“This is not the computer for you”

> 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 feel this, and on the whole I've done the same thing. I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem because it all just works together without me having to tinker with it. I think this is mostly a reaction to now doing that stuff professionally - 4 days a week, whether I feel like it or not, I'm required to make computers do things they couldn't do before I started.

When I get to the end of the work day, or out of bed on a Sunday morning, I might get the urge to tinker with things but I refuse to have tinkering with things to make them work be a requirement for my rest time. Leisure tinkering must be on my terms, because if I'm forced to tinker with something just to do what I really wanted to do that's not tinkering, that's the thing fucking with me, and I will swear profusely at it throughout.

There are absolutely $599 laptops available from companies that aren't Apple but they've all made major compromises to get to that price in ways that people will notice.

The cooling will be terrible so that every 30 seconds the fans kick in at full speed, thermal throttling takes hold, and then it decides all is fine 30 seconds after that so you're working on a machine that's constantly cycling fan noise. The trackpad will suck, meaning you need to have a mouse precariously balanced somewhere anytime you're using it. It'll have some irritating BIOS feature you can't work out how to turn off that flashes a giant icon on the screen whenever you hit the caps-lock button. The casing will be plastic and snap where the screen hinges are screwed in after a year of light use. It may even be a Chromebook, making it a glorified tablet with an attached keyboard and (terrible) trackpad.

The thing Apple have done here isn't to release a $599 laptop, its to release a $599 laptop where the compromises are ones the average user buying a $599 laptop isn't going to notice everyday, while not compromising on the things they do notice. Its made of metal, the trackpad feels good to use, the keyboard is pleasant, and the battery is large enough that you're not carrying around a charger that weighs as much as the laptop itself.

I fear this kind of experimentation will soon by killed by ai.

This article is a strange combination of defending the macbook neo from stupid attacks, and making similarly stupid attacks on the chromebook, with no self-awareness (unless there's some level of irony I'm missing here, which, come to think of it, might well be the case).

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.

Maybe some of these agentic AI superstars can point their 100x engineering chops at this. This would impress me but not going to hold my breath for that.