Sam Henri Gold, on the MacBook Neo, reminds us what our first computers are for:
Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.
I hit that limit on a Timex Sinclair 1000. With 1K of RAM, there’s enough to do something and the necessity to make it efficient. My next computer was a Commodore 64 which was quite powerful but I never had the software tools to find the hardware edges, and I wasn’t a good enough programmer to find them myself. It wasn’t until I had a Mac that I downloaded apps like Audacity and discovered how hard the Mac had to work to twist and shape audio.