It’s the end of the world as we know it
(It’s time I had some time alone)
And I feel fine
I’m going to run myself out of pertinent introductions at this point, aren’t I? It’s March 19, and you know what that means: it’s time to catch up on our random musing.
I wrote recently at my computing blog about the MacBook Neo, Apple’s attempt at building a budget laptop, and my first impression is that it’s a product that is going to sour more new users to the Mac than it will motivate to stay with the platform. Preliminary benchmarks suggest that the A18 Pro, formerly of the iPhone 16 Pro, performs about as well as the M1 processor released in 2020. Apple, in my view, made just a few too many compromises to get the Neo down to the $599 price point. Is it still an impeccably made device? Sure. Apple has come a long way since its design Stone Age, and the products it sells nowadays are universally recognized for quality. The biggest stumbling block is going to be the paltry 8 GB RAM ceiling, which was more than enough for OS X Mavericks in 2013 (my 2012 MacBook Air positively sings in Mavericks) but is a little constraining for macOS Tahoe in 2026, especially if you plan to take advantage of on-device AI (those models have to sit somewhere in memory) or play one of the few triple-A games released on the Mac. The MacBook Neo will sell absolute gangbusters, 90% of the people buying it won’t care about the modest specs, and the 10% who end up hating their Neos are the ones who should have bought literally any other laptop Apple sells.
I’m just this close to buying a MacBook Neo for myself so I can have a laptop with an operating system and keyboard both in French, but it would actually be easier, and much cheaper, to just run one of my spare Macs in French and just fake it with the keyboard.
A brief thought
Every time I try to make time to work on this blog, something happens that pushes me away. I have too many things to do, or so it seems, and blogging gets shunted to the bottom of the order. I think I’m going to put this monthly feature on ice since I don’t have much to say some months (I really struggled to come up with things for this month), and just let this become a whenever-I-feel-like-it blog.
We’ll see what shakes out by April 19. Until then.