Updated July 21, 2026. Originally published February 6, 2026. Summary: If you are looking for the best computer for Claude Code in 2026, these are some top contenders in bang for your buck: the MacBook Air M5 (16GB/512GB, $1,199 to $1,255 on Amazon as of July 2026, depending on color). If you value RAM, additional ports, or don’t want Mac OS then I recommend a 32GB ThinkPad instead, $1,300 to $1,750 for current-gen. If you are on a tight budget:
Summary: My Remote Desktop session into an old ThinkPad got progressively laggier. Ping said the network was perfect (1ms between host and client with no variation). Performance counters said the server was idle. I was about a day away from buying replacement hardware out of frustration with the lag 😣. The actual cause was a dropdown in the Remote Desktop Connection Experience tab that had the connection set to a 56 Kbps modem profile. 💡 Setting it to LAN (10
Summary: Apple raised prices across almost the whole Mac line on June 25, 2026. The general consensus is that this is due to a RAM shortage, and Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Microsoft all did similar things. A lot of the good sub $1,000 deals are gone for now: the MacBook Air M5 that drifted near $949 earlier this year is $1,299 today, and the MacBook Neo went from $599 to $699. It is a rough time to buy a computer,
Summary: Claude Code’s desktop app can SSH into a remote machine and run sessions there against your repo, MCP servers, and ~/.claude config. Setup is a four-field dialog, assuming ssh user@host (where user is your username and host is the hostname or IP) already works from your terminal. The non-obvious caveat: session history is siloed. The desktop app, the CLI on the remote, and the VS Code extension (if you use it) on the remote each keep separate session lists.
Q. I just got an email from distribution@bcbssettlement.com telling me I have a virtual Visa prepaid card waiting from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Subscribers Settlement. Is this real, or is it a phishing scam? A. If is is from that email and matches the info below it is real. These have been going out recently (May 20, 2026) and redemption can be very quick, no issues. Here’s how: to check before clicking, what the redemption flow looks like, and what
Have you ever been working in a VM, everything’s fine, then dialog pops up like this: VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (mks) ISBRendererComm: Lost connection to mksSandbox (3796) After that your VM is crashed and is powered off. Whatever you were in the middle of, gone with it. You start it back up, it runs for a bit, then it might crash again. 😢 Very not cool! This happened to me on a Framework Desktop system with AMD CPU, Ubuntu 24.04
TL;DR: There are a few ways to check your ChatGPT Codex usage, including: the web analytics page (covered in yesterday’s post) and the Codex CLI’s own status line, which can put live 5-hour and weekly percentages right at the bottom of your terminal session. The CLI method is easy to miss if you don’t have it enabled, thankfully it is super easy and configurable with the slash command /statusline. Codex CLI’s /statusline menu. Toggle the items you want, then press
TL;DR: ChatGPT’s Codex has its own usage analytics page at https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/settings/analytics, separate from the main ChatGPT settings. You need to be logged into your ChatGPT account first. The page splits your Codex usage into three meters: a 5-hour rolling limit, a weekly limit, and pay-as-you-go credits. Here is an example screenshot: Where EXACTLY Do I Find My Codex Usage on ChatGPT? You have to be logged into your ChatGPT account first. Then paste this URL into your browser: https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/settings/analytics Two
The MacBook Neo is Apple’s $599 fanless entry Mac, built around the binned 5-core-GPU variant of the A18 Pro. I covered its CPU, thermal behavior, silicon economics, and 8 GB RAM tradeoff in the main MacBook Neo benchmarks article. This post is the GPU companion to that piece, and it exists for a specific reason. Why this post exists This post puts the MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro 5-core GPU against Snapdragon X1 and X2, AMD Radeon iGPUs, Intel Arc, and