The MacBook Neo has attracted many of these reviews.
The consensus is fair: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, the first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you’re thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” Those who say this are not wrong. This is not even the point.
No one starts from the right place. You don’t start with the right equipment and work intelligently within its limitations until you systematically move up to more capable equipment. Passion doesn’t work like that. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and applying pressure to it until it either breaks or reveals something. The boundaries of the machine become a map of the area. You learn what computing really costs by paying a lot on hardware it can barely afford.
I know this because I was running Final Cut Pro I was nine years old. I had no business doing this. I did this every day after school until my parents let me go to bed.
The machine came with the help of my grandfather. He had it wiped down, installed in his kitchen in Massachusetts. It was one software update away from getting XX from Apple. I torrented Adobe CS5 that same week. Downloaded Xcode and dragged buttons and controls around in Interface Builder without understanding what I was looking at. i edited SystemVersion.plist The “About This Mac” window appears to show that it’s running Mac OS 69, which is sex number one, which is pretty funny. I pretended to be sick to watch WWDC 2011 – Steve Jobs’s last keynote – and clapped alone in my room while the audience applauded, and later recreated his slides in the keynote because I wanted to understand how they made him feel that way.
I knew what I wanted to do with the machine was wrong. I didn’t care. Every limit was just the edge of something I didn’t yet understand. It was green fields and blue sky.
I thought about all this when I first opened Neo.
What Apple has put inside Neo is the entire behavior contract of the Mac. Not Mac Lite. Not a browser in a laptop suit. Same macOS, same API, same Neural Engine, same weird byzantine AppKit controls that haven’t changed meaningfully since the NeXT era. Ability to disable SIP and install some bullshit system modification you saw in YouTube tutorials. All this, for $599.
They cut out things that are obviously not Mac. MagSafe. promotion. M-Series Silicon. Port Bandwidth. Configurable memory. All that’s left is the Retina display, the aluminum, the keyboard, and the entire software platform. I grabbed it and thought, “Yeah, still a Mac.”
Yes, you will reach the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see it through. But the limitations you hit on Neo are resource limitations – memory is limited, the silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. Chromebooks don’t teach you this. The roof of the Chromebook is made of the web browser, and the things you bump into are not the edge of computing but the edge of the product category designed to protect you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t realize that his machine can’t handle it. He learned that Google had decided it wasn’t allowed. They are completely different texts.
Some child somewhere is saving for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four-five times. Looked at every specification, every benchmark, every footnote. He might have gone to an Apple Store and asked an employee about it. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for what he wants to do.
He is determined that he will be okay.
This computer is not for the people writing those reviews – people who already have a MacBook Pro, who have a professional reference, who are optimizing on the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have the margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the perfect tool to materialize? Who will take what is available and keep pushing until it breaks and learn something lasting from the breaking.
He’ll go through the system settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can to see how he likes it. That’s going to create a folder called “Projects” that doesn’t contain anything. He’s going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He’s going to open up GarageBand and make something that’s not a song. He’ll take screenshots of his favorite fonts and put them in a folder called “Cool Fonts” and don’t know why. Then he’s going to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and None of this, from the outside, will seem like the beginning of anything. But one of those things is going to stick around longer than the others. He won’t know which one until later. All he will know is that he keeps opening it.
There is no bug in the way he is using the computer. This is the entire mechanism by which a child becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a film producer. Or whatever it is that comes from spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never right for what you were asking of it.
I was that kid.
He knows it’s probably not the right tool. It doesn’t matter. This never happened.
Reviews can tell you what the computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one person.
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