This piece by Sam Henri Gold captures the excitement and enthusiasm that so many of us felt when learning to use computers in simpler times: “This Is Not The Computer For You”: “Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. "
General purpose computers are great because they give users the freedom to dig deeper and discover more. Having the ability to explore and figure out how to do things is the best way to learn for many. Being able to take the time to learn and figure out how these systems work and use them to do creative, interesting, fun, and/or useful things is what brought me and many others to computers.
Today, where too many people are spending too much time listening to loud idiots or yelling at others through our magic communication computers, perhaps we should all spend more time slowly figuring out to do things on a slightly outdated, but perfectly functioning, general purpose computer.
The industry continues to push forward significant developments and improvements in processing power. The MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro performs very comparably to the 5-year old M1 in the MacBook Air, which is still a highly useful computer. But even if the A18 Pro is slower than the M4, given the choice between an iPad with M4 and a keyboard case and the MacBook Neo, the MacBook Neo would be far more useful. macOS continues to be so much more powerful and useful than iPadOS. I do use an iPad Pro as a secondary computer every day. But doing any kind of real work (which for me is primarily interacting with web apps and working with Office files) on iPad feels like using a cork fork. A totally useful Mac laptop at an accessible price is exciting. But even with Macbook Neo offering so much performance at a great value, I will be surprised if the Macintosh ever shakes the popular perception of being expensive and overpriced.
