Some people write software and when it's slow, they think they need a faster computer. Other people optimize the software to run faster. I think the former is how we got Electron.
I like using slow computers because if the thing I'm making runs ok here, it's going to run really fast for most other people.
As a software development leader I often told my team they should be developing on the slowest machines so they feel the impact of slow code. That’s not a very popular opinion. Often got the response “hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive”. Sure when you’re not paying for it.
I am currently daily driving a laptop that has only eight gigs of memory soldered to the motherboard.
It's been an eye opener in both context management where I have to be very careful otherwise oomearly kicks in and poof as well as realizing how incredibly (and unnecessarily) chunky some modern apps and/or websites are.
my thoughts exactly! all my main dev happens on a hp envy 13 (8/256G, i5 8th gen) or an optiplex i bought from eBay for ~250£. helps me keep the sites I build super lean, because it's instantly obvious to me if not.
You should do well but not really good. And the reason is that in the time it takes you to go from well to really good, Moore’s law has already surpassed you. You can pick up 10 percent but while you’re picking up that 10 percent, computers have gotten twice as fast and maybe with some other stuff that matters more for optimization, like caches. I think it’s largely a waste of time to do really well. It’s really hard; you generate as many bugs as you fix. You should stop, not take that extra 100 percent of time to do 10 percent of the work
Same thing for server applications. If performance is good on my Raspberry Pi 5 over Tailscale it will probably perform even better on an actual production server and there is enough headroom for vertical scaling.
Agreed, though I have usually run into it from the other direction. I've sometimes not realized some code was slow until I tested it on other systems because my workstation was very performant.
I really enjoyed reading this, thank you. One little personal story. The author mentioned:
The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.
I was that kid... when I was ~10, my school got Chromebooks. I had started programming a year earlier and a lot of my friends were into like Linux and Python and Flash games. At home, my family had a mac, and I had started to learn Inkscape and Blender on it.
The school blocked a lot of fun websites (like coolmathgames.com) at the chrome-browser level (not the network level). My friends and I worked together and figured out how to root our Chromebooks and install Ubuntu with chroot + crouton. (So we could play flash games! Later we hosted a web server full of flash games on the school's internal network, but that's a story for another time.)
What was very cool was that the Chromebook would boot both ChromeOS and Ubuntu side-by-side, simultaneously. You could instantly switch between them with a little keyboard shortcut. (Which was a great feature, as you can imagine!)
I installed Blender on Ubuntu on my Chromebook and would mess around with fluid and physics simulations during lunch or in the library. (I would bring a USB mouse to school in my backpack.) I learned a lot. Surprisingly, either because I was very patient or because I didn't know any better, I thought Blender worked quite well on my Chromebook. I think I still might have some old renders or screenshots from that time on an old hard drive, I'll see if I can find them later.
Kids do the craziest things with technology and this serendipity shapes their futures for the better. I also greatly enjoyed reading the article, it resonated with my 14-year-old so much.
When I was a kid, all my friends and me pirated Autocad (windows 3.1 era, maybe msdos even?). We had no use for it, of course. It was just cool to say you "have Autocad" and we'd pass around the diskettes.
Well, I did actually learn how to use it -via trial and error, of course, there were no tutorials- and I mapped my (parents') apartment. I got a meter tape, spent hours measuring it all and drawing maps, and created an autocad file.
I showed this to one of my high school teachers and they were so impressed that they sent me as an intern to a relative's architecture firm. It was crazy, I was 16 and I was converting handmade room maps from customers and plotting them in a huge HP plotter.
I fell in love with the plotter. The best part of the day was to watch it work, how it grabbed markers with a tiny robotic hand and drew like a person. I started plotting random drawings I made and I got "caught". I remember one of the drawings was a gameboy, exact size as the device. My supervisor laughed, he saw my obsession with the plotter and took me on an (already scheduled for employees) visit to HP headquarters. It was wild.
I then decided I would study computer science. I am a computer science professor now. It all started with pirating Autocad for the sake of it.
I remember begging and pleading for months for a baseline MacBook Pro for months as a teenager so I could have a computer that was truly my own to mess around with. when I finally got it that christmas it changed my life. I wouldn’t be where I am if I hadn’t been given that chance at radical computer ownership as a kid. I learned so much that way.
I do really wish that the author hadn’t assumed the “kid” was a guy but that’s just another day among tech people. the sentiment is good.
After reading this article I'm much more comfortable buying this for my 9 year old without worrying about whether I'm doing him a disservice in some way.
