I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

He didn't cite it because he is a liar:

Basically, the total NUMBER of white people killed by the police is higher. That's what racist chuds always cite when they try to claim that "Well, ACKSCHUALLY... ThE PoICe DoN'T hARas5 m1n0r!ties". But they don't adjust for the share of each demographic among the general population. Per-capita... well...

https://mappingpoliceviolence....
https://apnews.com/article/pol...

And we're supposed to be happy because *these* cops were merely incompetent and not also trigger happy? Progress?

Well behaved? They attacked and falsely accused the driver of a crime he never committed. That is the opposite of "well behaved". No. No credit to the scum. The Driver Did Not Commit The Crime. As such, the cops should have NEVER accused him, stopped him, interrogated him, approached him, or an any other way darkened his day.

No. They do NOT get credit merely for sot being AS abusive as other cops have in other cases. The ONLY acceptable situation is ZERO abuse of the innocent police... EVER.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Except that supermarket is an entirely new business that never existed before and those customers can all still go buy any random non-vetted, non-curated, thing they want from all of the original vendors they were shopping at before the new store opened up in town. And THIS market did not come into town like Walmart, undercutting all the existing stores and driving them out of business. THIS one positioned at as a premium, high end, high priced, and entirely unnecessary at the end of the day, fashionable market like Bi-Rite.

And are you seriously claiming that Apple will have to waste ZERO engineering effort to subsidize these competitors here? How do you figure, exactly?

No, SOME users want that unrestricted free-for-all. For my part, I'm fine with watching out for random spyware, malware, shovelware, and other garbage that's out there, on my general-purpose computers. For my *phone* I preferred to avoid that. I was fine with the sandboxed and protected walled garden IN THAT SPECIFIC CONTEXT.

So the EU's shenanigans actually TAKE AWAY choice from the consumer. I could already get the unregulated free-for-all where any random thing could fully take over my phone if I want; I'd have just already switched to Android if that were the case. But if I were in the EU, I would no longer have the walled garden option now. It's back to the days of Cydia and all of the chaff that was the vast majority of everything there.

Likewise, I like my iMessage just fine, thank you very much, and have exactly ZERO desire to downgrade (And YES, it IS a DOWNgrade. Look at the feature sets.) to RCS. Fortunately, here in the US, I still have the option in settings to turn and keep that shit off. But in the EU where RCS is mandated? I'd be downgraded to the inferior feature against my will.

And people are characterizing the EU's BS here as "freedom." There's a Princess Bride reference there about the meanings of words...

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

That... didn't happen. What you are probably thinking about is that during COVID, during both the Trump and Biden administrations (so your "sides" comment is laughable), there was a govt group which identified misinformation about COVID (yum yum gullible ivermectin!) and notified the social network owners. Those social network owners (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) added this data to their own internal checks, and decided to allow, deny, or demonitize based on their internal decisions. So the govt notified about potentially false information, but the decision to do anything was 100% made by the individual companies. And while some countries treat "suggestions by the govt" as law, the US did not (until CBS cancelled Colbert to make conservatives happy, so huh, your "sides" comment does have some validity!)

So "control what people were allowed to discuss" was false until the current administration.

20 years ago, which was a few years after conservatives supported the Patriot Act which greatly increased govt surveillance of US citizens? Yeah, no real changes. The folks who want the police state now are the folks who have always wanted the police state (mostly through some idiotic idea that THE OTHER will be persecuted, but never themselves).

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.