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Comment by haritha-j | Hacker News Reader

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.

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(Author of the post here) The post was inspired by the Neo and provoked by a certain YouTuber’s review of it, but yeah it’s about the Neo in the same way that The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing.

I wrote about the Mac in general since that’s what I know, but I imagine if I grew up in the Windows world and liked Windows more, I would have a similar experience with my dad’s old ThinkPad or something.

You perfectly encapsulated how I felt as a kid pushing my computer to its limit just to learn and try new things. I didn't have a Mac, but the experience was identical.

> 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 feel this, and on the whole I've done the same thing. I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem because it all just works together without me having to tinker with it. I think this is mostly a reaction to now doing that stuff professionally - 4 days a week, whether I feel like it or not, I'm required to make computers do things they couldn't do before I started.

When I get to the end of the work day, or out of bed on a Sunday morning, I might get the urge to tinker with things but I refuse to have tinkering with things to make them work be a requirement for my rest time. Leisure tinkering must be on my terms, because if I'm forced to tinker with something just to do what I really wanted to do that's not tinkering, that's the thing fucking with me, and I will swear profusely at it throughout.

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.

> I don't think this is about the macbook neo.

It shouldn't be, except that the author chose to make every single paragraph about Mac, Apple ecosystem and bashing Chromebook.

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.

it's so wild that we're in a place now where the utterly brainwashed can say this with a straight face:

> 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.

And faking being sick so he could clap at Apple marketing events. He kinda lost me there.

He's looking back to a time when they were still special. When every keynote brought out a new, interesting product, feature, OS enhancement, etc. Back in the Steve Jobs era, it was still worth tuning in every year to see what was new.

The whole article is about how Apple is still special just like when he was a kid.

But anyway, I find it funny that author implies if a kid gets a MacBook Neo they will explore all the possibilities to use and customize it, but somehow the same kid won't try to push a Chromebook to its limit. It 100% matches my stereotype of how Apple fans view machines.

Yeah, you'd find out about it all in the newspapers a few hours later, and none if it was "clap to yourself in an empty room" impressive anyway. I was around back then and I didn't feel the need to act like a drug addict whenever Steve Jobs opened his mouth.

Were you a kid then too? :)

Lighten up. He was a kid and he knows how silly that was.

It's sick even if it was a kid. Being so brand washed should trigger a parent intervention.

Mostly same story. Tinkered for hours with Windows 3.1 floppy disks. Reinstalling OS’s all the time because I’d break stuff or I’d just want a fresh slate. I loved pushing the boundaries. In my 30’s I slowed down with the tinkering because of life (kids, work). I thought I lost the ability to tinker. But recently at 42, I bought a MacBook for the sole purpose of tinkering on the couch at the end of the day (basically after being on computer the whole day, I didn’t want to be in office anymore). And slowly, it’s coming back. I’m playing with new things, learning about Neural Networks, learning about Softare Defined Radio, installing tons of random libraries and tools to test that out. It’s coming back. Keep pushing on it and hopefully it returns for you too!

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.

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