My work gave me MacBook 16" 2020 and probably the worst business laptop I have ever had. The screen is smudgy and glary, the keyboard is awful, touch bar is a meme, no ports and finally it literally cuts my wrists because it was designed to be looked at not used.
They aren't doing it to save 20$ per machine, they are doing it to make the higher price of a 16GB machine seem more reasonable than if it was the base model.
Yeah this screams classic Apple. Advertise the cost of the Mac as lower, but with a shitty option that most people will have to upgrade. Majority are not going to want to buy a 8gb laptop for that kind of money and not just bump it up to 16gb.
This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.
I’ll add classic Lenovo to the list, whose base level thinkpad are underspeced and have terrible screens. The fact that apple doesnt perpetually claim their machines are on sale is their last bastion of superiority
You used to be able to replace/extend ThinkPad parts quite easily. We'd buy base models exclusively and just add extra stick of ram and flip the CD rom to another hard drive or battery - those were super cheap high quality laptops.
Only recently Lenovo started to solder their parts so base models lost their power :(
They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.
That might be a somewhat relevant analogy if you had a choice to go somewhere else to buy bread elsewhere, but since both memory and storage are now soldered, you are forced to upgrade for the lifetime of the product at purchase. The relevance on the parts pricing here is to point out that Apple is being extremely abusive in their pricing to their customers.
Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.
Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.
These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.
Well, no. Apple buys RAM chips at that price, and they just have to swap one chip for another. The differential in price from one to the other including all costs is that much. Labour costs and OpEx are not affected by choosing Chip A or Chip B that are essentially identical.
This is pretty much the reason why I'll never will buy apple devices again. Recently I bought iphone 11 for my girlfriend as a present and the price difference between 64GB model (which honestly might as well be a dead brick in this data age) and 256GB model was around 30% in my country which is beyond absurd.
You can call me bitter but this sort of manipulation is making me extremely salty to the point where I'll be having seething hate for the company for the rest of my life.
But I think a more important factor is future sales. They will likely sell more laptops as these 8GB owners upgrade earlier (in 2-3 years) as the OS and apps continue to bloat.
So on one side they save $20 per laptop and they likely sell more laptops.
So charge $50 more per laptop and make $30 more profit while not producing 8 GB junk that'll be e-waste in a few years because that's barely enough RAM to run an average browser session anymore.
>Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years?
What about it? It's not like someone who mostly browses the web, checks email, works with office documents, and so on, will change what he does in a few years...
The fatal flaw in this argument is the failure to realize that web pages are bloating, video is becoming more prevalent, higher resolution images, etc.
So “browses the web” has ever increasing hardware requirements if you want to maintain the experience.
The large consumer market that uses mac for common computing activities will not need more soon, perhaps, but many of Apple's bulwark clients - graphic designers, musicians, and even developers - probably will.
Despite the software they demoed, the machines they show (with exception of the mini) were all for the non-demanding users.
I would like to see Photos on those benchmarks, that is one program that would benefit from lots of ram, and would be used by many of the Air’s customers.
The instant question this title raises: how hard would it be to move a planet into close orbit of the sun?
Weirdly enough I never came up to a similar scenario in countless sci-fi books. I'd imagine it would be so expensive that if we were capable of it we would probably wouldn't need/want it as other alternatives would be much more efficient, right?
The thought of designed solar system is interesting - what if we FTL is an unbeatable barrier - we might just be stuck here and populate our system with hundreds of rogue passerby planets!
Napkin math: Earth orbits at ~30 km/s, escape velocity is ~42 km/s. So to get Earth to leave the solar system (the inverse of capturing a planet under the most optimal circumstance), you would need to give it 12 km/s. Earth is ~6 * 10^24 kg, so that represents ~4.3 * 10^32 joules. The sun gives out around 3.8 * 10^26 joules per second (i.e. watts).
So with perfect efficiency, working just from conservation of energy, this would require around 13 days of the entire energy output of the sun. Or around a trillion years at Earth's current energy consumption.
Yeah, nothing complicated for an advanced Dyson swarm - getting the energy there and propelant (unless you somehow acquired a reactionless drive) would be the main problems.
