[GameOfKnowing]

This is true but also not at all the point of a review. Some tools are better suited for some tasks— reviews help those with the privilege of choice find the best ones for them. Otherwise you’d have a review of a hammer saying “this is a great tool for driving screws if you’re not afraid to get cREaTive with it!” Folks who need to make do with what they have already know about their constraints.

[MBCook]

I took the article as talking about the difference between reviews that say “this computer is not going to be great at X” and the reviews that say “this machine is only good for office tasks or Y“. The gatekeeping tone.

It can do most anything. It may not be amazing, but people get buy. And they may be ok with it.

I saw tons of comments in the original post about the Neo from people who talked about how they used extremely old hand-me-down/used laptops to learn to start programming and fall in love with computers.

I was just watching a video from ETA PRIME who tests lots of small computers to see how good they are for gaming.

He was playing RoboCop on it, and it ran pretty well. 45-ish FPS. It was using 11 gigs of RAM at the time. So it was obviously in swap.

Is that ideal? No. But it works.

[Forgeties79]

I’d bet a solid 25% of the people nitpicking the Neo would’ve called it a breath of fresh air if it wasn’t made by Apple.

I don’t want one, it doesn’t do what I need. But I can definitely see the use cases especially at that price point.

[GrifMD]

It reminds me of the iPhone 5C when I had a 5S, it's a beautiful colorful breath of fresh air that I wish I had but my needs are so much greater. But if I wasn't an engineer who needed a highspeced MacBook Pro I'd go with it.

[eru]

I have a high specced MacBook Pro, but honestly I mostly use it for vscode tunnels to my actual dev machine.

So the only real benefit compared to my MacBook Air is that the screen is a bit nicer, and I can keep more Firefox tabs open, because it has more RAM.

[RealityVoid]

Bingo! IMO, laptops are best used as thin clients and you do the heavy lifting on servers or a box in a closet somewhere.

I'va been migrating my workflow to this approach and I'm an embedded dev! My closet does have hw strewn about but once you set it up that you don't have to touch wires it's super convenient.

My one gripe with MacBook airs up to m4 was support for only one external monitor. But m4 fixed this.

[efreak]

This is how I mostly use my Windows PC: remote access from my Android tablet via ssh and rdp. My gripe is entirely different: Microsoft has turned to crap.

RDP: Every time a native notification pops up, I get disconnected (usually the notification is about something I've been doing, such as starting a self-hosted server or running winget via unigetui). It randomly disconnects when I've been using it for more than a few minutes, even when there isn't a notification. All of this so far seems to be limited to Android's rdp client (the Windows app). For Windows built-in RDP client, my issue is that there's no way to make it resize the desktop like vmconnect does when you resize the window (and no way to proxy vmconnect connections easily for home use--I do not want to enable WinRM for the full system and figure out how to secure it, I just want a single PC on the LAN to be able to access a single VM conveniently, preferably able to log in as different users)

But there's issues with ssh (and likely WinRM/ps remoting, though I haven't used it) as well: with Linux you need to use sudo, but with Windows there's apparently no CLI requirement; ssh runs elevated (though apparently you can change this; I make do with connecting to a running psmux session that's not elevated). So far as I know, there's no way to elevate without the GUI being involved (admittedly I haven't looked since I started using ssh with Windows).

Linux? Connecting to Linux works perfectly. I can't use xrdp or ssh or vnc or forwarding x11 over ssh or [other] and they work perfectly. I used to use x2go before Wayland, and despite the pain of actually getting it working even that worked better; XDMCP required some amount of setup, but it was awesome (too bad there's nothing that efficient with Wayland); xpra looks great, but either didn't exist or I was unaware at the time. The only issues with Linux remoting are, again, Windows-related (it's seemingly impossible to get vmconnect enhanced session to work properly with Linux at all on Fedora 43; the things I've found online don't seem to work for me).

[Forgeties79]

I thought the single external monitor support was only with the M1. Wild it went on after that

[eru]

I'm not sure about this being the best approach. It just works for me sometimes.