"Alice" and "Bob" have been the go-to names for example users since 1978. SICP refers to the programmer as she often, with the first fictional user named Alyssa P. Hacker. Don't disparage "tech people" for something "tech people" are relatively good at.
The author of this article does a little Chromebook bashing from a place of ignorance.
On ChromeOS, you can enable something called Crostini. It's a Linux container. In there, you can run any Linux software — including Blender. I've also run irssi, WeeChat, Krita, gVim, VS Code, gcc, clang, Go... even Luanti (formerly Minetest). It all works fine.
So, no: Google is NOT deciding the user can't run Blender on their Chromebook, because they CAN.
I'm astounded at reviewers saying you shouldn't be trying to program (and lots of other things) on this.
Six years ago, March 2020, this would have been the fastest laptop computer in the world.
The i9-10980HX laptops were just coming out (in fact in April for the Lenovo ones).
It's faster than them. By 2x single-core, but also multi-core, despite only having six cores.
It's 30% faster single core than the M1 that came out at the end of that year. And neck and neck single core. That was only available with 8 GB for the first month too.
Those M1s that are so good the Apple can't persuade people (including me) to upgrade from them. Apple's marketing is still mostly aimed at people who are still using Intel MacBooks.
Don't tell me you can't program on these. I used to run emacs and gcc on a Unix machine with a 33 MHz CPU and 64 MB RAM.
I learned to program in Pascal on a 1 MHz machine with 64 KB of RAM, that didn't even compile to native code but to an interpreted P-Code that probably didn't run much more than 10,000 instructions per second.
I'm astounded at reviewers saying you shouldn't be trying to program (and lots of other things) on this.
They're specifically saying you probably won't be able to run XCode, as it's a resource hog. Sure you can run other editors, but that's not the "Apple approved" way of programming...
It's a very very long time since I opened the XCode GUI, but I just tried it (Xcode 16 is installed) on an old project and Activity Monitor says it's using 300MB RAM. Which I admit seems excessive, but shouldn't trouble an 8 GB machine.
I wanted to up grade my old laptop to 32Gb of RAM back in December, but even then it was coming in at 400, while I had bought a 32Gb module last June for 100, and RAM is becoming more scarce, so the idea of a new machine for 600 with 8Gb has it's appeals...
Yeah. I have 16 GB and I don't really need more, but I assumed another 16 GB of DDR4 was going to be $20-$30 from checking about a year ago. I went online and it was almost $100. Probably more now.
I've joined the rest of the unwashed, praying for this AI bubble to pop so we can get on with our lives.
What a gem of an article, I haven't realized I was that kid!
At the place I am from, having a desktop with fast (1Mbps) internet access between 2005 and 2010 was a big luxury. Gladly, I was really fortunate to have a dad that thought it was important to be computer literate in the future!
The computer had an AMD Athlon CPU and 1GB DDR2 of RAM. I used it during a decade to do everything you could imagine:
Video editing with Sony Vegas and due to the memory constraint, I only had about 5 seconds of preview at a time;
photo editing with Photoshop that took 10 seconds for each change on the RAW editor;
basic networking hosting laggy game servers;
learned a bit about patching games for slower machines to play Call of Duty 4;
coding became a necessity as graphical programs weren't cutting anymore.
Not once I thought the machine was a problem. Maybe just an obstacle.
When internet browsing became unbearable, I read somewhere that this Ubuntu thing would help me. This gave the machine 2 more years until a kind German I met on the internet sent me an entire FX-6300 computer with 16GB of RAM (!!!) in 2016. Fast-forward and all these limitations eventually brought me to Lobste.rs!
The stars were aligned since the beginning for me to discover the world of tiling window managers and suckless software due to the limited hardware I had. Software minimalism, privacy and freedom were overlapping subjects on these communities.
I don't really recall how, but I found myself on a community born out of a dead imageboard. This community was filled to the brim with people from Germany and Russia. It was a great community at the time.
People often discussed how they could minimize their "software footprint" and depend on less software for their daily lives. The German guy I mentioned was just starting out on this path and I helped him with dwm patches, basic server administration and Linux in general. Well, I guess that at some point he noticed that it took hours (or more than one day if it involved another distro) to test stuff with him.
One day he sent me a message asking for my address saying that he would send some regards from Germany. I was extremely excited to receive a letter from abroad, going to another country was such a distant idea to me that it felt the same as discovering life on another planet!
After a regular day at school (I was 15 years old at the time) I come home and my mom tells me that I had received a huge package with some words she couldn't make sense of. I was so excited that I didn't even think about the danger of opening it inside the house!
