I agree I don’t think it’s going to be something people really do.

I just thought it was neat. It’s a phone chip, we’ve never been able to do stuff like this on an Apple phone chip before. No one was porting this to the iPhone to run there.

In my mind this is purely a curiosity article, and I like that.

You'd be surprised. There are many of us analysts in the third world who are paid pennies and expected to build large-scale exec dashboards from nontrivial data - with no cloud support whatsoever. ETL has to be local from hundreds of GBs of csv dumps.

I've used MacBook Airs as primary dev machines multiple times in my career (before Apple silicon, when Airs had truly shit performance).

There is always a trade-off of cost/convenience/power, and some folks are going to end up the the Neo end of the spectrum.

I love small form factors, and I am what youd call a professionel :P

I think the form factor is basically the same (maybe slightly thicker) as a Macbook Air. It's basically an Air with lower performance in most dimensions.

It’s necessary because the ignorant keep saying 8GB of RAM is a deal breaking limitation on the cheapest MacBook available.