Aside from the logistics and energy requirements of controlling the trajectory of something that weighs 10^24 kg, I wouldnt trust anyone alive on earth to be able to work out a stable orbit that wouldnt impact the delicate existing balance of our solar system. Something that massive would change the orbits of earth, mars, venus, even jupiter to a certain extent, not to mention all the asteroids and comets. The current stable configuration of the solar system was surely a significant contributor to the evolution of life, and it probably just came about as a freak accident. No way I would vote to allow anyone to mess with it on this scale.
S10e came out year and a half ago! Unfortunate despite everyone complaining no one bought it and we didnt get s20e. Seriously that has been the best smart phone I've ever used or heard of and if mine dies I'm buying the exact same one.
I have an S10e. Coming from the 2016 iPhone SE I was looking for something a bit larger, but still reasonably small. It was a bit bigger than I would have liked, but I thought it would be fine. It's not. It's too big for me and I'm an adult male with relatively large hands. I'd be all over the 12 mini if it weren't for the price.
So s10e is still the biggest one of "high-end small phones" though it has the best screen ratio by far.
I do think mini might be just the right size! I hope this will prompt more small phones on the market!
- convenient timers on a complication: use this a few times a day
- an alarm which can wake me up without jarring my brain, this being the only alarm I've ever used where that's the case: five times a week
- 2048
- ability to set reminders by speaking to it
- heart rate tracker which actually works. I let my heart rate get below 130 between weight sets, and like to check my peak after a set as well. Also, it likes to alert me when I'm having one of my infrequent panic attacks. You'd think I'd notice anyway, but, not always
- unlocks my computer when I'm wearing it. This is a tiny affordance but really a nice one
- pay for groceries without bringing my phone or wallet out. Do I have to? No. Do I like to? Yeah, I'll cop to that. It's nice
- take the occasional call when my phone is in another room or I don't want to dig it out. Works long enough to say "hey I'll call you back", which is usually about all I want to say
- remind me what the date is, because I'm terrible at that. Granted that my automatic watches would do that too
- when I'm feeling nostalgic, load up a watch face that shows me pictures of times when I was happy, and people I love
- pause and play music/podcasts/whatever
I'm sure I'm missing a few, but I'll also say this: it's way less fashionable than my automatics. It's actually kinda dorky when you get right down to it.
But it's so much more functional that I just don't care, I've made my peace with it.
Someday, I'll get to leave the house again and do fancy things, and I have a couple timepieces for those occasions. But in the meantime, and the rest of the time, it's a smartwatch for me.
A cute one: when using CarPlay for driving directions, AW taps your wrist when it’s time to make a turn. And the tap pattern is distinct for left and right.
> an alarm which can wake me up without jarring my brain
Which watch do you use? Sadly it seems Apple are the only ones not messing this up, as the other watches I tried alarms on, while effective in waking me up quietly, made me feel like my hand was going to fall of for the whole day.
The haptics in general are one of the best things about it. The only other smartwatch I've had to compare it to is the Withings Steel, which is just a very different beast.
No matter what you do, a smart watch will always look worse than a regular watch without seriously crippling the watches features. If you want something that looks nice then get a normal watch. The core feature of a smart watch is fitness tracking. I love using mine for going on a run and seeing my heart rate as well as switching music. And then if I stop at a cafe I can use it to pay. All without bringing any phone or wallet with me.
I'm sure it's not a coincidence that one of the biggest western social media apps - Instagram - launched a direct clone of tiktok. So far IG reels are dead but if TikTok gets banned there's an undeniable benefit for IG, right?
> I have no problem at all with Bezos being worth $200 billion
Really? You have no problem one person owning so much money? That's around 30$ for _every_ person on the planet, can you even wrap your head around that? There's no reason why a single person should ever own this sort of wealth, none at all.
> Microsoft is just selling unopinionated software to all businesses in the world
You have to be satirical right? Microsoft is notorious for lobbying everything to this day. Browser monopolies, OS monopolies, they pretty much invented EEE, made whole cities switch to their OS and the whole xbox platform is very political regarding software, gambling and IP politics.
