> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself.
I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.
I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.
When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.
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tombert
When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i video.
I still made it work. I got pretty good at reading the waveform preview, and was able to use that to figure out where to do cuts. I would apply effects and walk through frame by frame with the arrow keys to see how it looked. It usually took all night (and sometimes a bit of the next day) to render videos into 1080i, but it would render and the resulting videos would be fine.
Eventually I got a job and saved up and bought a decent CPU and GPU and editing got 10x easier, but I still kind of look back on the time of me having to make my shitty computer work with a certain degree of fondness. When you have a decent job with decent money you can buy the equipment you need to do most tasks, but there's sort of a purity in doing a task that you really don't have the equipment you need.
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delis-thumbs-7e
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why.
”Mrs. Jonson, the result are back. You son has autism.”
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haritha-j
I don't think this is about the macbook neo. I don't think the comments need to devolve into a mac vs. linux argument. It's simply an ode to that kid pushing hardware to the limits, and learning so much along the way.
What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.
Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. I've swapped out the endless tinkerability of android with the vanilla 'it just works'-ness of the iphone. That curiosity took me far, but I seem to have lost it along the way.
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TheDong
> The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.
Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook.
The Macbooks don't let have an officially supported path to unlocking the bootloader (edit: yes, I'm aware of asahi linux, which lives on the edge of what apple allows) and install your own OS. The Chromebooks do. I don't think that comparison plays as favorably as you think.
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moregrist
> He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes.
This hits home. Not because I did it as a kid; I'm a bit old for that. But because I've done this exact thing two or three times. You stare and know, just know, that somewhere in this byzantine interface there is the raw power to do lots of cool 3D stuff. But damn. It's quite an interface.
> That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.
Yeah. For me it was an old, beat-up 286 that I couldn't get anyone to upgrade and and loving devotion to MS-DOS, old EGA Sierra games, TSR programs, TUIs, GeoWorks, and just not being able to get enough of it.
When I finally saved up enough to buy a 486 motherboard, I installed Linux because it seemed cool (and was cool) and never looked back. But that 286 sparked my obsession with computers that has influenced almost every aspect of my life.
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amadeuspagel
This article is a strange combination of defending the macbook neo from stupid attacks, and making similarly stupid attacks on the chromebook, with no self-awareness (unless there's some level of irony I'm missing here, which, come to think of it, might well be the case).
Chromebooks have a linux VM where you can install anything, including GUI apps, and doing that is much more straightforward then installing something from the web on a mac. Download, right-click, install on linux. No scary warnings. No need to go to system settings.
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jayd16
The Neo seems kind of nice but I don't really see how it's more significant than "a nice low end computer." The article reads like its fire from Olympus but a nicer screen and trackpad is only incrementally better than what was available in Chromebooks and cheap PCs.
Personally I think a the Steam Machine will have a better chance to cheat a general computing device into the home of someone not looking for it. The Neo gives me hope on price point.
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NikolaNovak
1. This is the most optimistic, inspirational thing I've read in months :)
2. Are there kids like that still?? I would love to think so. None of the kids in my circle of parents are. There is one teenager who's going into computer science because they are smart and love math, which is great, but they never built or explored or been curious about anything on their computer as far as I can tell. There is a big ecosystem of wish fulfilment and instant gratification, and I think (right) limitations like the author insinuated are part of the allure.
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officeplant
> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.
As someone who lived on a chromebook for fun because it was a cheap way to get a browser machine that also had Linux access. I don't really get this. You can run blender on a chromebook as soon as you turn on the linux container. It will run even better if you install linux on it after a quick firmware flash.
If it's locked down by a school that's not really the chromebooks fault, schools are gonna lock down Macbook Neos via management policy the exact same way.
mbgerring
He’s right. I built a hackintosh from a PowerMac G4 motherboard I bought off of eBay with my saved-up babysitting money when I was 12 or 13 because I was absolutely desperate to have a machine I could edit movies with, I couldn’t afford a real Mac, and I read on the internet somewhere that this was the cheapest way to get one. I knew lots of older brothers who were “into” computers (all of them for gaming) that thought I was an idiot, because building my own mac made everything ten times harder. I didn’t care. I was obsessed.
This is a $599 computer with purpose-built architecture for (barely) running (small, underpowered, near-useless) LLMs. There are children saving pennies for this machine that will do great, horrifying, dangerous things with these computers. I can’t wait to see the results.
Agentlien
I remember this period of my own life. I had taken over my father's old 486 and spent my days and evenings trying to learn the basics of programming in C. I was making silly text based games, dreaming I'd one day be creating the game of my dreams. I also modded games by opening every content file and trying to figure out what they did and how I could modify them. I was still years from realizing game development was a career and not just a hobby.
I had replaced all the Windows sounds and cursors to customize the system so it looked and sounded like a Sci Fi system. I even patched the boot screen to be a humorous screen of "MS Broken Windows". It also was quite broken from messing with system files I didn't understand.
It was a magical period and I learned so much.
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sghiassy
I appreciate the article and agree. If you have a desire to learn computers, just get your hands on whatever you can and learn.
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ChrisMarshallNY
> They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.
Love the spirit of the post.
As a high school dropout, with a GED, I’ve spent my entire adult life, looking up noses. I chose a career jammed to bursting, with sheepskins, because I really enjoy doing tech. Not because I wanted to make money, or because I wanted to be a big shot.
My first ever program, was in the 1970s, some time. It was a Heathkit programmable calculator. My first ever ”serious” program, was Machine Code, typed into a 6800-based STD card, nailed to a piece of wood, with a hex keypad, and an 8-digit LED display. My first personal computer, was a VIC-20, with 3KB of RAM. My first Apple computer was a Mac Plus, with 4MB of RAM, and an external 20MB SCSI hard drive.
Learning on limited resources helps us to become frugal and efficient. It also helps us to become tough as hell. Some of the best engineers I ever worked with, had rough backgrounds.
These days, I use a pretty maxed-out Mini, and an LG ultrawide screen. I’m spoiled.
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jonplackett
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it
10 year old me identifies with this so much.
I managed to get the computer to display 256 colours instead of the 16 it had been set up with. Everyone was impressed and this meant I was now allowed to take the computer apart and put it back together again without anyone being scared.
oleggromov
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes.
Brilliant. Thank you for that.
orbital-decay
>Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.
Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this and installs Blender on it is WAY more likely to save up for any janky terrible half-working PC laptop with a bit better specs (memory in particular), or a desktop computer if possible, because A. games B. Linux C. piracy and more software D. he does not care about it being Apple or "just working", in the words of the author himself. I don't know how the US kids in particular feel about this since the reality distortion field is so strong, but anywhere else it's like this.
