Colossus is the world's largest single, unified GPU cluster, all GPUs acting as one coherent supercomputer rather than fragmented pools or multi-site setups. They spun it up in a fraction of the time by all estimates. It's not something you can just throw money at and reproduce the results.
Per Jensen Huang:
"As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it's just unbelievable. A supercomputer that you would build would take normally three years to plan and then they deliver the equipment and it takes one year to get it all working."
..."it took 19 days to get Colossus from hardware installation to beginning training, the fastest by far anyone's been able to do that."
Regarding on site generators. Meta, OpenAI (Microsoft/Oracle) and others are also using on-site gas turbines, generators, and "behind-the-meter" power plants to keep up with the power demand. This has become an industry-wide strategy driven by grid constraints, with natural gas as a fast-deploy option.
It would be great if the grids could keep up with demand, if other options would be considered capable of producing the ongoing demands (ie. more renewable, nuclear, etc) but they're not, and companies are not going to just wait because then they're as good as done.
Colossus took an old manufacturing plant where they made rangetops and stoves and turned it into a functioning 100,000-GPU datacenter in 122 days. That's a truly insane turnaround time!
> Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources
Why would I believe a rich guy hyping his company's temporarily magical product when he hypes another guy who is a proven liar and flagrant fraudster? The cool thing is how the Twitter purchase was "on hold" due to bots and now it's mostly bots. But if you own the company making the software that powers the bots, I guess that's ok.
Jensen is smart enough to know he's glossing over the many shortcomings of an ultra-rich loser because it benefits him in the markets. I have no respect for that.
I'd go through and find specific examples of his personal involvement picking 0 on the cheap/fast/good axis.
The submarine option in the caves? Expensive, not there on time, didn't work.
His push for the screens
Hyperloop was apparently his baby. Fails on all 3 counts.
Tesla self driving. Ineffective, overdue and I can imagine the lawsuits aren't cheap.
It looks like we have an idiot in charge where his only advantage is in pressuring his underlings into reckless behaviour and offloading the responsibility and the negative externalities
>Why does SpaceX warrant a change of existing trading rules?
They don't, while timing certainly benefits, and potentially was triggered by them and OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, these rules are not specific to only apply to SpaceX.
FTSE Russell (Russell 1000/2000 etc.) Adopted "fast entry" for large IPOs. Eligible companies (investable market cap above Russell Top 500 cutoff) can join after 5 trading days (previously quarterly rebalances). Also eased float rules with carve-outs.
Nasdaq (Nasdaq-100): Effective May 1, 2026, top ~40 market-cap companies can enter after 15 trading days (previously 3+ months). Adjusted low-float handling.
S&P Dow Jones (S&P 500): Reducing seasoning from 12 months to 6 months for megacaps and waiving the 4-quarter GAAP profitability requirement for large issuers.
The answer remains, these rules do not specifically apply to only SpaceX, they apply to a range of companies that fit specific profiles. Timing happens to favor SpaceX, but will equally favor OpenAI, Anthropic and others within the same qualifiers.
The links above provide specifics as to the what's and the why.
And prior to that Elon did float the idea of IPOing on a non-NYC exchange, some Texas exchange. So a bit of a stick and some honey in the IPO fees and early access.
Yeah ultimately who wouldnt want that? (Strawman btw) The other extreme is, what exactly do the power hungry cretins want? Godlike worship form all other humans.
Reality will be whatever happens (capital and corportism wins through the monopoly of violence and the oligarchic capture)
One example of legible demands: Americademands.com
There are many people with many unmet needs. Everyone has played a part and continues to do so every day with their choices.
We all know they get paid by musk to load up on overvalued stocks so musk can get some cash from pension funds, the pay off a bit Russell’s for bending the rules. No one in their right mind would change rules to buy space x. What profit must have to compensate the valuation?
Tesla has offered insurance on their vehicles since 2019, if they did self-insure the robitaxis, likely they would extend it through their existing insurance program.
* global distributed caching of content. This reduces the static load on our servers and bandwidth usages to essentially 0, and since it is served at an end point closest to wherever the client is, they get less latency. This includes user logged in specifics as well.
* shared precached common libraries (ie. jquery, etc) for faster client load times
* Offers automated minification of JS, CSS, and HTML, along with image optimization (serve size and resolution of image specific to the device user is viewing it from) to increase speed
* always up mode (even if my server is down for some reason, I can continue to serve static content)
* detailed analytics and reporting on usage / visitors
There are a lot more, but those are a few that come to mind.
The pushback isn't that they use Anthropic, it is that you stated they used it "entirely", which is not true.
Yes Anthropic is a priority model in their ecosystem and they are deeply embedded with both tech and staff, but they are not the one as indicated and sourced in my reply above.
