Sam Henri Gold is a product design engineer building playful, useful software.
There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.
The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews.
The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.
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.
I know this because I was running Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spinning rust. I was nine. I had no business doing this. I did it every day after school until my parents made me go to bed.
The machine came as a hand-me-down from my nana. She’d wiped it, set it up in her kitchen in Massachusetts. It was one software update away from getting the axe from Apple. I torrented Adobe CS5 the same week. Downloaded Xcode and dragged buttons and controls around in Interface Builder with no understanding of what I was looking at. I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” window say it was running Mac OS 69, which is the s*x number, which is very funny. I faked being sick to watch WWDC 2011 — Steve Jobs’ last keynote — and clapped alone in my room when the audience clapped, and rebuilt his slides in Keynote afterward because I wanted to understand how he’d made them feel that way.
I knew the machine was wrong for what I wanted to do with it. I didn’t care. Every limitation was just the edge of something I hadn’t figured out yet. It was green fields and blue skies.
I thought about all of this when I opened the Neo for the first time.
What Apple put inside the Neo is the complete behavioral contract of the Mac. Not a Mac Lite. Not a browser in a laptop costume. The same macOS, the same APIs, the same Neural Engine, the same weird byzantine AppKit controls that haven’t meaningfully changed since the NeXT era. The ability to disable SIP and install some fuck-ass system modification you saw in a YouTube tutorial. All of it, at $599.
They cut the things that are, apparently, not the Mac. MagSafe. ProMotion. M-series silicon. Port bandwidth. Configurable memory. What remains is the Retina display, the aluminum, the keyboard, and the full software platform. I held it and thought, “yep, still a Mac.”
Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. 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.
Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.
He has decided he’ll be fine.
This computer is not for the people writing those reviews — people who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why. Then he is going to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and Xcode all open at once, not because he’s working in all of them but because he doesn’t know you’re not supposed to do that, and the machine is going to get hot and slow and he is going to learn what the spinning beachball cursor means. None of this will look, from the outside, like the beginning of anything. But one of those things is going to stick longer than the others. He won’t know which one until later. He’ll just know he keeps opening it.
That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite 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. It never did.
The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.
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Comments
> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself.
I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.
I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.
When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.
Man I got a computer engineering degree in 2015 with a $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian. And I worked professionally for years on an 8gb MacBook Air. The Neo is definitely something younger me would be interested in.
Did the same for my freshman year of Uni on a $99 Chromebook. Java and C dev on 4GB of ram wasn't an issue.
That said, I quickly upgraded to a 4 year used Thinkpad and that was a huge difference.
C dev wasn't an issue back in the 1 GB or 256 MB or 16 MB days either. You just didn't use to have a Chrome tab open that by itself is eating 345 MB just to show a simple tutorial page.
By billforsternz 2026-03-1320:16 C dev wasn't a problem with MSDOS and 640K either. With CP/M and 64K it was a challenge I think. Struggling to remember the details on that and too lazy to research it right now.
> $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian
Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.
By toast0 2026-03-1314:42 Looking at BestBuy, category chromebook, the first one that comes up is $150, intel n4500.
I don't know if this is particularly current or what, or if it's easy to setup to run another OS or whatever, but it meets your price and architecture criteria.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/hp-14-chromebook-intel-celer...
By officeplant 2026-03-1314:39 ARM chromebooks run the Debian containers just fine. It's just at settings toggle to enable it and you don't even need dev mode.
By mattnewton 2026-03-1313:411 reply There were a bunch of intel atom ones IIRC. I got my degree with a used EEEpc with one of those.
By xyzzy_plugh 2026-03-1314:141 reply As did I. The most unbelievable part is that we used that tiny keyboard.
By uka 2026-03-1318:24 EEEPc ? Oh, I used to dream of having an EEEPc ... I got my degree using old C64 - had to manually encrypt packets with pen and paper to use https.
By JCattheATM 2026-03-1319:43 The problem is like all Apple stuff it's just needlessly limiting and has few advantages over alternatives.
I mean, never mind younger us. I have a M5 MBP and even I am tempted for a Neo for travelling
By BoxOfRain 2026-03-1313:04 When my mates at school had the aero glass effect on the new Windows, my ancient hand-me-down laptop wouldn't even try to run it. It could however run Compiz somewhat if it was persuaded very hard!
That's basically the reason I learned Linux initially, and those hours debugging video driver issues would serve me well later on.
When Chromebooks originally came out, that was not an option. And almost all school-issued computers will not let you do this.
By zeta0134 2026-03-1311:39 I've owned and used the CR-48 prototype Chromebook model, which very well did have a developer mode and a third kernel option built right in. Ran Ubuntu on it with no issues. This has been possible since before the device family was officially available for purchase.
The school thing is different, but also hardly unique. A school issued macbook is often similarly locked down and unusable as a dev machine, due to the student lacking permissions to install anything the school deems dangerous.
