It's certainly a perfect time to dip their toes in the water. The last time would have been Windows Vista, and for whatever reason mass market computers, despite his success with mass market music players, didn't seem to be something Jobs was ready to do.

There's a difference between lower end (none of these computers were even low end, just "on the lower end of Apple's offerings") and mass market. None of those devices are mass market, they're just the "non-pro" items.

The Classic, for example, was $999, which until the 2000s I believe was Apple's cheapest Mac. This was in 1990. It was still an upscale item, just slightly more accessable price wise than their Macs had been before. And its spec was basically identical to the Mac Plus, launched 5 years earlier.

To put it in perspective, including inflation, it cost four times the MacBook Neo, roughly $2,400 in today's money to $600. Given the PC architecture was dominant at that point, it was a niche platform with a high price tag that only a handful of people would spend money on. Oddly, students seemed to be the main market, and that was in part because Apple offered a sizable discount for students, while universities were one of the few places that supported Macs and PCs on an equal footing.

Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, Amstrad, Radio Shack, et al, were the companies doing the mass market stuff. Apple had a niche, and built upon that niche, but they were never interested in dominating the market the same way those five companies were. Which is fine. The Neo seems, however, to be a change from that.

Based on what? This is tremendously popular, well out of line with their regular sales.

$1,295. In 1984. Wouldn't even qualify as mass market today, but in 1984... phew. To put it in perspective, by then you could get IBM PC clones for under $1,000.

Apple has rarely dipped into the mass markets before now when it came to computers, the Mac mini being the rare exception, which was just a little too nerdy (needing your left over keyboard, mouse, and monitor) to actually be a mass market product. Maybe the success of their mass market non-computer stuff has helped them dip a toe in the waters.

In any case, I'm happy they're trying it and having the right kinds of problems.

Branson, alas, appears in some of the photographs that are in the files. FWIW there's a rather infamous interview he did with Conan O'Brien where he got handsy with fellow guest Salma Hayek.

He's very good with the PR, but I'm not seeing evidence he's actually a good guy. He just hasn't dropped the ball on his PR to the same extent Musk did.

Buffet has said he thinks people in his position should be paying higher taxes than people who earn less. That's positive but in many ways just the bare minimum.

> The odds of Peter Thiel molesting a small girl are extremely low

If he molests boys, as alleged (he was in with Epstein too, that's the "joke"), that's somehow better?

If not, why did you make that comment? It's weird!

You're a little out of date. Java hasn't really been part of the web for... well, I believe the Java plugin was effectively removed from most browsers a decade ago, and wasn't used much after the early 2000s despite the initial hype.

The web is bloated these days, but Java has nothing to do with it.

Gonna be a problem if you want to run a modern web browser.

Which is frustrating because there's no reason a script-enabled rich text viewer with networking should require this much f---ing memory.

It's a mixture. Intel licensed their designs to AMD for a while so IBM could use AMD as a second source. Later they became competitors. There's no evidence of "reverse engineering", which isn't even a bad thing (reverse engineering is what you do if you want to create a 1:1 compatible version of a product without copying it - you basically create as best you can documentation of how something should work, and then use the documentation to create a design) or of stealing it. And why would they steal it and then reverse engineer it? Rather at some point when they stopped getting licenses AMD just... made their own version based on Intel's public specs. As have a number of companies, using various degrees of reverse engineering, including NEC, Chips and Technologies, Cyrix, VMT, VIA Technologies, and even IBM.

Furthermore, the chip in your PC right now, be it Intel's or AMD's, is mostly an AMD design, with some legacy Intel design crufted on. That's right, AMD, not Intel, came up with the 64-bit ABI that most of us have been using since the mid-2010s. And Intel licensed it from them. It's AMD's technology now.

Does that mean Intel are the good guys after all? No, this is corporate bullshit. Neither AMD nor Intel are inherently good or bad. Intel foisted some pretty awful CPU architectures on the world before coming up with a non-mediocre one in the form of the 80386 (cue the idiot I argued with the other day who'll claim the 8086 is a modern CPU and works the way modern CPUs do and does not have a ridiculous architecture - you're still wrong!) because they didn't know what they were doing after FF left to found Zilog, but had the market dominance, mostly through mindshare, to get their CPUs everywhere.

AMD were responsible for the bulk of the "runs a little hot" CPU wars in the late 1990s/early 2000s, where AMD pushed power sucking cooling-system-overworking CPUs to try to beat Intel's performance... but then Intel decided to ape them until the Core architecture, so Intel's not a good guy there either.

Both have made mistakes and tried to paper over them. Both have fired people who didn't deserve it. Both are, ultimately, sociopathic corporations.

Unlike Motorola. Which they still made CPUs. ;-) 68000 FTW!

> Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41,

What? This is what passes for financial literacy these days? Do they think that the stock price of two equal companies is equal?

Maybe Berkshire Hathaway Inc, stock price $716,299.99 at the time of writing, can buy both of them, and use the money in the couch to buy Apple? I mean, if that's how the stock market works...

For those who really do think this is a thing, look up "Market Capitalization". That, divided by the number of shares, constitutes the share price, and is the market cap is considered the stock market valuation of a company. AMD does have a higher market cap at $355B to Intel's $253B, but those numbers are within 30% of each other, not nearly 5x.

There's at least some evidence on some level that the C-suite class actually believes all this bullshit. Hence the mandates forcing people to use AI and giving people bad performance reviews if they don't use it.

This isn't to say there hasn't also been a lot of redundancies blamed on AI that wouldn't have happened anyway, I've said as much myself, but certainly we've had plenty of cases where the C-suite have assumed that AI can fill in the gaps.

I think once the AI bubble pops, rehiring skilled workers will be a necessity for those companies that didn't bankrupt themselves.

Might very well be the opposite if all the non-AI companies betting on AI suddenly have to go on a hiring spree to rehire the people they thought they could replace with snake-oil.

It'd be nice to get back to Biden's full employment again.

Assuming the hype is real, I wonder if it's possible to train these algorithms on machine code, or if they need the semantics and expressiveness of a HLL.

Takes its sweet time because Congress keeps pulling the rug, you mean? And trust me, the people making the rug pulling decisions aren't "the present generation".