Let me wax poetics here. Apple has been chasing the dream of the portable computer for so long, and has been at the forefront of the ultimate form factor of the personal computer, the laptop, since the early 90s. It's not surprising to me that the company that made an OS for everything, and a project to make an OS for everything, cannot figure out a reliable way to bring us a bicycle for the mind where you just close the lid.
Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.
It's ridiculous to claim high and mighty that a chip that's not out yet is competitive. The only real way to test a laptop chip is in a laptop with the thermal choices made by the laptop maker. Hell, the M5 has been mostly benchmarked on the Macbook Pro, and that has a fan! The M5 is not going to be as impressive in the Air.
It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.
Unfortunately, Apple is not one to revisit their previous decisions very often. With the move to Apple Silicon, the capabilities of the bootloader were locked in (chain-of-trust, ability to load other OS and keep chain-of-trust on macOS) and that was it. Apple is telling you what they support; there's never any damning secret with them. You want to run Linux? Run it in a VM on macOS. That's what marketing has been saying since day one of the M1.
I don't mind using Apple's native Hypervisor framework, it's better then QEMU (speed/overhead), but Apple has no support to passthrough USB ports. https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/3778
It's all related to things outside the CPU and GPU that made me choose a base model M5 Macbook Pro. I prefer the larger 14-inch screen for its 120hz capability and much better brightness and colour capability. I adore that there are USB-C ports on both sides for charging. The battery's bigger. That's about it.
They bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but we're not there yet.
Worse than that, they hold their value, so buying a used M1 mini is still a few hundred bucks, and saving $200-300 by purchasing a 5 generation older mini seems like a bad deal in comparison.
Someone came to be excited they got a "deal" on the newest Intel Mac Mini for hosting OpenClaw. 8GB model for $300. I kind of regret bursting their bubble by telling them you can walk over to Costco (nearest one at time of discussion was walking distance) and pay $550 for one with an M4 and 16GB of RAM.
Android is the OS for the rest of the world. The people who need a smartphone, but cannot in good conscience pay what Apple is asking. A phone for the poorest 10% of the planet. A phone for those who don’t really think about what phone they should have.
Put in that context, it is not strange at all that your specific need is not met. All those people with Android, they don’t use a calendar to manage their lives. Maybe work forces them to use a calendar but that’s it.
You're right, but if you're already thinking about spending $1.5k on a phone that's super locked down, you might as well get an iPhone. That's my point.
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
I don't disagree. I trimmed "religious and mythological memeplexes" down to avoid repetition. (Also worth considering: de-facto religious behaviors need not be supernatural or "mythological"; you can substitute your own examples of political ideologies that are difficult to distinguish from religions in practice.)
It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples).
To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't.
> Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill).
While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc.
No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them.
To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way".
I'm from the East Coast. I lived a bit in Vancouver. The bus is the place to be. Everybody from all walks of life is on the bus.
I went to Seattle for one weekend and experienced the sad view of only the poorest people taking the bus. It was enlightening and changed my outlook on life.
Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.
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