By tosti 2026-03-1311:19 It was possible on the Acer model I got when it first came out, but it was still useless. A switch that wiped the whole thing back to defaults was needed to open a terminal and from there a shell script could install Ubuntu. It still ran the unmodifiable chromeos kernel with no updates and without some of the modules I'd like. And then the screen died.
It was junk. The EeePC was cheaper, lasted much longer and had Debian out of the box.
By ghoulishly 2026-03-1313:094 reply Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account.
If I got a Chromebook as a personal machine as a kid, I probably would’ve rooted it and see what I could do, but growing up, the beauty of the Mac (in that Snow Leopard era) was progressive disclosure. I could start on the happy path and have a perfectly stable machine, then customize the behaviors through the terminal, see what it does, mess with the system files, see what breaks, revert it, then go back to using iMovie like normal.
In my (admittedly limited) time using a rooted Chromebook, it’s much more like a switch flip. You go from mandatory water wings directly into getting pushed into the ocean and Google shouting “Good luck!!”
By seabrookmx 2026-03-1315:17 You don't have to root them to do cool shit anymore. They have a full Linux (Debian based) environment you can enable with a single toggle in the settings. Any GUI apps you install via apt get their icons dropped in the system tray and their windows are rendered via Wayland.
By officeplant 2026-03-1314:41 >the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk.
The Macbook Neo will be no different if the school is actually managing them properly.
By starkparker 2026-03-1318:151 reply Yeah, very little of this is still true of the period in which the Neo or modern Chromebooks exist.
If the school is managing these Macs, including laptops sent home with a student, then unless it's for a specific purpose they aren't allowing you modify files, you probably aren't allowed to open a terminal or system settings, and you definitely aren't disabling SIP. You might not even be able to access the open internet if they've hard-configured it into a VPN. No different from a managed Chromebook.
Likewise, even older and lower-end unmanaged Chromebooks can enable a full Linux environment that runs a terminal in a browser tab. Doing so doesn't require root or developer mode, and it doesn't change or sacrifice any of the rest of the ChromeOS environment (for which your core assertion, that an unmanaged Mac is a computer and an unmanaged Chromebook is a thin-client appliance, still fundamentally holds). You can install Blender and have it running in a window by about 1 minute into watching a YouTube video titled "How To Download Or Update ANY VERSION Of Blender On Chromebook".
Gaining root on a Chromebook is mostly just a prerequisite to modifying things specific to ChromeOS, but the easier to access, more featureful, and safer LDE is still an entire operating system that you can tinker with, screw up, overload, blow up, and reset to zero, all without losing the happy path of opening up Canva (or, more likely, CapCut on their phone/iPad) and editing videos or whatever.
By saagarjha 2026-03-143:18 Most schools will let you do all of those things, either out of incompetence or because it makes it impossible to actually use the Mac for what the Mac is good at.
macOS or Windows can be similarly locked down. In the schools, the school locks it down. In many companies, there are management tools like JAMF, InTune, or NinjaOne that lock down laptops, desktops, tablets, and cell phones a little or completely.
By saagarjha 2026-03-143:19 With a Chromebook, there is one thing to lock down. On a Mac, there are a lot of things to do, because the whole point of it is that it's a normal computer.
By creshal 2026-03-1311:48 That includes school-issued Macs, so I don't see how that's an argument against Chromebooks.
A kid looking for the best bang for the carefully saved buck would buy a used machine off eBay, for less than $599, and more capable. An M1 MBP 2021 with 16GB would cost about this much; an M1 Macbook Air, or an M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB would cost half as much. A ton of beefy, perfectly Linux-ready used laptops can be had for under $350.
So this is only for the kids who are obsessed not just with computers, but brand-new computers. Which is a different demographic.
By Ancapistani 2026-03-1319:44 It's also for parents who want to give their kids a "real computer" without breaking the bank.
My 12-year-old wanted a laptop to build mods for games. I got her a new M1 Macbook 8GB - $425 from Walmart, refurbished.
My 17-year-old wanted a laptop for college, but wasn't sure what she needed or wanted yet. I gave her my 2020 M1 MBP.
If either of those situations arose today, I'd get them a Neo.
By autoexec 2026-03-1323:39 It's for kids and parents who bought into marketing and thinks that they need a apple product to be an artist or to be cool and not nerdy but can't afford an apple computer with decent specs.
By Ancapistani 2026-03-1319:411 reply I went through a two-year period where I didn't have a decent job and couldn't afford a computer of any kind for myself. I ended up spending some time volunteering for a local non-profit, and they gave me an "old laptop" they had in storage. This was in ~2005.
It was a Sony Vaio, and the only thing I really remember about the hardware/specs is that it had a physical scroll widget under the touchpad on the edge of the case. Software-wise, it was running some relatively locked down version of Windows. I installed Arch on it and used it to rebuild and manage the non-profit's website.
