Is that for the Dell? Wow, that steep for a lowend model, even by Apple standards.
Macbook is:
8gb model $999
16gb model $1199 (also includes 2 more GPU cores)
24gb model $1499
Macbook Pro 16"
18gb model $2499
36gb model $2899
48gb model $3799 (!) (4 more CPU cores, 22 more GPU cores)
64gb model $3999
128gb model $4799 (holy crap)
Apple has been infamous for charging very inflated rates for memory upgrades for memory years.
Back in the Steve Jobs day it was almost comical how every bump up in model came with just enough features to REALLY convince you to spend the extra $. The upgrades were usually pretty compelling.
Today most Apple models are differentiated only by ram and disk sizes, and then cpu/gpu cores, and cpu/gpu cores probably don't realistically matter to 90% of buyers. Obviously my made up statistic...
The claim is there to justify selling you new hardware every so often, usually the shorter time between purchases the better. And nobody even cares about e-waste, which is huge problem as well.
I do agree that e-waste, in general, is a huge problem, but Apple is also one of the better players in terms of taking electronics back and recycling (or at least pretending to recycle!) them.
I purchase computers for a ~30-40 person company. Apples tend to last about twice as long as the PCs we buy (Dells mostly, some Surfaces). The modern Apples from the last ~10 years have been some of the longest lasting models I've seen. It's true across the industry, but we basically have no reason to upgrade anymore until the hardware dies. Our older Intel computers are going to be forcibly aged out in the next couple of years, unfortunately, but for our workloads, we should be good for some time.
This really bugs me. My old Macbook 2011 made it nearly a decade partly by me being able to flip on its back, and replace or update parts at will. It was long a machine in decline, as a mangled third party repair had left it so the back case never quite screwed on right again leaving it structurally a little unstable but in the time I had it I upgraded its HDD to a an SSD, upgraded the ram to either 16 or 32gb (Cant remember, might have just been 16), completely replace the wireless daughterboard with one off a *different model* of mac, replaced a screen after my cat knocked it off the table cracking the screen, and even replace the topcase and motherboard after drunkenly spilling a beer on it. The damn thing was a bonafide ship of theasus, I'm not sure there was a single original part in it by the end. Oh and at least one battery replacement.
Are you me? That sounds eerily similar to my, IIRC, 2008 MBP. I think I did every single one of those replacements except for the wifi daughterboard (certainly SSD, memory, battery, fan replacement, replaced optical drive with an extra SSD, etc). After one fall and crack that loosened a screen connector I had a mini industrial strength clip holding the bottom left corner of the screen together.
Having said that, my current MBP is a 2017 and I have not had a single thing go wrong with it. 7 years in and the battery is still over 80% of capacity. I don't like the Touchbar, but other than that, this thing is about perfect. I do miss tinkering, but I have raspberry pi, arduino, etc., for that now.
Interesting. I thought I thought a change along these lines had already happened. ScummVM has been on the AppStore for a couple of months now. You can hook it up to cloud services (Dropbox etc) or copy files from iCloud/etc to ScummVM storage on the ipad. It works really well.
Or Larry Wall of Perl. Was a music and chemsitry major, ultimately did linguistics and language.
I'm also a Liberal Arts major and grad schooler. I was 2 classes shy of an undergrad computer science major (2 prereq math classes I didn't care to take) and I've never felt that has held me back!
I tried OCLP with the latest Sonoma, which worked okay for getting Xcode 15.3 on a 2014 mini. It performed somewhat acceptably after disabling just about every service imaginable
I'm running OCLP on a 2017 imac and it runs about 98% fine. The 2% is that occasionally, like once a month or so it will fail to wake up from sleep. I haven't had to disable anything. I guess ther eare some issues with the old GPUs in the 2014 model? What did you have to disable?
After I realized Apple started forcing the use of their hypervisor
Which hypervisor?
I lack confidence that IQ means or strongly correlates with what you say it does. I know plenty of high IQ people who hyper fixate on their own problem while ignoring everything else around them. (The bookish and distracted professor?)
I read the article differently -- a reminiscing of what they went through as teens learning computers and of how different things are today.
I was programming in the about the same year, though I was younger. I was one of the very few kids who came into my first computer science (early 2000s) class knowing C and C++ (and Perl and Pascal) and having written actual programs in Assembly before.
Even then, the professors were saying don't worry about optimization, compilers are so good now, speeds are improving so rapidly, you have better things to focus on, etc. I actually got points marked off on a test once because I came up with (what I thought was) a nifty loop optimization for solving a problem. It was correct but marked off because of "premature optimization." (I tested it later and my answer was indeed far faster than the model answer.)
