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“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

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Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#261

Post by mattnewton »

xattt wrote: post #245
mauzybwy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I got a computer engineering degree in 2015 with a $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian. And I worked professionally for years on an 8gb MacBook Air. The Neo is definitely something younger me would be interested in.

> $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.

There were a bunch of intel atom ones IIRC. I got my degree with a used EEEpc with one of those.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#263

Post by glhaynes »

coldtea wrote: post #260
mauzybwy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I got a computer engineering degree in 2015 with a $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian. And I worked professionally for years on an 8gb MacBook Air. The Neo is definitely something younger me would be interested in.

I mean, never mind younger us. I have a M5 MBP and even I am tempted for a Neo for travelling

There is truly no space in my device repertoire for a Neo and I can say that with confidence because of how much time I've spent trying to find one.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#264

Post by jjice »

mauzybwy wrote: post #226
mr_briggs wrote: post #151

> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of t…

Man I got a computer engineering degree in 2015 with a $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian. And I worked professionally for years on an 8gb MacBook Air. The Neo is definitely something younger me would be interested in.

Did the same for my freshman year of Uni on a $99 Chromebook. Java and C dev on 4GB of ram wasn't an issue.

That said, I quickly upgraded to a 4 year used Thinkpad and that was a huge difference.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#265

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #206
tombert wrote: post #63

When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i vi…

I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0] 8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours. I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing. By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested…

I hear you, having learned programming on a machine even more constrained by the BBC Micro. But learners today are more likely to "Siri, build me a Hangman app."

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#266

Post by ryeguy_24 »

haritha-j wrote: post #149

I don't think this is about the macbook neo. I don't think the comments need to devolve into a mac vs. linux argument. It's simply an ode to that kid pushing hardware to the limits, and learning so much along the way. What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my pho…

Mostly same story. Tinkered for hours with Windows 3.1 floppy disks. Reinstalling OS’s all the time because I’d break stuff or I’d just want a fresh slate. I loved pushing the boundaries. In my 30’s I slowed down with the tinkering because of life (kids, work). I thought I lost the ability to tinker. But recently at 42, I bought a MacBook for the sole purpose of tinkering on the couch at the end of the day (basically after being on computer the whole day, I didn’t want to be in office anymore). And slowly, it’s coming back. I’m playing with new things, learning about Neural Networks, learning about Softare Defined Radio, installing tons of random libraries and tools to test that out. It’s coming back. Keep pushing on it and hopefully it returns for you too!

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#267

Post by zephen »

glhaynes wrote: post #263
coldtea wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, never mind younger us. I have a M5 MBP and even I am tempted for a Neo for travelling

There is truly no space in my device repertoire for a Neo and I can say that with confidence because of how much time I've spent trying to find one.

"Finding Neo"

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#268

Post by ghoulishly »

m000 wrote: post #182

A key point that TFA misses (probably for the sake of story-telling) is that, unlike the 2006 iMac the author fondly remembers of, MacBook Neo is not a hand-me-down computer. It is not the proverbial gift horse. You are paying fresh $ for it. So, it is only reasonable to have some baseline expectations on redeeming value from it. Also, an important point of the MacBook Neo criticism is that because of its cut-down fe…

ARM macs are too new for us to know how the reuse/hand-me-down/legacy support world will shake out for them. There’ll be signs when the first M1 machines get axed but for now, I have no clue.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#269

Post by saithir »

pjerem wrote: post #92
rafram wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bootloader isn’t locked. Asahi’s developers have written about how Apple specifically built support for third-party OSes into the bootloader.

The same Asahi developers also wrote about how Apple didn’t document anything and especially, Apple never talked in public about this. Apple betting Apple, If they had cared a single second about this, they would have called this Bootcamp 2. Honestly I’m pretty convinced that this « open » bootloader was just there to avoid criticism and bad press from specialized outlets when they presented the M1 because, for once,…

> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader

Is that gonna be before or after the iphone with no usb port?

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#270

Post by naftalibeder »

moregrist wrote: post #169

> He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. This hits home. Not because I did it as a kid; I'm a bit old for that. But because I've done this exact thing two or three times. You stare and know, just know, that somewhere in this byzantine interface there is the raw power to do lots of cool 3D stuff. But damn. It's quite an interf…

I got a cracked copy of 3ds Max at a LAN party (back when it was "Discreet 3dsmax"), and immediately dragged dozens of cubes, spheres, and cones into the scene.

Then I closed it for a year. Opened it up again one day, followed a box-modeling tutorial (from the documentation PDF linked in the Help menu!), and I was hooked. Spline modeling, rigging, walk cycles, texturing, lighting experiments, every spare minute for the rest of high school.

I still remember the whole-body panic of accidentally turning on "adaptive degradation", which replaced all meshes with their bounding cubes when rotating the viewport camera, and thinking I had broken my video card.

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