The other thing that I remember from it is that it was my entrance into using the terminal as my primary interface - the first place I used Vim regularly, and the first time I'd installed tmux. One day I was trying to test a dropdown or something on their website, and discovered that my touchpad didn't work. It turned out to have been broken by an Arch update, which wasn't terribly surprising. What was surprising is that once I'd traced down the issue and corrected it, I realized that it had been broken for almost two weeks. I'd used that computer every day and hadn't needed to use a mouse even once.
By opan 2026-03-1322:47 > realized that it had been broken for almost two weeks. I'd used that computer every day and hadn't needed to use a mouse even once.
I had a similar experience on a smaller scale a few weeks ago. I keep an extra keyboard of my preferred model (Pinky4) in a backpack to take on the go with me, but I only have one pointing device I really like (Ploopy Classic Trackball), so I pack up my one and only as needed. I'd gotten home, started using my computer, and an hour or two passed before I reached for the trackball and noticed it wasn't there. It was still in my backpack. I've got Sway keybinds to jump between my most-used programs instantly, and use a lot of terminal stuff as well. I can definitely imagine if I were on a low-end machine I'd go even longer without noticing.
By pentagrama 2026-03-140:42 And Chromebooks aren't only a web browser, are only an Android web browser.
I used one and it has the android play store to install apps, thank god FF at least supports extensions, but many apps lack features of the desktop counterparts, the layouts are designed only for mobile and on desktop looks terrible (including FF android).
By butILoveLife 2026-03-1311:174 reply > The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value
Uh... if you need to compile for iOS, sure.
But outside of that, no its not.
You are literally just paying the Apple tax that they deliberately choose.
Look, MacOS has certainly rotted over the past few years, but the primary reason I use it is because it's still a hundred times nicer to use than Windows (which is also regressing for worse reasons - shoving in AI and ads instead of benign neglect).
It's still the best desktop UNIX experience, especially since cheap PC laptops (and until very recently expensive ones) almost always have horrible build quality. It's also within only the last few years that PC trackpads came anywhere near the trackpads on Apple machines. Sometimes what you call a "tax" is literally some of us wanting quality.
macOS is the best desktop UNIX for one simple reason: the ⌘ key. The fact that 99% of your GUI keybindings use a key that your CLI tooling cannot use eliminates conflicts and means that you don't have to remember things like "Copy is ^C in Chrome but ^⇧C in the terminal".
using a linux with toshy to get the best of both worlds wrt keybindings. linux and kde is amazing nowadays... I don't miss macos but would be hating linux without mac style keybindings.
By meatmanek 2026-03-1318:16 Yeah, I use Kinto (which seems to be what Toshy is originally based on). A recent Ubuntu update broke it though, and I accidentally deleted my config file while trying to fix it, so maybe now's a good time to try out Toshy. Looks like Toshy creates a python virtualenv instead of relying on system packages, which should make it a little more resilient to system package changes.
By butILoveLife 2026-03-1311:454 reply Oh man, you NEED to use Fedora.
Fedora is the best OS humanity has ever made. No exaguration. There needs to be the best, and its Fedora.
Linux gets a bad reputation because 20-ish years ago Ubuntu sent out free CDs and became the dominant OS. Ubuntu/Mint is part of Debian family, outdated linux. They call outdated Linux 'stable', but its not stable like a table. Its software version frozen. Bugs that are fixed today wont get those fixes for 2 years. Not to mention, a new mouse you buy from amazon/nvidia card/web video player wont work due to the outdated nature of these distros. (And yes, I know you can do surgery to update it, but no one likes that)
Fedora is not Arch. Fedora is the consumer grade Red Hat.
By jeswin 2026-03-1313:13 > Linux gets a bad reputation because 20-ish years ago Ubuntu sent out free CDs and became the dominant OS.
I've been an Ubuntu user for 20 years, and RedHat and Suse prior to that. Ubuntu just worked. Debian had packages for everything, including from 3rd party vendors. It lets me focus on my work, and not worry about the OS, or compiling packages, or finding installers. When I had issues (rare), the large user base meant that someone had already figured out a solution to the problem.
The flavor of Linux doesn't matter so much in my opinion.
By cestith 2026-03-1317:58 Debian stable isn’t that much more version locked than CentOS or RHEL. Debian also has the Testing tier, which is semi-rolling. Or you could use Unstable. Or if you’re brave, you could use Nightly.
Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, and others with Debian as an upstream are not Debian. They build their own packages on their own schedules.
Fedora is not “consumer grade RedHat”. It’s the rolling release upstream of RHEL, much like Debian Testing is upstream of Debian Stable.
The main reason Linux got a bad reputation was the tribalism of people going off half-cocked talking about their personal preferences without actually working with the alternatives and starting this sort of holy war diatribe.
