If you start messing with the accessibility options for text size on MacOS, you quickly wind up with a blurry mess. This is particularly obnoxious if you're looking at a very high resolution display and very noticeable on the menu bar. It's a wonderful example of Apple's one size fits some design priorities.

MacOS is a third-rate *nix that can run MS Office, but so is ChromeOS. Should I be excited that I suddenly have the option to run Photoshop on a $600 device with as much RAM as the phone I had in 2018, but still can't control the size of system fonts on the desktop? Or is it just a more expensive way to run a browser and an SSH to something I'd rather be using?

I'll give you a hint: It's the second one.

If they're being thorough, Snapdragon, Mediatek and Ampere (server) SoCs are also being sold in traditional PC forms.

I might be interested if this thing could run Linux and had Thinkpad-grade input devices, but as it is, it's just a web terminal that's locked to Apple's ecosystem instead of Google's. That's just not very compelling.

What big European player wants to put $6B on the table though? SAP is the biggest European software company I can name and that doesn't seem like a strategic fit to me.

Everything new enough to use DDR5 has the DRAM controller embedded in the CPU, so we'd be talking about something more than just new motherboards.

I spent about 3 weeks trying to get 4x64GB DDR5 6400 working on an AM5 workstation. I never got it to run for more than about six hours at anything faster than 4200MHz, no matter how much I fiddled with timings and voltages.

Hilariously, that spare 128GB RAM kit is worth like $2000 right now.

Consumer DDR5 platforms have a hard time using more than a pair of DDR5 modules at any but the slowest timing and currently don't support DIMMs larger than 64GB. Workstation and Server Platforms can already support more RAM than that, but if you're buying a new enough Threadripper, Epyc, Xeon or Ampere platform to handle DDR5, you're almost certainly buying it with rDIMMs in the first place.

Check back in five or six years. I'm kind of serious. I just pulled my oldest 7.6TB u.2s at the end of a three year service term, drives I thought were unimaginably huge when I deployed them. When I checked them, I found that they had around 70% estimated wear life remaining, which seems pretty good for drives that were in use constantly for so long. The replacement drives were 15TB each, and I expect that in another three years, I'll be ready to fork over for the 30TB ones.

I'm thinking this is pretty typical for drive deployment life cycles.

28GB/s under conditions that will never be met for more than a few seconds at a time given most enterprise workloads isn't nearly as interesting as getting 200k IOPS+ sustained random reads for arbitrary lengths of time, and that's something that's theoretically possible even on PCIe gen 3, albeit not on any drives that currently exist.

Technically, all DDR5 has data protection for single-bit errors on-chip. It's not the same thing as big-boy registered DIMMs, but I don't think you're going to get the whole world of people who buy Acer whatevers from Walmart to go along with yet ANOTHER reason to make RAM more expensive.

Aside from that, there isn't currently much justification for looking at Intel on consumer platforms. Having integrated Xe cores is nifty for video editors, but just like gamers, they're probably going to spend cash on an nVidia card anyway. AMD doesn't really offer anything on the extreme low-end like an N150, but if you're buying that far down the food chain, you probably aren't looking at rDIMMs, either. If you're looking at pure power efficiency, Qualcomm does pretty well unless you're a gamer.

I get most of my drives by being the only local customer for my server colo. I'm the only person who comes and goes with any regularity, and I've gotten to know the on-site ops well enough that they give me a chance to buy anything juicy from the abandoned/nonpayment hardware as they pull it out and evaluate it. I have gotten CRAZY stuff that way and I highly recommend it.

That being said, I haven't seen any deals for larger than 20TB drives either, but I would like to point out that both Seagate and WD high capacity external drives are generally going to be SATA versions of the same enterprise drives they normally sell. Sometimes, they don't even bother to rebadge them. I don't have any as large as 30TB but they last bunch of 28TB Seagates were a mix of re-badged (often with another sticker underneath) Barracuda and Exos drives. I got them on sale from Best Buy for I think $330 each. Are they as good as the Ironwolf whatever ones that cost twice as much and come with five years of data recovery? Probably not. Since I just wanted those particular drives for my off-site Plex server, I think I'm OK with that. Neither Seagate nor WD are selling extremely high capacity SMR drives, so everything you get works great with ZFS and you can shuck them out of the external enclosures and stick them on your SATA or SAS controller as you see fit.

It's a bit of a moot point. Systems that aren't receiving general OS updates wouldn't receive updated bootloaders anyhow. So they wouldn't need the updated certificates that allow for bootloaders signed after June 2026.

It gets a bit tautological, but only systems that are getting updates need updates.

I think because most people incorrectly assume it's an acronym and not the guys name that invented it.

I modify my installation ISO to remove the most egregious matters and use an autounattend.xml to make sure the installation is as I wish it to be. I have sysprep images that are appropriate for things I deal with professionally and my generic installation ISO works well enough to handle one-off installs that I can use the same single file for at least anything up to a Ryzen HX370/Zen5 or 15th-gen Intel.

Schneegan's AutoUnattend generator is extremely helpful in this regard. I've recently found Winhance, which is useful for maintaining a steady configuration on Windows system AND for customizing Windows ISOs. Something else that is very helpful is knowing that it's very easy to make Windows Home SKUs install and run the Group Policy editor, which makes keeping any Windows system in order much less complicated.

How long did that take? I'm not sure. I've been doing it since Windows 2000, so either 40 minutes or 26 years.

Why shouldn't the phone be secure by default

It lacks an appropriate number of ports and doesn't support DisplayPort.

USB DisplayPort alt mode says hello. Every rear USB-C port on the Mac Mini is also a DisplayPort. Just as it is on all of Apple's laptops.

Thunderbolt is a garbage, proprietary Apple standard.

Thunderbolt is an Intel standard. And in the case of Thunderbolt 4, it's just an additional set of feature requirements over base USB4, where those features are optional. In other words, TB4 is a superset of USB4.