The examples you gave -- USB1, PS2, serial -- are legacy ports. Nowadays, the vast majority of computers do not have any of these. USB3 on USB-C and Thunderbolt have replaced them. Yes USB2/3 steps down to USB1 speeds in most cases, but there are issues sometimes where it doesn't work and you actually have to replace the obsolete equipment or keep an old-style computer around. Yes, serial is sometimes used on old routers/switches which means you might need an adapter if you buy new equipment.

You seem very upset. Do you feel threatened by new things? Step off the amphetamines please.

US wages for service workers need to be enough for them to survive. They are kept artificially low which then makes the workers reliant on tips. Raise the minimum wage, people have money which they spend in the local economy and everyone prospers. Take a look at other places where minimum wages have risen and everything seems to be working out.

The alternative is what has been going on -- people without enough to live are sponsored by the Federal govt, which costs taxpayers, and companies are pushing automation even at POS which takes away more jobs. With the increases in performance through automation, some jobs will transition to robots and there's no going back.

What happens when your job is automated away, do we need to go to a guaranteed income? Do you see how complex this whole thing is, now that we don't require people to perform huge swaths of jobs anymore -- and those swaths are growing?

Your political leaning may determine whether you think of this as a crisis that needs solving to prevent the harm to people, or if you think "meh, it's their problem, the business' profits are more important than the humans' rights and comfort". The problem is too many people are in the latter group, and only after they have lost everything do they understand that putting corporations first means people get hurt.

That logic only holds while there are no 3rd party alternatives. Since there is a viable 3rd party ecosystem, this design change doesn't necessarily net Apple any money through adapters.

That doesn't mean I am happy I don't have a new headphone adapter on my Macbook Pro. Oh wait, even their base model has one. Maybe you're talking about the iMac not having a headphone jack. Oh wait... the iMac also has a headphone jack.

So your ire must be that the most portable Apple gadgets -- the iPhone and the iPad -- no longer tether the user unless you buy a dongle. I can't get excited about that, it doesn't affect me in any way, and if I wanted to use headphones with either device I would prefer not to be tethered to the device. Of course you may have a different opinion, but it seems silly to get all worked up about it. You don't get upset because there isn't a built-in SCSI or FireWire connector on modern computers do you? Even though we can all agree that those interfaces may have some utility to some people? Apple ditched the floppy and people lost their minds. They stopped providing parallel ports and surely the gods were mad at us and we would not survive. Yet we did, and today we're happy not to be burdened with extra legacy connectors. Do you really want USB2 or USB3 connectors on a new machine? Most people probably don't.

Painting this as some conspiracy to extract money is something only the paranoid do. We're better than that.

It is a national security issue to have independent manufacturing facilities. We don't want to be dependent on other countries' cooperation even if it's our fault we cause the relationship to be tarnished. As we have discovered it becomes more and more difficult to do this as time progresses and processes become even more intertwined and sophisticated.

There is no reason we cannot have both nurses and factory workers. Everyone needs to eat, give the available hands another opportunity to earn money and help them succeed in society. We cannot be a complete nation without our blue-collar brothers and sisters, and it is morally wrong to want that.

Ding ding ding, finally someone who understands the issue.

If we are to bring back manufacturing to the US, we have to start somewhere. Companies who have large volume and specialty requirements probably won't be the first ones leading this, there are way too many dependencies to make this happen. We need some smaller companies with more mainstream needs to lead the way.

I remember GEOS, thanks for bringing back some great memories!

Repo Man! lmao

I think his point is that you have to develop different ways of doing things when you get to a much larger scale, for instance the connectors and safeties that work at 20MW don't directly scale to 200MW. You have to make changes. Like many things, "scaling up" doesn't just mean you have the same setup only bigger.

Apple supports open source projects such as CUPS, Swift, Bonjour, Webkit... there are quite a few large projects. Check out https://developer.apple.com/op... . They design their own chips which are used in iPhone and iPad devices as well as a security / TouchBar chip used in their laptops. Those chips have industry-leading benchmarks. Other than Samsung they are one of the few that design their own chips.

Their products ARE different... that's why we buy them. Give them a try and see if it's for you... return them if you don't like them. Not everything is for everybody but lots of people have tried their products and are happy with them. Who knows you may be pleasantly surprised.

My iPhone XR can use any charging mat based on the Qi standard. I don't have to purchase one from Apple, the cheap one I bought works fine. Maybe the Apple version charges quicker but I don't really care, I charge it overnight while I sleep.

Wireless charging makes sense for some people in some circumstances. I bought a cheap "Atomi Power Pad 3x" mat which gives 10W for each of 3 pads placed next to each other. For me, the wear and tear on the rubberized case and charging cable over time is more inconvenient than putting the device on the pad when I sleep. This charger lights up when it's charging a device so it's pretty easy to place the phone on it in the dark. YMMV and all that.

Tying to a single vendor? Maybe I missed something, my iPhone XR uses an "Atomi Power Pad 3x" charging mat just fine. So apparently I have choices on which pad to use.

Are you upset because the Apple device may or may not work with non-Apple devices, is that it? I'm trying to understand the issue here. Another competing product usually makes everyone else tighten their stuff, resulting in better offerings for customers. Leapfrogging is great.

+1 Sad but true

• 1. Versioning. I get hourly Time Machine backups by not storing my only copy to the cloud.
• 2. Large files are clunky to save to and retrieve from cloud
• 3. Windows 10 recently had an issue where people's documents saved to the Microsoft cloud (OneDrive) were lost. That alone should be good enough reason not to store important documents "in the cloud" but especially with Microsoft's cloud.

Windows 10 has a bunch of serious issues, that's not news, and those who can avoid it are lucky. Guess what? My machine is wanting to install the Windows feature update again, and I'm staving it off because the last time I tried it, after 2 hours of WTF-is-it-doing and then trying to roll back, it left things in such a mess after the "successful" rollback that I restored the entire VM from backup.

This is one reason why I no longer store documents within the VM, and do most of my work remoted onto Windows servers which seem to have fewer issues. Between Office 365 "updates" and forced Windows "updates" my machine has never been so "updated" yet suffering from so many issues before... and I go back to Windows 3.0

I would create another VM from scratch, but Windows 10 is the issue here. What a hot mess!