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ferguess_k
For young people out there, it is better to build a desktop gig instead of a laptop. You can't change much in a laptop, unless it is some legacy laptops, but definitely not a Mac. Parents should help their kids to build a 16GB Linux gig. It's going to be more expensive than $599 nowadays due to the price of everything, but still, it is very expansible, and the kid can earn $$ and decide which parts he wants to upgrade.
BTW a laptop is definitely the only choice if the kid wants mobility, though.
palla89
I loved every word of this article, I went back in time and felt again with my Pentium III 500 Mhz trying to hack everything out, like changing the splash screen of Windows 98 SE while loading just to feel I did it!
These things were the ones that led me to this passion and that today, with LLMs and almost only business applications to develop for the sake of living, feel like the magic is finally fading.
God I miss the old times! (I'm 36 yo but I feel like 70 in this specific moment!)
deepsquirrelnet
Interesting read! I love to see this spirit. I grew up with a different - but similar experience. Only, as an 80s and 90s kid, computers were nothing but limitations. Even when my dad built a machine with a 133MHz Cyrix chip, already a year later, it was outdated by computers with literally double the computing power.
That Cyrix machine was already miles ahead of the 386 that was handed down to me to play text based games on and learn dos through hard knocks. I remember leafing through old hard drives that had 10mb of capacity and realizing they had no value despite not being that old.
Later in college, I had the confidence to build my own first desktop with parts cobbled together from sketchy resellers. Athlon A1 single core 1ghz. Man that thing could fly.
dwd
Sometimes I feel privileged for being in the generation that learnt to program BASIC on a C64 when it was the coolest thing around at the time. Being that much closer to the metal is a whole different experience of learning what a computer is and can do.
Is that even possible now? Probably not. Years ago I tried to get my kids interested in playing with their own Raspberry Pi when they came out, that they could do whatever they wanted with on the side, to little effect. Not even the idea of setting one up as their own Minecraft server (they were heavily into it at the time) piqued their interest. Oh well.
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umarniz
Talking about staring at interfaces, I got my first Pentium computer when I was 7 in a village in Pakistan. I spent all day fooling around and accidently stumbled upon quick basic. Having nothing to do I learnt how to code because the help menu listed all the commands and the interpreter gave errors when I did something wrong.
With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.
Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.
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SoftTalker
> This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
That kid will be much better off with a used laptop and Linux or BSD.
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randallsquared
I'm sorry to say that those kids are a lot fewer and farther between than they were even 15 years ago, and much, much fewer than 30+ years ago.
When I was working my most recent corporate job (as a people manager, natch) there were new hires even in 2019 that had never owned a computer that wasn't a phone, and just used whatever laptop or other system was supplied by their school or (now) work. This experience blackpilled me a little, I will say.
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easygenes
I liked this not because it's a good story. It is, but that's beside the point. I liked this because it's my story. Not literally so, but the shape of it is. He's struck a nerve at the heart of growing up eager and curious and seeing a computer as a pathway to your dreams.
bichiliad
I’ve never had a post hit me with nostalgia as hard as this one. Thanks to the author for capturing what it felt like to be a stupid little kid with a weird old computer so well.
GameOfKnowing
This is true but also not at all the point of a review. Some tools are better suited for some tasks— reviews help those with the privilege of choice find the best ones for them. Otherwise you’d have a review of a hammer saying “this is a great tool for driving screws if you’re not afraid to get cREaTive with it!” Folks who need to make do with what they have already know about their constraints.
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Shalomboy
Outstanding article; I'm glad you put these thoughts into words and published them because I've felt similarly this week since I've had time and reason to reminisce on my 2010 MacBook. I had AutoCAD on that poor little computer, working at the pace it could handle.
forinti
Apple has turned computers into luxury items. They are not simply computers, there is some status and image projection involved.
As a hacker and tinkerer I could never justify the cost of purchasing one of their machines, but I see people around me trying to sell their old Apple machines and phones at absurd prices (I do live in a peripheral economy and Apple stuff is even more expensive here).
So it makes sense for Apple to segment its market like that. It makes sense for their audience too.
When I shop for a car, I find the same issue: most analyses have very little to do with the car's technical attributes and there's a lot of gibberish about design and lifestyle.
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jrochkind1
John Gruber used it for a day and found it was actually totally adequate, or better, for his actual daily work.
> But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.
I think people are assuming it's going to be a worse experience than it actually is. I don't know how it does it with 8GB of RAM either, but apparently it does; i suppose my guess would be SSD and bus are fast enough that swapping on app change is no longer so disruptive? (I don't know if improvements in virtual memory swap logic could also be a thing that matters or not, this is not my area).
mnky9800n
In high school we had a g3 Mac that we got Final Cut Pro on. It took forever to render a minute or two of video. But having a nonlinear editing system that took forever to do anything was way better than not having anything at all.
Edit: for true self embarrassment purposes you can see some of the films we made here:
I put the start times at my movies. But there are others as well. lol.
maguay
My first computer was a hand-me-down Compaq LTE laptop, several times removed from the original owner, with a 700MB hard drive and Windows 95 a decade after those were leading-edge specs. It had only Word and Access, of all things, and little room for more.
But it was mine, I tinkered with it forever, learned databases enough to turn Access into a basic quasi-Excel for my needs, cataloged things that really didn't need to be tabulated, and generally learned as much as that little machine would let me.
That was a limited computer, one that couldn't possibly have let me do what I needed to do when I hit university. But it got me started, taught me to tinker, and I'm prety sure pushed me to learn more than a state-of-the-art for the time computer would have.
And so I do wonder, at times, if it's the nostalgic look back at early computing that makes people inclined to say "my god that would have been an amazing computer to start out with" when you look at an entry-level computer. I'm inclined, even, to say man that's going to be an epic $100 computer on the second-hand market in a half decade or less.
When at the same time, it's actually a solid machine for more of us than us geeks with our inflated expectations of computers have than we'd like to accept. That, too, is pretty cool.
zahlman
My daily driver has a CPU less than half as powerful and a motherboard that doesn't even support DDR4 RAM.
raw_anon_1111
I had no personal computer for years except what only served as my Plex Server until I took it down.
I bought a 16GB M2 MacBook Air after I was Amazoned to work on a side contract when I was between jobs. I used it for four weeks and the only thing I ran on it was VSCode, Safari and Zoom. I would have been fine with the MacBook Neo. Right now with a job, it’s about the same - we use GSuite in a browser.
aenis
When I was 6, I got a Commodore PLUS/4, which was Commodore's unsuccessful attempt at a business-oriented 8 bit computer. I think my folks wanted to give me a Commodore 64, but things happen. Since there were not nearly as many games on that thing, I learned to program early. It had a build in assembler/disassembler (shift-reset would reset the computer without wiping the memory - just the first byte of the program memory), so I learned how to reverse engineer assembly code before I was 10. This arguably "wrong tool" shaped my whole life, and was maybe the most important thing that happened to me. If I got a C64, I could have easily turned into someone else.
kruffalon
> He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it.
