I loved reading his columns at PC Magazine growing up, it's an end of an era. He had such an interesting view of the PC industry as a whole and his column was almost always the first thing I read when a new issue would arrive at my house.
I really like Fastmail, but I wish they offered a lightweight AI feature. Their filtering system is unmatched, yet I’d love a basic, privacy-focused AI filter powered by a small, private model they run.
For example, I could set rules like “if an email looks like a promotion, move it to the promotions folder.” I could roll my own MCP server sure, but that’s not the direction I want to go.
If you spend more than 1 minute on Facebook, you realize what they are potentially training their data on, and it is not good. Their advertising algorithm is very good, I'll give them that.
I like how I can slap up a free Turnstile on my projects in two minutes and not have to worry about endless comment spam and user registration spam. Yes, I understand there's problems with Cloudflare, but there's also a lot of problems out there in the wild west of an open internet.
What's sad is that in my experience supporting 80 users, Word et al work with fewer issues on Mac. The stack integration on Windows is fine, until it isn't.
Yes! iOS 27 needs to categorize notifications using AI. Apps aren't supposed to advertise to you, but some don't allow for that distinction. I want notifications on for when my sandwich is arriving, but I don't want push notifications for a promotion. Some apps are good about this, others don't allow that granularity. I hate the all or nothing.
On the flipside, I have an app that sends notifications. We don't abuse it or use it for promotions, and APNS and Google's version works perfectly fine for us.
I use it more and more as a primary, and it doesn't feel like I've made many tradeoffs at all. I even like the keys better, they aren't transparent, so the plastic feels different, but in a good way.
I think I would cut the line at M3 or above. I think M2 uses an older architecture and it doesn't have WiFi 6E in it, and of course single core is a bit lower. Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
I really don't understand why more companies don't emulate Apple in terms of line simplicity. Look at Dell for a great example of a sprawling product mix. I can't imagine having that many product varieties helps with profitability.
In the consumer space, I recently bought a Sonicare toothbrush, and the number of models and combinations is staggering. 1000x plaque removal, 750% plaque removal, it's ridiculous.
The MacBook Neo proves that gadget "shrinkflation" is largely a choice. I own an Neo and I continue to marvel at how capable, nice, and yet inexpensive it was.
I bought a Neo to "replace" an M3 MacBook Air "travel/out of the house/outside" laptop. Are there drawbacks? Most certainly, but it feels like something special, and I enjoy the slightly smaller form factor. The main drawback is perhaps the most surprising, the screen, which is really good at 500 nits, draws a disproportionate amount of energy compared to the rest of the system, so you get about 3.5 hours in bright sunlight / maximum brightness.
As the only IT person in an 80 person unit, I can say the Neo trounces Dell Latitudes in a lot of ways, those have awful 250 nit screens out of the box, and they are nearly $1,200!