@yiningkarlli
Rendering Engineer at Disney Animation working on Disney's Hyperion Renderer. Previously at Pixar, Dreamworks, Cornell, Penn. Views here are my own. https://www.yiningkarlli.com https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@yiningkarlli
I was a big fan of the 11 inch MacBook Air; I liked my first 11″ Air so much that when it came time to replace it, I replaced it with... another newer 11″ Air! I hope the MacBook Neo form factor sticks around, because if you were an 11″ Air fan, the size is very close:
Meanwhile for me, I have to exercise a ton of discipline not to just impulse order a MacBook Neo right now. I am a Very Computer person and there are a ton of things in my life that a small light inexpensive colorful MacBook would be great for. I used an 11 inch Air for years.
A lot of the discourse from Very Computer people I've seen about the MacBook Neo is basically not far from this. The Very Computer people don't realize that if you have ever looked at the tech specs page for a laptop, you probably are not the target market for the MacBook Neo.
The Studio Display XDR has a A19 Pro in it and is only a monitor.
The MacBook Neo has a A18 Pro in it and is a full Mac.
There is no 27 inch iMac in the lineup anymore.
www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/n...
Part of what makes the WBC so awesome is things like getting to root for Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper on the same team. You'd never catch me dead rooting for the Yankees, but I'll 100% absolutely root for Aaron Judge when he's in a Team USA uniform.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
A Magic Keyboard costs $349 for the 13 inch iPad Pro version, which implies the core parts of the Neo only costs $250. Apple’s historic hardware margin is about 36%, so the core parts cost them only about $160 to make. Only $160 to make a modern really decent computer!
When I was in college I feel like 90% of my classmates had the white polycarbonate MacBook. This feels like Apple finally going for dominating that demographic market again. With PC component prices skyrocketing and Windows quality going to heck lately, the timing couldn’t be better.
I can't wait to see everyone's new product names over the next 24 months. Get ready for Samsung Galaxy Book Neo, Huawei Matebook Neo, Dell Neo, Xiamoi Neo, etc...
Only ones immune are MSI and Asus who will continue to name their laptops "ROG Crystal Elite Emperor 97TXU5BRev2".
The real story for the Neo isn't that its starting price is $599... it's that the price is _$499_ for students. They knocked it out of the park on the pricing. Interesting that recently, across the board for basically all models Macs are now really competitive on price.
Yeah. The real story around the Neo actually isn't the $599 starting price either... it's that the starting price is _$499_ for students. They knocked it out of the park on the pricing.
The MacBook Neo video feels like a return to peak early 2010s Apple videos; it's really wonderfully done. Also interesting is the target audience: it's as much an intro to the Neo as it is an intro to macOS. They're going to sell a zillion of these.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SI...
Ah yes the legendary Longchu 🤣
Oh wait I didn't realize that the introduction of the Studio Display XDR also means Apple is straight up _discontinuing_ the Pro Display XDR. That's pretty wild to me- the Pro Display XDR's size and resolution is completely in a league of its own.
For every show we keep an internal folder filled with this stuff, including funny glitches and bad renders, and goofy stuff the animators intentionally make for fun. But it'll almost certainly never see the light of day.
Interesting details on M5 Pro/Max chips: CPU and GPU are now separate dies combined via an interposer. Also Apple now has 3 types of cores: super cores (what used to be perf cores), perf cores (new design), and efficiency cores (same as before).
www.apple.com/newsroom/202...
Studio Display XDR is 5K/27 inches, has 2000 nit HDR, and does 120hz. This monitor is The Chosen One.
The interesting thing though is that you can get Pro Display XDR used for about the same price now. Only 60Hz sure, but 6K/32 inch.
www.apple.com/studio-displ...
I love the cinematography in the product video for the M4 iPad Air. They went with an idea where every shot has screen-upwards movement, resulting in a lot of really clever really fun shots. Absolutely delightful and wonderful framing and shot design.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT5i...
Opinion: product marketing videos which are just pretty footage of manufacturing processes are vastly underrated and everyone should do more of them. This startup's manufacturing video is great; it's right up there with the gold standard of Apple videos.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IAX...
The accompanying article from the magazine: beforesandafters.com/2026/02/10/b...
@beforesmag.bsky.social has an amazing breakdown of the VFX work done for Apple's F1 movie. For a movie that "had no CGI work", there's a ton of incredible, utterly seamless CGI work that you'd never be able to tell was there if you didn't know!
youtu.be/mmAxzrIgVcI?...
At every animation studio I've worked at, this is a weekly occurrence.
IQ is building a procedural piano in ShaderToy. 🤯
Yup.
The results look spectacular. But the plumbing to make it all work? Probably no single person in the entire studio understands the eye pipeline end-to-end.
This is very close to how eyes work in our pipeline.
Bonus: our eye shader internally implements a variant of manifold exploration to handle eye caustics. The eye shader is literally a more advanced light transport system than the main renderer, inside of a shader, inside the main renderer.
I suspect this may be true for AAA game engines too, but can't speak to that as well because I haven't been in a game studio.
Go into any large animation/VFX studio pipeline and I guarantee you that however they model/rig/texture/shade/light/render eyes is probably one of the most haunted/curséd parts of that pipeline.
So this is what Apple's custom Apple Silicon servers for Private Cloud Compute look like. The new WSJ video about Apple's push for US-based manufacturing features a first-ever look at Apple Silicon server enclosures.
...they look like normal servers!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktFl...