Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

Yes, exactly. When getting your car repaired there’s loaners or rentals to allow you to keep driving. Why isn’t a loaner computer a standard thing?

Some people occasionally returning products—that they intended to keep or not—is not like all of the energy grid being consumed by data centers, nor is it like all of the wetlands being paved over for suburbs.

Multi-trillion dollar corporation*

As far as I'm concerned, if I can't work because they have my laptop for a week, especially because I pay for AppleCare and have to leave it with them, it's not much different than an insurance policy that lends me a rental car while mine's in the shop.

Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.

The M4 and the neo share the same CPU architecture but the M4 has 4 performance cores at 4.4ghz, while the neo has 2 performance cores at 4ghz.

The neo also does not have any CPU heatsink so it thermal throttles after only a few seconds:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MacBo...

The actual code I am using for this is:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tp, void *tzp);

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      double xmin, xmax;
      double ymin, ymax;
      double x, y, xs, ys;
      int max_iter;
      int i, px, py;
      int width, height;
      volatile double wx, wy, t;
      double start, now;
      struct timeval tv;
      int count;

      xmin = -2.0;
      ymin = -1.5;
      xmax = 1.0;
      ymax = 1.5;

      max_iter = 1000;
      width = 200;
      height = 200;

      xs = (xmax - xmin) / (double) width;
      ys = (ymax - ymin) / (double) height;

      gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
      start = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
      count = 0;
      now = start;
      while (now - start < 10.0 /* && count == 0 */) {
        for (y=ymin, py = 0; py < height; py++, y += ys) {
          for (x=xmin, px = 0; px < width; px++, x += xs) {
            wx = 0.0;
            wy = 0.0;
            for (i=0; i < max_iter && (wx * wx + wy * wy) < 4; i++) {
              t = wx * wx - wy * wy + x;
              wy = 2 * wx * wy + y;
              wx = t;
            }
          }
        }
        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
        now = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
        count ++;
      }
      printf("%d iterations in %.2f seconds.\n", count, now - start);
    }

(If I were building a Jellyfin server today, I'd probably use a MacBook Neo.)

A M1 MacBook Air will perform virtually identically for most if not all laptop computing class tasks.

Not sure who’s buying these or if it’s just people dreaming about finding a rube.

Just bough a used mac today!