, and then bring the ratchet back out. all your stuff is in icloud. pay up.

CC: @[email protected]

Nick Foster Mar 17

@khm @glyph lol Apple phones are the longest supported by a mile. I had to buy an android for work recently and it was *difficult* to find one that promised 5 years of security updates. Many only promised 2.

I have an iPhone 6 on my desk (released in 2014) that got a security update TODAY, for iOS 12, an OS that was technically dropped 3 years ago, but apparently this security bug was bad enough that Apple decided to push an update for it

Edit: Apparently that update was pushed in January, and I just saw it today. STILL

khm Mar 17

yeah it's important to maximize the amount of time you have available to ratfuck your customers' devices when your business model depends on them buying more devices

I'm not calling apple stupid here, I'm calling them hostile

CC: @[email protected]

Glyph Mar 17

@khm @xgranade I take it you're referring to batterygate? I think it's probably good that apple had to pay out a settlement there because I do think that they ought to be forced into a degree of transparency about what software updates are doing, but the actual meat of the lawsuit is about a tradeoff which, while it SHOULD have been explained to users, is also a setting which 99% of users really ought to have turned on

Glyph Mar 17

@khm @xgranade what the software update did was to change the behavior of the device from "when the battery is degraded to the point where it is no longer providing the necessary level of power to keep the phone running properly, instead of randomly shutting off at low-but-unpredictable charge % and losing the users' data, cap the CPU performance so it won't do that". The change would let most users keep their device *longer* and give Apple *less* money.

khm Mar 17

yes I also read their bullshit justification. weird how they're the only company who has to throttle devices to stop them from fucking themselves up, but I guess that's what it takes to convince people you're the best

between "we'll dry-gulch you behind the scenes" and "all third-party development stops when our xcode cert stack shits the bed" there's basically no combination of words that will convince me apple is anything but user-hostile

CC: @[email protected]