There's a German company that uses a totally different type of cell that's low-cycle but should last a hundred years.

The cheap one is just big enough for key or two and has a serial interface and the expensive one is bigger and does the whole USB stack.

I think the serial interface stands more of a chance of being readable when I'm 90. USB seems so ubiquitous now but those parallel ZIP drives seemed perfect at the time too.

I'm going to get a few once the tariff situation gets kicked to the curb. And, no, nobody in America makes them or I would have them already.

> When I researched it last, 8GB/256GB was about what Windows laptops offered at this price point.

True. That is true. But typically, (there are always exceptions) the memory in Windows laptops is SO-DIMM in sockets accessible through a hatch in the back, the drive is either m.2 or ssd (or sometimes both) also removable, and the laptop comes apart.

As opposed to the memory soldered in and the two halves of the laptop body glued together.

The last time I bought a Windows laptop, it was offered with the CPU and graphics I wanted, but with not enough memory or storage for my purpose. So I bought it with minimum ram and storage and swapped out the ram for the architectural max and the SSD for something really large.

That's a lot more difficult to do with a macbook. Macs are boutique priced, but paradoxically are pretty much throw-away items.

The macbook I was assigned for work has a D key that no longer functions. It's not the keycap and electronic contact cleaner did not help.

I've had keyboards die in Windows laptops, and replacing them involves some tinkering (and about a thousand little screws) but is relatively straightforward. Cost $15 for the keyboard and about an hour of my time.

Replacing the keyboard on a macbook is often not worth the trouble. In my case, my work said they'd issue me another one and I should send this one back to be safely recycled.

I've been a Mac user for some time, starting with the G4, and like Beluga caviar, they've evolved into an expensive, commodity product. Which for a computer should be a contradiction in terms.

Mind you, I have one (1) non-web-based application for which I still use Windows, and if that ever gets ported to linux, I'll abandon Windows and never look back. But having bouncy icons is not enough reason to pay the Mac tax.

My daily driver is a 2012 Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and I do engineering work on it. After 14 years of use I replaced the battery just last week.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.

8 GB of "unified memory", sharing that pool with cpu, gpu and whatever they're calling "neural net" these days. Almost certainly soldered in, not expandable.

256 or 512 GB main storage. I'm speculating, but I suspect that also is glued in, (or the case is glued together not expandable except by USB port.

All this for about $150-$200 more than a comparably outfitted Windows laptop.

Mind you, I profoundly dislike Windows. But people tend to buy Macs for creation, and this one seems to be outfitted primarily for consumption, which is not Apple's audience.

Despite every rational reason to stay hidden, Jeffrey Epstein's gaming accounts are active and making purchases from an IP that surprises noone.

Then again the poster boy for the most horrific addictions might be an outlier.

I think it's more complicated than a Bayesian "dinotd we go?" but the government at the time was lying to the people about absolutely everything so the official truth must be a lie.

Watch Dr. G's body language analysis of the post-flight press conference. Those guys should have been joyous and triumphant having accomplished the most tremendous task in all of human history in this epoch.

Yeah, many schools like the Chomebooks but are sick of Google's shit on other fronts. I'm not confident they'll prefer Apple's MDM but these decisions are based on pain, not dispassionate logic.

Meanwhile OLPC turned out to lobotomize students so the whole thing should be thrown overboard. Buy paper and pencils with the money.

I would argue that when sweeps are largely indiscriminate, and being in proximity to a raid is enough to end up in custody, so that the odds of "wrong place wrong time" greatly increase, it becomes a much stronger argument for not being in the US as a foreign national at all.

Mistakes may happen, but the nature of ICE detainments rises far above mere mistakes. The intent of the current system is to make the US sufficiently inhospitable to foreign nationals that they don't come. So, I take that point, and won't come. And by the looks of depressed visits since last year from my fellow countrymen, many of us are choosing that route.

I'm unlikely to ever visit the US again. My daughter and I had planned on going to Comic-Con at some point in the next year or two, and we both agree now that while the risk of detainment is rather low, it is non-zero. There are other places we can go, and being Canadian, there are plenty of places in our own country that we haven't seen.

You don't see a problem with being arrested by an immigration enforcement agency as a US citizen? You think that eventually being released is a meaningful remedy?

And if a US citizen can be detained by ICE, why the fuck would a foreigner want to come to the US?

It was the courts that halted the Keystone XL pipeline.

AI should be used in Validation and QA also.

Funding was supposed to come from Gulf States as a quid-pro-quo for US military protection from Israel and Iran.