HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".
Moore's Law is coming to an end. The Macbook Neo says "why choose?"
Nobody needs a laptop with a 40 hour battery life. Nor does anybody needs 200 cpu threads and an AI coprocessor and 256Gb of RAM and 8Tb of SSD. So we're finally seeing the sweet spot in the phase diagram drift inexorably towards the corner labelled "cheap".
@Salty @cstross my experience is just comparing RAM sizes is misleading, just like comparing GHz etc.
They've highly optimized it - I'd say 8GB is enough for most "normal" use cases even though that sounds surprising. So, why pay the memory tax?
I think we've been marketed into believing we need lots of RAM (also indoctrinated into believing we do by history, edge use cases and the profligate nature of some OS environments).
I don't have a Neo. But, I have a MacBook Air M1 we got as freebie when Apple first released aarch64 Arm SoCs. That's the 8GB base spec.
I assumed it'd be a poor experience when I got it. But, it works absolutely fine with multiple browsers/tabs, libre office, untitled goose game, etc - all those things that probably constitute "normal" computer use. And that is a few generations ago.
Unsurprisingly it doesn't work fine for technical tasks like building large SW stacks or hosting VMs. But, that's a way smaller cohort's use case - outside Mastodon at least!
@ebooksyearn Yes. As it happens I have a ~$500 machine from 2 years ago. Intel N100 cpu, 12Gb RAM, same size SSD: runs Linux Mint nicely, but the flip side is the battery life is about 2h30m instead of 16h. A deal-breaker, that.
Apple *somehow* squared the circle.
@cstross
So, which business models are obsoleted now that compute is a commodity?
Is it maybe the folks that scream you need AI in everything, so that more datacenters need to be build? Cant allow people to be happy on decade old hardware because that is dampening demand.
Got a cheap notebook from 'reward points' at work. I named it 'cromulence'; everything about it is (just) acceptable.
CPU is okay, screen is meh, battery life is good enough. RAM and storage were barely sufficient, but I was easily able to open it up and add RAM and a better NVME I had lying around. Of course I put Linux on it. (Those last three are not common, of course...)
That was before the Neo, which has much better specs - except I can't bump up the RAM or storage on it. 🤷
I checked hardware prices for servers yesterday, and a 16 GB DDR5 RAM module had a purchase price of €1600.
How long will "cheap" remain an option under current market conditions?
@juergen_hubert @cstross, ouch.
The last RAM which I bought (2×8GB DDR4 3200) cost about £40, though that was 2½ years ago. If the increase in price were in line with inflation, it'd be somewhere around £43 to £45 – but no. From the same supplier, it now costs £145.
Let that popping sound be heard soon…
@su_liam. Best idea ever. Loot data centers for ram for your punk compute projects. Should be a short story if not just reality. Or a standard salutation:
I’m off to loot data centers for ram for my punk compute projects. See ya
@cstross Is this not just Apple doing what other laptop manufacturers have been doing for a while? My sprogs's laptops they use for school work and playing games are a higher spec than the Neo and were cheaper.
I mean it's great that you can now enter the walled garden of a massively overrated UX for cheap, but, like most Apple products, it's nothing new or better.
Someone once said the Moore's law of software is that the number of CPU instructions it takes to add two numbers doubles every two years.
@cstross
Hey, some people actually WANT cloud compute powered pretty things with constantly spinning color wheels that can only open one ad filled tab at a time.
I don't know any of them personally, but I'm told they exist.
They probably just go to a different high school.
In Canada or something.
@cstross
Careful now - accurate or not, the "get off my lawn / back in MY day" tone is rising.
We're gonna lose support from anyone who doesn't remember configuring hardware via jumpers and frankly they've got the numbers. We need them on our side! Quick, say something about avocados!
;-)
@cstross
Ok, but joking aside we've clearly tipped on some of the icons, right?
Save as a 3.5? I'm not suggesting these things change, but I've had to explain the concept of square disks twice this school year alone.
If that's staying, then clicking it had better create a local file. Save to cloud needs something deliberately 'other'.
@phpete @cstross @Phosphenes I work with so many of them
People who genuinely believe sales pitches and hype; eagerly and proudly post copilot slop into teams
Really truly feel like companies have our best interests at heart
Agreed, we joke but many specific people in my life come to mind - I simply don't understand it.
The lack of RAM really will be a disadvantage in the next few years.
If they could have sold it with 16 or 24 GBytes then it would be an easy recommendation for a "good enough"¹ laptop for many people.
If Apple can't make that happen, then it's probably not economic, or they are engineering for rapid obsolescence and enhanced shareholder value.
The used market should be buoyant though as people upgrade to more balanced specification laptops.
Alternatively someone might come up with a replacement motherboard that fits in the Neo chassis as a drop in replacement 😉
¹ Good enough in the Jerry Pournelle sense of that phrase.
Charlie Stross
Que
Malcolm Herbert
Tubemeister
Helge Wilker
David Gerard
A stopped clock never boils
markn🚲
Kiki Buber
Jon Renaut
Joe W
Bjoern Michaelsen
SpeakerToManagers
Ray Ingles
Steven D. Brewer 🏳️⚧️
Kilroy_Was_Here
Jürgen Hubert
lp0 on fire 
su_liam
Kæmpe-bjørneklo
Oblomov
tautology
Peter
Alex UsedToGoToVenice
woe2you
Simon Zerafa (Status: 
😊)