HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".

[su_liam@mas.to]

@juergen_hubert @cstross There’s always looting ai data centers as an option. Probably not a solo thing.

[kilroy_was_here@dobbs.town]

@stevendbrewer @cstross That's basically what I did with this computer. Wanted a nice IPS monitor for photo editing, the computer itself was more or less an afterthought.

[juergen_hubert@mementomori.social]

@su_liam @cstross

I recommend checking in advance whether it actually has servers or is just another financial investment shell that pretends activity.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@cstross outside of the Apple world we've had them for decades

[tautology@infosec.exchange]

@cstross Is this not just Apple doing what other laptop manufacturers have been doing for a while? My sprogs's laptops they use for school work and playing games are a higher spec than the Neo and were cheaper.

I mean it's great that you can now enter the walled garden of a massively overrated UX for cheap, but, like most Apple products, it's nothing new or better.

[markn@mastodonapp.uk]

@Salty @cstross my experience is just comparing RAM sizes is misleading, just like comparing GHz etc.

They've highly optimized it - I'd say 8GB is enough for most "normal" use cases even though that sounds surprising. So, why pay the memory tax?

I think we've been marketed into believing we need lots of RAM (also indoctrinated into believing we do by history, edge use cases and the profligate nature of some OS environments).

I don't have a Neo. But, I have a MacBook Air M1 we got as freebie when Apple first released aarch64 Arm SoCs. That's the 8GB base spec.

I assumed it'd be a poor experience when I got it. But, it works absolutely fine with multiple browsers/tabs, libre office, untitled goose game, etc - all those things that probably constitute "normal" computer use. And that is a few generations ago.

Unsurprisingly it doesn't work fine for technical tasks like building large SW stacks or hosting VMs. But, that's a way smaller cohort's use case - outside Mastodon at least!