For whatever reason, theyâ(TM)ve also done this if youâ(TM)re using DisplayLink, the thing that gives you extra monitors through your cheap usb docking station or usb monitor. Content wonâ(TM)t display on any screen (even the internal one) if you have any DisplayLink screens active. And DRM even shows up in places like Udemy, so if you want to watch your âoecourseâ at work (where all desks have those cheap DisplayLink docking stations), the only way to make it work is to turn off chrome acceleration⦠Which then breaks lots of other sites. WTF, Apple?

Marketing, mostly.

Not true! How much does a professional driver cost? Perhaps one that sleeps in or near the car and is always available... You could probably get quite a few for a million...

I thought industrial creatives cared about upgradeabily and longevity - isn't this just another [well equipped, but still] disposable machine?

I remember I used to be able to get NHK Japan in Canada on cloudy days... Long before the Internet... Of course, the Internet is only useful to you if you have Internet...

Does anyone (outside of perhaps the hardest of the hardcore survivalists) actually have a shortwave radio anymore? Pretty sure I got rid of my last one about 20 years ago...

None! But there'll probably be a lot of nuclear waste.

Except it doesn't, as lots of Intel Macbook Pros have had touch ID for years...

All I know is that my Pentium II PE (400 Mhz) from 1999 with 192MB of RAM seemingly did the same things as my current I9 with 16GB... Surf the web, internet chats, MS Office, email, etc... But it was able to do it all with a LOT less!!! Seriously - the size of apps has gotten out of hand!!! How many GB is Office now? How much RAM does Outlook take to sit there and do nothing??? Why is Calibre (eBook reader software) 380 MB??? No question that the hardware has gotten much more powerful (and readily available), but the functional utility enabled by it seems seriously lacking... It seems like we've packed on framework after framework that over-bloats everything such that even word processing now takes GBs of RAM and disk! Back in the day, they drilled us on stuff like computabilty, complexity, Big-O, etc... I guess today's crowd don't care about stuff like this anymore - it's too easy to just toss in a boatload of frameworks to do simple stuff these days...

They self-distruct over time on their own. Don't worry though, when that happens the companies that made the discs will be just as happy to tell you 'tough shit' as any streaming company will.

I don't think physical media is any better. About 2 years ago, I bought my wife the complete Dallas DVD box set (All 14 seasons - don't ask)... It sat on our shelf for 2 years, but when we finally opened it up - brand new pristine discs from the factory - we found that ALL of them are either completely unreadable or mostly unreadable! The consensus from a quick search on the Internet is that the factory that pressed the dics didn't manufacture them properly, so they've oxidized or otherwise decayed. Double-sided double-layer DVDs. About 50 of them. Unwatchable. What did Warner Bros say about it? "We don't distribute that product anymore so we can't help you. Sorry." Lesson? Physical discs don't last either, and people are still quite happy to walk away with your money. I've also had Blu Ray discs go bad on me - discs that I know used to work and are still in mint condition... One example was Total Recall.