111–120 of 125 posts
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I large part, the sticker trend is so that people can distinguish one gray rounded slab from another. It is the reaction, not the cause.
Maybe, but I always assumed that it was for the same reason that people put them on their cars. They are really signals to others.
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$10 in enamel paints and a free half hour and you can have as cool looking of a laptop as you like!
You can fairly easily get skins that will customize your laptop. I’ve done that, in the past. Seems the thing most people are into, these says, is “bumper stickers” on their laptop lids. I suspect neutral colors work best for that. I’ve found that I tend to replace my primary development machine every 3 years or so. Since retiring, I don’t travel much, so I got an M4Pro Mini. Works great, and I still have my M1Max Ma…
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Do you want your kids to play the piano or repair the piano? Should they learn to drive a car or repair a car. Etc.
If my kids play or drive, and can’t eventually tune the instrument or put air in the tires of the car, I’ll be disappointed.
Putting air in the tires is on the level of charging the battery.
But messing with drivers and config files and antivirus and RAM - that's not being creative or productive, that's being used by the machine instead of using the machine.
No specialist knowledge should be needed to use a computer, and thankfully Apple is providing that experience for people who are interested in what the computer can do for them. I remember when hardware had to be configured with COM ports and whatnot. Networks had to be configured with gateways and masks and whatnot. What a nightmare.
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If my kids play or drive, and can’t eventually tune the instrument or put air in the tires of the car, I’ll be disappointed.
No piano player can tune their instrument, they call in professionals. It's quite difficult. Putting air in the tires is on the level of charging the battery. But messing with drivers and config files and antivirus and RAM - that's not being creative or productive, that's being used by the machine instead of using the machine. No specialist knowledge should be needed to use a computer, and thankfully Apple is providi…
If you’re a developer and can’t diagnose a broken Ethernet port on the dock for your MacBook, I’m (perhaps silently) disappointed in you.
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Most of the major vendors are already assembling x86 laptops for the far larger Windows market, it's cheaper to just reuse those models for ChromeOS instead of designing a special ARM design, which in turn due to lack of scale are priced similarly to their x86 counterpart. Price sensitive customers thus don't see that much saving. Battery life is nice, but I doubt there's that much market yearning for a cheap laptop…
I'm shocked there isn't a market yearning for a cheap laptop with long battery life. That is like the two things I'd like most from a laptop
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> every Apple laptop I've ever owned has lasted 10+ years .. as long as you avoided the emoji keyboard era, or never used an emoji keyboard laptop outdoors or even with your windo open :) I have laptops much older than the ~2018 that work perfectly. But not only the 2018's keyboard broke, but to add insult to the injury they used a display cable that was too short in that generation and that broke too. That is Cook's…
Exactly my experience as well. Macs were great until 2016 and great after 2020. Between that the hardware was worst in class.
What I can’t do is replace the keyboard with ont that won’t break again in 3 months.
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Ridiculous. First Mac mini was a 1.25GHz G4 with 256MB RAM in 2005 for $499. There have many models since there, ranging from $499 to $799 for the base model. 2018 was indeed the highest at $799, but that was mainly Intel's fault, and Apple's poor refresh timing. Current M4 mini starts at $599, which is over $1000 in 2005 dollars, so the value has largely increased through the model's entire history, especially once…
That's not how money works
> Ridiculous
You can say all you want and you'll come back to this comment in 2028 when the price is set at +100 or +150.
When I think of companies that make cheapness cool I think of IKEA, Primark, Ryanair and Fiat, not Apple and Porsche. The Macbook Neo and the Porsche 968 are cheap only compared to other products by the same brand and they are designed not to cannibalize those other products.
Zara might be a better example (though not much better in practices).
Apple has been doing this for ages. The base tier one always gets the fun colors while the pro models get silver, grey, and maybe some muted blue. Not sure why they make the cheaper models cooler than the top tier ones. Maybe it's just too expensive to stock multiple colors of every product. The Neo has minimal customization options for specs so making it colorful is cheaper.
not universally true for all of their products. the new iphone pro max to the apple watch ultra got the bright orange going for them compared the typical muted colours for the base one. the "red" edition, while for charity, used to be the exclusive (maybe more expensive?) version when there was fewer segmentation between the products.
but while we are speaking about a decent device, sometimes it feels like we are giving its maker too much credit. tim's apple has been about the supply chain, with many past "parts bin" offerings, some arguably more appropriate than the neo.
for instance, the "se" edition devices. while for the neo, they had to create a new chasis and trackpad from scratch, the se phones were literally a mash up of the older parts.
to me, they had several other approaches to hit the price point unlike the carmaker, also with lower capex required. while they show some courage with the liquid glass and the change in ux, combined with the same core architecture powering all their devices, just empowering the ipad would have been good enough.
in car terms, they have showed a capable sports car internals inside a tricycle and pat themselves in the back. for me, neo resembles more like a mass-market brand overbuilding the car chassis while using an old powertrain from a capable platform. the same brand use the same capable vtec engine across hatchbacks, sedans and a crossover.