e benchmarks I saw had it about the same. The 2020 M1 Air slightly faster in single threaded, slightly slower in multithreaded, or do I have those two swapped. Either way, it's abouth the same overall.

Geekbench puts them at Neo 3535/8920 (s/m) & MBA 2347/8342 (s/m). So the Neo is significantly ahead on single core performance, and ahead (but just barely) in muti threaded even with the reduced core count! Which is decent for half the price! (well if you get the EDU discount on the Neo, the M1 MBA doesn’t have a EDU discount that I know of).

To be clear at the price point not too much slower would be Ok, but the benchmarks have it at way faster for single thread, and faster but basely a tie for MT.

To be honest a used M1 Air or M3 Air would seem a better deal

A used M1 Air at under the Neo's price would be a good deal. The M3 at the Neo’s price would be a great deal. I mean the Neo is pretty damn good at its price point. It is fast, it works surprisingly well for its RAM configuration. The +$100 model has touchID and slightly less pathetic local storage. The Neo’s display is physically smaller, but the whole device is quite small, some people prefer smaller devices for carrying about and use in cramped areas. I mean from my view point (16” MBP with large external displays) both the Neo and MBA have tiny cramped displays! However both are shockingly fast for their price.

The MacBook Neo gets a fairly high repairability score. Most people who have disassembled it seem to be of the opinion that since it isn’t going for absolute minimal size and weight they used very few adhesives and lots of screws. So it is pretty simple to take apart and put back together. Apple does also make “self repair” kits for many products amiable to rent with an unreasonable deposit (purchase also available, but not useful to most people), but has apparently decent instructions and such to get things done.

As for upgradability, nope, they are headed away from that as fast as they can. No RAM upgrades on any modern Apple device, the RAM chips are wire bonded to the CPU, which at least means they use lower voltage swings and get somewhat better latency out of the same parts. Not in general a tradeoff I would make (I would rather have DIMMs and be able to do a late-life RAM upgrade to get more useful years out of a device rather then be stuck at my purchase RAM allotment forever -- and/or buy a low RAN model from Apple and do a day 1 3rd party RAM upgrade). To be fair to Apple customer installed RAM, and factory installed RAM that managed to work loose were the number one and number two repair issues for their upgradable devices (or maybe just laptops?) prior to starting to solder down RAM. Which statically means a shit ton of people thought Apple just made crap computers that flaked out at random and never brought them in for someone to tap on each DIMM and “fix it”. So soldering the RAM down decreased warranty repair costs, decreased out of warranty “customer comp” repair costs, and increased perceived reliability amongst people that don’t take flaky laptops into an Apple Store and try to get someone to look at it.

The obvious downside is I pay more when I buy a Mac either because I don’t buy enough RAM for the full useful lifecycle of the CPU, or because I do and Apple charges a lot of money for it (well until recently, due to long term supply contracts Apple’s RAM cost is very low, so the normal 50+% profit margin they take on RAM now seems highly competitatave with spot RAM prices)

The Neo is nerfed in way to reduce cannibalizing the Air. It 2020 M1 CPU performance with a smaller screen and slower I/O.

Or alternately it is intended to be a replacement for keeping the 2020 era M1 MacBook Air around for “special retail partners” (i.e. Walmart and Costco) to sell at $799. The MacBook Neo other then the I/O much faster then the M1 MacBook Air, and in various “whole system” benchmarks apparently the slower SSD doesn’t really impact it too much. Which blows my theory that the M1 at 8G could get so much done without feeling slow because the SSD was fast enough that it blunted the effects of doing VM page-outs/page-ins.

The Neo will make money, but that will be largely due to growth in the educational ecosystem. Maybe some other Chromebook niches.

It seems very popular for people who “always wanted a MacBook” and never could convince themselves they could afford one. I don’t know how many will be repeat buyers (let alone climb up the product chain to the Air). If they are satisfied with the Neo they don’t need the next Mac to be faster. If they are not satisfied with it, will they blamee that on “Macs suck!”, or on “The Neo is just entry level, I need to spend 2x to 3x to get a faster one!”.

I do see a ton of people talking about getting one as a first Mac, or having bought one and asking all the “how do I make it do (some random thing they miss from Windows)” questions.