I'm still this person today :)
f055
You learn the most from failure and the least from success. Likewise, you grow the most from pushing through the limits and the least from living in abundance. You can do pretty much anything on a full spec Mac Studio, but so can anyone else with a lot of money. But if you push through the limit of a MacBook Neo, you just did something no one else was able to do. And that is awesome.
maxvij
I absolutely loved reading this, bring back memories. I was that kid too.
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oveja
This reminds me of learning linux and cli commands because an old netbook with like 512 of ram was struggling with modern guis and web browsers. So I used a minimal i3 installation and interacted mostly with a terminal.
andai
Main machine is a $50 Thinkpad.
I haven't used a computer more recent than 2016. As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm missing is AAA gaming (RTX looks cool), and local LLMs.
I did a bunch of game jams on it. Even won one! (Of course, even 2010s hardware is overkill for 2d games :)
I also did some basic video editing on it but it was a bit slow to render.
I won't say I'm not missing out — I'm certainly looking forward to an upgrade! — but that you can get surprisingly far with surprisingly little.
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teekert
"I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny."
If I'd see that on my kids' computer it would fill me with pride.
I do miss the days that a (Linux) computer was like this for me. I say Linux because I had a similar obsession with FOSS and what it meant in a broad sense. But it doesn't matter, before that I de-compiled some program to make the text on the Windows START button different. Re-installed Win 2000 about every week, often after f-ing it up. Before that I changed some lines in DOS' autoexe.bat so it would ask for a password (which was just 2 input parameters readable in the autoexec.bat, but that is some mighty fine security (through obscurity) in a normie family).
samename
This article struck a nerve. There's something about the curiosity of tinkering around in a computer. It's the most powerful technology humankind has built. It's versatile. It lets you break it. It's a bicycle for the mind, as Steve Jobs would say.
May all the hackers out there, old and young, discover the beauty of the personal computer.
_glass
When doing my Bachelor degree my dad gave me an old thinkpad to run on linux. It was a horrible experience for preparing powerpoints, papers, etc. But I still have that command line muscle memory and an eye to spot errors which really helped me in my career. In my final year I bought myself a macbook because I earned real money doing a consulting internship. But the unix muscle memory stayed, and I found working with IDEs so wasteful. In my first years at my job I rejected word and excel still to do everything in groff and awk.
raincole
What's so special about this machine? Is there no comparable $599 Windows or Linux laptop for kids to buy?
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martwyymem
I could 100% agree, putting up with i5-4210u and geforce 840m for twelve years. Making stupid shit, ditching Windows for Linux to gain any usability. Editing videos in too high resolutions. I taught myself being patient with electronics and it's the thing I couldn't have taught any other way.
clouedoc
Same. I got a crazy old Ubuntu desktop when I was 9 or something. It couldn’t run any games and that’s why I learned Python. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I had a machine capable of running Minecraft at the time…
NamlchakKhandro
> Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory.
This is why you should grow your own trees and wait a million years and melt the silicon into nvidia gpus and install linux.
learn linux.
only sanfran idealists dreaming of a world that destroys them use apple products.
m000
A key point that TFA misses (probably for the sake of story-telling) is that, unlike the 2006 iMac the author fondly remembers of, MacBook Neo is not a hand-me-down computer.
It is not the proverbial gift horse. You are paying fresh $ for it. So, it is only reasonable to have some baseline expectations on redeeming value from it.
Also, an important point of the MacBook Neo criticism is that because of its cut-down features, a Neo may never graduate to a "hand-me-down computer", but instead head straight to the e-waste pile.
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monocularvision
This post reminds me of a 14-year old boy reading the MS-DOS manual to figure out what AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS at his younger brother’s football games.
elfly
Dunno about Xcode, but if you put a go compiler in there, I doubt it will compile or run slowly. Some dependencies may require C, but you could avoid that mostly.
moondowner
> He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song.
As a kid I just loved playing around in Reason (1 or 2?) and making strange sounds and just flipping the racks around and trying to connect the cables in any jack possible, to see what happens.
I would open one of the demo songs, to 'learn' how these racks were wired, and then experimented.
Good old memories.
Kids nowadays need those type of experiences too.
cjfd
There are also some funny humorous pieces on this site.
lxgr
My first computer was a Palm m100 with 2 MB of RAM. No persistent storage. (I once lost all my data when changing batteries a bit too slowly.)
I’m optimistic that kids will continue ignoring adults telling them what is and isn’t “reasonable” with this hardware and that software and just have fun!
bitmasher9
I hope they sell so many of these, because the Mac ecosystem is just better for learning about computers then what most young people use daily.
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Animats
Not enough memory -> can't do it.
Not enough CPU -> can do it, but it's slow.
(Ubuntu with the OOM killer - could do it, but when it filled half of memory, it was killed.)
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DGAP
I fear this kind of experimentation will soon by killed by ai.
holliplex
It's an interesting slip, given the premise of the article, that this hypothetical child is assumed to be a boy.
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PaulHoule
"A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that"
But seriously, if you go to school today they will make a point to put you on the slowest, weakest Chromebook available because they're terrified that you're going to play Krunker.
The result is you become an adult and you'll never buy a Chromebook. It's the same way that being bullied on the schoolbus means you become an adult who'll never ride public transit.
will sell you a desktop computer for around $150 (e.g. four of them for the price of a Neo) which will put an enterprising young person on a much better path to learn about computers than the Neo ever will.
Now you might say I'm being Orwellian but I really think Swift/XCode/iOS is "slavery" and the web platform is "freedom". I mean dev tools are fully competitive for the web platform, I can write my application once and run it on desktop and phone and tablet and VR headset and game consoles and all sorts of things I don't even know about it. I never have to ask permission if I want to deploy an app or update it. I don't have to pay anyone 30% of my revenue.
erelong
Used thinkpad or mini pc seems more practical
kelvinjps10
For this kind of experience I would recommend just buying a Thinkpad t480 you can buy for 200$ and install a Linux distro like Linux mint and then something more challenging like arch Linux
jameszog
I like the cut of you jib! If you lived around the corner, we’d have a coffee.
You nailed it.
