So, we have some of those MacBook NEO’s sitting around the office since they are a pretty good deal (even after the price increases) for the demo devices that we need. The intent wasn’t to use them as daily drivers just as a node that would be online for our products to talk to.
However over the last couple of weeks really playing around with the device it’s becoming more and more apparent that the devices are able to hit well above the price point that they are selling for.
In our office a lot of our staff spend most of their day working in web based apps (CRM & Email) and working through a soft phone that we use for our phone system. None of those are things that are particularly taxing for a computer and we have had some folks running on hardware that’s older a decade old without any specific performance issues. However on those decade old machines Windows 10 is the flavour of Windows that plays nice on that hardware and now that it’s officially out of support we are having to roll that hardware out of production and get replacements in place.
Our general go-to devices have, for a long time, been Lenovo Thinkpads. Generally speaking we were able to pick them up for around the 1200$ range at a reasonable specification, however with the recent increase in price for all IT gear those are harder and harder to get and we are starting to look at 1800$ or higher for devices that would match what we were picking up previously.
And the thing is playing with the Neo’s we found that they were working fine for anything we threw at them, and since they are still around the 1000$ CAD mark even after the price increases we are looking at using them as a alternative to the Windows based machines we have been picking up.
I know, buying a 8gb machine for day to day use seems strange as hell but in our testing we can’t see the machine getting to more than ~7gb of used RAM during our normal operations. Even if for some reason the devices wind up being underpowered in a couple of years they were are cheap enough that we can swap them out for something new in a couple of years and not feel horrible about it.