And this tells me that you've never had to find replacement parts for a 25 year old car. I had a '95 motorcycle in the shop for an entire summer trying to get parts for the shaft drive.

Dedicated e-readers are generally designed to work closely with a particular company's servers, and keeping that code running is very expensive. I suppose they could let the code run without maintenance, so that it would either fail someday with zero warning (which people would complain about) or cause massive security issues (which people would complain about). I'd love eternal tablets that work forever with magical fairy dust, but in the real world, 14 years for a device with an expected 5-year lifespan is pretty damn good.

Huh. Many of the paperbacks I bought in the 90s are yellowing and the paper is cracking. The paperbacks from the 70s that I 'inherited" from my siblings (when I moved away from my parents) are all in bad shape. Nothing against paper, but a single-minded "paper good, four legs bad" mindset is just as bad as the opposite single-minded view.

I'm not always a fan of Amazon and their policies, but I gotta respect a 14 year support window for portable devices.

> So far the only reliable way to stop piracy has
> been to make a product that is better and have
> consumers that can actually afford to consume.

Isn't is amazing that the record labels continuously fail to understand this? For my part, even as far back is the original launch of the ITMS, my Limewire usage dropped dramatically because I could just buy the one good song on an album and not waste money on the filler. Convenience. At this point, I don't even know HOW long it's been now since I've fired up Limewire... not since Spotify and Apple Music became things, that's for sure... or if it's even still around. Convenience.

And it is well past time for the TV/Movie studios/networks to knock off the nickel-and-dime crap with a different streaming service per channel. Id Tim Cook wants to secure an actual legacy at Apple after his shameful kowtowing to mega; what he should do is channel Steve Jobs, get the studio heads together, and lay down the law like Jobs did with the record labels so that EVERYTHING is wrapped up in AppleTV's flat rate. There does need to be competition, so Netflix should probably become the Spotify for video. Do that, and movie/tv piracy will collapse too. Like I said... I can't even remember the last time I pirated a song. But I have actually hopped over to TPB and torrented movies that I actually OWN before, because they weren't available on Netflix, the DVDs were buried in a box in the basement somewhere, and it was much faster... AND MORE CONVENIENT... than going down there and digging through boxes to find the actual physical media for the movies I was in the mood to watch at the times.

You fail to realize that different people have different needs and priorities... and that is 100% A-OK. This whole "If this product is not the perfect product for me, Me, ME; than it is crap and should not be sold to anyone." business was tedious from the start and has gone on far too long.

My own laptop needs and priorities are light weight and long battery life. For my use case, those two stand above all other considerations by a fair margin. And if repairability suffers in order to shave off a half-pound or to gain another hour of battery life, so be it. So obviously, I'm on a MacBook Air. It is the right laptop for ME.

It sounds like you have different needs and priorities than I do. So that MacBook Air is probably NOT the right laptop for you. But you know what? That is ALSO 100% A-OK.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

I can see it now. Instead of "Houston, we've had a problem." and Omega being awarded another Silver Snoopy; with the beast of redmond on board the ship, the mission transcript will read:

"This ship will self-destruct in 20 seconds. This is your last chance to push the cancellation button."
"Cancellation button? Hurry!"
"Where is it?! Where is it?!"
"It's gotta be here!"
"Out of order"?! Fuck! Even in the FUTURE, nothing works!"

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

Seriously. I mean... $500, or *maybe* $600 for the Pro; that'd be fine. More than that, and I may as well just get back up to speed on PC gaming gear and build another PC of Theseus. Then... congrats Sony, that's better than a decade of buying NO consoles.

Then again, maybe it's just time for the gaming pendulum to swing hard back towards real computers anyway. It's been stuck on firmly on the console side for quite a while, and certian genres have definitely suffered for it.

> Trump's tariff war

Don't forget trump's ACTUAL war. I've had six figures scooped out of my retirement accounts and burned to ash since he decided to do at least ONE traditionally republican thing and launch us into yet another middle-eastern quagmire. The rest of the country is seeing the gas prices they used to attack California for. And it seems that the media is just now finally waking up to the fact that there's a shit ton of OTHER things that we make out of petroleum that are about to start to skyrocket.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Well, this WAS the Apple of: "1984 won't be like 1984" and earlier refusals to bend over and backdoor the iPhone so that the FBI could snoop at will.

So, for the fact that they've dona a 180 to whore themselves out to MAGA and become big brother and do the bidding of dear leader and his henchmen... yes, they absolutely should be scorned and condemned.

No. Actually he wasn't political from day one on the Late Show. At first he shed his Colbert Report persona and tried to do the typical "make nice with everyone" late night host a la Carson, Leno, and Letterman. Thing is, times were changing, audiences were expecting and demanding sharper wit, speaking truth to power, and takedowns of the high and mighty. And ratings started to slide. So Colbert adapted, brought elements of the Report back, but more overt and open than the playing th coy in-character persona from the old days. And ratings recovered. That worked swimmingly until COVID and malevolent mega media manipulation blew ups the entire television landscape and installed their minion to purge CBS of anyone who's not a true believer.

In his personal life, he's catholic and raising his kids as such, conservatively but not to be bigots. He's also a HUGE nerd and MASSIVE Tolkien and LOTR fan. He'll do fine as a writer on a LOTR movie. He havs the chops for it, and he "gets" the material. I knew the MAGAts were delusional from the outset for thinking they could silence him and that he'd bounce back. Though I must admit it's kind of a bummer he'll be holed up in a writers' room instead of back on air immediately on another platform.

Well then, I guess it's a good thing that the sort of big brother wannabe thugs who would demand your passwords under the guise of law would absolutely respect actual correctness and are not in any way the sort who would just toss you in the gulag for your stunt or just beat you with a pipe until you talk in the first place.