Apologies for not finding words to describe how happy I was digging inside the infinite amount of foam he put on that box. He didn't use our postal office service, he paid a DHL delivery as he could then pay the customs for me beforehand (otherwise, he would accidentally bankrupt me!). He even went as far as pre-installing Debian for me so that I wouldn't waste time setting up the machine before using it!
This gift literally turned my life around, man! Hell, I was studying to become a psychologist, not a damn software developer. Ever since he sent me that package I was able to find better jobs, meet great people, experience things I've never thought about and even save enough money to try and study abroad!
The postcard inside that package was framed in UV-resistant glass and is to this day hanging where the computer used to be when I lived with my parents.
I had a related feeling after reading The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Huang, although it was more on the technical side. I realized that I could spend the rest of my life exploring the capabilities & architecture of the dumpiest computer I own and barely glimpse its horizons. Everything I needed was already sitting under my desk, moldering.
This made me nostalgic for my IBM 5150. Bought it at auction for $42 of my own money (and now realise that that number was almost certainly the adults in the room making a joke by stopping the bidding there). Fitted a used 20MiB HDD to it, after saving up the $100 required.
Given all the bash author is receiving for saying that Chromebooks disallow experimenting, I wonder if the several editions Windows has would have been a better analogy.
I feel this, my main dev machine is a converted second-hand i5 tiger lake Chromebook to NixOS and that's the machine I'm trying to build my renderer on lol.
The 8GB soldered RAM feels a bit rough now, wouldn't mind 16 so I could scatter tabs around more freely haha
This was a nice read. Coming from a 1KB of RAM 8 bit computer (the TRS-80 model 1, with a tape drive!), and upgrading eventually to the speedy 8 bit 6502-based Apple ][+ with an upgrade to 64KB of RAM and dual floppy drives, I totally appreciate the PoV here, and love the story-telling.
Great read to be honest, I kinda felt like a target audience for this machine, but then also ran into a need of a new MacBook (to retire Intel one) for outdoors programming and photo/video editing. Neo is an amazing choice for hobby/beginner photographers and programmers (on iPadOS, you can’t easily write code and commit changes) Considered the Air model as well, but then it doesn’t include HDR, and display is limited to 60Hz. Next obvious choice is, of course the Pro model, as you start adding stuff like nanostructured display, final cost quickly builds up.
While it’s fashionable to dunk on machine reviews for ‘pigeonholing’ users, spec lists and categories actually help people filter options quickly. Not everyone has the time or ability to squeeze performance out of under‑powered machines—sometimes you really do need more memory or compute. Blaming Electron or hardware specs misses the reality that workloads differ widely.
This is really beautiful. It really speaks to my experience of using underpowered computers and trying to do too much with them for most of my young life, starting with my Packard Bell 386SX-16, an intentionally shitty computer at the beginning of the 486 era.
jcs | a day ago
Some people write software and when it's slow, they think they need a faster computer. Other people optimize the software to run faster. I think the former is how we got Electron.
I like using slow computers because if the thing I'm making runs ok here, it's going to run really fast for most other people.
hmaddocks | 10 hours ago
As a software development leader I often told my team they should be developing on the slowest machines so they feel the impact of slow code. That’s not a very popular opinion. Often got the response “hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive”. Sure when you’re not paying for it.
Qyriad | 9 hours ago
The argument works better when you can at least compile on the fast machines, even if you run on the slow ones.
miro | 20 hours ago
I am currently daily driving a laptop that has only eight gigs of memory soldered to the motherboard.
It's been an eye opener in both context management where I have to be very careful otherwise oomearly kicks in and poof as well as realizing how incredibly (and unnecessarily) chunky some modern apps and/or websites are.
op | 13 hours ago
my thoughts exactly! all my main dev happens on a hp envy 13 (8/256G, i5 8th gen) or an optiplex i bought from eBay for ~250£. helps me keep the sites I build super lean, because it's instantly obvious to me if not.
vpr | 3 hours ago
Counterpoint, from Ken Thompson,
jstoja | 12 hours ago
It is a matter of perspective. I have a MacBook Pro for work, M3 Pro, 64 GB RAM, but it’s very slow compared to what we use for production.
lpil | 8 hours ago
I wager it's not per-user.
