APFS supports compression, but it's the same compression techniques (deflate, LZVN, LZFSE) that HSF+ supports. And it seems to be a slightly higher-level approach to compression than ZFS uses, making it only mostly transparent compression. So newer techniques that ZFS leverages, like LZ4 or ZSTD, they're not an option. Compression is such a no-brainer with ZFS (particularly with how fast LZ4 and ZSTD can be) that more and more distros/operating systems are enabling it by default.

I think Apple should have converted to ZFS in the first place, APFS kind of feels like they decided to re-invent the wheel and missed out on some important stuff (like block checksums) in the process. I still think it's reasonable for them to drop HFS+ encryption support and tell people to convert the drives to APFS if they want to keep doing it, though.

What's stopping users from converting the drives from HFS+ encrypted to APFS encrypted? They have a process to do that in-place. People can keep using their existing drives, and can still have them encrypted.

Legacy systems aren't going to run macOS 28, since the last release to support Intel processors is macOS 26. This will only affect legacy archives, so, older external disks. Assuming they didn't use exFAT, but you didn't get native encryption in macOS with that either.

They're not removing encryption support, they have a modern filesystem that you can use with encryption. They're only dropping it from their deprecated 1990s-era filesystem. They're telling people to move to the modern filesystem if they want to use encrypted drives.

HFS+ was introduced with MacOS 8.1 in the late 90s. It doesn't even support dates past the year 2040. It makes sense for them to start phasing it out.

LFP, NMC, and NCA are the three main types of lithium ion batteries you'll find on roads today. LFP have lower density (they store less power) but are cheaper, safer, and last longer (more cycles), so they're gradually taking over the market, at ballpark 50% market share these days, and growing.

The next likely chemistry will probably be sodium ion batteries (which are not another lithium ion chemistry, though they're similar). From a specification and performance standpoint, they're largely similar to LFP, but better tolerate very cold temperatures, and are expected to be modestly to moderately cheaper than LFP (though they aren't yet).

The first link doesn't show linear degradation, it seems to show an initial sharp dropoff followed by along steady state of range (the graph of various Tesla Model 3 variants). The second link does show a linear degradation, but at such low rates (~2% health per year) that the battery can reasonably be expected to outlive the car for most consumers.

My understanding is that rising car costs has pushed US typical replacement terms to ~13 years for cars. At 2% per year, that means your 13 year old car will still have a 74% state of health by the end, which is pretty good. The battery also isn't useless at that point, even if you decide to keep your car longer than that, and have to replace the battery, the old used ones still have significant resale value, helping to defray the replacement cost.

Montreal and Toronto do get around 26% more sunlight than London, in terms of hours per year, but London doesn't really have winter either. They don't get 85 inches of snow per year like Montreal.

Canada's power already comes from renewables as a strict majority: 57.4% from hydro, 9.1% from other renewables. For the clean-but-non-renewables, you've got nuclear at 13.5%. The vast majority of the rest is natural gas. But hydro can be difficult and expensive to expand (even if it's cheap in the long-run), and many renewables other than hydro struggle to serve base-load applications.

Asahi Linux doesn't really support Apple Silicon in the first place. They have prototype-level quality support for the M1 and M2, and no support at all for the M3/M4/M5/A18. If you want to run Linux on a mac today, virtualization is the only realistic option.

If your goal is the cheapest Mac, the cheapest way to get a new computer in that ecosystem, then they're comparable in that they are both Macintosh computers, and the Neo is significantly cheaper. If your goal is the cheapest Mac laptop, then the Mini isn't relevant regardless of the price.

Are you replying to the right person? The grandparent said you shouldn't buy a neo because a mac mini costs the same. And I pointed out that it doesn't cost the same, they discontinued the cheaper model. I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with.

The MacBook Neo at $599 is $200 cheaper than the entry-level Mac Mini at $799. They discontinued the cheaper Mini.

Build quality on the Dell is good, but from hands-ons, not *as* good. Touchscreen is not something most people want on a laptop, I think (I know a niche loves them, but most people don't), but it's 120 Hz, which is a major advantage over the Neo (and Air for that matter). The touchpad is not as good. The CPU is much slower (at least in bursty tasks). I'll speculate that speakers and battery life are much worse. Connectivity is a wash (faster second USB port, but no headphone jack). The backlit keyboard is nice. The entry price point is $100 higher. Worst of all, it comes with Windows 11.

Of course this is just based on specsheets, very brief hands-on previews, and speculation, we'll need to see what real reviews show.

"All input is evil"