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Comment by commandersaki | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions

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Yep! They got a Macbook Pro!

Damn that’s so cool. When I heard about that kid programming OSS on his phone it really put me to shame complaining about my work load.

On the one hand, that's awesome. On the other hand, I do wish open source people would have opted to get him something more free than a MacBook.

He choose the laptop for durability because he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh. People didn't pick a non-free laptop without consulting him.

A ThinkPad might have also been an excellent choice, but hope the MacBook serves him well!

Note: this isn't a critique of his choice, just a mention of something others might find useful.

Source: I had a T480, P51, X1 Carbon and now P1 Gen 6, they're pretty good. Also have a MacBook M1 Air for note taking and stuff.

Please don’t downvote this advice into oblivion. As a person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually valuable.

Framework?

Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case. Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced, aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more general purpose laptop that everyone at the company fell in love with, which led to it actually going to production.

12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.

Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.

https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-countries-and-regions-...

Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.

Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy

Yes, fair, it’s off-topic in here.

>he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh

Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.

So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.

This case was different from hackclub’s usual donations. Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev, coding on his phone and shared it with the community. People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a hassle and Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.

I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I can't recall more than once in south east asia the words "you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the "west".

I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.

Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure. These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a i-know-best kind of way.

It is not about their decisions, it is about their bs about the need for high reliability

About… the teenage boy’s… “bs” about his preferences? About his supporters recognizing his free labor, wanting to reward it, asking him to make a choice for himself and him making it?

Bro. Just let the kid have his MacBook.

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