JulianWgs | 10 hours ago
Same thing for server applications. If performance is good on my Raspberry Pi 5 over Tailscale it will probably perform even better on an actual production server and there is enough headroom for vertical scaling.
zod000 | a day ago
Agreed, though I have usually run into it from the other direction. I've sometimes not realized some code was slow until I tested it on other systems because my workstation was very performant.
slightknack | a day ago
I really enjoyed reading this, thank you. One little personal story. The author mentioned:
I was that kid... when I was ~10, my school got Chromebooks. I had started programming a year earlier and a lot of my friends were into like Linux and Python and Flash games. At home, my family had a mac, and I had started to learn Inkscape and Blender on it.
The school blocked a lot of fun websites (like
coolmathgames.com) at the chrome-browser level (not the network level). My friends and I worked together and figured out how to root our Chromebooks and install Ubuntu with chroot + crouton. (So we could play flash games! Later we hosted a web server full of flash games on the school's internal network, but that's a story for another time.)What was very cool was that the Chromebook would boot both ChromeOS and Ubuntu side-by-side, simultaneously. You could instantly switch between them with a little keyboard shortcut. (Which was a great feature, as you can imagine!)
I installed Blender on Ubuntu on my Chromebook and would mess around with fluid and physics simulations during lunch or in the library. (I would bring a USB mouse to school in my backpack.) I learned a lot. Surprisingly, either because I was very patient or because I didn't know any better, I thought Blender worked quite well on my Chromebook. I think I still might have some old renders or screenshots from that time on an old hard drive, I'll see if I can find them later.
Thanks for reminding me of these memories!
cfenollosa | an hour ago
Kids do the craziest things with technology and this serendipity shapes their futures for the better. I also greatly enjoyed reading the article, it resonated with my 14-year-old so much.
When I was a kid, all my friends and me pirated Autocad (windows 3.1 era, maybe msdos even?). We had no use for it, of course. It was just cool to say you "have Autocad" and we'd pass around the diskettes.
Well, I did actually learn how to use it -via trial and error, of course, there were no tutorials- and I mapped my (parents') apartment. I got a meter tape, spent hours measuring it all and drawing maps, and created an autocad file.
I showed this to one of my high school teachers and they were so impressed that they sent me as an intern to a relative's architecture firm. It was crazy, I was 16 and I was converting handmade room maps from customers and plotting them in a huge HP plotter.
I fell in love with the plotter. The best part of the day was to watch it work, how it grabbed markers with a tiny robotic hand and drew like a person. I started plotting random drawings I made and I got "caught". I remember one of the drawings was a gameboy, exact size as the device. My supervisor laughed, he saw my obsession with the plotter and took me on an (already scheduled for employees) visit to HP headquarters. It was wild.
I then decided I would study computer science. I am a computer science professor now. It all started with pirating Autocad for the sake of it.
JustinAzoff | a day ago
You can run blender on a Chromebook using the Linux environment.
ag | a day ago
Shhh the kid didn't know that
dsr | 6 hours ago
more to the point, some of the kids will learn:
Google doesn't want them to do something
the school doesn't want them to do something
but if they are clever, they can do it anyway
And those kids have learned the right lesson: you can't trust authority to have your best interests in mind.
mort | an hour ago
Doesn't that depend on the Chromebook?
lilac | 19 hours ago
I remember begging and pleading for months for a baseline MacBook Pro for months as a teenager so I could have a computer that was truly my own to mess around with. when I finally got it that christmas it changed my life. I wouldn’t be where I am if I hadn’t been given that chance at radical computer ownership as a kid. I learned so much that way.
I do really wish that the author hadn’t assumed the “kid” was a guy but that’s just another day among tech people. the sentiment is good.
mudkip | 18 hours ago
The article is about the author, written in third-person.
pulsoste | 17 hours ago
After reading this article I'm much more comfortable buying this for my 9 year old without worrying about whether I'm doing him a disservice in some way.
mudkip | 2 hours ago
Much better choice than a phone, I think.
WilhelmVonWeiner | 14 hours ago
"Alice" and "Bob" have been the go-to names for example users since 1978. SICP refers to the programmer as she often, with the first fictional user named Alyssa P. Hacker. Don't disparage "tech people" for something "tech people" are relatively good at.
lilac | 13 hours ago
Teckla | 23 hours ago
The author of this article does a little Chromebook bashing from a place of ignorance.
On ChromeOS, you can enable something called Crostini. It's a Linux container. In there, you can run any Linux software — including Blender. I've also run irssi, WeeChat, Krita, gVim, VS Code, gcc, clang, Go... even Luanti (formerly Minetest). It all works fine.
