It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

There will be no manned Mars missions: radiation. The problem is that no one has any doable idea to stop it. And this isn't the milk toast radiation we get around the Earth. This is the really nasty stuff from the rest of the Universe. And if you are lucky, you won't run into a solar flare on the way. Aside from the pretty lights, it is really nasty radiation. Don't forget to protect your space craft's instruments, they are more delicate than even you.

Another reason is that if you send someone up there for roughly a year just to get there, their bodies are not programmed to work very well in extended periods of no gravity. One's heart and other organs were developed in the Earth's gravity. When they get there, they get to enjoy low gravity. And then up to another year later, they are in the right planetary positions to catch the red-eye back. We might get them there and back (irradiated as they are), but they won't be living on Earth. Their internal organs will not take the strain.

Ever lived with 4-5 college roommates in a tin-can for even a month. It won't be pretty. Now we want them married to each other for 3 year years. Yup, that'll work.

So to sum up, I think we should send you. You are dim-witted enough not to understand the implications so you won't experience any angst over the trip or the radiation or the lack of functioning bodily organs. But you'll at least be wanting in a little buddy. I suggest Elmo, he too is dim-witted and is wildly enthusiastic enough to go. And he has the money to make it happen. Go submit your application to him for the trip. Better take a lot of ketamine with you (hint: that's what you will need, not him).

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

The real world is full of all kinds of things that are harmful to kids, too. There's roads full of cars that can run you over, bodies of water you can drown in, poisonous plants and dangerous wildlife (oh, that says "Austria", not "Australia", I digress), etc. Seems kind of weird that when it comes to the internet though, parents' brains seem to shut off and they no longer realize it's supposed to be their responsibility not to give their kids devices with unrestricted internet access.

I suppose the difference is that it was never feasible to make real life child-safe, but since the internet is all computer, it can't be any harder than pressing a few buttons, amiright politicians?

We tried this with alcohol prohibition; it didn't work out so well. Turns out some people don't take too kindly to the government deciding which addictions they need to kick.

The iMac in that era was objectively a pretty awful computer. I had one of the indigo blue ones back in the day and it was dog slow running OS X. It came in pretty colors though, so there was that.

iOS is like this, too. It rarely completely crashes, but often just starts acting a bit squirrely and you've gotta reboot the device to clear up the issue.

I run my home media server on an old ASRock DeskMini (connected to an external hard drive array, obviously) that's running Windows 10. It literally is more reliable than our power company, because the only time it gets rebooted is during outages (and I'm too cheap to buy a UPS for it). Granted, that's doing nothing more than running the OS and a server application, but the belief that Windows isn't stable enough for such use cases is rather outdated.

I upgraded my gaming PC awhile back from 10 to 11. I honestly haven't noticed any difference in game performance. I get that around these parts Windows 11 is the devil (and I have a also friend who absolutely refuses to use anything newer than 10), but I really don't feel one way or the other about it. If anything, I'd say Windows 11 is kind of boring as far as OSes go - it's just kind of there.

And how do you plan to enforce this? If it's just a toothless guideline, you may as well skip the disingenuousness and say that no new legislation is necessary.

It did change with the internet, because unless your state firewalls off everything that doesn't follow the local laws, you're going to run into situations like with 4chan. Ironically, 4chan could possibly end up getting blocked in the UK for exactly this reason.

Now, this time I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt this time and not assume that you believe having a firewall blocking non-compliant sites is somehow a superior solution to placing age gates at the OS level, but damn if that's not the impression you're giving.

I didn't think anyone even still played with that vestigial feature held over from when this site was trying to be more like the social media big boys. This feels more like an honor than an insult, actually.

"Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that"

I see you don't remember the 68k Macs OR the PPC Macs. Apple offered machines with lots of slots ever since the Macintosh II line. HTH.

Too much latency for RAM.

You mean running them on an external GPU? That doesn't take much bandwidth unless you're constantly loading new models.

There's no strawman here. Your proposal requires the individual adult app and website vendors on the global internet to comply with state laws requiring they do $THING. We can argue all day long about how you want to define $THING, but ultimately the flaw rests in the belief that you'll be able to get a myriad of different companies to implement any form of age gating in a privacy-respecting manner.

Again, at the OS level, all three major commercial OS vendors are US-based companies operating under then jurisdiction of US laws. Requiring they comply with age check regulation is actually achievable (in fact, Apple is already complying with a UK age verification law), unlike the broken mess that is immediately obvious if you've been following how, for example, Discord implemented their age checking.

We have age gating at the website level here in Florida. Some adult sites complied by blocking Florida IP addresses from accessing the site, some sites actually are doing the age checks (which is a potential privacy issue), and since the internet is worldwide with site operators being unaware of individual state laws (or just not caring since they're outside of Florida's legal reach) - there's also adult sites that are just ignoring the law.

Yours is the first I've seen of someone actually praising this mess as the lesser evil. Having the age gate at the OS level can at least be implemented in a more privacy-respecting manner than trusting individual app developers and websites not to leak/sell your information. Yeah, there's still the "what if a kid installs Linux" loophole, but you have to remember these laws are primarily intended to stop kids from accessing adult content through their phones, and most phones have a locked bootloader anyway. Plus, with the mobile OS realm being essentially a duopoly, if Google and Apple comply - mission accomplished.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.