By GuinansEyebrows 2026-03-1315:22 i've made my entire career digging deep into linux - i've been what some people would call a "power user" for about 25 years, and a professional for 15. i spent over a decade distrohopping, tweaking, tinkering and customizing every distro from Corel to Mandrake to Mandriva to Debian to Slackware to Ubuntu to Gentoo to Arch to Void, and everything in between, plus the BSDs. i've been a sysadmin, network admin, devops engineer, yadda yadda yadda.
i have never once successfully installed fedora. probably just hardware stuff, but as often as i've wanted to try it and opensuse, they have never booted post-install for me. on machines i've successfully installed Debian and openBSD. go figure. i know i'm an outlier here. maybe it's just bad luck.
but reading your post, it sounds like a club i don't want to be a part of. linux is linux. distros don't matter. you can get nearly anything to work if you spend enough time on it. GUI OS installers that fail are not worth my time.
Fedora Silverblue it's better and Cosmic Desktop looks good for a DE in every release (upcoming 44). For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way. If you use Nonguix for Guix, on your own, but I'd only use a nonfree kernel in an emergency (the wireless adapter somehow gets broken and the alternative is to boot the OS with propietary fw in order to buy a new one). And in that case I would blacklist every propietary fw except for the wireless ones.
And, yes, I have an overlaid Linux-Libre kernel in SilverBlue.
> For some isolated and rollbackable option, your only options are Silverblue and Guix for the hard way.
How about Qubes OS? Also the parent never said anything about isolation and roll-backs. Nobody mentioned Silverblue except you. The discussion is about ordinary users, not hackers.
By butILoveLife 2026-03-1312:25 Silverblue is supposed to be for normies. Rollbacks are for when you screw everything up.
But honestly I did not like Silverblue. I had a 13 year old gaming computer I installed it on and I couldnt get the ancient GPU drivers installed due to the way things are containerized. This would have been a few commands otherwise.
Maybe its fine for chromebook-like things. I might have picked a bad testcase.
By mghackerlady 2026-03-1313:18 Glad to see someone else care so much about software freedom. Guix is great (though my ideal system would be debian with a shepherd init, fhs, and guix for non-root package management)
By thebruce87m 2026-03-1314:451 reply Given the list of alternatives you provided I’m inclined to disagree with you.
By sroerick 2026-03-1314:58 I'm developing on a $270 refurbished Dell, which has an i7 and 16 gigs of RAM. The Apple processor might be competitive, but the rest of the machine is not. 600 dollars is fine and not unreasonable, but there is certainly an Apple tax.
By Lalabadie 2026-03-1313:27 What amount of that 600$ cost do you reckon is the Apple tax? I'm curious what comparables you see, and how much they cost.
By rconti 2026-03-1315:45 > You are literally just paying the Apple tax that they deliberately choose
And when I go to the grocery store, I am paying the Safeway tax that they deliberately choose, and when I go to the gas station I am paying the Exxon tax that they deliberately choose, and so on.
When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i video.
I still made it work. I got pretty good at reading the waveform preview, and was able to use that to figure out where to do cuts. I would apply effects and walk through frame by frame with the arrow keys to see how it looked. It usually took all night (and sometimes a bit of the next day) to render videos into 1080i, but it would render and the resulting videos would be fine.
Eventually I got a job and saved up and bought a decent CPU and GPU and editing got 10x easier, but I still kind of look back on the time of me having to make my shitty computer work with a certain degree of fondness. When you have a decent job with decent money you can buy the equipment you need to do most tasks, but there's sort of a purity in doing a task that you really don't have the equipment you need.
By curiousigor 2026-03-136:01 I had a similar experience but with design software (which I pirated at the time since I just didn't have the money to buy stuff from Adobe).
I'd install Photoshop and Illustrator on my shitty computer I put together from spare parts my dad didn't have the use of anymore from his business computers. It was horribly slow, but I kinda made it work slowly.
The thing is that I think this is what made me think a bit differently, since everything was slowed down and took more time than I would want it to, I had to make deliberate decisions on what to add/edit. I still work the same way today to pa point, but that's because I'm both faster, more experienced and the computers have gotten more performant (and because I can afford better devices sure).
When I look at my half-brother and his teenage generation I wonder if they can still have such an experience. The personal devices have gotten better and faster, most things are really convenient and you sometimes even don't have to think a lot to do something also because they're cheap to do... they probably won't have the experience of "grinding it out" just for the sake of producing something they like...maybe sports is the closest...no idea, but have been thinking about this quite a lot recently...
By PaulRobinson 2026-03-1311:074 reply I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0]
8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours.
I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing.
By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested in at the time, I lost something.
Working within constraints teaches you something, I think. Doing more with less makes you appreciate the "more" you eventually end up with. You develop intuitions and instincts and whole skillsets that others never had to develop. You get an advantage.
I don't think we should be going back to 8-bit days any time soon, but in the context of this post, I want novices to try and build software on an A18 chip, I want learners to be curious enough to build a small word game (Hangman will do at first, but the A18 will let them push way, way past that into the limits of something that starts to feel hard all of a sudden), to develop the intuition of writing code on a system that isn't quite big enough for their ideas. It'll make them thirsty for more, and better at using it when they get it.
