I took the article as talking about the difference between reviews that say “this computer is not going to be great at X” and the reviews that say “this machine is only good for office tasks or Y“. The gatekeeping tone.

It can do most anything. It may not be amazing, but people get buy. And they may be ok with it.

I saw tons of comments in the original post about the Neo from people who talked about how they used extremely old hand-me-down/used laptops to learn to start programming and fall in love with computers.

I was just watching a video from ETA PRIME who tests lots of small computers to see how good they are for gaming.

He was playing RoboCop on it, and it ran pretty well. 45-ish FPS. It was using 11 gigs of RAM at the time. So it was obviously in swap.

Is that ideal? No. But it works.

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Forgeties79 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I’d bet a solid 25% of the people nitpicking the Neo would’ve called it a breath of fresh air if it wasn’t made by Apple.

I don’t want one, it doesn’t do what I need. But I can definitely see the use cases especially at that price point.

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GrifMD 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It reminds me of the iPhone 5C when I had a 5S, it's a beautiful colorful breath of fresh air that I wish I had but my needs are so much greater. But if I wasn't an engineer who needed a highspeced MacBook Pro I'd go with it.

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eru 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a high specced MacBook Pro, but honestly I mostly use it for vscode tunnels to my actual dev machine.

So the only real benefit compared to my MacBook Air is that the screen is a bit nicer, and I can keep more Firefox tabs open, because it has more RAM.

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RealityVoid 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Bingo! IMO, laptops are best used as thin clients and you do the heavy lifting on servers or a box in a closet somewhere.

I'va been migrating my workflow to this approach and I'm an embedded dev! My closet does have hw strewn about but once you set it up that you don't have to touch wires it's super convenient.

My one gripe with MacBook airs up to m4 was support for only one external monitor. But m4 fixed this.

	▲	eru 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not sure about this being the best approach. It just works for me sometimes.
	▲	Forgeties79 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I thought the single external monitor support was only with the M1. Wild it went on after that