what do you call the psychological phenomenon where you hallucinate a human face onto a corporation like Apple and decide it must have goals other than profit maximization and exploitation

“the macbook neo will usher in a new age of software tinkering” cool! so they finally rereleased HyperCard?

…no? ok fine, at least they published some new developer guidelines such that developers will need to ensure their apps run great on the neo for 8 years since it’s such a performance gap from the high end macbook pro they’re using to develop, right?

…also no? oh dear, how strange. the neo is starting to look a lot like the utterly obvious: an overgrown iPad for SaaS apps

the macbook neo is a device that’s designed to normalize low-end devices as consumption-only SaaS clients. it’s the soft opening blow for the death of general purpose computing for anyone who doesn’t have a corporation’s budget for a $10k+ a pop pro laptop. the future looks like a macbook neo but more expensive, less powerful, and more locked down.

if you’re considering a macbook neo or defending the macbook neo in my replies like a fucking weirdo, please do our environment a solid and get a used device that’ll outperform the neo instead

if available, a surplus thinkpad running linux will knock your fucking socks off, I guarantee it. it is the repairable, tinkerable, cozy system you imagine the neo must be.

believe it or not you don’t need to buy a brand new device that’s, by both its spec sheet and benchmarks, less performant than a 2020 MacBook Air, in the opening stages of a global economic depression

you don’t actually owe these capitalists your attention, your free advertising, or your money. they do not give a shit that you’ll be the goodest little consumer and use your neo to make cozy little indie games and ssh into servers and program mcus and post on fedi. you’re invisible to them.

gimme some of that ✨apple magic✨ that makes a 6 year old device a miserable experience but a new device with worse specs and benchmarks than the 6 year old device somehow wonderful until 2034

what do you mean the magic is that it’s built for apple intelligence and other SaaS horseshit and as an entry-level market wedge for Apple’s take on adobe’s horrifically exploitative Creative Cloud suite

it’s almost like 8GB RAM, non-expandable, split between the CPU and GPU, is the absolute minimum needed to make the trainwreck that is Liquid Glass macOS run at all and Apple isn’t planning on changing any of their development practices for an entry level device
@zzt tim apple knows his users are part of the cult now. they'll buy anything, overpay for the privilege, and praise Apple for inventing it, too.
feels like this Apple NEO thing is going to be ewaste so fast. nobody should be allowed to sell computers with 8 gb of ram ONLY. too little for what people expect.
@tootbrute It still feels insane to me that to some people, 8gb of ram seems like nothing. I have machines running right now with less than that, and they're performing just fine.

@tyil me too, but for normies trying to raw dog youtube inside of chrome without ad blockers or pihole it's going to be slow.

i have a machine with 4 gb of ram running Nixbook.

this neo thing is going to feel fast for 1 year and then, it will feel slow and 'old'.

@tootbrute Maybe normies should feel the slowness of the garbage that gets peddled to them. Maybe if normies would, for once, feel the effects of the garbage they've been giving up their money, privacy, and self-respect for, some of them might for once think about their actions.

I don't think rewarding idiots with ever expensive hardware to do stupid shit is the way to go. We've tried it for a couple decades, and things only get worse.

@tyil true. anyone buying a NEW computer with only 8gb of ram is asking for trouble and not really buying a computer that will last them for the next 5-10 years. the learned helplessness of computer users is not good.

i can't wait until users start complaining that their new mac is slow. should be fun.