That kid will be much better off with a used laptop and Linux or BSD.

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.)

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

jesus christ thats grim

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Neo is the right first tool for many people.

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.

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 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.

May all the hackers out there, old and young, discover the beauty of the personal computer.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I'm still this person today :)

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.

Brilliant. Thank you for that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

You nailed it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

”Mrs. Jonson, the result are back. You son has autism.”

BTW a laptop is definitely the only choice if the kid wants mobility, though.

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.

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!)

bro its your blog just say sex