It's highly unlikely that anything you'd do in the course of normal desktop use would make much of a subjective difference from a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive. Most sustained IO operations don't take so long that you'll realize the difference. I can tell when I'm copying 30GB files from my camera card or doing full database dumps, but for just loading up a game or booting an OS? They're subjectively almost exactly the same experience.

That being said, there is such a thing as a cacheless drive. SSDs used to have a certain amount of DRAM or SLC NAND as a faster intermediary interface for storage. Low-cost drives might not have THAT, and that seriously reduces the utility of the SSD in the first place, especially on no-name drives. Those guys are sometimes no better than mechanical drives. Since your system is a refurb, it's possible they did just stick a POS drive in.

Audacity has been on a very long journey to modernize itself. It wouldn't shock me to learn that they shipped it with functions that are being most widely used or easiest to carry over just to get over the hurdle of getting a major release out the door. It's a beloved tool; I know a bunch of people for whom it's a production linchpin, and I think the developers working on are aware of the number of edge cases where only some tiny fraction of their users make use of a feature. Those people can stay on version 3 for now.

IIRC, a lot of what needed to happen with Audacity was an overall change in user interfaces, which required a lot of deep thought about how people interact with the application. It may be that some of the unhandled features just don't align with the current user experience.

So you're saying that a US$212 replacement display that costs more than an entire Chromebook is going to be somehow better for these public schools over some period of time?

Right.

Do you think there's a world where Apple suddenly offers inexpensive replacement parts for anything? Sometimes the screens on Chromebooks are as low as $30. I'm sure they're third party panels, but they work and return the device to useful life. How likely is it that Apple offers screen replacements under $100, even to institutional buyers?

That is repairable by the standards of Apple computers, not the standards of open hardware.

My experience dealing with a Chromebook deployment mirrors one of the grandparent commenters: 90% of the problems are broken screens, Screens are quick and easy to replace if you have the part, but screens cost money and you'll never had as many as you'll eventually need. You'll have extra parts for everything else because of the staggering number of broken screens.

I have an occasional side job dealing with PC/laptop/Chromebook repairs at a local weirdo private Christian Academy. Given that the place definitely seems to have a "go pick the stick I'm going to beat you with"-vibe, I suspect there's actually fewer broken systems than I might see from a similar deployment at a public school. Chromebook screens are still the biggest problem. One of the reasons I got this side gig is that an acquaintance saw the number of devices being written off and just assumed their day-to-day IT person couldn't possibly know what they're doing.

Anything else Apple does, unless their screens are indestructible or only cost $20 to replace, isn't going to help with that.

Firefox has an extension called Youtube Custom Speed. You can set arbitrary speeds from .05 to 16x in whatever increments you feel like adding. Not that it helps for the dipshits explaining how to type something in a terminal prompt, but it's definitely handy for speeding through laptop disassemblies and the like.

Chrome does appear to have the same thing so it probably works on whatever browser you like.

In Pocket Casts, the app I use, there's a playback speed control that can go up to 5x. I usually listen to podcasts at about 3x speed, which feels right to me. I lose a little nuance for audio fiction, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

16x audio playback speeds are typical for screen readers for visually impaired users. Maybe your wife configured something like that, but they take practice to get used to. I only have some familiarity with those because I used to have a blind co-worker and had to support his setup.

see subject.

I don't know why I should care about limited compatibility for a subset of devices with another subset of devices. There's some of everything in my home. I found a tool called LocalSend years ago that allows me to do mildly obnoxious data transfers between arbitrary devices regardless of platform.

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.