I will say this, I love my M5 Air and it doesn’t have An Apple Account. Like, at all. Nor did my last M2. Apple allows me more desktop privacy than Ms or Google will, and I don’t have to gut the OS. I’m not motivated to because they make the horsepower available to me.

Every other machine is running some debian/Ubuntu variant today, principally. I got tired of the cat-and-mouse and all of the uosells under the hood of MS, and I just can’t trust Google in this era.

You know I thought about that as I was commenting, and also kind of rolled the dice on someone calling it out. And ancient Apple equipment are built like tanks.

But I remember running Minecraft Beta on an ancient iMac G5, and it was too choppy even back in the day. I can’t imagine you being pleasant on one in the modern era.

So I think looking back, I would put a hard limit at only putting machines in service that were manufactured at or after 2012 or so. Get a cute Haswell Mac Mini and call it a day.

If you insisted on vintage Apple hardware older than that, I would recommend getting the system and throwing a Raspberry Pi in there instead. I really wish the G4 lamp Macs would make a come back.

Linux is great for any of the Intel series max, but apple silicone is so new that they’ve barely cracked the surface of M3 full capabilities with any Linux distro.

Wait, is it Fox Disney, or Fox News?

I thought NewsCorp/Murdoch doesn’t have ownership of MOST of Fox anymore, just Business, Sports, and News.

Most cannot afford to build their own and are at the mercy of ODM/MFG capacity.

Most cannot afford to command a large volume order of units, so they cannot get any discount on the prosu tioj cost and the sticker price of building their supply chain and distribution.

And nobody can get discounts on RAM. Not Valve. Not Apple.

The thing is, if we just keep writing the existing Supply of used Hardware from the evil empire company in 3 years time who do you think will still be available to spin up a project like this?

Doing the right thing is going to cost a premium AND if you don’t do it soon the option may be off the table permanently.

Samsung owner, checking in, so I absolutely get the appeal of having one device that serves as a traveling workstation and mobile comms platform.

I do miss headphone jacks, but I’ve got a grip of 99 cent USB to stereo adapters if I really care about it, and I’ve got almost exclusively Bluetooth headsets anyways.

Thunderbolt is glorious, but you also can accomplish all the things you mentioned with USB 3.x and I’ve accomplished most of them with Samsung Dex and a USB Dock.

Thunderbolt was developed in Partnership between Intel and Apple, and Intel largely holds the keys for it, and opened the spec for TB 3/4 to be available rolled into USB 4 devices and beyond, many years ago, so Thunderbolt licensing is rarely needed.

I have literally one dock and one Apple computer which even support Thunderbolt 5, and I can’t really do anything that needs to saturate its bandwidth in production. Generally speaking, 40gbps is enough today for anything I would need to do on my phone docked as a workstation except for larger LLM’s, or maybe video production or CAD design, which are likely want the full fat horsepower of any of the computers available to me instead.

But I really freaking want though out of my phone, is for it to not be locked down to one of two spyware ecosystems, and for it to be small enough that I can comfortably use it with one hand. I have bought the smallest Samsung Galaxy S phone available to me every year since around 2015 and I’m quietly resentful about it that I’m forced to carry around a phablet. Every time I picked up my old iPhone 4S from a drawer and dusted It Off I would charge it up and turn it on and be dismayed at the state of the software and SOC, but it’s form factor and elegance is what I want, just in something more open.

One key point you need to understand regardless of where all of the jumble of Technology goes next, affordability is out the window, and it’s not the upstart phone vendors fault that they can’t command millions and millions of orders to get manufacturing discounts. Any phone that is better for you and me to carry is going to cost a pretty premium and we’re basically funding the R&D with the first Generations we buy. That is pretty much unavoidable in this era.

So we slavishly keep buying pixels and galaxies and iPhones.

1. You don’t have to be on a list for ICE to predate. Most of the children weren’t on lists. Most of the dead parents weren’t, either.
2. I don’t understand what your trust remarks have to do with predators, but the important thing is don’t trust LEO’s

That’s why he already said he’s teaching his kids about avoiding the cops. ICE and other LEO’s abduct people all the time, quite often extrajudiciously.

Non cop kidnappers arguably might do it less but are inarguably less successful at it than LEO’s.

Is the impression I’m in a minority and a lot of folks aren’t fans, but I’ve been absolutely satisfied with Tuta for email and calendaring, and with a private domain attached I have virtually unlimited email accounts. I choose to pay 36 Euros per year to that vendor, over the alternatives.

I get the impression this means per specific build of the game submitted to steam, not just the game.

Fun fact, early scripts for the original film had Humanity plugged in to share computational processing Power for the Machines, but the studios didn’t believe audiences could grasp that so it was changed to providing electricity.

Which is impossible, the whole feeding cycle for harvesting us as batteries would yield less power than just using the feed source for power.

Killing the entire species is absolutely less of a concern for investors than copyright violations.

They want to become another forever platform. The cosplay is a nonprofit, when in reality they are a for-profit company that has a non-profit org in their leadership.

I don’t think they can help but institify into a smaller version of Google at this point, and I don’t want anyone vendor to own my entire Tech stack. Never again.