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sarbanharble
If one doesn’t know how to play the violin, they can make a Stradivarius sound like crap.
esafak
The hacker is strong in this one. Keep it up.
sudo_cowsay
Learning to make use of limited resources is truly rewarding.
michaelhoney
This was lovely, I appreciated reading it
dhruv3006
You can run blender on a Chromebook using the Linux environment.
TurdF3rguson
I like how these days you have to say things like: "fuck-ass system modification" just to prove you're not AI.
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DonHopkins
>What Apple put inside the Neo is the complete behavioral contract of the Mac.
I remember seeing and using my first powerbook 160 and being blown away that it had the "complete behavior contract of the Mac" that I knew at the time. Even the 16 shades of gray screen made it more luxurious than a classic black-and-white Mac.
And the "What's on Your Powerbook" ads, with Todd Rundgren and Rev. Don Doll, SJ.
>Todd also co-developed graphic tablet software with a music theme for Apple in a technology venture in the late eighties. With Dave Levine, he designed and developed a screensaver product called Flowfazer (see example of one of the screensavers below), with the strapline “Music for the Eye.” They introduced it at MacWorld thinking they would publish it themselves, but found there was already well-funded competition with Berkeley Systems Flying Toasters and were forced to abandon the project.
glimshe
I used to run POV-Ray on my pathetic AMD 386 clone. A simple render took 20 hours and yet I did it.
croes
Can you use an apple notebook without an apple account?
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waynesonfire
Depending on your process, there is nothing wrong starting with this tool (Neo) first. It's a classic dilemma. For your first tool, buy the cheapest one possible to get the job done. Once the tool becomes understoond, it's limits reached, it's place in the process discovered, then, buy the most expensive one you can afford.
The Neo is the right first tool for many people.
Forgeties79
A little dramatic in tone but loved it all the same. I really do remember what it felt like to work on a “machine” as a kid. The family dell lol hit all sorts of walls but learned a lot.
JohnTHaller
I don't get the folks referring to this as a "Chromebook killer". Chromebooks start at around US$150 new. The MacBook Neo is 4 times the price at US$599. There are premium Chromebooks like the Chromebook Plus line that are more in the Neo price range, but those aren't the ones being bought for schools and such. Doesn't make the Neo a bad thing, of course, I think it's a solid basic laptop from the reviews.
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dangus
I like the sentiment expressed here, but on this note, I think there are other dangers to consider listening to early reviewers:
- Reviewers do get early access and often are receiving units AND doing their tests, writing their script, recording, and editing their videos before regular users can even possibly get a system shipped in. At best this rushes them where they miss details (e.g., few reviewers noticed that the MacBook Pro 14" M5 keyboard is different hardware then what you got on the M4 Pro because so much content is rushed)
- Reviewers are almost never experts on what street prices look like because they are focused on reviewing, getting content out ASAP. They are not spending time monitoring pricing with only a few exceptional channels doing so.
- The best marketing machine companies like Apple absolutely groom the review ecosystem without even needing to tell reviewers what to do directly. It's a competitive landscape of self-made YouTubers who are susceptible to positive reinforcement from the industry. i.e., companies don't have to tell reviewers to censor themselves, they can instead use positive reinforcement to select which reviewers are getting the best access and privileges.
Now, about the computer itself: related to the way the author of this article talks about the MacBook Neo, about the role of a cheap computer to just try have a working computer that is able to get some stuff done: this is the kind of thing that should likely steer you AWAY from this MacBook Neo that initially looked so exciting.
If you're considering a ~$500-750 computer, well, not only should you be checking the used market, but also, actually look at the competition to this thing.
The reactions I've seen from regular people seems to be, basically, "wow, Apple pulled off an incredible feat, they've disrupted the computer market again!"
Well, let's pump the brakes. First off, realize the Neo is making a lot of the same trade-offs that budget laptops have been doing for years. They aren't even giving you a backlit keyboard! The lower model cuts out biometric auth! There's no haptic trackpad, which used to be a major differentiator for Apple! It comes with a tiny slow charger! The battery life is actually not that good under load/bright screen because the battery is tiny! The CPU is old/slower/low power biased! These are all the classic cheap laptop tradeoffs that give PC manufacturers a LOT of room to actually compete really well against the Neo.
On top of that, almost every cheapo Windows laptop on the market is going to deliver to you a computer with at least a replaceable SSD. Usually RAM is soldered but it's not impossible to find that as something you can upgrade as well even on consumer-ish stuff that isn't just an old ThinkPad.
Actually spend the time to jump on some retailer websites like Best Buy and take a look at what the street prices look like.
There are multiple computers on there that make way more sense for someone budget constrained than a MacBook Neo.
My two favorites, one at a lower price and one at a higher price:
Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 2K OLED Touchscreen Laptop, AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 2025 - 16GB memory, 512GB SSD, $679. This is a proper mid-range laptop and not just some cheap bottom of the barrel model in the lineup. To gain an OLED touchscreen, double the RAM, and the same storage as the highest Neo model at the same price, this is just great all around. I'm pretty sure these get very respectable battery life as well.
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15.3" touchscreen snapdragon X, 16GB memory, 256GB storage, $549. With this model, you get a lot of the same ARM benefits that Apple is giving you. Sure, Windows on ARM is not the kind of polished native experience as a Mac, but we are just talking about a cheap laptop that works and, generally, everything you want to do in Windows will work on an ARM system. Once again, you're getting doubled RAM, which is important, and you're going to gain a touch screen, numpad, and possibly even beat out the Neo's battery life.
Another option is the HP OmniBook X Flip 2-in-1, a little less of a good value than the above, but it's another 16GB/512GB option that slides under $700.
show comments
lapcat
In my opinion, this article looks like a straw man argument, and the author appears to completely misinterpret "This is not the computer for you."
Such a statement needs to be understood in the relevant context. It's not intended to discourage kids from buying a Mac! Rather, it's intended to rebut critics who are already Mac owners and who scoff at the MacBook Neo technical specs, such as RAM. The computer is indeed not for them, people who can already afford a MacBook Pro, for example. The point of "This is not the computer for you" is the opposite of how the author characterized it: the point is that the MacBook Neo and its specs are actually fine for the people who are going to buy one.
For some strange reason, the author has invented an imaginary opponent to become offended by. We're supposed to cheer for the kids here, and I see that many people have fallen for it, but the whole schtick falls completely flat for me. The kids were never endangered or discouraged by the reviews of the MacBook Neo.
show comments
SuperHeavy256
Thank you thank you thank you for writing this. This made me smile and feel like shedding a tear. This is exactly how I felt when I watched the Dave2D video of the MacBook Neo, and other "reviews" that miss the entire point. This captures the point. The other reviews capture specs. This captures the emotion. This captures the reality.
everyone
" I faked being sick to watch WWDC 2011 — Steve Jobs’ last keynote — and clapped alone in my room when the audience clapped, and rebuilt his slides in Keynote afterward because I wanted to understand how he’d made them feel that way."
> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself.
I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.
I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.
When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.
When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i video.
I still made it work. I got pretty good at reading the waveform preview, and was able to use that to figure out where to do cuts. I would apply effects and walk through frame by frame with the arrow keys to see how it looked. It usually took all night (and sometimes a bit of the next day) to render videos into 1080i, but it would render and the resulting videos would be fine.
Eventually I got a job and saved up and bought a decent CPU and GPU and editing got 10x easier, but I still kind of look back on the time of me having to make my shitty computer work with a certain degree of fondness. When you have a decent job with decent money you can buy the equipment you need to do most tasks, but there's sort of a purity in doing a task that you really don't have the equipment you need.
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why.
”Mrs. Jonson, the result are back. You son has autism.”
I don't think this is about the macbook neo. I don't think the comments need to devolve into a mac vs. linux argument. It's simply an ode to that kid pushing hardware to the limits, and learning so much along the way.
What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.
Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. I've swapped out the endless tinkerability of android with the vanilla 'it just works'-ness of the iphone. That curiosity took me far, but I seem to have lost it along the way.
> The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.
Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook.
The Macbooks don't let have an officially supported path to unlocking the bootloader (edit: yes, I'm aware of asahi linux, which lives on the edge of what apple allows) and install your own OS. The Chromebooks do. I don't think that comparison plays as favorably as you think.
> He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes.
This hits home. Not because I did it as a kid; I'm a bit old for that. But because I've done this exact thing two or three times. You stare and know, just know, that somewhere in this byzantine interface there is the raw power to do lots of cool 3D stuff. But damn. It's quite an interface.
> That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.
Yeah. For me it was an old, beat-up 286 that I couldn't get anyone to upgrade and and loving devotion to MS-DOS, old EGA Sierra games, TSR programs, TUIs, GeoWorks, and just not being able to get enough of it.
When I finally saved up enough to buy a 486 motherboard, I installed Linux because it seemed cool (and was cool) and never looked back. But that 286 sparked my obsession with computers that has influenced almost every aspect of my life.
This article is a strange combination of defending the macbook neo from stupid attacks, and making similarly stupid attacks on the chromebook, with no self-awareness (unless there's some level of irony I'm missing here, which, come to think of it, might well be the case).
Chromebooks have a linux VM where you can install anything, including GUI apps, and doing that is much more straightforward then installing something from the web on a mac. Download, right-click, install on linux. No scary warnings. No need to go to system settings.
The Neo seems kind of nice but I don't really see how it's more significant than "a nice low end computer." The article reads like its fire from Olympus but a nicer screen and trackpad is only incrementally better than what was available in Chromebooks and cheap PCs.
Personally I think a the Steam Machine will have a better chance to cheat a general computing device into the home of someone not looking for it. The Neo gives me hope on price point.
1. This is the most optimistic, inspirational thing I've read in months :)
2. Are there kids like that still?? I would love to think so. None of the kids in my circle of parents are. There is one teenager who's going into computer science because they are smart and love math, which is great, but they never built or explored or been curious about anything on their computer as far as I can tell. There is a big ecosystem of wish fulfilment and instant gratification, and I think (right) limitations like the author insinuated are part of the allure.
> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.
As someone who lived on a chromebook for fun because it was a cheap way to get a browser machine that also had Linux access. I don't really get this. You can run blender on a chromebook as soon as you turn on the linux container. It will run even better if you install linux on it after a quick firmware flash.
If it's locked down by a school that's not really the chromebooks fault, schools are gonna lock down Macbook Neos via management policy the exact same way.
He’s right. I built a hackintosh from a PowerMac G4 motherboard I bought off of eBay with my saved-up babysitting money when I was 12 or 13 because I was absolutely desperate to have a machine I could edit movies with, I couldn’t afford a real Mac, and I read on the internet somewhere that this was the cheapest way to get one. I knew lots of older brothers who were “into” computers (all of them for gaming) that thought I was an idiot, because building my own mac made everything ten times harder. I didn’t care. I was obsessed.
This is a $599 computer with purpose-built architecture for (barely) running (small, underpowered, near-useless) LLMs. There are children saving pennies for this machine that will do great, horrifying, dangerous things with these computers. I can’t wait to see the results.
I remember this period of my own life. I had taken over my father's old 486 and spent my days and evenings trying to learn the basics of programming in C. I was making silly text based games, dreaming I'd one day be creating the game of my dreams. I also modded games by opening every content file and trying to figure out what they did and how I could modify them. I was still years from realizing game development was a career and not just a hobby.
I had replaced all the Windows sounds and cursors to customize the system so it looked and sounded like a Sci Fi system. I even patched the boot screen to be a humorous screen of "MS Broken Windows". It also was quite broken from messing with system files I didn't understand.
It was a magical period and I learned so much.
I appreciate the article and agree. If you have a desire to learn computers, just get your hands on whatever you can and learn.
> They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.
Love the spirit of the post.
As a high school dropout, with a GED, I’ve spent my entire adult life, looking up noses. I chose a career jammed to bursting, with sheepskins, because I really enjoy doing tech. Not because I wanted to make money, or because I wanted to be a big shot.
My first ever program, was in the 1970s, some time. It was a Heathkit programmable calculator. My first ever ”serious” program, was Machine Code, typed into a 6800-based STD card, nailed to a piece of wood, with a hex keypad, and an 8-digit LED display. My first personal computer, was a VIC-20, with 3KB of RAM. My first Apple computer was a Mac Plus, with 4MB of RAM, and an external 20MB SCSI hard drive.
Learning on limited resources helps us to become frugal and efficient. It also helps us to become tough as hell. Some of the best engineers I ever worked with, had rough backgrounds.
These days, I use a pretty maxed-out Mini, and an LG ultrawide screen. I’m spoiled.
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it
10 year old me identifies with this so much.
I managed to get the computer to display 256 colours instead of the 16 it had been set up with. Everyone was impressed and this meant I was now allowed to take the computer apart and put it back together again without anyone being scared.
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes.
Brilliant. Thank you for that.
>Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.
Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this and installs Blender on it is WAY more likely to save up for any janky terrible half-working PC laptop with a bit better specs (memory in particular), or a desktop computer if possible, because A. games B. Linux C. piracy and more software D. he does not care about it being Apple or "just working", in the words of the author himself. I don't know how the US kids in particular feel about this since the reality distortion field is so strong, but anywhere else it's like this.
