It's worse than them charging $200 for extra RAM. Discounts on the entry level configuration of many Mac models are widely available, but there are hardly ever discounts on models with more RAM. So you're not paying an extra $200, it may cost as much as $350 to get the upgrade from 8 to 16 GB. Macs are not super-cheap systems for K-12 students and should not be configured like one.

Even if that 8 GB is barely adequate now, it's certain not to be by the natural end of life of the system, which should be at least five years away and likely more. Those RAM-starved systems are going to end up as e-waste before their time, even if you don't wear out the (non-replaceable) SSD due to excessive swapping.

We don't yet know what the battery life of the upcoming Oryon-based SOCs from Qualcomm will be. Almost certainly better than most x86 processors, but perhaps not in Apple's class.

so why fix it? It serves its purpose well enough. Yes, there is that 32 GB limit on FAT32 volumes, but since that file system limits individual files to 4 GB you don't want to use it for larger volumes anyway. The format tool will produce larger NTFS or exFAT volumes; the latter was added long after the original creation of the dialog since the exFAT file system didn't exist back then. exFAT is also the default file system for SD cards larger than 32 GB; it's a required part of the SDXC standard.

Trivia: although the Raspberry Pi hardware has had support for larger microSD cards since at least the RPi 2, it couldn't originally claim SDXC support because there was no Linux support for exFAT. (The system would happily format larger cards with other file systems such as ext3 or ext4.) Microsoft contributed exFAT to the Open Innovation Network (OIN) in 2019, and Linux added support for it shortly after, so the Raspberry Pi is now officially SDXC-compliant.

Verizon makes you take a wired phone number along with FIOS service, at least around here. But it's VoIP, not traditional landline service; the phone plugs into your fiber modem. And if you get FIOS they convert ALL the landlines in your house to use the fiber, not just the one that gets bundled with the service.

The list in the article doesn't mention the mass extinction event that is coming in October 2025, when Microsoft will drop support for ten years worth of computers, which is far and away the largest number of systems that have lost Windows support at one time and includes many systems that are otherwise still viable. Significant numbers of users are preparing for that by switching to Linux, rather than buying new computers as Microsoft and manufacturers of Windows computers were hoping they would do. I expect Linux use will continue to grow over the next year and a half.

It works now. But I suspect it will no longer work on 2H25 and subsequent builds of Windows 11; Microsoft will probably change those in a way that is impossible to bypass. We'll find out in a less than a year when Insider builds of 2H25 appear.

On most reasonably modern systems from major brands bought used, you no longer have to pirate Windows. The Windows license is no longer on a sticker that wears out and becomes unreadable, or falls off the system, it's baked into the computer. Do a fresh Windows install and it's recognized as being licensed as soon as it connects to Microsoft. This has worked on all the HP, Dell, and Lenovo cast-offs I've tried.

Computers from small companies or assembled by white-box builders are exceptions.

9th gen Intel systems (also 8th gen) can run Windows 11, so they aren't quite as cheap as the 7th gen and earlier ones.

If AMD were to release an open source driver for HDMI 2.1, it would effectively make parts of that spec visible to the public in the form of source code that implements it. It would make it easier for companies to develop unlicensed hardware. The HDMI consortium is protecting its revenue sources, memberships in the group and royalties on devices.

I'm not saying that they're RIGHT to do that. The status quo amounts to a cabal that locks out potential small competitors that can't afford the annual membership cost. But it's what we're stuck with.

Monitors with DisplayPort inputs are scarce in consumer channels, aside from expensive gaming monitors. The cheap ones available at retail all have HDMI.

The NVidia CEO is looking at coding as a career path. He's likely correct that it will not be as good a bet toward finding a future job as it has been for the past 50 or so years. I don't think that human involvement in coding will go away soon, but there will be fewer jobs doing it.

But there is an additional value to learning how to code, one that will persist even if humans are eventually out of the path of writing computer programs. Coding teaches essential truths about logical thinking: the importance of including all the necessary steps, in the right order, and not putting in any extraneous ones that interfere. That kind of thinking is also useful for many things that don't involve a computer at all, such as writing a cooking recipe. It's the same reason that proof geometry is taught in school, even though people who don't take up mathematics as a career will never use it again, but the computer is an even better tool for teaching it because of the immediate feedback from the computer.

No, I haven't run a large IT budget. My career has been almost entirely spent working for startups and non-profits. The amounts of money that you are thinking of as trivial absolutely DO matter in those environments.

The makerspace that I'm doing stuff for currently is looking at having to replace 30 or more computers in October 2025 because they are systems that are not supported by Windows 11. We currently own 5 systems that ARE supported, which means that nearly all of our systems will have to be replaced. (Switching to Linux is only an option for a small number of them; the software that drives things like the laser cutters and CNC lathes is Windows-only, as are many of the things that people want to teach in our classroom.) Unless donations of older but supported systems (8th generation and later Intel, or or second generation and later Ryzen) become available by then, we're looking at an expense that we simply don't have the money to pay for. Having to go out and spend $20,000 or more on computers in a year and a half absolutely IS an existential threat to our existence; it might be trivial by large corporate standards but it's not trivial to us.

It's a mass extinction event on a scale that we haven't seen Microsoft do for a long time. Systems build in 2007 originally ran Windows Vista, but most of them have been fully supported by Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10. The ones that started with Windows 7 or later were even upgradable to Windows 10 for free. They will have had a supported lifetime of EIGHTEEN YEARS when 2025 comes along. But it's not only those admittedly ancient CPUs that are losing support; everything older than 8th generation Core (introduced in late 2017) will be unsupported. That's TEN YEARS worth of equipment that is suddenly becoming obsolete. Microsoft has NEVER dropped support for that many systems all at once, and the fact that most of them can be made to work on Windows 11 with a registry patch or other workaround (though there is no guarantee that will be true of the 2H25 release; those Core 2 processors from 2007 won't work with 24H2, you need to step up to at least the first generation Core i5 or i7 from 2009) suggests that there is no compelling reason to drop all of them. If they had adopted a more gradual approach, the pain level would be manageable; say, dropping three year's worth of systems now, and maybe another three years when Windows 12 comes along, and so forth.

The replacement period is more like five years now and growing. And that's at for-profit businesses. Non-profits, especially small ones that operate on minimal budgets, often keep equipment far longer. The looming deadline for dropping support of Windows 10 and the increased hardware requirements for Windows 11 are a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads; they're looking at 50% or more of their installed base of hardware needing to be replaced if they stay with Windows, and the cost most definitely IS an issue.

Most download sites can't keep up with gigabit service. 10 gigabit service won't lead to faster downloads from those sites.

FIOS internet-only service for home use doesn't cost anywhere near $250/month. If you're paying that much, you are either buying additional services like TV or have business service.