Sam Henri Gold:

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

I know this because I was running Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spinning rust. I was nine. I had no business doing this. I did it every day after school until my parents made me go to bed.

What a lovely essay. The best piece anyone has written about the MacBook Neo — because it’s not really about the MacBook Neo.

Horace Dediu, under the headline “The Most Brilliant Move in Corporate History?”:

Apple used to be the biggest capex spender, mainly because it paid for most of the property plant and equipment in the factories that made its phones and computers. [...]

But that all changed with AI. Amazon is spending $200 billion this year on AI data centers. Google, $185 billion. Microsoft, $114 billion. Meta, $135 billion. Combined: $650 billion. (Not including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX/XAI.) That is like buying the US Navy every year. And yet Apple’s capital budget is still a modest $14 billion, oscillating with new hardware tooling cycles.

Apple is refusing to transfer its cash flow to Nvidia. Curiously, it believes that its cash flow belongs to its shareholders, not to Nvidia’s.

The hyperscalers are now spending 94% of their operating cash flows on AI infrastructure. Amazon is projected to go negative free cash flow this year with as much as $28 billion in the red. Alphabet’s free cash flow is expected to collapse 90% from $73 billion to $8 billion. These companies used to be the greatest cash machines ever built. Now they’re borrowing money to keep the data center lights on.

It has served Apple very well to guard its free cash flow preciously ever since the company sprung back to growth under Steve Jobs. Are they stuck in the past by sitting this out, or wisely passing on a mania?

If they can make Apple Intelligence a first-class agentic AI by relying on Gemini, paying only $1 billion per year, it sure looks like genius. But given their track record with Apple Intelligence to date, that is an enormous “if”.

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Reuters:

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told ​them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. The sources spoke anonymously because they ​were not authorized to disclose the cuts.

“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.

This, hot on the heels of a New York Times report that Meta’s in-house AI models are lagging and they’re considering licensing Gemini from Google.

Matt Mullenweg:

One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account — a technique Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismissed the prompts, but the stage was set.

What made the attack impressive was the next move: The scammers actually contacted Apple Support themselves, pretending to be me, and opened a real case claiming I’d lost my phone and needed to update my number. That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers. These were legitimate; no filter on earth could have caught them.

Then “Alexander from Apple Support” called. He was calm, knowledgeable, and careful. His first moves were solid security advice: check your account, verify nothing’s changed, consider updating your password. He was so good that I actually thanked him for being excellent at his job.

That, of course, was when he moved into the next phase of the attack.

What makes this attack so dastardly is that parts of it are actual emails from Apple. And because the attackers are the ones who opened the support incident, when they called Mullenweg, they knew the case ID from the legitimate emails sent by Apple.

One of the tells that alerted Mullenweg that this was a scam was that he knew he hadn’t initiated any of it, so his guard was up from the start. Another is that the scammer texted him a link pointing to the domain “audit-apple.com” (which domain is now defunct). That domain name looks obviously fake to me. But to most people? Most people have no idea that whatever-apple.com is totally different than whatever.apple.com.

iFixit:

Is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever also one of its most repairable? For years, opening a MacBook has usually meant fighting your way through glue and buried parts.

But the Neo stands out, with increasingly good day-one manuals, less-painful keyboard repairs, and a screwed-in battery tray that sent cheers across the iFixit office. This laptop proves that things can be made more affordable and more repairable at the same time.

That conclusion is backwards, I think. I suspect the MacBook Neo is more repairable not despite of its lower price, but because of its lower price. It’s designed and engineered to be easier, and thus cheaper, to assemble. And the aspects that make it easier to assemble make it easier to disassemble.

Regarding the Neo’s 2.7-pound weight:

We were all a bit curious as to why the cheaper and less feature rich Neo weighed the same as a MacBook Air M3, each 13″ laptop weighing in at about 1.24kg. It’s especially puzzling when considering the Neo supposedly uses a lighter chassis, and is, uh, smaller.

Here’s what we found: The Neo’s chassis is actually only barely lighter than the Air’s. Together, its chassis, keyboard, and bottom cover are just 8g lighter than the Air’s. But the Neo’s screen is 48g heavier, and the solid chunk of metal that supports its trackpad makes up 7% of the laptop’s overall weight! The Neo’s full trackpad assembly is almost exactly twice as heavy as the M3 MacBook Air’s, too.