721–730 of 1001 posts
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15 years ago this comment would have been a troll. Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
OS X / macOS has been ahead of Windows for a long time for anyone who lives in a web browser.
Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale.…
Especially not when a certified macbook air refurb straight from Apple isn't that much more if you're not able to get the $500 EDU pricing on the Neo. $850 gets you a 16GB RAM / 512GB M4 Air, which is significantly better than the $700 Neo in every way.
IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doe…
The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…
> I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house.
My wife and I prefer iPads around the house as she is a pencil centric artist and loosely speaking I prefer touch to keyboards. But his framing points out Apple is expansively addressing broad market work/school/home computing needs/preferences and thus also brings up a question I think is under discussed...
What is Apple's user experience roadmap for Apple TV mass market home computing? And for home computing in general?
We are overdue for a leap up there, where Apple, as with the Neo, exploits their ability to profitably deliver higher end hardware which enables features at prices below any comparable competition.
I know folks are fond of pointing to Apple struggling to deliver Siri/AI advances but I view that like their Apple Maps fiasco: an ongoing priority roadmap that they will keep working at until it is better than good enough.
I believe Apple will soon accelerate the power ramp up in Apple TV both because they could now ~ Neo that device into very $/performance competitive vs game consoles but also because they likely predict an ever increasing demand for home compute by consumers.
Not just speech i/o and AI conversation but also active realtime cheap private application of compute, such as personalizing your sports game feed, for example:
a) continually show me where the ball is by [dynamic method] b) rewind to when player X had the ball c) freeze there and show me what might have happened if they had passed to Y d) dress all the players in tutus e) change to my cooking show but warp me back to this game if someone scores f) etc etc etc.
Their 5+ year planning and commitment to the Apple Watch and Vision Pro show that they are ardent bettors on personal computing continuing to evolve very rapidly if they can concoct a profitable multi-year course from niche to ubiquitous. [not just for a product but for their synergistic products]
Remember they build elaborate fake homes as test centers, and not just to film product promos. I would be very surprised to learn their current 5 year outlook ignores robotics. Look around the edges of their public activities and imagine how what you notice might also fit together with something new but hidden.
They are ambitious. Very Ambitious. What's next?
IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs. Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doe…
The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…
Apple a decade ago had like 10. Now probably 20-30 Mac configurations, and even those probably share alot of components.
Honestly, I don’t understand how Dell does it.
I was watching this video and it’s pretty impressive what can be done on this spec machine. https://youtu.be/d-VOt9559Gk?si=tYlDstnaxtQWoJ88 He opens 50+ apps at once while working in Final Cut and Lightroom. Obviously anyone doing those full time would benefit from more resources but I think this is going to be enough for a big chunk of the population, and will be more appealing than the windows alternatives.
Is swapping more efficient on Apple machines thana Wintel running Linux?
But I think a lot is also down to things like the dispatch library and scheduler being able to work together and being able to make assumptions about the hardware to have a smoother experience under pressure.
I was watching this video and it’s pretty impressive what can be done on this spec machine. https://youtu.be/d-VOt9559Gk?si=tYlDstnaxtQWoJ88 He opens 50+ apps at once while working in Final Cut and Lightroom. Obviously anyone doing those full time would benefit from more resources but I think this is going to be enough for a big chunk of the population, and will be more appealing than the windows alternatives.
And here I am on my M2 w/ 24GB RAM and a couple of RAW 48MP photos will bog the system down. And if Time Machine kicks in, there goes any form of performance since Apple can't seem to figure out what a 'background task' is.
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From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.
I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. It’s a great computer, but even on days where I’m doing fuck all but using the web I can pressure that memory easily. I also have a tendency to never reboot until that becomes the fastest way to fix whatever performance bottlenecks I’m running into. I’m not saying you can’t get away with 8GB of RAM. You can , but I won’t recommend a Mac with only 8GB of RAM to anybody for a…
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Minus an intentionally bad hardware design, I struggle to imagine how a software version of the idea could ever be more secure than a power line hard-wired to an LED.
You build it directly into the GPU firmware and don't give the operating system any access to it.