alt Hacker News“This is not the computer for you”
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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 video.
I still made it work. I got pretty good at reading the waveform preview, and was able to use that to figure out where to do cuts. I would apply effects and walk through frame by frame with the arrow keys to see how it looked. It usually took all night (and sometimes a bit of the next day) to render videos into 1080i, but it would render and the resulting videos would be fine.
Eventually I got a job and saved up and bought a decent CPU and GPU and editing got 10x easier, but I still kind of look back on the time of me having to make my shitty computer work with a certain degree of fondness. When you have a decent job with decent money you can buy the equipment you need to do most tasks, but there's sort of a purity in doing a task that you really don't have the equipment you need.
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why.
”Mrs. Jonson, the result are back. You son has autism.”
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 phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.
Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. 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.
> The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.
Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook.
The Macbooks don't let have an officially supported path to unlocking the bootloader (edit: yes, I'm aware of asahi linux, which lives on the edge of what apple allows) and install your own OS. The Chromebooks do. I don't think that comparison plays as favorably as you think.
> 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 interface.
> That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.
Yeah. For me it was an old, beat-up 286 that I couldn't get anyone to upgrade and and loving devotion to MS-DOS, old EGA Sierra games, TSR programs, TUIs, GeoWorks, and just not being able to get enough of it.
When I finally saved up enough to buy a 486 motherboard, I installed Linux because it seemed cool (and was cool) and never looked back. But that 286 sparked my obsession with computers that has influenced almost every aspect of my life.
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.
The Neo seems kind of nice but I don't really see how it's more significant than "a nice low end computer." The article reads like its fire from Olympus but a nicer screen and trackpad is only incrementally better than what was available in Chromebooks and cheap PCs.
Personally I think a the Steam Machine will have a better chance to cheat a general computing device into the home of someone not looking for it. The Neo gives me hope on price point.
1. This is the most optimistic, inspirational thing I've read in months :)
2. Are there kids like that still?? I would love to think so. None of the kids in my circle of parents are. There is one teenager who's going into computer science because they are smart and love math, which is great, but they never built or explored or been curious about anything on their computer as far as I can tell. There is a big ecosystem of wish fulfilment and instant gratification, and I think (right) limitations like the author insinuated are part of the allure.
> 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. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.
As someone who lived on a chromebook for fun because it was a cheap way to get a browser machine that also had Linux access. I don't really get this. You can run blender on a chromebook as soon as you turn on the linux container. It will run even better if you install linux on it after a quick firmware flash.
If it's locked down by a school that's not really the chromebooks fault, schools are gonna lock down Macbook Neos via management policy the exact same way.
He’s right. I built a hackintosh from a PowerMac G4 motherboard I bought off of eBay with my saved-up babysitting money when I was 12 or 13 because I was absolutely desperate to have a machine I could edit movies with, I couldn’t afford a real Mac, and I read on the internet somewhere that this was the cheapest way to get one. I knew lots of older brothers who were “into” computers (all of them for gaming) that thought I was an idiot, because building my own mac made everything ten times harder. I didn’t care. I was obsessed.
This is a $599 computer with purpose-built architecture for (barely) running (small, underpowered, near-useless) LLMs. There are children saving pennies for this machine that will do great, horrifying, dangerous things with these computers. I can’t wait to see the results.
I remember this period of my own life. I had taken over my father's old 486 and spent my days and evenings trying to learn the basics of programming in C. I was making silly text based games, dreaming I'd one day be creating the game of my dreams. I also modded games by opening every content file and trying to figure out what they did and how I could modify them. I was still years from realizing game development was a career and not just a hobby.
I had replaced all the Windows sounds and cursors to customize the system so it looked and sounded like a Sci Fi system. I even patched the boot screen to be a humorous screen of "MS Broken Windows". It also was quite broken from messing with system files I didn't understand.
It was a magical period and I learned so much.
> They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.
Love the spirit of the post.
