If we don’t keep building bigger and faster, people might realize they don’t need to keep buying our stuff.

🔗 Why Apple’s New “MacBook Neo” Has Stunned the Tech World – Lauren Weinstein’s Blog:

The first reactions were that this must be a really stripped down laptop with quality corners cut here, there, and everywhere. But this appears not to be the case. People who got their hands on these — and they’re sold out at some suppliers — are praising the quality throughout. A completely aluminum case, with an excellent display, keyboard, trackpad and so on.

Two specs that caught a lot of attention were that the Neo doesn’t use the class of Apple CPU chip you’d normally expect in a Mac, but actually uses the Apple chip from a recent iPhone. And the Neo (both models) has a fixed and unexpandable RAM memory of 8 gig, seemingly small for a Mac.

My takeaways from this whole Neo thing are:

1. If a phone CPU can power a usable laptop, most mobile devices are quite over-specced for what people actually use them for, and

2. The vast majority of people also don’t need the even more tremendously overpowered laptops that Apple and most other manufacturers have been cranking out for years.

That any of this comes as a surprise to tech pundits and tech “journalists” is a likely a function of that whole crowd having been bought into the story the tech industry has been spinning for the better part of two decades, that everything has to and will always get faster and more powerful and god help you if you get left behind.