For young people out there, it is better to build a desktop gig instead of a laptop. You can't change much in a laptop, unless it is some legacy laptops, but definitely not a Mac. Parents should help their kids to build a 16GB Linux gig. It's going to be more expensive than $599 nowadays due to the price of everything, but still, it is very expansible, and the kid can earn $$ and decide which parts he wants to upgrade.
BTW a laptop is definitely the only choice if the kid wants mobility, though.
I loved every word of this article, I went back in time and felt again with my Pentium III 500 Mhz trying to hack everything out, like changing the splash screen of Windows 98 SE while loading just to feel I did it!
These things were the ones that led me to this passion and that today, with LLMs and almost only business applications to develop for the sake of living, feel like the magic is finally fading.
God I miss the old times! (I'm 36 yo but I feel like 70 in this specific moment!)
Interesting read! I love to see this spirit. I grew up with a different - but similar experience. Only, as an 80s and 90s kid, computers were nothing but limitations. Even when my dad built a machine with a 133MHz Cyrix chip, already a year later, it was outdated by computers with literally double the computing power.
That Cyrix machine was already miles ahead of the 386 that was handed down to me to play text based games on and learn dos through hard knocks. I remember leafing through old hard drives that had 10mb of capacity and realizing they had no value despite not being that old.
Later in college, I had the confidence to build my own first desktop with parts cobbled together from sketchy resellers. Athlon A1 single core 1ghz. Man that thing could fly.
Sometimes I feel privileged for being in the generation that learnt to program BASIC on a C64 when it was the coolest thing around at the time. Being that much closer to the metal is a whole different experience of learning what a computer is and can do.
Is that even possible now? Probably not. Years ago I tried to get my kids interested in playing with their own Raspberry Pi when they came out, that they could do whatever they wanted with on the side, to little effect. Not even the idea of setting one up as their own Minecraft server (they were heavily into it at the time) piqued their interest. Oh well.
Talking about staring at interfaces, I got my first Pentium computer when I was 7 in a village in Pakistan. I spent all day fooling around and accidently stumbled upon quick basic. Having nothing to do I learnt how to code because the help menu listed all the commands and the interpreter gave errors when I did something wrong.
With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.
Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.
> This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
That kid will be much better off with a used laptop and Linux or BSD.
I'm sorry to say that those kids are a lot fewer and farther between than they were even 15 years ago, and much, much fewer than 30+ years ago.
When I was working my most recent corporate job (as a people manager, natch) there were new hires even in 2019 that had never owned a computer that wasn't a phone, and just used whatever laptop or other system was supplied by their school or (now) work. This experience blackpilled me a little, I will say.
I liked this not because it's a good story. It is, but that's beside the point. I liked this because it's my story. Not literally so, but the shape of it is. He's struck a nerve at the heart of growing up eager and curious and seeing a computer as a pathway to your dreams.
I’ve never had a post hit me with nostalgia as hard as this one. Thanks to the author for capturing what it felt like to be a stupid little kid with a weird old computer so well.
This is true but also not at all the point of a review. Some tools are better suited for some tasks— reviews help those with the privilege of choice find the best ones for them. Otherwise you’d have a review of a hammer saying “this is a great tool for driving screws if you’re not afraid to get cREaTive with it!” Folks who need to make do with what they have already know about their constraints.
Outstanding article; I'm glad you put these thoughts into words and published them because I've felt similarly this week since I've had time and reason to reminisce on my 2010 MacBook. I had AutoCAD on that poor little computer, working at the pace it could handle.
Apple has turned computers into luxury items. They are not simply computers, there is some status and image projection involved.
As a hacker and tinkerer I could never justify the cost of purchasing one of their machines, but I see people around me trying to sell their old Apple machines and phones at absurd prices (I do live in a peripheral economy and Apple stuff is even more expensive here).
So it makes sense for Apple to segment its market like that. It makes sense for their audience too.
When I shop for a car, I find the same issue: most analyses have very little to do with the car's technical attributes and there's a lot of gibberish about design and lifestyle.
John Gruber used it for a day and found it was actually totally adequate, or better, for his actual daily work.
> But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/the_macbook_neo
I think people are assuming it's going to be a worse experience than it actually is. I don't know how it does it with 8GB of RAM either, but apparently it does; i suppose my guess would be SSD and bus are fast enough that swapping on app change is no longer so disruptive? (I don't know if improvements in virtual memory swap logic could also be a thing that matters or not, this is not my area).
In high school we had a g3 Mac that we got Final Cut Pro on. It took forever to render a minute or two of video. But having a nonlinear editing system that took forever to do anything was way better than not having anything at all.
Edit: for true self embarrassment purposes you can see some of the films we made here:
https://youtu.be/FRQv7VUauWs?t=447&si=lCu3rp28XfKWN5ch
And also here:
https://youtu.be/ytKIG802baw?t=615&si=FJI8Cm9yYaXKMZdS
I put the start times at my movies. But there are others as well. lol.
My first computer was a hand-me-down Compaq LTE laptop, several times removed from the original owner, with a 700MB hard drive and Windows 95 a decade after those were leading-edge specs. It had only Word and Access, of all things, and little room for more.
But it was mine, I tinkered with it forever, learned databases enough to turn Access into a basic quasi-Excel for my needs, cataloged things that really didn't need to be tabulated, and generally learned as much as that little machine would let me.
That was a limited computer, one that couldn't possibly have let me do what I needed to do when I hit university. But it got me started, taught me to tinker, and I'm prety sure pushed me to learn more than a state-of-the-art for the time computer would have.
And so I do wonder, at times, if it's the nostalgic look back at early computing that makes people inclined to say "my god that would have been an amazing computer to start out with" when you look at an entry-level computer. I'm inclined, even, to say man that's going to be an epic $100 computer on the second-hand market in a half decade or less.
When at the same time, it's actually a solid machine for more of us than us geeks with our inflated expectations of computers have than we'd like to accept. That, too, is pretty cool.
My daily driver has a CPU less than half as powerful and a motherboard that doesn't even support DDR4 RAM.
I had no personal computer for years except what only served as my Plex Server until I took it down.
I bought a 16GB M2 MacBook Air after I was Amazoned to work on a side contract when I was between jobs. I used it for four weeks and the only thing I ran on it was VSCode, Safari and Zoom. I would have been fine with the MacBook Neo. Right now with a job, it’s about the same - we use GSuite in a browser.
