MacBook Neo v. Intel NUC, a Prisoner's Perspective

Fact:
I don't know when I'll get to leave prison.
It could be a decade down the road with a lot of restrictions.
It could be six months from now.
It could be any number or no number at all.
Such are the whims of the system I'm currently in.

But I choose to look positively forward, and that means I'm keeping my eyes on the technology as best I can from inside the curlicues of 'cordion wire that make up my prison home for now.

One announcement I heard was that Apple is introducing the MacBook Neo, which has been lauded as one of the most repairable pieces of Apple hardware in over a decade. The article's wording intimates that Apple might be coming after the slice of market Google carved out for itself with their Chromebooks.

As someone who was staunchly an Apple detractor on the streets before prison, let me tell you something startling:

I am genuinely rooting for Apple to pull this off.

I have a few reasons.

Anything but Intel.

Sorry, Intel, but even in x86-land, I personally preferred your competitor AMD. Before VIA went industrial machines only, I liked their stuff, too.

I'm curious to see the performance of Apple silicon, though I'll likely be jumping through multiple hoops as a gamer to get some of my old titles working if I do go that way.

Then again, software challenges can be overcome: we've emulated entire machines before. Came and went were the days of NESticle, GeneCyst, zSNES and SNES9x, chankast, no$GBA, Dolphin, and the like, where we have PCs pretending to be old video game consoles; Virtual machines emulate entire computers of specific age to enable our ability to run operating systems and softwares of ages past -- things modern machines would die trying to do.
So if the processor in this Neo is performing well enough to let me manage my mail, my conversations, and maybe play some of my older games that didn't have native macOS ports, $600 is a really decent starting place.

Repairability

Queen of my Heart is reparability: can this piece of hardware be fixed in a reasonable amount of time with reasonable tools?
Can I take my old Wowstick 1F, stick a Torx bit in, unscrew a screw or four with it and announce, "I'm in." while swapping or reseating a component?
Word I'm hearing thus far is "Wow!" for reparability. This bodes well, especially if replacement parts are also readily available. Swap out a broken keyboard in a little bit of time? Yes, please.

A Portable Reason to Not Windows 11

Okay, okay. In the past, I was not super big on laptops. I would occasionally pick up a machine (like my little Chuwi Herobook, or a retired Dell Latitude E6500 project(RED) series machine), shove a not-Windows OS onboard and use it as my Starbucksing machine.
Yes, I was that enby who hauled their lappy and its wall wart with them to a Starbucks on a chill winter day, curled up in a corner with a Trenta iced green tea, easy ice, scoop of strawberries, no classic, six Splenda, room for cream, a chonga bagel, and a pair of Bluetooth headphones on listening to lo-fi tunes after the start of the year.

The problem with the Latitude

Heavy. I like big machines, but even I found the Latitude E6500 to be a whale. Putting it in my backpack's wetsuit pouch proved to be a problem at times, because it was thick, too.

The problem with the Herobook

Anemic. It was small and light, but the Intel Atom Z8350 CPU and 4GB of RAM was light, even with me using a lightweight Linux distro and running very few things at a time.

So if I were to buy a Neo, I would hopefully be getting reasonable performance in a $600 package. The question of whether it would work with an eGPU then comes to mind... :) Because then, docking the unit for work here, detaching for on the go usage there becomes viable.

NUC

I believe Intel NUC units (likely made by third parties now, and not Intel) cost about $600, excluding a display, and are likely optioned with less RAM. It would also limit me to working in a fixed location, which may or may not be a big issue.

Last thoughts

I want to really see what Apple can do with this Neo, and if it can change this growing trend of electronic garbage we are creating. We've poured the cat out of the bag, but what we haven't determined is what we've poured the cat into: let it be a bigger bag. Let's catch what we can of our mistakes in mangle-facturing, and clean up this mess.