As a high school dropout, with a GED, I’ve spent my entire adult life, looking up noses. I chose a career jammed to bursting, with sheepskins, because I really enjoy doing tech. Not because I wanted to make money, or because I wanted to be a big shot.
My first ever program, was in the 1970s, some time. It was a Heathkit programmable calculator. My first ever ”serious” program, was Machine Code, typed into a 6800-based STD card, nailed to a piece of wood, with a hex keypad, and an 8-digit LED display. My first personal computer, was a VIC-20, with 3KB of RAM. My first Apple computer was a Mac Plus, with 4MB of RAM, and an external 20MB SCSI hard drive.
Learning on limited resources helps us to become frugal and efficient. It also helps us to become tough as hell. Some of the best engineers I ever worked with, had rough backgrounds.
These days, I use a pretty maxed-out Mini, and an LG ultrawide screen. I’m spoiled.
I appreciate the article and agree. If you have a desire to learn computers, just get your hands on whatever you can and learn.
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it
10 year old me identifies with this so much.
I managed to get the computer to display 256 colours instead of the 16 it had been set up with. Everyone was impressed and this meant I was now allowed to take the computer apart and put it back together again without anyone being scared.
For young people out there, it is better to build a desktop gig instead of a laptop. You can't change much in a laptop, unless it is some legacy laptops, but definitely not a Mac. Parents should help their kids to build a 16GB Linux gig. It's going to be more expensive than $599 nowadays due to the price of everything, but still, it is very expansible, and the kid can earn $$ and decide which parts he wants to upgrade.
BTW a laptop is definitely the only choice if the kid wants mobility, though.
> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes.
Brilliant. Thank you for that.
>Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.
Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this and installs Blender on it is WAY more likely to save up for any janky terrible half-working PC laptop with a bit better specs (memory in particular), or a desktop computer if possible, because A. games B. Linux C. piracy and more software D. he does not care about it being Apple or "just working", in the words of the author himself. I don't know how the US kids in particular feel about this since the reality distortion field is so strong, but anywhere else it's like this.
I loved every word of this article, I went back in time and felt again with my Pentium III 500 Mhz trying to hack everything out, like changing the splash screen of Windows 98 SE while loading just to feel I did it!
These things were the ones that led me to this passion and that today, with LLMs and almost only business applications to develop for the sake of living, feel like the magic is finally fading.
God I miss the old times! (I'm 36 yo but I feel like 70 in this specific moment!)
Interesting read! I love to see this spirit. I grew up with a different - but similar experience. Only, as an 80s and 90s kid, computers were nothing but limitations. Even when my dad built a machine with a 133MHz Cyrix chip, already a year later, it was outdated by computers with literally double the computing power.
That Cyrix machine was already miles ahead of the 386 that was handed down to me to play text based games on and learn dos through hard knocks. I remember leafing through old hard drives that had 10mb of capacity and realizing they had no value despite not being that old.
Later in college, I had the confidence to build my own first desktop with parts cobbled together from sketchy resellers. Athlon A1 single core 1ghz. Man that thing could fly.
Sometimes I feel privileged for being in the generation that learnt to program BASIC on a C64 when it was the coolest thing around at the time. Being that much closer to the metal is a whole different experience of learning what a computer is and can do.
Is that even possible now? Probably not. Years ago I tried to get my kids interested in playing with their own Raspberry Pi when they came out, that they could do whatever they wanted with on the side, to little effect. Not even the idea of setting one up as their own Minecraft server (they were heavily into it at the time) piqued their interest. Oh well.
Talking about staring at interfaces, I got my first Pentium computer when I was 7 in a village in Pakistan. I spent all day fooling around and accidently stumbled upon quick basic. Having nothing to do I learnt how to code because the help menu listed all the commands and the interpreter gave errors when I did something wrong.
With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.
Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.
> This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
That kid will be much better off with a used laptop and Linux or BSD.
I'm sorry to say that those kids are a lot fewer and farther between than they were even 15 years ago, and much, much fewer than 30+ years ago.
