“This Is Not The Computer For You”
Maybe it’s because I’m a little bit allergic to hype, but I just now got around to reading this review of the Macbook Neo by Sam Henri Gold that absolutely everyone has been recommending and, well, this might be the best product review ever written?
The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.
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. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.
Gold captures something here about every single person I’ve ever known who fell in love with computers as a kid in the 70s, 80s, and 90s experienced — the sense of tremendous possibility represented by these machines paired with the glorious struggle to push them beyond their limits. For many of us, it was our first glimpse of infinity — as long as your curiosity & obsession remained, you could keep going forever.
Unrelatedly-ish, it is also really interesting that Apple’s answer to the AI gold rush is a $499 laptop (Neo price w/ educational discount). I don’t know if it suggests that the multi-trillion dollar, multinational corporation that Apple has become retains some institutional memory of what computing used to mean to people, but it’s something.
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There's also a great piece from Horace Dediu last week covering Apple's decision to license AI tech and not blow billions on their own that I feel is somehow tangentially related to the thinking behing the Macbook Neo.
(I linked that piece in the last paragraph 😉)
**ugh** I just like Asymco THAT MUCH
"Every limitation was just the edge of something I hadn’t figured out yet." is such a great way to put it.
Technology revealing the human spirit is a great thing to be reminded of right now.
I was one of those kids who fell in love with computers in the 70s. I've stayed in love with them, through grad school in computer science, a career as a professor of computer science and then a software engineer, and a tinkerer with software and AI in my retirement.
When the earliest PCs and the Amiga walked the earth, I would get my copy of Byte magazine, and immediately look for the Gateway 2000 ads, to find out how much CPU, memory, and disk you could get, and how much the top-of-the-line machine would cost. And I would always pay that (often to Gateway) when I needed a new machine.
Between, let's say, 2000 and 2010, computers got so good that specs didn't matter to me. I could buy any machine with enough memory and disk and it was great. My work wasn't CPU intensive -- no graphics or video, for example. Computers were "done" in a sense; it was the internet that was being developed.
Two things about the Neo, and current computers: First, for a long time now, Apple does not even describe their products as computers. Go to any Mac-related page on apple.com, and the only place you see the word "computer" is in the legal fine print at the bottom of the page. They are appliances, much like an iPhone or iPad. They are awesome machines, used by creative people, but creative people in software, I think, have been on Linux for many years.
Second: Specs are starting to matter again, because of AI. Now the GPU matters, and how much memory (VRAM) that GPU has access to. I can't even understand current discussions of specs, things have moved faster than I can keep up. Sentiment seems to be that the best AI around right now is Claude, and that costs money to use, serious money for serious work. So my interest is in models that can run locally (i.e. on my own computer).
The current age of AI experimentation has the same kind of excitement that I saw in the 70s -- a dizzying pace of progress, specs are important again, kids are tinkering, amazing new things are being built, tech giants are being and will be disrupted.
This is such a beautiful piece. Thanks for posting it!
Apple has always based its business around selling to individuals. It makes sense that their play right now is to let others compete in the morass of huge capital expenditures while taking the opportunity to expand its long term customer base (especially in middle income countries where the Neo will be closer to the high end of affordability).
This phrase “the glorious struggle to push them beyond their limits” reminds me of how “overclocking” your CPU was a thing that computer nerds (or maybe dorks?) would do in the x86 days. Is that still a thing, or do chips do that on their own now?
I vaguely remember the word "overclocking" but I do know that my computer in the 90s had a turbo button. (Why would you ever not want the turbo button pressed?)
Just in case that wasn’t rhetorical… the Turbo button was kind of a remnant of the days when computers kind of all assumed they were running on the same 8086 and for things like games, they’d just use CPU clock speed as a timing reference. After all, it’s not like CPUs are going to get much faster in the next few years, right? So you could un-push the Turbo button to downshift the CPU for compatibility purposes, at least in theory. I feel like that button stuck around on computer cases far beyond when that function stopped working.
Student models are seldom ever where obsessives find themselves. I see this in the guitar community a lot. The entry level stuff is seldom anything appealing to an obsessive.
Last August I bought the new 15" Air that Jason recommended and have really loved it. But I did something to it and had to take it in today for repair, which meant I'd be without a computer for 5 days which I couldn't do because I have a big presentation tomorrow. So on a rec from the Apple guy, I bought the basic Nemo.
I have to say, it feels and sounds like a toy. It's 13", 8GB of RAM, and the keyboard makes a click sound like a kids' toy. And to me it feels and looks like one too. I do think it would be the perfect first computer for someone or someone who can't afford an air but needs the basic things it can do so I do think this fills a void. But for work and media, the MacBook Air and its 15" screen is still the way to go. If you're used to these types of computers, it's hard to go down to a Nemo.
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