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".
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. 🤷
Charlie Stross
Ray Ingles