So, no: Google is NOT deciding the user can't run Blender on their Chromebook, because they CAN.
tobz619 | 16 hours ago
Honestly, Crostini got me to pop my Linux cherry and once I saw the value and wanted more, I did everything I could do convert to full Linux
dsr | 6 hours ago
I have Chromebooks that won't run Crostini.
I also have one which got a SeaBIOS replacement, so it can run anything.
brucehoult | 12 hours ago
I'm astounded at reviewers saying you shouldn't be trying to program (and lots of other things) on this.
Six years ago, March 2020, this would have been the fastest laptop computer in the world.
The i9-10980HX laptops were just coming out (in fact in April for the Lenovo ones).
It's faster than them. By 2x single-core, but also multi-core, despite only having six cores.
It's 30% faster single core than the M1 that came out at the end of that year. And neck and neck single core. That was only available with 8 GB for the first month too.
Those M1s that are so good the Apple can't persuade people (including me) to upgrade from them. Apple's marketing is still mostly aimed at people who are still using Intel MacBooks.
Don't tell me you can't program on these. I used to run emacs and gcc on a Unix machine with a 33 MHz CPU and 64 MB RAM.
I learned to program in Pascal on a 1 MHz machine with 64 KB of RAM, that didn't even compile to native code but to an interpreted P-Code that probably didn't run much more than 10,000 instructions per second.
sjamaan | 10 hours ago
They're specifically saying you probably won't be able to run XCode, as it's a resource hog. Sure you can run other editors, but that's not the "Apple approved" way of programming...
brucehoult | 9 hours ago
You're kidding?
It's a very very long time since I opened the XCode GUI, but I just tried it (Xcode 16 is installed) on an old project and Activity Monitor says it's using 300MB RAM. Which I admit seems excessive, but shouldn't trouble an 8 GB machine.
What am I missing?
sjamaan | 9 hours ago
I had no idea XCode was "lightweight". No clue what the reviewers are going for then...
glhaynes | 9 hours ago
You can absolutely run Xcode for anything at the scale the article is talking about in 8GB.
gcupc | 7 hours ago
Have you mildly beat. 16 MHz and 8 MB. Running emacs and gcc on OS/2. The OS/2 version of Emacs 19 was surprisingly great.
kghose | 22 hours ago
People will pay 600 + tax for an 8G machine? I thought that’s what ebay, thinkpads and the $50 you found in the couch was for.
zem | 15 hours ago
it is a little depressing that 8G is not more than enough to run anything a casual hobbyist might want.
kghose | 8 hours ago
8G on linux is enough for office suite tasks. Never tried 3D or video editing, so I can’t say.
Jackevansevo | 5 hours ago
If you think it's a dumb purchase just because a second hand ThinkPad with Linux would be cheaper than this isn't the computer for you.
Its for normies who want something that works. People that probably already have a iPhone/iPad who are locked into the ecosystem.
fcbsd | 20 hours ago
I wanted to up grade my old laptop to 32Gb of RAM back in December, but even then it was coming in at 400, while I had bought a 32Gb module last June for 100, and RAM is becoming more scarce, so the idea of a new machine for 600 with 8Gb has it's appeals...
kghose | 20 hours ago
Yeah. I have 16 GB and I don't really need more, but I assumed another 16 GB of DDR4 was going to be $20-$30 from checking about a year ago. I went online and it was almost $100. Probably more now.
I've joined the rest of the unwashed, praying for this AI bubble to pop so we can get on with our lives.
duncan_bayne | 13 hours ago
Nope, they'll pay $50 for the laptop and $550 for a door into the Apple walled garden 🙄
ratsclub | 18 hours ago
What a gem of an article, I haven't realized I was that kid!
At the place I am from, having a desktop with fast (1Mbps) internet access between 2005 and 2010 was a big luxury. Gladly, I was really fortunate to have a dad that thought it was important to be computer literate in the future!
The computer had an AMD Athlon CPU and 1GB DDR2 of RAM. I used it during a decade to do everything you could imagine:
Not once I thought the machine was a problem. Maybe just an obstacle.
When internet browsing became unbearable, I read somewhere that this Ubuntu thing would help me. This gave the machine 2 more years until a kind German I met on the internet sent me an entire FX-6300 computer with 16GB of RAM (!!!) in 2016. Fast-forward and all these limitations eventually brought me to Lobste.rs!
Thanks for sharing this!
tomsmeding | 10 hours ago
That sounds like a story, how did that happen? :)
ratsclub | 6 hours ago
The stars were aligned since the beginning for me to discover the world of tiling window managers and suckless software due to the limited hardware I had. Software minimalism, privacy and freedom were overlapping subjects on these communities.