Enjoy your retirement TIm Apple, you nauseating man

Except he isn’t retiring, he is stepping down as CEO and assuming the Chairman of the Board position where he will be specifically responsible for interfacing with world leaders (i.e. more sucking up to the orange man). Which is nice for John Ternus I guess because he can run Apple without dealing with(directly) with Trump, and let Tim deal with tossing golden trinkets at him and assuring him Apple is bringing manufacturing to the USA while talking to every other world leader and assuring them he is bringing manufacturing to them, and to China and tell them manufacturing is going no where and all the other things are just tiny slivers of inconsequential volume to appease random world leaders.

So no, his replacement isn’t kissing any rings, Tim gets to keep kissing the same rings. I don’t know if he enjoys it (I suspect not), or just thinks it is his responsibility, or can’t liquidate his stock fast enough to deal with the fallout if Apple stops being favored by Trump (Tariff bypass) and starts being targeted (special Tariffs, and more levers that a President could pull...like having someone hand inspect each iPhone before it comes through customs which would move a scheduled launch day back by weeks, months or years depending on how slowly the inspections are carried out).

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

Well also Ford and everyone else that spent a decade or more saying “nobody wants EVs”, saw Teslas’ success, and various government invcentaves and says “we are all in on EVs!”, and then when the incentives went away said “nobody wants EVs!”, is after the last week or so seeing record EV sales about to swing back to: “Yes EVs!”

So I won’t really take their opinions on the future with a lot of faith.

”only” about 20% of the world oil passes through it, so if we cut oil needs by 20% that’ll take a significant amount of the problem away. Which I know takes more then say filling half a desert with solar panels, we also have to buffer that energy for non-productive times, and convert things like oil burning heating systems into heat pumps and/or resistive heat systems, or regular cars into EVs (which mostly come with their own solution to the buffering issues). Very little of that is an engineering issue, it is mostly a “pay money and it can be done” problem. Which is the boring kind to fix because it is so “easy", but also frequently doesn’t get fixed (want to end homelessness? Buy everyone a home! End world hunger? Move the food from where it is currently rotting to where the hungry people are! We know how to move food (and people!), we just don’t do it!).

...My installation of minidlna still works fine, is Free Software, and doesn't phone home or exfiltrate my metadata.

You may be right, but there are definitely PC vender executives who claim to be very worried about the Neo. Maybe foolishly, or maybe for once they are seeing a bigger picture, Apple is hitting one narrow slice here but in ways they can’t counter. They may be legit worried about other configurations taking other slices with no real counter.

I think Windows will provide an extremely large area for that market to “retreat” into though where Apple won’t really follow. I mean with some serious compatibility systems maybe, but this isn’t an x86 Mac, I don’t think BootCamp or any sort of windows emulation systems are going to take large chunks of the market...and then I remember SteamOS. So yes, Apple could embrace something like that, and that would take a big chunk out of the traditional laptop market...

You might have intended it as a joke, but semiconductor supplies go through the SoH, and while I don’t believe production has been interrupted due to a lack yet the supplies are being drawn down and will eventually run out resulting in increased cost for RAM, CPUs and GPUs and possibly even shortages. About a third of the helium supply goes via SoH and without it you ain’t getting more RAM, nor am I. Or MRI scans. Fortunately there are a few months of supply, more or less. Maybe less.

Definitely not “nobody”, but for sure “not enough to build a business on it”, the more surprising conclusion is “not really enough people to make expensive configurations of something that is basically an existing system”, at least not if you are Apple blunts the surprise a bit.

Apple discontinues a lot of things that other companies could survive on as a sole product. The iPod mini when the nano came out, the iPod Touchok, maybe just products with the name “iPod” in them. Oh! Also a whole line of 802.11 bas stations including one with a backup disk in itand the iPhone mini, and a bunch of other iPhone variants that sold less then the other iPhones but still better then the majority of Android phones.

Big configuration desktops do sell, just not a lot. I mean back pre-COVID I worked for a company that bought and handed out $16k iMac Pro configurations like they were candy! Granted that was mostly for the large memory config and doesn’t need the MacPro to keep existing! I assume the current Mac Studio is filling that role for them now, and obviously as they were iMac Pros when I was there if Apple makes a big iMac configuration they could be iMac Pros again (although I hope if Apple brings back the iMac Pro they have a target display mode for them!)

Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

I'm doing just fine with a 128g Mac Studio M1 Ultra. Editing 4k video weekly for Airwindows. Not sure 'certain tasks' is anything BUT local AI.