By kmoser 2026-03-1316:18 > Working within constraints teaches you something, I think.
It absolutely does. But every system has constraints; even when provided with massive resources, humans tend to try things that exceed those resources, as evidenced by Parkinson's Law of data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome, or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them).
The game Elite did something extremely evil and clever: it was actually able to switch between modes partway through each frame, so that it could display higher-resolution wireframe graphics in the upper part of the screen and lower-resolution more-colourful stuff for the radar/status display further down.
By Doctor_Fegg 2026-03-1323:33 Switching modes like that was common practice on the Amstrad CPC (which used the same 6845 video chip), but as time went on, people also learned how to change the base address of screen RAM part way through each frame. This gave you super-smooth hardware scrolling for the main game area while still retaining a static score display. Unfortunately it came too late in the machine's history to be used for more than a handful of games, but demo coders used it extensively (and still do).
By hyperbrainer 2026-03-1314:56 AlexandertheOk's documentary on Elite and the BBC Micro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I
By cbm-vic-20 2026-03-1313:50 I hear you, having learned programming on a machine even more constrained by the BBC Micro. But learners today are more likely to "Siri, build me a Hangman app."
I’m waiting for somebody to come and tell us about the time they punched cards by hand, one hole at the time, and then threw coal in the furnace to have the cards interpreted by a steam-powered computer.
By zeristor 2026-03-1312:34 Is this close enough? it’s from 1969, I wonder what became of them:
“Tomorrow's World: Nellie the School Computer 15 February 1969 - BBC”
Do you have a substantive argument against any points made by parent?
By znpy 2026-03-1412:47 it should be clear i'm not arguing along the points made by parent nor against them.
At some point the limitations can flip around.
when you're young, time is infinite, money is scarce.
Older, and time seems to take over. The limitations are - when can you free up the time? Is relaxing allowed?
By tombert 2026-03-135:09 Oh no argument on that.
I have a typical yuppie software job with decent pay, so generally I will buy the right tools for a job now instead of trying to make due with whatever I can scrap together. I'm not that busy of a person, but I certainly have more obligations than I did when I was sixteen, and now sometimes it really is worth it to spend an extra grand on something than it is to spend a week hacking together something from my existing stuff.
Still, I look back at the hours I spent making terrible YouTube videos with my terrible computer really fondly. I was proud of myself for making things work, I was proud of the little workarounds I found.
I think it's the same reason I love reading about classic computing (80's-90's era). Computers in the 80's were objectively terrible compared to anything we have now, and people still figured out how to squeeze every little bit of juice possible to make really awesome games and programs. The Commodore 64 and Amiga demos are fun to play around with because people will figure out the coolest tricks to make these computers do things that they have no business doing. I mean, the fact that Bad Apple has been "ported" to pretty much everything is something I cannot stop being fascinated by. [1] [2] [3] [4]
[1] https://youtu.be/2vPe452cegU
[2] https://youtu.be/qRdGhHEoj3o
By rebolek 2026-03-1310:41 It probably depends where you live. When I was young, time was infinite and money were scarce. Now they're both the limit.
By neonstatic 2026-03-134:01 It's a great example of going the extra mile due to external limitations. I bet you developed skills and intuitions you wouldn't have if you started with great hardware from the get go.
> 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.
Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook.
The Macbooks don't let have an officially supported path to unlocking the bootloader (edit: yes, I'm aware of asahi linux, which lives on the edge of what apple allows) and install your own OS. The Chromebooks do. I don't think that comparison plays as favorably as you think.
The bootloader isn’t locked. Asahi’s developers have written about how Apple specifically built support for third-party OSes into the bootloader.
The same Asahi developers also wrote about how Apple didn’t document anything and especially, Apple never talked in public about this. Apple betting Apple, If they had cared a single second about this, they would have called this Bootcamp 2.
Honestly I’m pretty convinced that this « open » bootloader was just there to avoid criticism and bad press from specialized outlets when they presented the M1 because, for once, they needed specialized outlet to benchmark the M1 performance and not have anything bad to say about anything else.
They constantly break everything year after year without documenting any change which effectively makes Asahi unusable in anything recent.
I’m betting that they are just patiently waiting for Asahi to die by being too late of several years (which is already the case) to announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader when nobody and especially the press will care anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Asahi and I even have it installed on my M2 Air, the project is doing incredible quality work. But I don’t believe it will last long. Hope I’m wrong, though.
For them to call it Bootcamp 2 (a "product" per se), they'd have had to have another OS they could actually demo installing. Otherwise "Bootcamp 2" is just a mysterious empty chooser window.
But at the time there was nothing, because Apple Silicon wasn't a platform anyone but them was targeting, because they had just created it.
So they built the infrastructure, and then waited for someone to actually start taking advantage of it, before bothering to acknowledge it.
And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP.
> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader
That's extremely unlikely to happen, as Apple's hardware and OS developers build Macs and macOS (and all the other hardware + OSes) using Macs and macOS. And those engineers (and engineers working at Apple's hardware and accessory manufacturing partners) will always need to be able to diddle around with the kernel and extensions "in anger" without needing to go through a three-day-turnaround code-signing process.
There's a whole proprietary, distributed kernel development and QC flow for macOS, that looks a lot like the Linux one (i.e. with all the same bigcorps involved making sure their stuff works), but all happening behind closed doors. But all the same stuff still needs to happen regardless, to ensure that buggy drivers don't ship. Thus macOS kernel development mode being just one reboot-and-toggle away.
By Nathan2055 2026-03-138:231 reply > And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP.
It's also important to remember that Microsoft was in the middle of their Qualcomm exclusivity deal at the time of the M1's release, and thus Windows for ARM wasn't available on anything other than a few select devices or unofficial use of Insider builds.
That deal didn't actually expire until 2024[1], at which point Windows for ARM finally started to be sold in an official capacity with stable builds widely available.
It's entirely possible, though unconfirmed, that Apple was intentionally leaving the door open for "Boot Camp 2", and Microsoft simply never took them up on the offer, either because they were stuck in a deal made prior to the M1's release that prevented it, or because they no longer saw a financial benefit to being able to sell Windows to Mac users (possibly since Windows license sales are effectively a rounding error to Microsoft at this point; they make way more off of subscription services and/or Office, all of which are already available on macOS without having to dual-boot Windows).
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/windows-on-a...
By derefr 2026-03-1319:41 > possibly since Windows license sales are effectively a rounding error to Microsoft at this point; they make way more off of subscription services and/or Office, all of which are already available on macOS without having to dual-boot Windows
AFAICT, the way Microsoft wants things to work, is that "Windows" is the native fat-client platform / SDK that ISVs are supposed to use/target when building fat-client apps that interact with (i.e. generate spend on) Azure-based backend systems. The #1 way Microsoft makes money at this point isn't from direct consumer or even volume-licensed subscriptions; it's from providing paid backend infra to dev shops who had long since locked themselves into the Microsoft/Windows development ecosystem, and who therefore saw Azure as the only valid cloud backend to integrate with when "cloud-enabling" their software (and/or, where the compliance story of integrating their previously native-and-local-syncing software with Azure, was 100x simpler than with integrating with any other cloud, due to Azure+Windows being able to act as a trusted principal-agent pair that can enforce policy-based security via a shared "cloud domain" identity [Entra ID] baked right into the OS ACL layer.)
Until recently, though, Microsoft thought of the Windows "platform" the same way Apple do of the Mac "platform": that "Windows"-the-platform-SDK was the same thing as Windows-the-OS. Which necessarily meant that consumers must be pushed with all conceivable effort toward using Windows-the-OS on their machines, so that these dev shops who had targeted Windows-the-SDK could reach them with their software (so that those dev shops would in turn spend more on Azure.)
But I think this equivalence is going away!
From what I've seen of discussions in various Microsoft-aligned sources recently, it feels to me like some part of what Windows 12 may mean by calling itself a "modular OS", is that Microsoft may be establishing some kind of very clean boundary layer between Windows-the-OS and Windows-the-platform/SDK.
---
What would that look like? I don't know for sure, but here's some spitballing:
Picture Mono, but as a complete UWP projection, shipping with all the native libraries that are built into Windows.
Or, if you'd prefer, picture Wine/Proton; but rather than black-box-reverse-engineered equivalents to Windows DLLs, it is all the DLLs that come with Windows. Except, now rebuilt from the ground up so that they compile against NTOS or Mach or Linux syscalls.
Basically, "the complete Windows platform" as a JVM-like runtime you "get for free" when installing Windows-the-OS, but can install on top of macOS and Linux. (Probably in various runtime profiles, as with Embedded vs Server vs Desktop JREs. You don't need D3D on your server.)
This would be likely to take 100% of the wind out of the sails of the Wine/Proton projects overnight. And maybe kill Mono itself, too. After all, why bother with half-assed third-party implementations of the Windows Platform, when you can just install the "real" Windows Platform, and get guaranteed bug-for-bug compatibility with existing Windows software (relying on the same databases of app shims and fixes Windows-the-OS has shipped with for ~forever)?
SteamOS would be reduced to "a Linux distro that preinstalls the Windows Platform." ReactOS might or might not (depends on stubbornness) be reduced to "a clean-room-implemented NTOSKRNL-compatible base OS, that preinstalls the Windows target of the Windows Platform."
Wine/Proton themselves would, if they even bothered to keep going, end up rebranded as "an alternative ground-up Windows Platform runtime." (If the official "Windows Platform runtime" was then open-sourced, then likely Wine/Proton would fully fade into obscurity, as anyone who wanted to maintain their own libre Windows Platform runtime would just start by forking Microsoft's. Very similar to the situation with OpenJDK.)
