Of course you can. You can do real work on an $80 Amazon Fire. Yes, some things will be potentially impossible or frustrating but that's also true of the MacBook Neo, just a bit higher of a bar. A lot of this also depends on your definition of "real work".

$350 USD can get you a decent laptop with a SSD, 16GB RAM and something like an Intel N100 or N95. And they pretty comparable to a decent Intel Skylake CPU which are still pretty usable.

https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Keyboard-Fi...

https://www.amazon.com/AOC-Computer-Processor-Laptops-Window...

Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and less storage and costs more and has less ports. Besides ray traced games what can the Neo do that the others can't? They'll take longer but they'll get there.

And if you're willing to go used? That $350 goes a lot further.

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prmph an hour ago | parent [-]

> Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and less storage and costs more and has less ports.

8GB on Apple Silicon is far better than 16 GB on Wintel, and I don't event trust the quality of 16GB of RAM on a bottom of the barrel Windows machine.

Would you prefer a machine that is still good 7 years from now with less ports, or one with more ports that you have to replace in 2 years? Yes it is more expensive now, but over 7 years it is an absolute bargain.

	▲	chocochunks 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		16 GB physical RAM is just better. Apple isn't magic. Gimme a break. Both devices have SSDs for fast swapping and have RAM compression. You can't spin up a VM that has 8GB RAM on the Neo, you can't load a large spreadsheet or do a decently sized digital painting. I could maybe buy a claim that 8GB is better on Mac than 8GB on Windows. Why would you have to replace it in 2 years? How do we know Apple will even be offering updates to Neo in 7 years? Will 8GB still be usable in 7 years really? 8GB is barely on the fence already. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple drops the Neo from software support in less than 7 years.