I’m a bit confused about who this article is really for. The MacBook Neo starts at $600 so when I read:
“MacBook Neo is built on an iPhone chip—the A18 Pro. It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
and that:
“It’s merely the right kind of performance for anybody who wants to browse the internet or stream video.”
...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Standard HDMI/USB‑C video out for external displays
So I can definitely see the appeal of the Neo for people who just want an inexpensive way into macOS, but the claim that “no other budget laptop can compete.” doesn't track.
Maybe it should have been "The least expensive Macbook yet, but that comes with significant downsides."
MKBHD said it best: If you're looking at the reviews of the product on tech youtube channels or tech news sites - it's not the laptop for you.
As for your comparisons: My aunt doesn't need a terabyte of storage or a Ryzen 7 5700U, she needs 15+ hours of battery life because the laptop is going to live next to her spot on the couch and she most likely can't remember to plug it in every night.
Also the first laptop is from a reputable brand called NIAKUN. They must have amazing customer service and unbeatable warranties, right? =) And they certainly will exist in 12 months when you go look for the brand on Amazon and won't be replaced by another random set of letters in all caps selling the exact same product?
The HP is on sale, it's MSRP is $699 and for some weird fucking reason has the numpad on it, making the whole keyboard wonky. Who wants that on a laptop?
And the final thing, as with all price-forward comparisons: build quality. We need an objective standard measurement for chassis and keyboard flex, the ability to open the lid with one finger, the amount of creaking and squeaking said laptop will do in normal use and how hot and loud it gets in your lap when doing light browsing.
Anyone doing accounts and data entry wants a numpad. My dad recently damaged his laptop keyboard. I gave him a spare usb keyboard, and he still went out and bought a new keyboard just for the numpad. There's a reason pc makers keep stuffing those lopsided monstrosities in there
Anyone doing data entry with a numpad will also want a proper one, not a squishy laptop one.
But they're clearly not the majority of the people - the rest of us have to live with a lopsided keyboard because a few people for some reason do data entry on a laptop keyboard.
Ah the classic NIAKUN, what we expect from brand name quality: awesome keyboard layout (love a number pad that smashes into the arrow keys), great resolution (1920x1080 so good for 2026!). I'm sure the speakers are state of the art for the form factor, gets amazing battery life (love me max 4-5 hrs on moderate usage), and of course can't forget the plastic body.
I'm sure a similar story can be said about the HP.
If you didn't detect the sarcasm, a laptop is much more than cpu, memory, and storage; it'd be short-sighted to only fixate on this trio. PC laptops compromise on pretty much everything and usually do everything poorly, including CPU (since apple silicon Macs are much better performance per watt).
Then there's the whole aspect of Apple support for both hardware AND software, something no PC vendor can provide.
I was about to say the same thing. How can people compare Apple to a NIAKUN throwaway laptop? I'm no Mac fanboy - I use Windows, Linux and Mac at home. I find MacOS somewhat annoying, but as a Internet browsing laptop, I'd much rather pay for the Mac Neo than "NIAKUN".
> ...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
Laughable. Seriously, how long has it been since the M1 Air dropped? And we're still this clueless?
> For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Awesome spec dump. Now, what's the real life usage battery life of that laptop like? Oh? Yeah, thought so.
Nobody buys a list of specs, they buy a set of capabilities. And the Neo is capable of supporting normal usage for 12h+ on battery. Go ahead and link me some alternative laptops that can do that, with comparable performance of course — which is on par or better than the original M1 Air mind you.
Killer move by Apple, and I'm shocked there's still so much ignorance around.
Looked up more info on this laptop, my cursory thoughts:
plastic chassis: gross.
keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
no inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
limited size trackpad, not to mention a PC trackpad: yuck
display looks good and is matte: nice
fans: gross
usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array: yuck
supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
But at least it seems to have comparable battery life to the neo.
I don't care, it holds, it is not slippery (a huge problem with my current phone with metal body). What exactly is better with metal?
> keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
I would prefer one without, but that's just a matter of preference here. The layout is good. In fact, it's the keyboard that mostly makes me feel good whenever I use this laptop.
> inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
In theory I agree, but for some reason that did not feel problematic on this particular keyboard.
> limited size trackpad
?
> not to mention a PC trackpad
To each their own
> fans: gross
Never heard them, not even sure they are there.
> usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array
Sounds like a minor issue
> supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
I prefer "bricks" on the wire to "bricks" on the plug like Apple does because it does not take 10 slots on a power strip.
I would ask the opposite. For years now for most of my family even a Raspberry Pi 3B+ 3ould be enough. 95% of people use their machine to run a web browser, that easily ran on hardware that was old 20 years ago.
Well but that's the thing. It is priced like a phone for exactly the kind of person who would spend 600 bucks on a phone. I don't think this is a coincidence.