When I was 6, I got a Commodore PLUS/4, which was Commodore's unsuccessful attempt at a business-oriented 8 bit computer. I think my folks wanted to give me a Commodore 64, but things happen. Since there were not nearly as many games on that thing, I learned to program early. It had a build in assembler/disassembler (shift-reset would reset the computer without wiping the memory - just the first byte of the program memory), so I learned how to reverse engineer assembly code before I was 10. This arguably "wrong tool" shaped my whole life, and was maybe the most important thing that happened to me. If I got a C64, I could have easily turned into someone else.
> He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it.
I'm still this person today :)
You learn the most from failure and the least from success. Likewise, you grow the most from pushing through the limits and the least from living in abundance. You can do pretty much anything on a full spec Mac Studio, but so can anyone else with a lot of money. But if you push through the limit of a MacBook Neo, you just did something no one else was able to do. And that is awesome.
I absolutely loved reading this, bring back memories. I was that kid too.
This reminds me of learning linux and cli commands because an old netbook with like 512 of ram was struggling with modern guis and web browsers. So I used a minimal i3 installation and interacted mostly with a terminal.
Main machine is a $50 Thinkpad.
I haven't used a computer more recent than 2016. As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm missing is AAA gaming (RTX looks cool), and local LLMs.
I did a bunch of game jams on it. Even won one! (Of course, even 2010s hardware is overkill for 2d games :)
I also did some basic video editing on it but it was a bit slow to render.
I won't say I'm not missing out — I'm certainly looking forward to an upgrade! — but that you can get surprisingly far with surprisingly little.
"I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny."
If I'd see that on my kids' computer it would fill me with pride.
I do miss the days that a (Linux) computer was like this for me. I say Linux because I had a similar obsession with FOSS and what it meant in a broad sense. But it doesn't matter, before that I de-compiled some program to make the text on the Windows START button different. Re-installed Win 2000 about every week, often after f-ing it up. Before that I changed some lines in DOS' autoexe.bat so it would ask for a password (which was just 2 input parameters readable in the autoexec.bat, but that is some mighty fine security (through obscurity) in a normie family).
This article struck a nerve. There's something about the curiosity of tinkering around in a computer. It's the most powerful technology humankind has built. It's versatile. It lets you break it. It's a bicycle for the mind, as Steve Jobs would say.
May all the hackers out there, old and young, discover the beauty of the personal computer.
When doing my Bachelor degree my dad gave me an old thinkpad to run on linux. It was a horrible experience for preparing powerpoints, papers, etc. But I still have that command line muscle memory and an eye to spot errors which really helped me in my career. In my final year I bought myself a macbook because I earned real money doing a consulting internship. But the unix muscle memory stayed, and I found working with IDEs so wasteful. In my first years at my job I rejected word and excel still to do everything in groff and awk.
What's so special about this machine? Is there no comparable $599 Windows or Linux laptop for kids to buy?
I could 100% agree, putting up with i5-4210u and geforce 840m for twelve years. Making stupid shit, ditching Windows for Linux to gain any usability. Editing videos in too high resolutions. I taught myself being patient with electronics and it's the thing I couldn't have taught any other way.
Same. I got a crazy old Ubuntu desktop when I was 9 or something. It couldn’t run any games and that’s why I learned Python. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I had a machine capable of running Minecraft at the time…
> Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory.
This is why you should grow your own trees and wait a million years and melt the silicon into nvidia gpus and install linux.
learn linux.
only sanfran idealists dreaming of a world that destroys them use apple products.
A key point that TFA misses (probably for the sake of story-telling) is that, unlike the 2006 iMac the author fondly remembers of, MacBook Neo is not a hand-me-down computer.
It is not the proverbial gift horse. You are paying fresh $ for it. So, it is only reasonable to have some baseline expectations on redeeming value from it.
Also, an important point of the MacBook Neo criticism is that because of its cut-down features, a Neo may never graduate to a "hand-me-down computer", but instead head straight to the e-waste pile.
This post reminds me of a 14-year old boy reading the MS-DOS manual to figure out what AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS at his younger brother’s football games.
Dunno about Xcode, but if you put a go compiler in there, I doubt it will compile or run slowly. Some dependencies may require C, but you could avoid that mostly.
> He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song.
As a kid I just loved playing around in Reason (1 or 2?) and making strange sounds and just flipping the racks around and trying to connect the cables in any jack possible, to see what happens.
I would open one of the demo songs, to 'learn' how these racks were wired, and then experimented.
Good old memories.
Kids nowadays need those type of experiences too.
There are also some funny humorous pieces on this site.
My first computer was a Palm m100 with 2 MB of RAM. No persistent storage. (I once lost all my data when changing batteries a bit too slowly.)
I’m optimistic that kids will continue ignoring adults telling them what is and isn’t “reasonable” with this hardware and that software and just have fun!
I hope they sell so many of these, because the Mac ecosystem is just better for learning about computers then what most young people use daily.
Not enough memory -> can't do it.
Not enough CPU -> can do it, but it's slow.
(Ubuntu with the OOM killer - could do it, but when it filled half of memory, it was killed.)
I fear this kind of experimentation will soon by killed by ai.
It's an interesting slip, given the premise of the article, that this hypothetical child is assumed to be a boy.
"A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that"
But seriously, if you go to school today they will make a point to put you on the slowest, weakest Chromebook available because they're terrified that you're going to play Krunker.
The result is you become an adult and you'll never buy a Chromebook. It's the same way that being bullied on the schoolbus means you become an adult who'll never ride public transit.
https://ithacareuse.org/
will sell you a desktop computer for around $150 (e.g. four of them for the price of a Neo) which will put an enterprising young person on a much better path to learn about computers than the Neo ever will.
Now you might say I'm being Orwellian but I really think Swift/XCode/iOS is "slavery" and the web platform is "freedom". I mean dev tools are fully competitive for the web platform, I can write my application once and run it on desktop and phone and tablet and VR headset and game consoles and all sorts of things I don't even know about it. I never have to ask permission if I want to deploy an app or update it. I don't have to pay anyone 30% of my revenue.
Used thinkpad or mini pc seems more practical
For this kind of experience I would recommend just buying a Thinkpad t480 you can buy for 200$ and install a Linux distro like Linux mint and then something more challenging like arch Linux
I like the cut of you jib! If you lived around the corner, we’d have a coffee.
You nailed it.
If one doesn’t know how to play the violin, they can make a Stradivarius sound like crap.
The hacker is strong in this one. Keep it up.
Learning to make use of limited resources is truly rewarding.
This was lovely, I appreciated reading it
You can run blender on a Chromebook using the Linux environment.
I like how these days you have to say things like: "fuck-ass system modification" just to prove you're not AI.
>What Apple put inside the Neo is the complete behavioral contract of the Mac.
