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Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one
by efficax 7mo ago
Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale. It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine without killing the browser, for example.
- nicole_express 7mo agoI can definitely see why the Asus CEO would want to put it in that box, though.
- thesuitonym 7mo agoContent consumption definitely seems like the wrong term, it seems perfectly cromulent for let's say a college student, or an executive.
- nottorp 7mo agoIf you ask me, all web devs should be forced to work on 4 Gb machines. This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.
- whynotmaybe 7mo agoShould be forced to Test on a 4gb machine. A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen. I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.
- dangus 7mo agoThat's dumb. You can hardly even buy a machine with 4GB of memory on sale, at any price. If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.
- BugsJustFindMe 7mo agoNot caring makes the world worse for everyone. All of us. Including you.
- dangus 7mo agoMy main point isn’t about caring or not, the point is that 4GB RAM in a laptop/desktop is incredibly rare for how outdated it is. The PS4 came out in 2013 and has 8GB of RAM. In case you need help counting, that’s 13 years ago. And that’s an optimized game console with no general purpose operating system and limited multitasking capability. 10 years ago, Samsung phones were shipping with 6GB of RAM. Not many phones even physically last that long. My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
- bigfishrunning 7mo agoThe price of memory is insane, so if anyone wants to increase performance/dollar, they're likely going to have to do it in software. I would suspect 4Gb computers are going to come back if the hungry AI beast doesn't cool it soon.
- dangus 7mo agoThe RAM market will stabilize. These crazy spikes never last.
- sonofhans 7mo agoI must say, the irony of this comment in a thread about Apple moving down-market without losing quality is … well, it burns. Along with the arrogance: “Anyone who can’t afford 8GB isn’t worthy of being my customer,” is literally the opposite of what Steve Jobs always said. I was stuck once in a cabin in the woods with an old Android phone. I’m glad it still worked, and that people curating software experiences for it had more empathy — and more business sense — than this comment displays.
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoI like to imagine the gaming landscape if developers were forced to work on 5yr old hardware.
- extrabajs 7mo agoYou mean like consoles?
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoKinda, games ported to mobile also.
- nottorp 7mo agoPorting to mobile comes with a dumbing down of the control scheme and thus dumbing down of game complexity since you can't control it. And they turn into "free" with IAPs. Rather not.
- nottorp 7mo agoSometimes I have the feeling AAAs can be better optimized than Unity based indies. It's probably a bit better than when Unity was new. I do remember the first x-com remake in 2012 was lasting longer on battery than $random_unity_indie.
- MarsIronPI 7mo agoI agree, but it's nice to be able to run LLMs locally on my laptop. LLMs are actually the only reason I'm looking to upgrade my 2013 hardware.
- mrbonner 7mo agoHah. When I worked for a very big Just Print Money bank circa 2008, they gave me, a SDE with the Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows with 4GB of RAM and a bonus of Lotus Notes for email. This thing was slower than molasses. Not to mention because we had an offshore team in India. every morning every engineer would begin the day with syncing the Subversion repo. My team was in central US but we had to connect to a proxy in NYC for network traffic inspection. This makes the sync over 45 minutes long. Repeat the same for every SDE, from both sides of the world, and you can guess the amount of time wasted. I don’t think I would want to work in that environment anymore.
- LeonM 7mo agoSimilar story, I had a customer who wanted me to change the entire UI of a legacy application, because some information would not fit on the ancient 1024*786 15" desktop monitor of one employee, meaning he would have to use horizontal scroll constantly. I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks. Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!". In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper. A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.
- ashdksnndck 7mo agoI think for this plan to work you’d have to force the developers of Xcode to work on the 4 Gb machines first. If they could do that, the rest would follow naturally.
- nottorp 7mo agoWeb devs use xcode?
- mock-possum 7mo agoSure and all game devs should be forced to do their work on 80s NES dev kits or whatever. /eyeroll This line of thought is ridiculous Ludditism. Artists and craftsmen deserve to work with SOTA tools, you can only benefit from having better more accessible more performant tools.
- kccqzy 7mo ago> It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
- zparky 7mo ago> The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
- mmcnl 7mo agoTrue for Geekbench.
- fsh 7mo agoWhich notoriously favors anything made by Apple.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoSaid only by those that don’t favor Apple.
- klausa 7mo agoThose chart seem _very_ suspect when it comes to Apple CPUs, to the point I don't think they're worth considering much. M3 Ultra being fastest in single core than M4 or A19 Pro doesn't make any sense. Those chart also suggest that M3->M4 was a _regression_ in performance, which, is... an interesting conclusion.
- whycome 7mo agoI have a macbook pro m1 with 8gb ram and it has been surprisingly good for all kinds of work. And I've had it since about 2020.
- whstl 7mo agoI have the same, and I probably won't get another that soon. I have used it for dev work daily for 6 years.
- solarkraft 7mo agoIt’s not even a less powerful device. It has the same performance as the M1, which is still a beast.
- faitswulff 7mo agoThere are multiple videos out there of reviewers running multiple “Pro” apps at the same time on the Neo. It’s an impressive machine.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- whyenot 7mo agoAs Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) mentioned in his review, the Neo has the same keyboard as Apple's MacBook Pro line, just without backlighting. That makes them really good for writing and potentially coding on the go.
- kllrnohj 7mo agoThe CPU is capable. The 8GB of RAM not so much. If this had even just the 12GB of the A19 Pro that'd be a huge upgrade. Unless the RAM shortage gets developers to actually start giving a shit about RAM efficiency, but that seems unlikely to happen honestly. Especially not when a certified macbook air refurb straight from Apple isn't that much more if you're not able to get the $500 EDU pricing on the Neo. $850 gets you a 16GB RAM / 512GB M4 Air, which is significantly better than the $700 Neo in every way.
- tuetuopay 7mo agoHonestly the 8GB is not really an issue. As opposed to basically every other computer on this price range, Apple puts real storage in their machines, making a well-tuned swap simply transparent. I'd also bet they have very performant hardware engines for memory (de)compression. A few years ago, my parents asked me for a laptop for my sisters, for university use. We targeted this price range. It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage. And I'm not speaking about the other specs like display or build quality. We ended up buying second-hand M1 and M2 macbook airs, and both I and my sisters are very happy about it. (also, as the "tech support guy" of the family, I'm oh my so happy about them not running windows)
- kllrnohj 7mo agoThe SSD in the Neo only manages around 1,500 MB/s in sequential benchmarks, it's not an impressive drive. > It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage. I just went to Dell's website and picked a random $400 laptop and it had an NVME SSD. The $650 Dell 14 Essential also is NVME. Both of which are M.2 so easily upgraded, replaced, or have data recovery done on them. The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
- tuetuopay 7mo ago> The SSD in the Neo only manages around 1,500 MB/s in sequential benchmarks, it's not an impressive drive. That's sequential, not what you want for swap, but already a good start. I agree that it's not impressive, but already leagues ahead of a SATA SSD. And for swapping a 8GB machine it's more than enough (when the swap pattern is sequential though): you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive. > The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops" Then it's good the situation improved, genuinely! Less e-waste being on the store shelves. Pretty sure windows is nigh unusable on eMMC. And yes, those were sold alongside chromebooks, but at a markup of a "real computer" despite having roughly the same internals. Another thing that could impact, though, is availability in different markets. I am in France, and the offerings are perhaps worse than in the US? (quite likely, in fact). Add to that the usual price markup where US companies tend to do, at best, 1 USD = 1 EUR, and we get worse machines for the equivalent price range.