This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.
The A18 Pro isn't even two years old yet; it debuted in iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max September 2024. What's funny is none of the PC laptops manufactures can match the speed and quality of the Neo.
The benchmarks for the A18 Pro are impressive; its Single Thread Performance beats all mobile processors [1]; remember this processor was created for a phone:
Apple A18 Pro 4,091
Apple M1 8 Core 3200 MHz. 3,675
Apple A15 Bionic 3,579
AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 3,546
AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 230 3,538
Apple A14 Bionic 3,382
Intel Core i5-1235U 3,090
Apple A13 Bionic 2,354
Intel N150 1,902
Intel N100 1,893
AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G 1,820
More efficient software benefits everyone.
Because the issue isn't electron, it's not freeing resources which you can do in any language/platform.
That’s still an order of magnitude worse than it should be. You don’t need 200mb of ram for a chat app.
Fewer developers want to write ASM or C, today. Slower to market, slower to roll out features, etc. While that may seem like a good thing, and probably could be, the market doesn't like it.
Developer choose heavy weight frameworks or don't make use of modern features in said frameworks to improve performance. And in some cases, performance can be 'good enough'. If I pretended to be a developer, if my app performs well enough, it's not my problem what else is running on your system. Besides, the OS governs it all regardless.
That said, macOS has a terrible memory leak _somewhere_ that impacts even OOTB apps and this hasn't been corrected for the last two major releases.
Usually you just have to actually look at memory usage and trim the obvious fat. But so many developers these days treat memory as an infinite resource, and don't have a clue how to use profiling tools to even investigate memory usage. That and, maybe stop shipping a copy of Chrome with your application.
I'm hopeful that LLMs will improve the state of application development. Claude can write sloppy code, but it also knows how to write rust and swift, and it knows a lot of tricks for optimisation if you prompt it.
There's 3rd party libraries which know how to interact with spotify. I wonder how many claude code tokens it would take to make a simple, native spotify client. Or discord client. Or client for Teams or Slack.
Not necessarily a reason to avoid the Neo, for the right use case. If I had secondary school kids they’d get one of these, but something to bear in mind.
Nintendo Switch - 279 euro
Nintendo Switch 2 - 489 euro
Neo with a proper SSD size - 800 euro.