---
In any case, regardless of how they do it, any move in this direction would make it blindingly obvious why Microsoft wouldn't care about enabling something like a "Boot Camp 2" feature on Macs any more: they no longer care if you install Windows-the-OS on a Mac; they rather want you to install the Windows Platform runtime under macOS. And then they'll have you as a consumer of Windows Platform products all the same.
(Actually, even better, as they'll have you far more of the time. In the Boot Camp business strategy, any time you spend booted into macOS puts you out of Microsoft's reach, save for the few first-party apps Microsoft has ported to macOS + sells on the App Store. In the Windows Platform business strategy, meanwhile, you can be running arbitrary Windows Platform apps on your Mac [and so generating Azure spend for some ISV somewhere] 100% of the time you're using it!)
By NamlchakKhandro 2026-03-139:40 [flagged]
By wnoise 2026-03-137:09 To be clear, "Apple" is a group, not a unified thing with one will.
That doesn't mean that the engineeers will necessarily ship something more flexible than what the PMs asked for. Often not.
But sometimes they will.
By amelius 2026-03-138:50 Apple's legal department will kill it once someone tells them the project is a handy tool for patent trolls to mine for infringements.
By saithir 2026-03-1314:03 > announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader
Is that gonna be before or after the iphone with no usb port?
By t-writescode 2026-03-133:151 reply Switching to developer mode is very likely something he won’t be doing nor allowed to do on the Chromebook his parents bought him or the school assigned him.
Will a managed MacBook allow the installation of random native apps, either?
Though let's be realistic, here: $600 is much more than the typical school-assigned Chromebook.
By hyperhello 2026-03-133:56 It’s $500 for a kid, a full time student.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-133:43 Yes
By ToucanLoucan 2026-03-133:511 reply > Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook.
Oh so all our hypothetical child has to do to discover what computers can actually do is completely rebuild one's software from scratch with no prior knowledge.
Next you'll tell me F1 drivers in their teens just have to LS swap a Saturn SC2 and book time at a track.
It's really not that hard. Someone who can follow a tutorial can do it.
5 seconds of googling will get you an answer to "install blender on a Chromebook"
I used to be the cool tech guy in school because I memorized the tutorial to jailbreak iPhone or to cheat in games with a memory editor. You know, stuff like "when you see this screen, click that icon", "find row 5 and change the second value to 0", or "open terminal, copy paste this command and hit enter". I don't think I learned anything useful from those.
By harvey9 2026-03-139:42 You learned that such things are even possible, and you learned that other people saw you as the cool tech guy just because you took time to memorise that stuff.
By stickynotememo 2026-03-135:091 reply Well, sure. Maybe you're the kid in the article who opened Xcode and Blender and Final Cut, but it didn't click for you. Of course not everything is for everyone, but it doesn't prove exploring the limits like that is a bad thing.
By ToucanLoucan 2026-03-134:011 reply > It's really not that hard.
Of course not. I could do it in a coma. I've also been using computers since 2004, and you're probably similar.
By throwawaytea 2026-03-137:39 I've been using computers since 1991 (I'm 42, from 1984), and to be honest this stuff is getting harder and more confusing, not easier. Mostly because it keeps changing, and not based on any logic towards improvement. Sure I'm good at getting my questions and problems solved now, especially with AI, but I don't believe I have the ingrained mastery I felt after a while with computers in the 90s.
By eru 2026-03-134:05 And these days, you can ask your favourite LLM for step by step advice, and you can even give it shaky phone camera shots of the error message on your screen.
You can't install a different OS on these? Are they different from the M series? Because those have Asahi Linux.
Asahi linux effectively only supports the M1 and M2 chips, so even a modern macbook air won't work, and even on "supported devices" you can't use thunderbolt or a usb-c display yet.
These use the A series chip, and even supporting new M chip revisions has been enough of an undertaking that I wouldn't really expect this to get Asahi linux anytime soon....
And apple can lock down the bootloader to be closer to the iPad/iPhone at any time with no notice, and based on their past actions, it would be quite in-line with their character to do so.
By brookst 2026-03-134:59 By “past actions”, do you mean doing extra work to make the bootloader support other operating systems? https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/introduction/
By zozbot234 2026-03-1311:43 The Asahi folks have also demonstrated M3 support, though without GPU-accelerated graphics (the M3 GPU is very different from the M1 or M2). Much of the effort is currently on getting the existing components upstream.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-133:441 reply Surprisingly enough you don’t need Linux to learn about computers. You know that Macs have terminal?
The default Mac terminal environment is the Weetabix of UNIX-likes. You need GNU coreutils to do pretty much anything.
By rz2k 2026-03-135:16 I'm confused. Isn't coreutils a just small subset of even macOS's current zsh's builtins? What do you prefer about systemd to launchd? defaults seems like a convenient way to manage settings. Is it confusing for people from other operating systems?
By BigTTYGothGF 2026-03-1319:50 My first unix was ultrix. I'll take the default mac stuff over that any day of the week.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1322:06 Wow so you mean you need to actually run brew to install core-utils!!! The inhumanity!!!
