The UI is simpler because the product is simpler. If all you want is 1-2 VMs in the cloud and to not think about the rest, its great. For any actual business that's moved from 'hobby'/'seed' phase, its not the right platform.
For great many businesses way past the "hobby" stage, a managed DB + managed queue + managed cache + a few VMs under managed k8s + serverless functions is plenty enough. Given a right architecture, this could serve a million paying customers. When you have more, you usually have the resources to consider a more elaborate setup.
I'd say that for most businesses 3-4 VMs, or a couple of bare metal boxes, is already enough, unless they grow explosively.
The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector
I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.
Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific.
Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.
I don’t see much “for anybody”, but I do see a lot of “for students / people who browse the web / word processing” which is still a pretty large set of people, and the Neo handles those workloads just fine
13” is not really that small. It’s a screen size many people choose.
The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly. It seems pretty clearly a play for students who will eventually enter the business world with their personal laptop preferences.
I spent one year using an M1 8GB Macbook Air as a professional developer during covid. The A18 Pro flies around the M1. You can definitely use this as a dev - especially when we're just prompting AI nowadays.
Big tech should loose its safe harbor protection. It’s both an aggregator AND a curator. The algorithms showing you what to see is no different than a newspaper editor. Just like newspapers big tech should be liable for their “feeds” showing harmful and defamatory information
I would be happy if congress passed a law saying a social media has no liability for anything their users post as long as the algorithm is completely open source. If we had social media like that, they'd even have APIs that let users design their own algorithm and we'd see a golden age of social media emerge from it. Twitter seems to moving in this direction but they enjoy no legal protections from being open at the moment. Blusky is already this way I believe, but without a neutral and trusted centralized control it's a bit different of an animal.
I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
I think the difference should be whether they are a dumb pipe, or whether they exercise editorial control and/or promote some content over others.
If you are truly a dumb pipe, that just transmits whatever the users post, then you shouldn't be liable for what goes over your wires. Like the phone company.
As soon as you start acting as an editor: amplifying some content and downplaying (or removing) other content, re-ordering it, ranking it, and so on, then you are placing your name on the content and in a sense should share liability around it.
Companies should have to deliberately decide who they are going to be: are they just wires like the phone company, or are they a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor department? They shouldn't be able to act like one, but have the liability of the other.
That seems unworkable because, well, I just don’t want social media to be dumb pipes. Without sites making editorial decisions every site will be full of porn and animal torture videos. The current status quo seems way better tbh.
Well, local history in the US, judged by most current Americans, would probably say the current system is better than the previous one, and the current one spawned from a revolution. Maybe the second (third?) time it'll incrementally improve at least.
The current system is the result of hundreds of years of gradual democratization and economic development, not the revolution. For an example of the US without the American Revolution, look at Canada. They’re doing fine. Here in the US, the Revolution didn’t cause life to change at all for the vast majority of people.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
The Revolution allowed a new system to be built, but it is a teleological fallacy to point to the current system as the result. Centuries of trial, error, and institutional hardening led to the system current Americans would judge.
The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.
"Almost every" is a very strong statement. But even granted that, the interregnum periods (civil wars and revolutions) tend to be so horrific that they are wise to avoid. In fact, people like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes who lived through revolutions tended to come to the cynical conclusion that any system of government was better than a civil war. I don't agree with that conclusion, but I'd rather see the system reform itself than jump immediately to "tear up the constitution and start over"
No matter how much you hate Communists, you must admit the fall of the USSR was catastrophic in terms of quality of life and life expectancy. All the public goods and services were sold off en masse and children were driven to prostitution to avoid starvation.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
Smart employees understand this dynamic. When leadership hides information - it always means its bad. The first thing I noticed when I had a bout of bad employers was that they claimed "we can't share financial information because of XYZ investor/legal reason."
Those startups all had major financial problems within 6 months to 2 years. Management has strong incentives to hide bad information from employees.
ehh there is a common thread that when management becomes convinced either of falsehoods or that lying to employees is the best strategy, the business outcomes won't be the best either.
Yep, I've worked at two startups which started to really emphasise The Numbers in weekly all-hands meetings, and how we're all in it together to improve them, etc. Both of those jobs ended in redundancy.
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