> 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.
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.
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...
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]
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.
>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.
Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this and installs Blender on it is WAY more likely to save up for any janky terrible half-working PC laptop with a bit better specs (memory in particular), or a desktop computer if possible, because A. games B. Linux C. piracy and more software D. he does not care about it being Apple or "just working", in the words of the author himself. I don't know how the US kids in particular feel about this since the reality distortion field is so strong, but anywhere else it's like this.
Depends on the kid’s hobby and purpose of the computer. I’ve always known that MacBooks are better for music making (especially driver hassle, audio signal reliability, etc.). Could I afford a MacBook as my first laptop? No. Did I buy a second-hand MacBook as soon as I could afford it, and have been happy with it since? Yes. As a teenager, I would’ve loved to buy a new MacBook for 500/600€.
I’m sure most other applications are less Mac-optimized, though (software development, 3d/graphics editing, gaming, …).
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
?? 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.
In high school we had a g3 Mac that we got Final Cut Pro on. It took forever to render a minute or two of video. But having a nonlinear editing system that took forever to do anything was way better than not having anything at all.
Edit: for true self embarrassment purposes you can see some of the films we made here:
I don't think this is about the macbook neo. I don't think the comments need to devolve into a mac vs. linux argument. It's simply an ode to that kid pushing hardware to the limits, and learning so much along the way.
What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.
Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. I've swapped out the endless tinkerability of android with the vanilla 'it just works'-ness of the iphone. That curiosity took me far, but I seem to have lost it along the way.
I didn't grow up in a 3rd world country but had the same experience, bar running games I don't own. Not everyone in the west had parents that wanted to just spend thousands on hardware that seemed to be obsolete next year, or any means of making that money. And I've never stopped using sub-par hardware, to this day I enjoy squeezing every drop of performance from cheap pre-owned stuff.
Most of us learned a lot that way, trying to squeeze and make something work out of nothing. That's why we understand much more than kids today. In the end that is the reason I still optimize stuff in my corporate company and I have a pretty awesome job, so it's a good path.
I'd agree it is about the Neo in the sense that the device and the talk around it obviously triggered this post.
I don't think the author is exactly bashing the Chromebook. I'm reading it in that the author praise an open ecosystem where you have flexibility and the choice to "take off the guard rails" and go where the device was not originally made to take you.
There's an argument to be made that it is ironic that Apple is the example of this, but to me that shows why I _still_ like MacOS, when all the other variants (iPadOS and iOS) are entirely locked down.
> He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes.
This hits home. Not because I did it as a kid; I'm a bit old for that. But because I've done this exact thing two or three times. You stare and know, just know, that somewhere in this byzantine interface there is the raw power to do lots of cool 3D stuff. But damn. It's quite an interface.
> 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.
Yeah. For me it was an old, beat-up 286 that I couldn't get anyone to upgrade and and loving devotion to MS-DOS, old EGA Sierra games, TSR programs, TUIs, GeoWorks, and just not being able to get enough of it.
When I finally saved up enough to buy a 486 motherboard, I installed Linux because it seemed cool (and was cool) and never looked back. But that 286 sparked my obsession with computers that has influenced almost every aspect of my life.
Talking about staring at interfaces, I got my first Pentium computer when I was 7 in a village in Pakistan. I spent all day fooling around and accidently stumbled upon quick basic. Having nothing to do I learnt how to code because the help menu listed all the commands and the interpreter gave errors when I did something wrong.
With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.
Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.
Readit News
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
[3] https://youtu.be/OsDy-4L6-tQ
[4] https://youtu.be/Ko9ZA50X71s
Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this and installs Blender on it is WAY more likely to save up for any janky terrible half-working PC laptop with a bit better specs (memory in particular), or a desktop computer if possible, because A. games B. Linux C. piracy and more software D. he does not care about it being Apple or "just working", in the words of the author himself. I don't know how the US kids in particular feel about this since the reality distortion field is so strong, but anywhere else it's like this.
I’m sure most other applications are less Mac-optimized, though (software development, 3d/graphics editing, gaming, …).
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.
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.
Though let's be realistic, here: $600 is much more than the typical school-assigned Chromebook.
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.
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).
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.
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.
5 seconds of googling will get you an answer to "install blender on a Chromebook"
Edit: for true self embarrassment purposes you can see some of the films we made here:
https://youtu.be/FRQv7VUauWs?t=447&si=lCu3rp28XfKWN5ch
And also here:
https://youtu.be/ytKIG802baw?t=615&si=FJI8Cm9yYaXKMZdS
I put the start times at my movies. But there are others as well. lol.
What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.
Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. I've swapped out the endless tinkerability of android with the vanilla 'it just works'-ness of the iphone. That curiosity took me far, but I seem to have lost it along the way.
It shouldn't be, except that the author chose to make every single paragraph about Mac, Apple ecosystem and bashing Chromebook.
I don't think the author is exactly bashing the Chromebook. I'm reading it in that the author praise an open ecosystem where you have flexibility and the choice to "take off the guard rails" and go where the device was not originally made to take you.
There's an argument to be made that it is ironic that Apple is the example of this, but to me that shows why I _still_ like MacOS, when all the other variants (iPadOS and iOS) are entirely locked down.
This hits home. Not because I did it as a kid; I'm a bit old for that. But because I've done this exact thing two or three times. You stare and know, just know, that somewhere in this byzantine interface there is the raw power to do lots of cool 3D stuff. But damn. It's quite an interface.
> 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.
Yeah. For me it was an old, beat-up 286 that I couldn't get anyone to upgrade and and loving devotion to MS-DOS, old EGA Sierra games, TSR programs, TUIs, GeoWorks, and just not being able to get enough of it.
When I finally saved up enough to buy a 486 motherboard, I installed Linux because it seemed cool (and was cool) and never looked back. But that 286 sparked my obsession with computers that has influenced almost every aspect of my life.
With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.
Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.