Today, almost nobody ever needs to program in asm. Today, almost everybody is programming by gluing bits of often highly optimized (but often not) libraries together. It's how even simple programs can have 50+ dependencies now. Probably for the vast majority of programmers, even those who have been programming for 20+ years, this IS a fascinating look into the past. It reminded me of some of the things friends and I did in highschool! Our highschool had a couple of games that had been developed over multiple years by successive groups of students. One group wrote the initial code, another group pulled the Doom networking code into the project, another one updated that form IPX/SPX to TCP/IP, etc. Not unique, but fun times.
The "Stanford-Binet" test was originally devised for children, but the revisions upon it--that make it the modern IQ test--coming from Stern and Terman in large part, seem to be statistical modifications to do exactly what you're saying it can't. So, even if (your position) the test is not meaningful, the intent was to make a generally comparable measure of intelligence.
You said "IQ was never intended as a general measure of intelligence." The argument I'm making is that it seems as if that was exactly the intent of creating the IQ test.
In response to your other questions:
Do you believe that a 110 IQ person is 10% smarter than a 100 IQ person?
Unsure, but I would say no in terms of thinking about it as some kind of normalized distribution.
Smarter in what way? What does it even mean to be smarter or have a higher "intelligence quotient"? Note the use of the word quotient.
I'm not sure anyone has ever proposed that IQ is the ONLY measure that matters for ALL aspects of life. But, there's very strong evidence that whatever IQ measures has a statistically significant correlation with a number of life outcomes (job performance, income, health, educational performance, etc.).
I heard a lecture years ago where the speaker talked about IQ in terms of mental plasticity / learning flexibility. The example given was being a cashier at McDonalds. This is actually be a fairly mentally taxing job. You have to be able to listen to customers, understand special orders, know the buttons on the register to press to get the desired order in, accept multiple forms of payment, make change from cash, multitask with getting different orders to different customers, etc. Almost anyone can do this job (though as anyone who has been a fastfood customer can attest, some workers ARE better than others!). What impact does IQ have the ability to perform this job? Not a lot. The impact of IQ is in the ability to learn the computer system, learn how to handle new and unexpected order combos, etc--the learning portions.
My own crank theory is that human intelligence almost all boils down to pattern matching on steroids and that genius is pattern matching on a level that most people can't understand (or, differently, recognizing different kinds of patterns from what most people see).
Lewis Terman (Wikipedia):
Early on, Terman adopted William Stern's suggestion that mental age/chronological age times 100 be made the intelligence quotient or IQ.
Revisions (mostly recently the fifth) of the Stanford-Binet remain in widespread use as a measure of general intelligence for both adults and for children.
Unlike Binet and Simon, whose goal was to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care required, Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track.
William Stern (Wikipedia:
During Stern's time, many other psychologists were working on ways to qualitatively assess individual differences. Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, for instance, were developing tests to assess the mental age of children in order to identify learning disabilities, but lacked a standardized way to compare these scores across populations of children. Stern suggested a change in the formula for intelligence, which has previously been calculated using the difference between an individual's mental age and chronological age. Instead, Stern proposed dividing an individual's mental age by their chronological age to obtain a single ratio. This formula was later improved by Lewis Terman, who multiplied the intelligence quotient by 100 to obtain a whole number.[6]
It seems that the point of the IQ methodology, added on to preexisting intelligence testing, was intended to come up with a general measure that was comparable across populations. Disagree?
Completely agree re the 8gb, especially as that is shared between desktop and RAM. However, having used one of the minimal spec M* macbook airs before, it was completely fine for average desktop usage (ie web browser machine, maybe Word/Excel).
The 256gb I don't think matters at all for many people.
Ya, adding in extra memory requires no significant engineering on Apple's part to provide for it. Are you really that daft?
In this particular case, all RAM is part of the processor package. So yeah, it's a bit different than adding a few dimm slots.
I feel you on the local bank. My local bank, one with a long history in my area and the first bank I opened an account with in highschool, got bought out by Wells Fargo and it just went to hell. I'm still sad about that one. I'm not surprised that Capital One was similiar when dealing with a local bank.
On your other points, I've never had any issues with Capital One website or tech. I've used the chat function a handful of times over the years (I had an accidental late payment on a credit card once; one check I was depositng was having issues clearing; etc) and they were very good. Removed my fees in the case of the late payment, figured out the failure to deposit. Basically, nothing to complain about. I don't doubt your experiences at all, I just haven't had the same.
So my account is currently listed as a "360 Performance Savings" with 4.35% APR. Not too shabby. Not the absolute best, but not bad either. I haven't done anything to modify my account in years...
"Don't drop acid, take it pass-fail!" -- Bryan Michael Wendt