I remember seeing and using my first powerbook 160 and being blown away that it had the "complete behavior contract of the Mac" that I knew at the time. Even the 16 shades of gray screen made it more luxurious than a classic black-and-white Mac.
And the "What's on Your Powerbook" ads, with Todd Rundgren and Rev. Don Doll, SJ.
https://alumni.creighton.edu/news-events/news/father-don-dol...
Todd> Flowfazer, the screen saver I codeveloped [with David Levine]
Fernando Perdomo - Dreaming in Stereo Suite (FlowFazer Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4X4FmIhIw
http://www.trconnection.com/trconn.php/article=grokware.art/...
https://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/pop-for-the-people-by...
https://rocknrollwithme.substack.com/p/todd-rundgren-as-a-pr...
>Todd also co-developed graphic tablet software with a music theme for Apple in a technology venture in the late eighties. With Dave Levine, he designed and developed a screensaver product called Flowfazer (see example of one of the screensavers below), with the strapline “Music for the Eye.” They introduced it at MacWorld thinking they would publish it themselves, but found there was already well-funded competition with Berkeley Systems Flying Toasters and were forced to abandon the project.
I used to run POV-Ray on my pathetic AMD 386 clone. A simple render took 20 hours and yet I did it.
Can you use an apple notebook without an apple account?
Depending on your process, there is nothing wrong starting with this tool (Neo) first. It's a classic dilemma. For your first tool, buy the cheapest one possible to get the job done. Once the tool becomes understoond, it's limits reached, it's place in the process discovered, then, buy the most expensive one you can afford.
The Neo is the right first tool for many people.
A little dramatic in tone but loved it all the same. I really do remember what it felt like to work on a “machine” as a kid. The family dell lol hit all sorts of walls but learned a lot.
I don't get the folks referring to this as a "Chromebook killer". Chromebooks start at around US$150 new. The MacBook Neo is 4 times the price at US$599. There are premium Chromebooks like the Chromebook Plus line that are more in the Neo price range, but those aren't the ones being bought for schools and such. Doesn't make the Neo a bad thing, of course, I think it's a solid basic laptop from the reviews.
I like the sentiment expressed here, but on this note, I think there are other dangers to consider listening to early reviewers:
- Reviewers do get early access and often are receiving units AND doing their tests, writing their script, recording, and editing their videos before regular users can even possibly get a system shipped in. At best this rushes them where they miss details (e.g., few reviewers noticed that the MacBook Pro 14" M5 keyboard is different hardware then what you got on the M4 Pro because so much content is rushed)
- Reviewers are almost never experts on what street prices look like because they are focused on reviewing, getting content out ASAP. They are not spending time monitoring pricing with only a few exceptional channels doing so.
- The best marketing machine companies like Apple absolutely groom the review ecosystem without even needing to tell reviewers what to do directly. It's a competitive landscape of self-made YouTubers who are susceptible to positive reinforcement from the industry. i.e., companies don't have to tell reviewers to censor themselves, they can instead use positive reinforcement to select which reviewers are getting the best access and privileges.
Now, about the computer itself: related to the way the author of this article talks about the MacBook Neo, about the role of a cheap computer to just try have a working computer that is able to get some stuff done: this is the kind of thing that should likely steer you AWAY from this MacBook Neo that initially looked so exciting.
If you're considering a ~$500-750 computer, well, not only should you be checking the used market, but also, actually look at the competition to this thing.
The reactions I've seen from regular people seems to be, basically, "wow, Apple pulled off an incredible feat, they've disrupted the computer market again!"
Well, let's pump the brakes. First off, realize the Neo is making a lot of the same trade-offs that budget laptops have been doing for years. They aren't even giving you a backlit keyboard! The lower model cuts out biometric auth! There's no haptic trackpad, which used to be a major differentiator for Apple! It comes with a tiny slow charger! The battery life is actually not that good under load/bright screen because the battery is tiny! The CPU is old/slower/low power biased! These are all the classic cheap laptop tradeoffs that give PC manufacturers a LOT of room to actually compete really well against the Neo.
On top of that, almost every cheapo Windows laptop on the market is going to deliver to you a computer with at least a replaceable SSD. Usually RAM is soldered but it's not impossible to find that as something you can upgrade as well even on consumer-ish stuff that isn't just an old ThinkPad.
Actually spend the time to jump on some retailer websites like Best Buy and take a look at what the street prices look like.
There are multiple computers on there that make way more sense for someone budget constrained than a MacBook Neo.
My two favorites, one at a lower price and one at a higher price:
Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 2K OLED Touchscreen Laptop, AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 2025 - 16GB memory, 512GB SSD, $679. This is a proper mid-range laptop and not just some cheap bottom of the barrel model in the lineup. To gain an OLED touchscreen, double the RAM, and the same storage as the highest Neo model at the same price, this is just great all around. I'm pretty sure these get very respectable battery life as well.
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15.3" touchscreen snapdragon X, 16GB memory, 256GB storage, $549. With this model, you get a lot of the same ARM benefits that Apple is giving you. Sure, Windows on ARM is not the kind of polished native experience as a Mac, but we are just talking about a cheap laptop that works and, generally, everything you want to do in Windows will work on an ARM system. Once again, you're getting doubled RAM, which is important, and you're going to gain a touch screen, numpad, and possibly even beat out the Neo's battery life.
Another option is the HP OmniBook X Flip 2-in-1, a little less of a good value than the above, but it's another 16GB/512GB option that slides under $700.
In my opinion, this article looks like a straw man argument, and the author appears to completely misinterpret "This is not the computer for you."
Such a statement needs to be understood in the relevant context. It's not intended to discourage kids from buying a Mac! Rather, it's intended to rebut critics who are already Mac owners and who scoff at the MacBook Neo technical specs, such as RAM. The computer is indeed not for them, people who can already afford a MacBook Pro, for example. The point of "This is not the computer for you" is the opposite of how the author characterized it: the point is that the MacBook Neo and its specs are actually fine for the people who are going to buy one.
For some strange reason, the author has invented an imaginary opponent to become offended by. We're supposed to cheer for the kids here, and I see that many people have fallen for it, but the whole schtick falls completely flat for me. The kids were never endangered or discouraged by the reviews of the MacBook Neo.
Thank you thank you thank you for writing this. This made me smile and feel like shedding a tear. This is exactly how I felt when I watched the Dave2D video of the MacBook Neo, and other "reviews" that miss the entire point. This captures the point. The other reviews capture specs. This captures the emotion. This captures the reality.
" I faked being sick to watch WWDC 2011 — Steve Jobs’ last keynote — and clapped alone in my room when the audience clapped, and rebuilt his slides in Keynote afterward because I wanted to understand how he’d made them feel that way."
jesus christ thats grim
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