I mean, there really isn’t for the majority. Fame and fortune are fleeting; fame has a short half life (hence the phrase “15 minutes” of it) and fortunes can be lost as quickly as they’re made (80% of NFL players face financial distress after retirement). Not to mention that for every pro athlete there’s at least 100 that don’t make the cut.
The same is true in every field to varying degrees. For the average individual who can provide for themselves and their families, more money and fame only sounds good on paper. In reality, it invites more stress than anything else.
And that’s only a subset of the engineering failures with MacBooks. You even bring it up in your post: the only reason they have “dead silence” is because Apple is literally baking your laptop and leaving you to pay the bill.
I’ll give Apple that their custom chips are pretty great for power and efficiency, but their actual product design is bad. I mean, who designs a laptop with the fan pointing the wrong way?[0] Or a power bus alongside a data bus?[1] These are literally basic errors that go into production for a company that is far too big for this to be happening.
They’re not. The MacBook Air can easily thermal throttle under any sustained load because they went with a fanless design. It may work for casual usage, but it also negates at least half of your claims.
Screen cracking was ~4 years ago for M1 laptops, which also included Apple making screen repairs far more difficult, exacerbating the problems they’re currently being sued over.
They did separate NAND from the rest of the board in recent models, but NAND on the board was only a problem because A) bad engineering & B) greed. Thay’s not even getting into MacOS overwriting to NAND and wearing it out.
“Engineering is hard” is not an excuse for a company that’s worth $4 trillion. With flexgate they cheaped out on shorter flex cables. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flex cables knows that’s a recipe for disaster. And while Flexgate itself is an older case, it’s a clear example of their profits-at-all-costs approach.
For that ~$900 M1 Macbook Air, you’d get:
- an old laptop, nearing its end-of-life, with:
- a fragile, expensive-to-repair screen, plus:
- thermal throttling on any decent load
All for $1,000, which by the way is not “low-cost”. That same $1,000 can buy you far better machines. Genuinely, it doesn’t fit any realistic use case. Casual users? A Chromebook or cheaper Windows laptop suffices. Productivity? It can’t sustain loads, so heavy workloads are out of the picture (and can be handled more effectively by newer hardware). Its only clear benefit is the battery life, but that’s not enough to spend $900 on a 5yo laptop with known issues.
M1 macbooks are known to have fragile screens, there are multiple class action lawsuits over it. Just because you, anecdotally, have not had issues does not mean they don’t exist.
And the average Joe is far better off with a newer laptop with the same performance for 1/3rd the price. The M1 Air will be out of updates in 2 years, requiring whoever’s listening to your advice to either suffer with an insecure laptop or to spend another grand or more on a new laptop.
Apple has no unique benefits for the average person, and in fact a Chromebook fulfills the average user’s needs perfectly fine.
> Consider the number of m1 laptops manufactured and then the number of claims.
Consider the fact that most consumers wouldn‘t file a claim even if they were eligible—the FTC finds that only about 5-10% of affected consumers actually participate in class actions. And considering there‘s multiple class actions over different models of the laptops, that signifies a decent chunk of users.
> Regarding, the “fragile screens” — find me one that ended at least with a settlement and not dismissed.
People really believe this. And also if you mention other disabilities that affect a similar ratio to the one they care about, ie 0.16% of people, they'll say it's too expensive and doesn't affect enough people. Like what if I want this content to be consumable by people who have such heavy learning disabilities that the whole content would need to be 20x as long and explained much more step by step?
They were uploading these for free. The end result of the videos being taken down is that they are now even more inaccessible to that 4% than they were before.
Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.
It’s not even really a problem of the Internet necessarily; it’s rather a symptom of the growing political divide in Western society. Things are “simple” now because we’ve reached the point where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you can be jailed for going against the Accepted Opinions™, and we’re seeing a rise in politically motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to emotionally backed rhetoric like we’ve seen with the Turtle Island terrorists; you can’t debate ethics with someone who wants you dead.
By their own words they were going to commit terrorism. That, logically, makes them terrorists. They were found, on film, to be making and experimenting with illegal explosives, and they were found to own even more materials. If you have trustworthy evidence that this is all fabrication—evidence that doesn’t exist in your mind—then I’d be more than happy to see it.
And if you’re saying all of this because you agree with them and their actions, at least have the courage to state you support terrorism directly.
Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery.
She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.
The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.
Protip: If you call it an investment, it becomes not only respectable but it is in fact the responsible thing to do for your customer's financial security.
Legally? No. However, due to their alteration of search results anything that becomes the top is effectively an endorsement regardless of whether it was chosen by the black box or their employees. They already remove legally operating websites they disagree with. Since they’re selective editors with multiple lost antitrust suits, the only thing we as consumers can do is criticize. Especially as most of these companies top the charts due to SEO spam and not genuine traffic.
Google is my third choice for searches. I try Ecosia first, but their indexing is garbage so I typically then go to Brave. If Brave doesn’t have it then I submit to the evil overlords at Google. Thankfully Brave indexing is pretty good so it‘s had a measurable impact on the amount of search I actually put through Google.
It‘s also hard to respect a format whose main value-add is quantity over quality, but that‘s Netflix‘s strategy. And will continue to be Netflix‘s strategy if they get WB.
If the award is already being given based on perceived quality, that would be handled by the existing rules. Low quality movies don't tend to win Oscars in the first place so that's hardly an argument for changing the rules to preclude Netflix releases.
The same is true in every field to varying degrees. For the average individual who can provide for themselves and their families, more money and fame only sounds good on paper. In reality, it invites more stress than anything else.
Veritasium made an excellent video on that: https://www.veritasium.com/videos/2024/1/15/what-the-longest...