I was on the boat of "Apple hardware will last longer and service will be superior" for many years (being Apple user since 2001). Recent changes in macOS got me to decide to get a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9) for work and I must say that not being a cheap device either, it's on par in hardware quality (does not have an M1/M2, but still more than enough) and battery it's about 7-8 hours. The nice thing is that is gonna last really long since I can just keep updating Debian for many years to come.
Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
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Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it. How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years?…
Thinkpad T440 - 7 years of daily use (could probably use some cleaning inside). I expect it to last quite a bit longer, still. It did cost $500 + some upgrades. Windows 10 is still supported. :) 17 or so year old IBM T41 stopped working about 2 years ago.
Yeah, give laptops a good cleanout every couple of years even if you're a non-smoking obsessive clean freak. My T42 started acting weird a while back and opened it up...numerous odd places clogged with lint, dust and what I assume is cat hair. Worked fine after degunking.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
The #1 thing preventing Apple from getting into S-tier is user-serviceable storage. Baking on the memory? It's frustrating and gimps the device lifespan, but arguably unavoidable with the bandwidth Apple is targeting. Without replaceable storage though, every Apple Silicon device is effectively a ticking time-bomb. These devices will all hit their TBW limit long before they're unusable, and Apple refused to anticipat…
Constant backups are essential when using a computer without user-serviceable storage. That or mounting another [network] drive and doing all your work from that instead of internal storage. Otherwise you'll be without your data for hours if not days/weeks whenever something inevitably goes wrong (not even with the storage itself) and you can't simply pull the drive to continue working on another computer.
M1 won't boot without internal storage.
The point of the parent comment was not about saving data from the drive, but that the devices are landfill material once they hit tbw limits on their drives, even if they were otherwise in good condition.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#724Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of Peter Zeihan, I'm also utterly surprised that no one even brings up the demographics debate. Everyone has been so indoctrinated on the "we have too many people" propaganda that they haven't even realized how fast birth rates have dropped across the globe (and they're dropping even faster now). The demographics of Europe, China, Japan and S. Korea are all terminal at this point. Outside of UK, France, and t…
> America, meanwhile, has decent native birth rate No, it doesn't. It's about 1.8 and dropping, and most of the higher values in that group are from recent immigrants, which are also having fewer kids. Educated folks also have lower fertility rates. The US is basically a mirror of Western Europe in this regard: https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rate... > AND a culture that's always willing to ac…
> Lots and lots of natural resources facilitating lots of businesses which aren't really feasible in say, Germany, France, Japan.
This doesn't seem to be a big factor in the boom industries in the US: tech, finance, pharma. It does matter for construction, the biggest employer.
The US still seems like a more welcoming place than western Europe. Or at least you can take comfort in a suburban home and drive to people/institutions that are from your immigrant group.
We have an immigrant ethos that exceeds that of the UK, France, and Germany. Plus, our large number of decent universities means the masters/F1->OPT->H1B pipeline works well for many educated workers.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it tariffs or something? Everything in Canada is usually 10-25% more expensive than the US, besides stuff covered under NAFTA. Consumer things like clothes/electronics are usually the biggest victims. But I just compared the Apple stores and the base Macbook = $999USD vs $1299CAD, doing pure currency conversion $1299CAD = $965.96USD, so it's technically ~$32USD cheaper in Canada? Probably just out-of-step with cur…
It’s mostly the Euro having weakened vis-à-vis the USD, plus some very minor components like private-copying levy. European prices are usually listed including sales tax, which can make them appear higher compared to the US list prices which don’t include tax.
Private copy levy is so insignificant that it's just weird to mention it. We're talking about a tenth of a percent of the price of a MB here.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#726In my case, I feel that Apple has priced itself out of the EU market with the latest Macs and iDevices. The new base M2 Air begins at €1500 after taxes which is genuinely an absurd amount of money to ask for a device that comes with 8 GB and 256 GB of non-replaceable ram and ssd respectively. The cheapest iPhone 14 starts at a bit over €1000. My plan is to keep my entry-level M1 Air for a few more years and then I'm…
FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it. How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years?…
Being stuck with a 256GB machine for a long time is not great.
Apple should start at 512GB. It doesn't meaningfully increase their BOM, and gets rid of a lot of user frustration.
Also, I notice you had a 2014 machine, so you skipped the keyboard issues that plagued Apple until ~2021.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#727In my case, I feel that Apple has priced itself out of the EU market with the latest Macs and iDevices. The new base M2 Air begins at €1500 after taxes which is genuinely an absurd amount of money to ask for a device that comes with 8 GB and 256 GB of non-replaceable ram and ssd respectively. The cheapest iPhone 14 starts at a bit over €1000. My plan is to keep my entry-level M1 Air for a few more years and then I'm…
FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time. My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it. How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years?…
Old Thinkpads are at least equally durable, though not sure about the newest generation. Been using a T520 from 2011 for a few years with Linux, no problems.
Macbooks are great if you get a model without some serious design fault - like screen protection peeling off, or butterly keyboard breaking.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as someone who has and uses an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM, I agree it's not a lot but it's more than sufficient for any use case a Macbook Air would generally see. This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum. I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?
> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum. 4GB of RAM.[0] It's the stupid websites that require GB of RAM to display a couple pieces of written text and the hundreds of MB of JS that tally up to the additional 28GB you may be thinking of. Oh and all the electron apps which add additional browser requirements where there shouldn't be any. I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular…
What websites are you visiting that download hundreds of MB of Javascript?
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of developers and video editors use Macbook Air and 24GB is what is considered sufficient for them. They buy into Macbook Air for portability reasons. Windows laptops on the other hands hold incredibly well at 16GB of RAM. There are also windows laptops with the same weight as Macbook Air at half the cost and double the specs.
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Sorry but I was referring to all Macbook Air laptops as a whole, as a single brand here, rather than one specific device. I think that is acceptable.
Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is a bigger story that isn’t being told properly often. The recent BRICS currency move is about them panicking over increasing dollar global dominance. I figured out a while ago that anyone who mentions the "petrodollar" in a geopolitical context knows knothing about geopolitics. Bonus idiocy points if "BRICS" is mentioned in a way that implies any kind of formal collectivity, as opposed to a catchy nickname Go…
> anyone who mentions the "petrodollar" in a geopolitical context knows knothing about geopolitics I'm curious about this. The petrodollar is clearly a real phenomenon and policy decision. You might say that it's the replacement for when the dollar was backed by gold; instead of being convertible into gold, it's now the currency that's de facto required to purchase oil (which is basically liquid gold), as well as bei…
What "petrodollar" refers to is the fact that oil producing countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia) have a vast surplus of oil revenue far in excess of their cost of production or ability to do anything internally useful with it. This means they have an extra stash of dollars that they need to do something with--and that stash of dollars is the petrodollar. It is a real phenomenon.
The problem is... it just doesn't have much relevance to geopolitics. The people who try to link it to such imagine that the US has a major foreign policy plank in upholding the use of dollars to price oil, to the point of starting wars purely to do so, despite such proponents not being able to offer a shred of evidence that any US official cared about this, or even being able to articulate what the supposed benefits the US receives from such pricing is.