In terms of performance the raw compute people have in their pockets nowadays surpasses what they typically need by magnitudes for a while now. Granted: programmers and tech companies find new ways of wasting that compute on features that people ultimately do not need, so they may need that the compute so things feel snappy, but if I think about what my parents do on their devices you could easily enable them to do theirs tasks with far less. They are essentially doing the same as ca. 2006 with pictures and videos being higher fidelity & resolution and websites running hundred thousand lines of javascript being the main difference.
The thing with laptops in my experience is a) they last ~6 years (macs at any rate) so that's ~$100/year or 27c a day and b) people spend a lot of time on them, hours a day often. Is it really worth cutting back much on that when it's like 1/10th the cost of getting a cup of coffee?
I would take 8x worse specs for the computer to be built by Apple because it's guaranteed to be 2x faster and a 10x better user experience. Raw specs are meaningless.
> It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
This is false. The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance. Most people would see no noticeable benefit to a faster CPU. Especially with a fanless design, the additional cores of a comparable M-series chip would give you better burst performance for some workloads, but possibly not much improvement in sustained performance.
> In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes. Both the M1 Air and the new M5 Air (4.46 GHz) are able to sustain their peak clock speeds indefinitely in single-core mode.
That's a fair point above sustained multicore, but this is probably the right tradeoff for this class of device. Few people are regularly maxing out all of their cores for more than a few minutes at a time, and the people who are doing that probably weren't going to buy Apple's budget $600 MacBook anyway. The increase in single core performance over the M1 is much more valuable to most users.
That's probably true, although once again it's the sustained _single core_ performance that suffers. Statements like "the A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1" without this context still aren't true.
The A18's sustained single core performance is about the same as the M1's and the "burst" performance is quite a bit better. So I'd say it clearly has better single core performance overall.
I wonder if the new displays with A19 processors have better heat dissipation. (and if they can be modified to run full iOS instead of the displayOS variant)
Your amazon links are broken. But I think you're missing the point of this thing. This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone, does all the things their school needs them to do in a browser, and doesn't come with a complete dogsh*t OS, and isn't of dubious quality like an HP or a "NIAKUN", whatever that is.
>This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone
That was my conclusion to my comment in my original. The title of "no other budget laptop can compete" is not just sensationalized, it is factually wrong. It should have been "the least expensive macbook yet comes with a catch"
"No other budget laptop can compete on offering MacOS" is certainly a correct statement, but it's not a particularly interesting one. If they're missing the point, it's because it was exaggerated to the point of not being recognizable.
And for their kids sick and tired of trying to help them fix Window's incompetence. You're into Dell for at least $800 for anything approaching an actually usable laptop. This is definitely my mom's next laptop.
The target customer for this wants a laptop that will live in a dedicated space and rarely/never travel, except to the couch. 15 inches is perfect for that.
"Audio-to-Sheet-Music: Upload or record audio, get accurate sheet music"
but the bot says:
"I can't process an MP3 for you right now, but I can totally help you generate some awesome classical piano sheet music! Just let me know if you'd like me to create some for you! "
Is this a future feature or is there another way I should be sending audio?
Secondly, they're preloading the executable resident in memory to accelerate click to open, similar to what Chrome Browser does on Windows (and websites when browsing)
I don't perceive this as "fixing bad performance, given explorer has never been slow to open for me, but rather further optimizing the experience.
"We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn’t be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it. If you have the change, if needed there is an option you can uncheck to disable this called “Enable window preloading for faster launch times” in File Explorer’s Folder Options, under View. Looking forward to your feedback! If you do encounter any issues, please file them in the Feedback Hub under Files Folders and Online Storage > File Explorer Performance, or Files Folders and Online Storage > File Explorer."
Colossus is the world's largest single, unified GPU cluster, all GPUs acting as one coherent supercomputer rather than fragmented pools or multi-site setups. They spun it up in a fraction of the time by all estimates. It's not something you can just throw money at and reproduce the results.
Per Jensen Huang:
"As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it's just unbelievable. A supercomputer that you would build would take normally three years to plan and then they deliver the equipment and it takes one year to get it all working."
..."it took 19 days to get Colossus from hardware installation to beginning training, the fastest by far anyone's been able to do that."
https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-elon-musk-super...
Regarding on site generators. Meta, OpenAI (Microsoft/Oracle) and others are also using on-site gas turbines, generators, and "behind-the-meter" power plants to keep up with the power demand. This has become an industry-wide strategy driven by grid constraints, with natural gas as a fast-deploy option.
It would be great if the grids could keep up with demand, if other options would be considered capable of producing the ongoing demands (ie. more renewable, nuclear, etc) but they're not, and companies are not going to just wait because then they're as good as done.
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