When I was working my most recent corporate job (as a people manager, natch) there were new hires even in 2019 that had never owned a computer that wasn't a phone, and just used whatever laptop or other system was supplied by their school or (now) work. This experience blackpilled me a little, I will say.
I liked this not because it's a good story. It is, but that's beside the point. I liked this because it's my story. Not literally so, but the shape of it is. He's struck a nerve at the heart of growing up eager and curious and seeing a computer as a pathway to your dreams.
I’ve never had a post hit me with nostalgia as hard as this one. Thanks to the author for capturing what it felt like to be a stupid little kid with a weird old computer so well.
Outstanding article; I'm glad you put these thoughts into words and published them because I've felt similarly this week since I've had time and reason to reminisce on my 2010 MacBook. I had AutoCAD on that poor little computer, working at the pace it could handle.
This is true but also not at all the point of a review. Some tools are better suited for some tasks— reviews help those with the privilege of choice find the best ones for them. Otherwise you’d have a review of a hammer saying “this is a great tool for driving screws if you’re not afraid to get cREaTive with it!” Folks who need to make do with what they have already know about their constraints.
Apple has turned computers into luxury items. They are not simply computers, there is some status and image projection involved.
As a hacker and tinkerer I could never justify the cost of purchasing one of their machines, but I see people around me trying to sell their old Apple machines and phones at absurd prices (I do live in a peripheral economy and Apple stuff is even more expensive here).
So it makes sense for Apple to segment its market like that. It makes sense for their audience too.
When I shop for a car, I find the same issue: most analyses have very little to do with the car's technical attributes and there's a lot of gibberish about design and lifestyle.
John Gruber used it for a day and found it was actually totally adequate, or better, for his actual daily work.
> But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/the_macbook_neo
I think people are assuming it's going to be a worse experience than it actually is. I don't know how it does it with 8GB of RAM either, but apparently it does; i suppose my guess would be SSD and bus are fast enough that swapping on app change is no longer so disruptive? (I don't know if improvements in virtual memory swap logic could also be a thing that matters or not, this is not my area).
My daily driver has a CPU less than half as powerful and a motherboard that doesn't even support DDR4 RAM.
In high school we had a g3 Mac that we got Final Cut Pro on. It took forever to render a minute or two of video. But having a nonlinear editing system that took forever to do anything was way better than not having anything at all.
Edit: for true self embarrassment purposes you can see some of the films we made here:
https://youtu.be/FRQv7VUauWs?t=447&si=lCu3rp28XfKWN5ch
And also here:
https://youtu.be/ytKIG802baw?t=615&si=FJI8Cm9yYaXKMZdS
I put the start times at my movies. But there are others as well. lol.
My first computer was a hand-me-down Compaq LTE laptop, several times removed from the original owner, with a 700MB hard drive and Windows 95 a decade after those were leading-edge specs. It had only Word and Access, of all things, and little room for more.
But it was mine, I tinkered with it forever, learned databases enough to turn Access into a basic quasi-Excel for my needs, cataloged things that really didn't need to be tabulated, and generally learned as much as that little machine would let me.
That was a limited computer, one that couldn't possibly have let me do what I needed to do when I hit university. But it got me started, taught me to tinker, and I'm prety sure pushed me to learn more than a state-of-the-art for the time computer would have.
And so I do wonder, at times, if it's the nostalgic look back at early computing that makes people inclined to say "my god that would have been an amazing computer to start out with" when you look at an entry-level computer. I'm inclined, even, to say man that's going to be an epic $100 computer on the second-hand market in a half decade or less.
When at the same time, it's actually a solid machine for more of us than us geeks with our inflated expectations of computers have than we'd like to accept. That, too, is pretty cool.
I had no personal computer for years except what only served as my Plex Server until I took it down.
I bought a 16GB M2 MacBook Air after I was Amazoned to work on a side contract when I was between jobs. I used it for four weeks and the only thing I ran on it was VSCode, Safari and Zoom. I would have been fine with the MacBook Neo. Right now with a job, it’s about the same - we use GSuite in a browser.
When I was 6, I got a Commodore PLUS/4, which was Commodore's unsuccessful attempt at a business-oriented 8 bit computer. I think my folks wanted to give me a Commodore 64, but things happen. Since there were not nearly as many games on that thing, I learned to program early. It had a build in assembler/disassembler (shift-reset would reset the computer without wiping the memory - just the first byte of the program memory), so I learned how to reverse engineer assembly code before I was 10. This arguably "wrong tool" shaped my whole life, and was maybe the most important thing that happened to me. If I got a C64, I could have easily turned into someone else.
> He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it.
I'm still this person today :)
You learn the most from failure and the least from success. Likewise, you grow the most from pushing through the limits and the least from living in abundance. You can do pretty much anything on a full spec Mac Studio, but so can anyone else with a lot of money. But if you push through the limit of a MacBook Neo, you just did something no one else was able to do. And that is awesome.
This reminds me of learning linux and cli commands because an old netbook with like 512 of ram was struggling with modern guis and web browsers. So I used a minimal i3 installation and interacted mostly with a terminal.
I absolutely loved reading this, bring back memories. I was that kid too.
Main machine is a $50 Thinkpad.
I haven't used a computer more recent than 2016. As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm missing is AAA gaming (RTX looks cool), and local LLMs.
I did a bunch of game jams on it. Even won one! (Of course, even 2010s hardware is overkill for 2d games :)
I also did some basic video editing on it but it was a bit slow to render.
I won't say I'm not missing out — I'm certainly looking forward to an upgrade! — but that you can get surprisingly far with surprisingly little.
"I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny."
If I'd see that on my kids' computer it would fill me with pride.
I do miss the days that a (Linux) computer was like this for me. I say Linux because I had a similar obsession with FOSS and what it meant in a broad sense. But it doesn't matter, before that I de-compiled some program to make the text on the Windows START button different. Re-installed Win 2000 about every week, often after f-ing it up. Before that I changed some lines in DOS' autoexe.bat so it would ask for a password (which was just 2 input parameters readable in the autoexec.bat, but that is some mighty fine security (through obscurity) in a normie family).
This article struck a nerve. There's something about the curiosity of tinkering around in a computer. It's the most powerful technology humankind has built. It's versatile. It lets you break it. It's a bicycle for the mind, as Steve Jobs would say.
May all the hackers out there, old and young, discover the beauty of the personal computer.
When doing my Bachelor degree my dad gave me an old thinkpad to run on linux. It was a horrible experience for preparing powerpoints, papers, etc. But I still have that command line muscle memory and an eye to spot errors which really helped me in my career. In my final year I bought myself a macbook because I earned real money doing a consulting internship. But the unix muscle memory stayed, and I found working with IDEs so wasteful. In my first years at my job I rejected word and excel still to do everything in groff and awk.
I could 100% agree, putting up with i5-4210u and geforce 840m for twelve years. Making stupid shit, ditching Windows for Linux to gain any usability. Editing videos in too high resolutions. I taught myself being patient with electronics and it's the thing I couldn't have taught any other way.
What's so special about this machine? Is there no comparable $599 Windows or Linux laptop for kids to buy?
> 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.
This is why you should grow your own trees and wait a million years and melt the silicon into nvidia gpus and install linux.
learn linux.
only sanfran idealists dreaming of a world that destroys them use apple products.
Same. I got a crazy old Ubuntu desktop when I was 9 or something. It couldn’t run any games and that’s why I learned Python. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I had a machine capable of running Minecraft at the time…
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 features, a Neo may never graduate to a "hand-me-down computer", but instead head straight to the e-waste pile.
This post reminds me of a 14-year old boy reading the MS-DOS manual to figure out what AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS at his younger brother’s football games.
Dunno about Xcode, but if you put a go compiler in there, I doubt it will compile or run slowly. Some dependencies may require C, but you could avoid that mostly.
> 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 the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.
I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.
When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.