After shifting to Avis for a while, I returned to Hertz BECAUSE they were offering EVs at reasonable rates, and I had been looking forward to them becoming more readily available. With this cutback they're not going to be available at as many locations, and they're going to cost double the price of renting an ICE car because they will be scarce. This is not a good move for drivers or for the planet.

justwatch.com is pretty close to being that universal search.

Spotify still uses Vorbis for its desktop and mobile apps. The web player uses AAC. The upcoming HiFi service, if it ever actually launches, is expected to use FLAC.

Not true to a significant extent for games. Most of the RAM is used for game assets and data, and those won't magically shrink because they're on a Mac. Leaning on the SSD for swap works well enough for office applications, making an 8 GB system somewhat livable, but it's not going to cut it for games; even if they run, they will wear out the non-replaceable SSD in short order, leaving the owner with a huge repair bill. Even 16 GB isn't really enough for a current day gaming system, especially one with integrated graphics that use up some of the RAM; gamers who want more than a year or two of useful life for a new system are targeting 32 GB, and the price for upgrading a Mac to that level is cringeworthy.

If it really was a brand new 2007 Hess truck, I'd expect the batteries to be corroded. Those batteries were in the package for 16 years. Dirt is another matter.

Tuvalu wants to remain a nation so it can preserve its most valuable asset: the .tv internet domain.

At most stadiums the total number of people ends up around the same. There are people on the field, but the sections of stands behind the performers are not used.

That cover is rock music with some metal elements. The original song is pop with perhaps a bit of rock.

Apple isn't just loading their store on their device. They are also blocking the loading of any other store, or any app that doesn't come from their store.

Google, which allows competing app stores to exist and allows sideloading, is an illegal monopoly? And Apple, which doesn't allow either of those things and therefore has a true monopoly on iOS app sales, is not?? How can those two verdicts possibly make sense?

The presidents of Harvard and MIT are both very new. Replacing them at this time would lead to a lot of turmoil at the universities.

Graceland is a successful tourist attraction that draws 600,000 visitors a year. Not so bad. The Liberace Museum is not; it closed in 2010 after the visitor account dwindled to 50,000/year from a peak of 450,000. Elvis's popularity has endured better than Liberace's, and Liberace's museum likely also suffered because there are so many other things to do in Las Vegas.

The virtual concerts could be a success if they settle into a niche similar to tribute bands. A fraction of the experience for a fraction of the price. The future is less clear for concert movies; the Taylor Swift movie was a big success, but the opening weekend of Beyonce's movie suggests that it will not come close to matching those numbers. (It could still be a financial success; concert movies are fairly inexpensive to make.) Adjusted for inflation, Swift's movie is the third most successful concert movie of all time. Woodstock and Michael Jackson's This Is It are tied (within the margin of error of inflation adjustment) for the top spot. Nothing else comes close. With no adjustment, Swift's movie is a few million behind Jackson, and may overtake it for the #1 spot by the time it closes everywhere.

There are more advanced chips being made in the US. Intel operates fabs that make 10nm and 7nm chips, and is working on making more advanced processes such as Intel 4 and 20A. The GlobalFoundaries fab in Malta NY gets down to 12nm (the most advanced process that company makes). The upcoming TSMC plant will make 3nm chips if it ever gets finished.

The monitor with the stupidly expensive stand is the Pro Display XDR, not the Studio Display. On that one you have to buy either the $1000 stand or the $200 VESA mount adapter; it's not even ready to use without buying one of those. I suppose that if you can afford a $5000 display ($6000 with the nano-texture glass) you can also afford the stand.

The Studio Display comes with either the basic stand or the VESA adapter at the base price. The height-adjustable stand adds $400. It does have the benefit of built-in microphones, pretty good speakers, and a camera, something that competing products mostly lack, so it's ready for go for teleconferencing without any additional peripherals. It even comes with the Thunderbolt cable.

In both cases the stand/mount pricing feels like gouging to me, since just about every non-Apple display in existence is VESA-mount ready out of the box in addition to coming with some sort of stand. But by all accounts they are very nice displays, and I like how the Studio Display is fully conference-ready. You just have to decide whether they're worth the price or whether your money would be better spent on a non-Apple display.

If you really want to keep down the desk clutter, it might be possible to get some sort of third party stand that would hold both the Studio Display with the VESA adapter and a Mac Mini or Studio. Even without that it's not so bad, as you only need one connecting cable between the Mac and the display.

The tower has benefits for a few specific use cases. If you need more internal storage, more and/or faster Ethernet interfaces (it's already got 10 GbE, so I'm talking 40 or 100 GbE), or AI or video encoding/decoding accelerators, it's there for you with its SATA ports and PCIe slots. But that's about it. Oddly, it doesn't support graphics cards in those PCIe slots, something that would make the potential market significantly larger, though they would have to make peace with Nvidia after all these years to fully address that market.

Apple has written off the people doing big data analysis who need more than 192 GB of RAM; those people were pretty well served by the last Intel-based Mac Pro so long as they didn't buy Apple's overpriced RAM. (You could load that up with 1.5 terabytes of RAM, but that configuration cost over $50,000 -- but half that if you bought the RAM elsewhere.) Apple will never be able to address that market with unified memory because of thermal constraints; by the time it's possible to build a processor with a terabyte of RAM in the package, the big data people will be shopping for systems with 8 TB or more. Apple has not even hinted at plans to build an M-series CPU with an interface to external RAM so all evidence suggests they're just not interested, just as they abandoned the server market in 2011 when they discontinued the Xserve line.