MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

Post by weezing » Thu, May 14, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #21

weezing wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people really do that when out in the wild?

It's one of the nicest things to do if you love computers, and great for your health compared with staying indoors. > Could one actually work like this, typing and everything? After my “heart-rate discovery” I decided I had to try it. I thought I’d have to build something myself, but actually one can just buy “walking desks”, and so I did. And after minor modifications, I discovered that I could walk and type perfect…

Post by seabrookmx » Thu, May 14, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

viccis wrote: post #377

seabrookmx wrote: post #352

I bought one just to have Mac around (I haven't daily driven MacOS since the PowerPC days) and to help debug MacOS specific dev environment issues my team has. While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client, I've ended up using the Neo more than any of my other machines. My Windows and Fedora machines have 2-4x the RAM but the Neo is just as responsive when j…

>While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client I plan on getting one for this use case. I do most dev work on servers via either something like VSCode remote or just through Vim. Tailscale and make it easy to use my Mac Mini from anywhere. I can get the Neo on an educational discount, making it $500 and a pretty easy choice. A while back I went into an Apple…

Post by throwaway27448 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

dlcarrier wrote: post #214

throwaway27448 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much "full circle" as we never came up with a better way to render general purpose rich text content than html/css to begin with

It's not really using it for much text, though. It's mostly buttons and controls, which GDI, QuickDraw, and Motif did much better back then and newer toolkits like GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, DWM, Cocoa, etc are great at today.

Post by stodor89 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

abrowne wrote: post #396

nyantaro1 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely loved that m1 air, but one time there was a MacOS update, and it bricked. I discovered that another mac is required to recover my M1. As if I had another working mac laying around somewhere. I would love to go back to mac, but those things really scare me.

If a {Dell, HP, Lenovo} firmware update fails leaving the computer bricked, can you use another {Dell, HP, Lenovo} to restore the firmware? (Honest question: I'm a longtime Mac user, I use Macs at work and I can tell you the correct DFU port for each model. But my home computer for the last 6 years has been an HP EliteBook with Ubuntu.)

Post by mono442 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

iknowstuff wrote: post #389

Jaepa wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be an arguments that you can install a lighter OS on these machines. That's not as easy with MacOS.

Asahi is easier to install on Macs than distros for Windows PCs. You just run a CLI command and follow simple prompts. On Windows PCs, you have to go buy a flash stick, download a tool for flashing it for your BIOS/UEFI (and maybe learn MBR vs GPT), wait while that happens, maybe learn about partitions and repartition your disk ahead of time, mess with your BIOS to change boot order, hope you don't wipe your data by…