Oh, I thought you were just using this as another excuse to rant about Apple and Trump and your usual list of things. Forgive my confusion.

Can we finally know whether or not there is beer on the sun?!

If you find that confusing, that's totally fine with me! It's a nice service to have around, either way.

"VPN for normies" -- as I said, in iCloud Private Relay word, Safari is a special citizen with hiding IPs and using its own DNS, etc. It's a "VPN for normies" who don't have a full VPN.

I'm very happy that Apple is including a VPN for "normies." I see a lot of traffic to sites I manage coming from iCloud private relay blocks, and the demographic is teens and twenty somethings.

Having said that, for me, it's a bit mixed. Things get confused when running my OpenVPN or Wireguard split DNS vpn with--and sometimes without--iCloud relay. There are also some OS network-specific settings that involve blocking trackers that impact things too. Safari is kind of "special" in terms of how it looks at networks and DNS as compared to base *nix utilities or Chrome/Firefox. I'm still entirely on macOS 15 (skipping macOS 26, we'll see about 27), and the situation has gotten much better since early OS levels.

I have such fond memories of EA from the '80s, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a completely different and unrelated entity.

Click the links. They have exlpoded parts diagram, step-by-step instructions, diagnostic software, etc. If you want pictures of every step along the way, iFixit has you covered there. I've repaired many Macs over the last ~30 years (Plungers for iMac monitors, etc) and I'm glad Apple had made it easier again. Hilarious joke about "biting that apple" lololol!

I think you replied to the wrong post.

Fallacious argument. A Macbook Neo is not the same as a sub-$200 Chromebook (I cannot find a single Chromebook for that cheap on Amazon, either. The ones that are close, in the $250+, are dramatically inferior to the Neo in every way I can see.). I am speculating, but I expect that a Neo would be more durable and longlasting than a budget Chromebook. The screen, keyboard, trackpad, and everything else is certainly better.

If school systems with 25,000+ students are deciding to make this investment, there is a reason. They also have far more information about the financial realities of using Chromebooks and the costs of acquiring 25,000+ Neos. The proof will be in the pudding, and we'll see what happens in the next several years.

My own personal opinion--Chromebooks suck and worst of all, they make computing utterly miserable for students.

https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/macbook-neo/display

https://support.apple.com/genuine-parts-distributor

https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/mac/301292

Apple went through a span of time where it was unfriendly to repairs. People rightfully complained, and they got better. That's everything working like it's supposed to, and Apple should be praised for improving.

So here we have the goalposts shifting. First it was "the whole thing has been pumped full of epoxy" and "you don't repair these things, you replace them" and now we've evolved to "That is repairable by the standards of Apple computers, not the standards of open hardware."

The repair manuals are available online. You can order replacement parts directly from Apple. A new screen costs about $200 (I would also guess that schools get dramatically reduced prices to repair, but that's purely speculation). Yes, I get it, that doesn't meet your value proposition, but clearly a large number of school districts disagree with your financial analysis.

My kids have Chromebooks. On average they need about 3 repairs a year, and my kids ARE careful with their stuff. They are complete junk, terrible trackpads, terrible screens, terrible keyboards. I have not touched a Neo, but I would expect it to be substantially hardier, faster, and with a much better screen than the budget junk my kids are forced to use. Yes, that does come with a higher initial investment.

But is 5s still usable like on the web, online services, etc.?

As opposed to Chromebooks?

ahref=https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-yearsrel=url2html-19906https://www.ifixit.com/News/11...>

Please continue the whining, if it makes you feel better?

I was on with AT&T recently and the human on the other side sounded pretty American, with maybe a slight Eastern European accent. At one point during the call, something went haywire--I heard my own voice echoed back to me, sounding vaguelly Eastern European, while the person on the other side now sounded 100% Indian.

It was pretty impressive voice mod software (until it messed up!).

That mentality never left Microsoft. They just to have work harder to maintain plausible deniability. Plausible, that is, to the anti-trust courts and politicians, none of whom know anything about technology.