There are people out there who use an iPad (or a Galaxy S Ultra Tab) as a daily driver. As few as you might think, but they do exist.

I like having an iPad Pro for those times when I use it, but I use my laptop for 95% of my computing. It's a nice-to-have, and I really only have one because my work allows me the opportunity.

Come back zinc!! Come baaaaack!!!

Apple Silicon machines (our district has hundreds of them deployed) are great because they *do* have pretty good uptime. But they develop weird quirks that a reboot does cure. 9/10 times if a teacher says something is acting up that isn't a crash or file corruption, and it's something I've never heard of, a reboot fixes it.

He's saying that slightly larger NiMH 2500mah batteries do not fit, not that regular AA batteries don't fit.

Likewise. My M1 Pro 16" is the best computer I've ever used. It has it's quirks, but for something basically representing the best of the first generation of M1-based desktop computing... it's pretty stellar. As long as you're not trying to game on it.

Also, fuck Parallels hard. Used it for awhile but I'd rather be able to buy it outright. Tired of subscription-based bullshit. VMWare Fusion works well enough, not nearly as fast, but it's not nearly as annoying.

Ran into this last night, trying to download Chrome on an (admittedly waaaayyy too) old machine that was already chugging. Every time I tried to go to the Chrome download site in Edge it'd time out, so I tried using IE - it would go to the download site, complain that it was too old, and then auto-close IE and try to open Edge again. Literally all I wanted to do was download the executable.

Probably should just look into another alternative (or just run 7) on something that old, but yeah, it doesn't help when Microsoft won't even let you do what you're trying to do and throws you down a path you're trying to avoid because it causes an even bigger performance bottleneck.

Man, India must be way behind if they're not only still using NetZero, but having to use gas-powered modems as well!

>Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I've reported 2,500 of these to their journals' editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public....

"This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and seeing quite a few shops in my time."

>The flimsy part, which is the actual male part with is in the open, whereas it's hidden inside a receptacle for USB-C.

I'd much rather have to replace a "flimsy" Lightning cord that got broken, than a USB-C connector or an entire phone because it broke. That's what's nice about Lightning is that the connector doesn't have the terminals on a protrusion that can break.

So, streaming services: sell me a $2 a-la-carte week of service that I can use to watch what I want to, and pay another $2 for another week if I need to. I'd bet they'd get more revenue from that as people find out they want to watch just one show on a service and don't want to pay the full monty for an entire month or worry about remembering to cancel yet another service.

I appreciate the news story, because I thought someone had possibly breached my BK account and tried to order something and failed.

I plug my 2021 16" into a dock nightly and while I do have to reboot once in awhile to "reset" things (which takes literally ~8 seconds depending on what I have open) due to this platform being relatively new for desktop use, I plug in and 99.9% of the time my displays just work. And I don't even open the laptop, just take it out of my bag and drop it into my dock and plug in one cable.

Windows 10 is simultaneously the best and shittiest Windows ever. I like some of what they've done, but lots of what they're removing is power user features that are legitimately useful and have no Metro alternative, and often just drop you into a legacy applet anyway. We have lots of speedy Lenovo Tiny machines with Win10 that are good except that Windows routinely has an "error" that coincidentally defaults the PDF reader and browser to Edge for no reason. It's all the little antagonistic shit like that, or driver bullshit, or constant nagging about all kinds of random minutae that confuses end users and makes life a living death by a thousand cuts. Windows 11 looks to be even worse. I get they need to ditch the legacy code. If they were replacing it with something legitimately useful, I'd be more diplomatic.

As it is, the sins that Apple commits are more "ugh, that's annoying but at least I don't have to deal with this at crisis time", vs Windows consistently fucking up crucial things that require time or research, like nuking printing in such a way that I have to dig through endless forum posts to find the single registry or GPedit hack to get it working again, or the constant, CONSTANT stream of useless updates that you can't disable. I thought I'd be clever and create a stripped Win10 image to use on our new Windows machines going out, disabling automatic updates, and removing stuff that people in an office setting (I work for a school district, these are meant to be used for secretaries and custodians) will NEVER use. Stuff like XBox integration, gaming, OneDrive, baked in Office install, etc. I then found out six months later when a few of them just dropped like flies overnight for no discernible reason, that doing this breaks Windows Update in such a way that a new update will still download, attempt to run, and nuke the install to the point that no amount of fucking with it will revive it, and you have to just reinstall from scratch and copy data from Windows.old. Yeah, more fool me for messing with the install, but at this point Windows is such a dog's breakfast of old and new code haphazardly duct-taped together that it's infuriating to use and even more infuriating to support.

Not to mention that Windows somehow has this ridiculous bug where the mouse pointer will jump sideways 25 pixels or so for no reason every dozen clicks or so. There is no rhyme or reason to why this happens, and it seems to occur regardless of drivers or hardware. Every model of laptop I've ever used with Windows 10+ has this bug, it has never been fixed, I've seen random forum postings about it but no fixes, and every time it happens I am reminded why I use a Mac.

As it is, MacOS is robust, consistent and for the most part gets out of my way and lets me work, and if I need Windows, I have Parallels. Apple does annoying, antagonizing shit once in awhile, but the MacBook Airs and iPads we deploy in our district are relatively trouble free and durable outside of some aspects of using non-Pro model iPads in a laptop role, and the inevitable Apple locking down of features that would make life in an educational environment so, so much better. But there are no showstoppers that make me want to break the thing in half over my knee.

Depending on what you do, the current lineup of Apple Silicon laptops is IMO the best laptop you can buy. If you need legacy Windows software that isn't readily supported via Parallels, or native Windows boot capability, that's an obvious caveat.

The current iteration 14"/16" MacBook Pro lineup in particular is amazing. Battery life is fantastic, performance is great, and the build quality is the best of pre-2016 MacBook with an amazing screen.

PC manufacturers have done some great work with design, but there are always little compromises, like a great car that's been gutted by corporate bean-counters and has some crippling flaw that manifests. Dell's XPS lineup is probably the most solid PC laptop I've ever used, and if I ever needed to carry a dedicated PC laptop, that's what I'd use.

But I traded in a 2019 i9 MacBook Pro 16" and a 2013 Mac Pro to get a base model 16" MacBook Pro 2021, and haven't looked back since. I use it at work and then dock it at home and it basically does everything I need it to, faster and better than before even with the annoyances of using a docked laptop. I don't think I have ever heard the fans spin up, I carry my charger but I never need it since it's at 100% every morning anyway, and aside from needing more storage (courtesy of a continually annoying Apple habit of overcharging for SSDs) I have never been happier with a laptop. I run Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Parallels running Windows 11 (often at the same time) with zero major issues.

What people don't really seem to understand is that the extra money you pay (if you absolutely HAVE to buy new, which is stupid because refurb or even used Apple stuff is often just as good as buying new thanks to the durability of their hardware) gets you refinement - little shit adds up.

Caveats to my screed:

- Apple does stupid, annoying shit that I can totally understand being a turn-off. You pay a lot for a nice laptop that will last awhile, but you deal with arbitrary restrictions, or design restrictions that annoy or actively antagonize. More and more features get locked down in the name of security, which sometimes makes sense and sometimes does not. There is lock-in and walled garden shit, but if you're already in the system it's something you begrudgingly accept.

- The 12th generation of Intel Core processors do go a long way towards evening the playing field for performance, but not necessarily battery life.

Pull the other one!