Yep. There's tons of highly polluted properties on coasts, including refineries, fuel depots, shipyards, storage yards... Even if you removed the buildings and whatnot completely the soil would still be contaminated. And then there's the nuclear plants... Over 40% of them are coastal worldwide, and that number rises to 66% if you count plants under construction.

Yes, they are deluded.

Even if their Mac shits all over them, they will praise it. Mac OS has been getting less and less reliable since about the same time they stopped calling it Mac OS X. The Mac users I know have become less and less enthralled with it as advertised functionality becomes more likely to malfunction. In particular they are distressed by recent degradations in the performance and reliability of Time Machine backups, which is arguably the thing Apple most needs to get right. (If all else fails, format the disk with your backups on it? THANKS APPLE.)

Skill issue.

I've been a Windows to Linux waffler since I put Slackware 2.0 on a 386DX25 with 8MB RAM and 120MB ATA hdd, using Kernel 1.1.47 (thus dating the start of my Linux saga) with A, N, D, and enough of the X set to run Netscape 2.0. And on that system I played (besides the epic classics like Nethack) Doom and Abuse. I ran Windows 7 for some time because it was a great place to run most games, even most of the vintage ones, and a tolerable place to run other things. I ran Linux occasionally in VMware Player or from USB stick for tasks that Windows couldn't or wouldn't do gracefully.

Now I run Devuan 5, and I am having a fairly excellent experience gaming with a combination of Lutris, PlayOnLinux, Steam, and Proton-GE. I only have a Pinnacle Ridge (1600AF) and a 4060 16GB, but I only game at 1080p. I got the version with more VRAM for LLM stuff, and so if/when I do get a 4k monitor, the card isn't worthless. I am frequently surprised by how many games I actually can run with this combination. With the exception of games with Windows kernel DRM, by far the vast majority of them can be made to work well.

If I were only gaming, I'd probably be on Windows 10. But Linux now is a very viable place to do a lot of gaming, and thanks to work put in to support the Steam Deck, a lot of games will now run very well indeed. Publishers of older games are also putting in a fair bit of work to make games function on Linux today. The new Fallout 4 patch coming out (I know that game is old AF, but it has an extremely active community) is Steam Deck Verified, but the game has run at least as well on Linux as on Windows for years now.

I do sometimes indeed still use normal Wine, but more commonly I use Proton-GE. Try it out, it's impressive.

You not picking up what I'm putting down doesn't mean I'm not putting it down for you.

Not off the top of my head. The Macbook Pro is my work machine and rarely leaves my desk. I take the Acer into the field quite a bit, but I have an adapter (12v - 19v I think) that allows me to plug it into a cigarette lighter, so battery life hasn't been an issue. I'll grant that Apple's ability to charge from USB-C is probably an advantage, provided they're not doing some DRM stupidity that prevents me from plugging into the car's USB-C slot. (I haven't tried, to be honest.)

Performance while unplugged is adequate in both cases.

Again, I'll grant you that the Macbook is probably faster. I'm a heavy user of Adobe Lightroom and a less heavy user of Photoshop, and there isn't a lot of difference between the two, which is for me the main point. While Adobe CC will make use of GPU, it doesn't take as much advantage of GPU as does games for instance. I don't game. I picked the Aspire because it had an AMD Radeon GPU that CC would use, rather than the usual Intel basic graphics, that CC would not use. I don't know what the Mac has, frankly, but it seems to be adequate.

Again, it comes down to use case. There is a pretty sharp premium for the Mac, and maybe there are uses for which that is justified. So, when buying a Mac, I think it's important to ask one's self, is it a need, or a want?

Yes, exactly. Undergunning the ram is historical, not practical.

And, according to a developer I talked to recently, Edge forked from Chrome.

Not sure I agree. It so happens I have an Acer Aspire 5 to my left and a Macbook Pro to my right, (the Acer belongs to me and the Macbook belongs to work) so I can make a pretty close comparison.

They're both about the same thickness. I'd need tools to measure the difference.

The Macbook is a little heavier.

Both make roaring noises when pushed. I couldn't honestly say which is louder at max.

I haven't benchmarked them, but I will grant you the Mac is probably faster. I use Adobe CC on both and either is adequate for what I do, which is the important thing. Let me repeat that because it is key: Either machine is adequate for the work I am doing. It is not important to have the fastest available, it is only important to have enough resources to do the job plus some buffer. (I say this because I have a friend who hungers to replace his older Intel macbook for an M3, but when pressed has no use case. It's not for doing, it's for having. I guess.)

Screens are about the same size, both are calibrated and accurate. Ok that's not quite true, the Mac's screen is a little larger. Maybe a half inch on the diagonal with a slightly slimmer bezel.

At $580 new, I could buy three of the Aspires for the cost of the least expensive Macbook Pro I could find online. ($1599).

The Aspire came with 4GB, which I pulled and replaced with two 16GB DIMMs for about $80. So I guess you could say I paid $660 new, and couldn't quite buy three for the cost of the cheapest Macbook Pro. But pretty close. And that $1599 Macbook Pro has 8GB of memory soldered in.

I work with Macs, have supported them in IT jobs (Jamf is your friend) and they're ok. I've noticed that they sometimes get confused and will refuse to charge from the official Apple wall wart but I guess that just adds character. But when people say they're considering a Mac, my response is, that's going to be a big investment. What is your use case? What do you do that a Mac does well enough to justify the price?

The thing is, memory is cheap. Even retail. Much cheaper wholesale. I strongly suspect the quantity wholesale cost of 32 GB is less than the cost of the fancy box the unit comes in.

I think this is at least partly due to "old thinking" by the execs making decisions. They remember memory as being a major cost, and part of their reptilian brain still believes that is true. It hasn't been for a while.

Yeah, 8 GB is fine for browsing and email. But do people really buy macs for browsing and email? Or would they buy a Chromebook or a $120 BestBuy special for that purpose? Or a tablet? I have a wife and two friends who got tablets because they were "cute", and then realized they could do everything they needed to do from the tablet, and their computers gathered dust. When all you do is consumption, you don't even need a macbook.

To your point, I think the major learning here is, the system they're referring to "as low as"? Never, ever buy that one.

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

Putting the ram on the package means both making everything cheaper and smaller. Having equal length traces between modern CPUs and memory is not feasible so you also have to add latency to compensate. Apple probably gets a measurable performance boost this way, but making the system cheaper and smaller certainly matters more.

None of that excuses selling such a low-memory configuration at all, or the prices Apple charges for versions with larger storage, let alone having soldered storage. Ram on package makes sense, it saves space and significant money. SSD soldered makes little sense, it saves almost no space or money. The soldered SSD is on the same kind of bus it would be on if it weren't soldered!

It is retaliation in English, but it is not retaliation in legalese.

And only the latter matters when it comes to having something done about a firing.

I had an employer who did not pay the wages legally required by the state. The state was unwilling to do anything about my wage claim. Although what he did was technically grand theft (here in California, wage theft over a certain amount is now legally grand theft) they had no interest in prosecuting. This is why wage theft exceeds all other theft combined, it is not at all enforced. District Attorneys across the nation are not willing to do their jobs and prosecute. But once we got to my retaliation complaint things got a lot more serious and I was able to secure a settlement.

Because of interconnects. Are you new? Apple has even claimed themselves that putting the RAM in the same package improves performance. Here are the claims distilled by some iFanboys.