Name one thing lacking in the utilities included with MacOS (which come from BSD).
By Paracompact 2026-03-137:291 reply `grep -P` kinda annoying. GNU has Perl-compatible regex, and BSD does not. You're reaching for `perl` or installing `ggrep` the moment you need a lookbehind.
By kybernetyk 2026-03-139:011 reply BSD grep is the pure grep version though. Perl regex is unnecessary bloat.
By Paracompact 2026-03-143:52 Is it unnecessary bloat to match for digits X in patterns $X, say among a bunch of receipts? Eye of the beholder and all, but I'm inclined to think no.
By realusername 2026-03-137:051 reply Is it still shipping with that ancient bash, the awful Iterm and without a package manager? I haven't used OSX for a while.
No. Zsh is now standard, though it still included an old optional version of bash. Apple hates GPLv3 that's why they moved away from bash.
The terminal app is not iterm. But Apple's own Terminal.app
And no there's no package manager but there's brew and macports.
By realusername 2026-03-1311:031 reply I didn't know it was an homemade terminal, it's just that it looked old and abandoned compared to your average Linux distribution.
By wolvoleo 2026-03-1316:27 It is made by Apple yes. It's not very bad, it even has big font support from the VT100 series. And a lot of style settings in the menu bar. It's not iterm2 but it's way better than what windows offers (not just the console but the newer windows terminal isn't as good either IMO)
The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software isn't designed for BSD runtimes, to name one.
By hollerith 2026-03-134:52 I ask for a specific example, and you respond with more generalities.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1312:30 So exactly eves “Unix like software” will kids be missing that prevents them from learning about computers?
By veltas 2026-03-138:20 The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software is available in the package managers right now for major BSDs.
By BigTTYGothGF 2026-03-1320:01 Throughout history the overwhelming majority of unix-like software was designed to work only on the particular flavor of unix used by its author.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-03-1322:26 And guess how many people care?
By freeone3000 2026-03-135:20 Aside from the BSD software, the Mac software, and all the software that’s actually POSIX-compliant (on purpose or by accident).
Asahi only supports M1 and M2 series Macs currently. The Neo uses an A18 Pro, which was only ever in an iPhone before. I wouldn’t count on Asahi coming to these soon.
By gedy 2026-03-1311:14 Maybe some of these agentic AI superstars can point their 100x engineering chops at this. This would impress me but not going to hold my breath for that.
I see no reason they couldn’t.
But we know there’s lots of other models that they’re already working on. We don’t know how similar or different it is from an OS perspective.
The reason is the lack of documentation from Apple.
Reverse engineering needs a lot of time and hard work, which may not be worthwhile.
Sometimes someone does this work, and everyone may benefit from it, but you should never count on this happening, unless you do the work yourself.
By zozbot234 2026-03-1311:46 Reverse engineered documentation is very often preferable to the internal kind, which is not necessarily accurate. So either way, the Asahi folks are doing valuable work.
By xbar 2026-03-1314:35 Some kids undoubtedly get there, exactly as you say. That's not at all the same experience as opening a device that has a MUCH bigger sandbox to begin with and lets them start exploring with boundless applications from the beginning.
The bootloader kids get my deep respect. I think I'd rather give my kid a Neo to begin with.
This is an argument, but it’s also fundamentally comparing a computer that works out of the box to one that doesn’t.
By Spivak 2026-03-1319:04 I really don't get this comment section. You get a Macbook then you have a perfectly usable machine which will run all the mainstream software you ask of it, and then you get natively compiled well supported developer tooling, no VM required. The best argument for Chromebooks is that you can throw away ChromeOS and install Linux or use Linux in a VM. These are not even close to the same.
I think folks want to hate Apple more than they want to admit that Chromebooks kinda suck.
By nickvec 2026-03-137:02 I was sadly too dumb in high school to figure out how to get Linux running on my Chromebook.
By pseudocomposer 2026-03-133:221 reply There’s an entire Linux distro (Asahi) for MacBooks. Apple has never released a Mac with a locked bootloader.
And macOS frankly provides a far better Unix experience than ChromeOS, in my experience, having actually used both (including for development, though only for a short time on ChromeOS because it was horrible).
By adrian_b 2026-03-136:59 Apple did not lock the bootloader, but they do not provide documentation for their products.
What would have been a trivial porting work with documentation, becomes extremely time-consuming and hard work without documentation.
That is why Asahi Linux lags by several years with the support for Apple computers, and it is unlikely that this lag time will ever be reduced. Even for the old Apple computers the hardware support is only partial, so such computers are never as useful for running Linux as AMD/Intel based computers.
By VladVladikoff 2026-03-133:591 reply ?? I installed Omarchy on an old MBP simply by inserting the usb stick into a USB port and holding a key combo during boot. Didn’t have to unlock anything.
By stavros 2026-03-139:57 Try it on a new one.
