“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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