I don't really recall how, but I found myself on a community born out of a dead imageboard. This community was filled to the brim with people from Germany and Russia. It was a great community at the time.
People often discussed how they could minimize their "software footprint" and depend on less software for their daily lives. The German guy I mentioned was just starting out on this path and I helped him with
dwmpatches, basic server administration and Linux in general. Well, I guess that at some point he noticed that it took hours (or more than one day if it involved another distro) to test stuff with him.One day he sent me a message asking for my address saying that he would send some regards from Germany. I was extremely excited to receive a letter from abroad, going to another country was such a distant idea to me that it felt the same as discovering life on another planet!
After a regular day at school (I was 15 years old at the time) I come home and my mom tells me that I had received a huge package with some words she couldn't make sense of. I was so excited that I didn't even think about the danger of opening it inside the house!
Apologies for not finding words to describe how happy I was digging inside the infinite amount of foam he put on that box. He didn't use our postal office service, he paid a DHL delivery as he could then pay the customs for me beforehand (otherwise, he would accidentally bankrupt me!). He even went as far as pre-installing Debian for me so that I wouldn't waste time setting up the machine before using it!
This gift literally turned my life around, man! Hell, I was studying to become a psychologist, not a damn software developer. Ever since he sent me that package I was able to find better jobs, meet great people, experience things I've never thought about and even save enough money to try and study abroad!
The postcard inside that package was framed in UV-resistant glass and is to this day hanging where the computer used to be when I lived with my parents.
mewse | 4 hours ago
Great story.
ahelwer | a day ago
I had a related feeling after reading The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Huang, although it was more on the technical side. I realized that I could spend the rest of my life exploring the capabilities & architecture of the dumpiest computer I own and barely glimpse its horizons. Everything I needed was already sitting under my desk, moldering.
chazu | 20 hours ago
Great article man. Reminds me of so many good times spent fucking with jumpers on my motherboard or trying to compile MUDs with minGW.
duncan_bayne | 22 hours ago
This made me nostalgic for my IBM 5150. Bought it at auction for $42 of my own money (and now realise that that number was almost certainly the adults in the room making a joke by stopping the bidding there). Fitted a used 20MiB HDD to it, after saving up the $100 required.
fedemp | 21 hours ago
Given all the bash author is receiving for saying that Chromebooks disallow experimenting, I wonder if the several editions Windows has would have been a better analogy.
tobz619 | 16 hours ago
I feel this, my main dev machine is a converted second-hand i5 tiger lake Chromebook to NixOS and that's the machine I'm trying to build my renderer on lol.
The 8GB soldered RAM feels a bit rough now, wouldn't mind 16 so I could scatter tabs around more freely haha
hwj | 13 hours ago
Does anyone else have the feeling that he is this kid? Remembering my first Mac (iBook G4) - I do...
cpurdy | 19 hours ago
This was a nice read. Coming from a 1KB of RAM 8 bit computer (the TRS-80 model 1, with a tape drive!), and upgrading eventually to the speedy 8 bit 6502-based Apple ][+ with an upgrade to 64KB of RAM and dual floppy drives, I totally appreciate the PoV here, and love the story-telling.
heavyrain266 | a day ago
Great read to be honest, I kinda felt like a target audience for this machine, but then also ran into a need of a new MacBook (to retire Intel one) for outdoors programming and photo/video editing. Neo is an amazing choice for hobby/beginner photographers and programmers (on iPadOS, you can’t easily write code and commit changes) Considered the Air model as well, but then it doesn’t include HDR, and display is limited to 60Hz. Next obvious choice is, of course the Pro model, as you start adding stuff like nanostructured display, final cost quickly builds up.
zupo | 2 hours ago
While it’s fashionable to dunk on machine reviews for ‘pigeonholing’ users, spec lists and categories actually help people filter options quickly. Not everyone has the time or ability to squeeze performance out of under‑powered machines—sometimes you really do need more memory or compute. Blaming Electron or hardware specs misses the reality that workloads differ widely.
scruss | an hour ago
Where? MacBooks are your dad's or your grandpa's computer. They are solid, corporate, ancient.
gcupc | 7 hours ago
This is really beautiful. It really speaks to my experience of using underpowered computers and trying to do too much with them for most of my young life, starting with my Packard Bell 386SX-16, an intentionally shitty computer at the beginning of the 486 era.