Apple's most affordable MacBook ever appears to be a resounding hit with customers, based on comments shared by CEO Tim Cook this week. On an earnings call on Thursday, Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo has been "off the charts" since the laptop was unveiled in March. "We could not be happier with how things are going at the moment," he said.
I walked into a Best Buy last fall just to kind of browse the computers on offer. The sales rep recommended a laptop (Asus, I think) with 16gb of RAM, saying he actually even got his aunt one of the same model he was recommending to me.
That’s insane. What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
spoiler
Rhetorical question, the answers are: mega-reliance on webviews, every mid-level PM having to ship “features” to justify their position and to climb the corporate ladder, and every UI designer getting the brain-sickness that’s rounded-corners and animations everywhere, while some VP of product insisting on more ads and user-tracking. Add “agentic” aka slop coding to cap a decade of learn-2-code bootcamp 2nd-rate programmers who vigorously studied Cracking the Coding Interview without properly understanding the fundamentals… and voila!
That’s the splendid thing about the Neo. Apple is saying ok, we know it’s only 8GB of RAM, but through the service life of the laptop we can ensure that that will give you a good desktop experience.
Why? Were we incapable of using computers 10-14 years ago when 2-8gb were standard? 16 gigabyte computer to log into email, instagram, and facebook. Give me a break.
Apple has been optimizing macOS for underpowered machines for a long time.
Testing a bunch of linux distros on old intel macbooks has shown me that apple is really good with resource management on their vertically integrated hardware, even with greedy daemons like identityserverd or whatever it is, trolling through your drive cataloguing faces in your photos all the time, and the relentless indexing system, and telemetry.
Most models work smoothly most of the time, even the little 11" Air with 4GB, doing standard basic user stuff, and the 2020 1.1 GHz i3 Air is somehow usable on macOS 15, basically current.
I walked into a Best Buy last fall just to kind of browse the computers on offer. The sales rep recommended a laptop (Asus, I think) with 16gb of RAM, saying he actually even got his aunt one of the same model he was recommending to me.
That’s insane. What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
spoiler
Rhetorical question, the answers are: mega-reliance on webviews, every mid-level PM having to ship “features” to justify their position and to climb the corporate ladder, and every UI designer getting the brain-sickness that’s rounded-corners and animations everywhere, while some VP of product insisting on more ads and user-tracking. Add “agentic” aka slop coding to cap a decade of learn-2-code bootcamp 2nd-rate programmers who vigorously studied Cracking the Coding Interview without properly understanding the fundamentals… and voila!
That’s the splendid thing about the Neo. Apple is saying ok, we know it’s only 8GB of RAM, but through the service life of the laptop we can ensure that that will give you a good desktop experience.
Uhhhh 16GB RAM should be the bare minimum, what are you on about?
Why? Were we incapable of using computers 10-14 years ago when 2-8gb were standard? 16 gigabyte computer to log into email, instagram, and facebook. Give me a break.
LOL are you serious?
I dunno about you but I’m not running a 10+ year old OS, nor 10+ year old software. You may not have noticed but times have changed…
Apple has been optimizing macOS for underpowered machines for a long time.
Testing a bunch of linux distros on old intel macbooks has shown me that apple is really good with resource management on their vertically integrated hardware, even with greedy daemons like identityserverd or whatever it is, trolling through your drive cataloguing faces in your photos all the time, and the relentless indexing system, and telemetry.
Most models work smoothly most of the time, even the little 11" Air with 4GB, doing standard basic user stuff, and the 2020 1.1 GHz i3 Air is somehow usable on macOS 15, basically current.
mediaanalysisd loves to go brrr. They certainly handle close-to-OOM situations more nicely than most Linux distros with their growable swap
What AI does to a mfer.