That Amazon's Fire Phone failed because people knew it was made by Amazon.

Unfortunately my phone thought it should remove the "is not" from my opening sentence and I only just now caught it. That opening sentence was intended to state "Reagonmics is not to blame". The overall crux here is that you cannot pin blame for the current situation on any one party or administration. We have been deficit spending since at least the Great Depression. Sometimes more than others. But, it is entirely out of hand now.

Regardless of your take on what appropriate tax levels are there's only one thing that can fix the current situation. We have to stop having the government spend more than it takes in.

Reaganomics to blame. It is decades and decades of spending more than is brought in via taxes. FDR kicked it off with the New Deal. WWII we continued it to support the war. After the war we propped up Europe and paid to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure and feed their starving populations. No one administration can take full blame. But, not one of them has bothered to stop it either. The only time in recent memory where it improved a little was when Clinton was president and Congress was republican.

It is not a bonus to the economy. Because you cannot cancel debt. You can only transfer it or pay it off. What is being done here is that one person committed to debt and now other people are being made to pay for it. And, no you cannot just tax the rich to pay for the levels of debt our government has incurred. This debt and so much more is being transferred to not just people alive now but two or three generations into the future. It is not sustainable.

We also know that in many places coroners were directed to list Covid as a cause of death if the person happened to have Covid but died of something else. So while there may be some undercounted there is also overcounted.

I also know people who avoided going to the hospital who needed to because of Covid protocols scaring them. One of my uncles might still be alive today he he felt comfortable going to the doctor and catching his cancer early enough to treat it before it metastasized. However there are also people like my other uncle who refused to believe that vaccines were helpful and got super nasty Covid with a respirator. He also later died of cancer that they found while treating him. Iâ(TM)m donâ(TM)t know if his death is listed as Covid but his death was definitely caused by chain smoking himself into throat cancer.

Actually the problem is that it actively refused to generate any pictures of white people and said doing so was problematic and then spewed out a list of woke reasons for why generating a picture of a white person is not allowed. And, then when prompted for things such as show me a picture of a historical Viking or a nazi soldier it would provide historically inaccurate images where the Viking or nazi soldier was black or Asian. And, when asked for images of the pilgrims from the mayflower it again refused to render them as the white English people they were and instead rendered them as black or Asian again. If all it did was provide a mixture of ethnic backgrounds in appropriate contexts there wouldnâ(TM)t be an uproar. But, when it actively refused to render one ethnic group even in appropriate historical contexts that is a huge problem.

My takeaway is that we need to start wearing beaver skin hats again.

AppleTV has a unified search. If you search for a show or movie it will more often than not show you multiple options to watch or purchase it. Unfortunately I usually find that the show is behind a paywall on a service I don't want or am not willing to purchase.

Their website notes that automatic updates and the package repository are works in progress. I would guess these are the features they are aiming to gain parity on.

Don't forget that they want you to pay through the nose for their data service to be able to run that built-in maps app. Some people (including me) will not buy a GM vehicle.

Others who do buy them are going to go back to putting a phone mount in their car which is arguably worse than Android Auto and CarPlay.

One thing that I think people forget too is that at the time that iMessage came out phone companies were making you pay out of your nose for SMS/MMS messages. Mostly plans here in the US had a limited number of messages per month and if you exceeded that number you would be paying something insane like five cents a message.

iMessage turned that on its head. By auto-detecting if the number you were sending to was another iOS device it would shunt the messages over to the iMessage protocol and not use your precious/expensive few SMS messages. The blue bubble became an indicator originally of whether you were using SMS messages or iMessages. That was important because it told you whether you were using those precious few SMS messages. you had or a tiny fraction of your data plan (or wifi).

As time progressed the blue bubble just became a general indicator that some of the other features that were limited to iMessage at the time would work or not, or if you might be able to use FaceTime to call the other person. Photo sharing, reactions, sending contact info, etc.. all have different experiences between two Apple devices and an Apple device and non-apple device.

RCS came afterwards and was pushed by Google to bring in some of those enhancements and to get the phone companies off of legacy SMS/MMS protocols. I credit them for wanting to have an open standard. But, it's my understanding that the phone companies by and large didn't want to invest in RCS. They weren't making money off of text messages anymore. So Google started standing up its own RCS servers and directing many Android devices to those. Thus RCS is a hodge podge of carrier hosted infrastructure and Google hosted. iMessage is still entirely hosted by Apple.

I won't claim to be an expert there. Just trying to note that the original poster's comments seem to be based on an incorrect reading of the summary. According to Wikipedia's article on the Macintosh II it had some support for 32bit addressing prior to System 7 but it was not "clean" until System 7 arrived. Considering the 32 bit comment is from an interview that happened at least 30 years after the initial development I can allow that their memory of exactly when 32 bit was a thing might be a touch foggy.

I think you have your timelines off a bit. The summary says they released the software in October of 1986. In 1986 Mac was the only consumer grade 32bit OS out there. The confusion might come from the fact that right after they state October of 1986 they referred to a 2019 interview.

We had all those narcissits before social media too. They were just easier to ignore then. Or at least when they said something stupid they got the immediate feedback from someone's facial expression that maybe they shouldn't say that.

The education market right now is less about the hardware and more about the cloud. When us "old timers" talk about Apple's heyday as the main computer in schools computer companies made most of their money on the hardware. Now whether it is Microsoft, Apple, or Google the money is in the cloud and the services that go with it.

My wife is completely non tech saavy and continues to use the Google email account and services her school gave her during her master's degree program. My own alma-mater has converted our alumni accounts over to their Microsoft products. Why do Google and Microsoft provide licensing that is so favorable that schools are able to do this? Because they want to keep those students on their cloud services and sell them more features.

My main speculation is that Apple is deciding that they need a cheaper laptop to bring people into their ecosystem. Or maybe they want to have something to help them get a foothold in markets that can't afford as many of the shiny high end Apple products?