Linux does typically require more RAM than Windows. I mean Linux is a full operating system including network stack and multitasking, while Windows essentially is a shell for DOS... with some added benefits like having a GUI-Toolkit that supports multiple applications running at once due to cooperative multitasking.

So while your typical Windows system was sold with 4 Megs of RAM, a Linux system typically isn't usable with less than 8 Megs of RAM.

Of course this is now largely irrelevant as RAM is fairly cheap. You can literally have a machine with multiple Gigabytes of RAM, way more than himem.sys would support. (the limit is at 1 Gig, BTW)

It seems to me that many people confuse "Apple Computer" with "Apple" since they have a similar logo, one with a rainbow apple, one with a plain apple, and worked in tangential areas, one sold computers, the other one sold computerized consumer products.

I mean "Apple Computer" had an excellent reputation as treating their customers as equal, providing them with all necessary documentation for fixing and modifying their computers in any way. In contrast "Apple" today doesn't even let you run non-approved software without going through their hoops.

You might as well say that we are at 58 years of Apple, since Apple Records was founded in 1968. They too have an apple as their logo.

Both Intel and AMD need each other. They both sell the CPUs for virtually the only open computing architecture there is the "IBM-PC"-derived "PC". That architecture is what's running all serious workloads as it is currently the only standardized architecture. For ARM you need to port every operating system to every SoC individually. on "PC" you just pop in your USB-stick and can run the same OS image, regardless who made it. There are only minor incompatibilities which can be resolved by checking the PCI bus for what hardware you have there.

This is an important market. If the number of companies making those CPUs went down to 1, there would surely be governmental interventions. Either in making sure this company works, or by moving away from them. That's why Intel needs AMD and AMD needs Intel. If one of them falls, the other one will get big problems.
Yes, such interventions are not that likely, but just think about Microsoft, they sold BASIC interpreters and PC operating systems for a while and had a fairly big market share. Even though that was nowhere near an important monopoly, there were serious considerations of splitting up the company.

Giving a project top much money is a fairly easy way to kill it. Look at Mozilla, for example.

For years it swam in insane amounts of money. Since they cannot simply put that much money onto a bank-account, they reasonably did all kinds of non-browser related things with it. Since software development kinda doesn't need much classical management, the managers focused on those areas. A Mozilla manager didn't need to care for the browser, as that is managed by technical people.
However once that source of money has dried up, you still have the management, which will, obviously, first cut funding for the browser part... eliminating the path to more sustainable ways of funding.

If instead Firefox was a true "Free Software" project, this would have gone differently. Whatever money they needed would have come in by lots of small donations. They would have had limited developer resources which may have helped keeping web standards less complex. Maybe we would even have had a better web where things like Passkeys wouldn't rely on Javascript.

It combines 2 things, very good portraits of the people designing computers, and very good "bird's eye views" of how computers work. Particularly the later is great as the author managed to distill the core of each concept into something even a lay-person can swallow and understand. It's didactical simplification to the point and not beyond it. So what he says is stays correct, only ignoring things that are not important.

Considering text generators mostly work for things you'd have "copied of StackOverflow" before, I fear that this might lead to more and more boilerplate code. We already saw this with advanced development systems in languages like Java, where you often have more boilerplate than actual code.

I mean we keep seeing more and more effort being put into the same trivial code we've written for many decades now. Generative AI will likely only make that problem worse. Probably good programmers, now called 10x engineers, who just write short and efficient code, will be called 100x or 1000x engineers, since all the rest might have gotten even less efficient.

I mean, it's been clear for many years now that app stores do not care about malware. You can find many kinds of software that, even by the definitions of the 1990s, would be classified as malware. App stores contain anything from adware via DRM, and third party tracking to software dedicated to stealing your attention.

The move to China already happened back when Apple was still called Apple Computers.

I mean for the Windows world the bigger "shock" probably is the declining quality of Windows. Apple hasn't exactly been in the "premium" segment for decades, for example in the 1990s when the "Desktop Publishing" revolution arrived the main claim was that a Macintosh was much cheaper than "something proper".

Now that Laptop from Apple isn't even particularly cheap. It's stripped and locked down almost to the point of a Chromebook. It still cost more than a regular refurbished laptop with better specs.

Of course, but that's true for any kind of mass storage, also SSDs. Also hard disks become progressively more expensive per Terabyte as they get to the extreme sizes, you kinda need multiple drives to get any meaningful amount of storage. 44 Terabyte is not _that_ much these days, particularly when doing archival work.

Lithium Ion batteries are already converging on the prices of lead-acid, soon they will be cheaper.
Even though there may not yet be a recycling system in place for lead-acid batteries... since there aren't to many of them, once there are more of them, they will get recycled or repaired. If costs are no issue, you can probably fix simple lead-acid batteries. Particularly if the work-force is cheap, things can become feasible that would be uneconomical here.

I mean it's very simple to fall into the "colonialism"-trap and think that the people in the 3rd world are all somehow "idiots", unable to deal with the challenges they face, but they are smarter, they will find try to find ways around their problems.

Yes, they may be completely safe now and they are probably somewhat cleaner than fossil fuel... ... but the time we only had those 2 options is long gone. We now have renewables and storage. Consumer prices (at least in Europe) for a 430-450 watts peak panel are down to about 60 Euros.
Storage prices are sinking to a level where storing a kWh or energy is much below 10 cents.
We are, at least for residential users in Germany, at the point where it's cheaper to harvest and store solar energy then to buy it from the grid.

Battery grid storage is by now a fairly common product. You can buy integrated containers you only need to connect to the grid and your control system. If you want have a larger system you just order 1000 instead of 100 containers (and make sure the power lines are sufficient).

It's easier than, for example, making a giant ball of yarn, as such things don't scale well, every new layer of yarn is harder to put on than the previous. With grid storage you just need to buy more boxes.

Streaming services are one of the pinnacles of enshittification. You pay for stuff you don't own. Everything can be taken away from you at any time. Ads can be added at any time, etc.

Having physical media means that you can get a simple DRM-free file from it, you can watch whenever and wherever you want.

Well you do need language support, as in many languages you have no protection between components. So while you might not be able to directly open a file, you can get the rest of the program to open a file for you.

Also things like, for example a text-editor, would be rather pointless if they couldn't open and modify your files. If they can do that, they can also encrypt them easily.