💻 This Is Not The Computer For You

Sam Henri Gold, in a wonderful review of the MacBook Neo:

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. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

When the first version of World of Warcraft was released in 2004, the PC I had at the time didn't meet the minimum system requirements. Not by a long shot. My CPU was too slow, I didn't have enough RAM, and my graphics card was a generation or two out of date.

I bought World of Warcraft and forced it to run anyway.

Even with the resolution cranked way down, the frame rate was abysmal. Visual glitches were abundant. But it ran. I was in Azeroth. It was blurry, fuzzy, and glitchy, but I was doing quests, finding loot, and chatting with other players.

It wasn't good enough. Every update or change—even tiny ones—tended to break everything and require hours of adjustments, experimentation, and tweaks to get things working again. I installed so many different drivers. I made so many registry and INI file tweaks. So, so many. Even when the game was technically working, I had to avoid certain areas because they were too visually demanding or too crowded and would cause a crash.

It was, in many ways, terrible. But terrible got me in the door. Terrible taught me a lot about how games worked, about how graphics drivers worked, about how Windows worked, and about how computers in general worked. Terrible forced me to figure out how to wring every last bit of performance from outdated hardware that had every right to flip me the bird as it committed thermal suicide.

The MacBook Neo is far from terrible. If anything, it’s far more capable than most people think when they hear things like “iPhone chip” and “8 GB of RAM.” It does have more limits than any other current-gen Mac, but it’s also scrappy, fun, extremely well-designed, and makes the Mac accessible to a much larger audience.

When it comes to performance and specs, there’s no way anyone can argue it’s the best Mac. When it comes to people and practicality, it’s the best Mac Apple has made in years.