I’m actually laughing over here, that was pretty good.

Dude the last thing I needed for my “talking to an idiot online” bingo card was “(ignores point) aPpLe fAnBoY”

Two professional 27" 4k dell monitors cost ~$800 combined. You overpaid like a mf if you spend $2000 on a monitor.

Sorry, but you don’t understand the needs of the market that we’re talking about if you think that a pair of ~$400 dell monitors is equivalent to a high-end display. The difference between $800 and $2500 amounts to a few days’ worth of production for my workstation, which is very easily worth the huge difference in color accuracy, screen real estate, and not having a bezel run down the middle of your workspace over the 3-5 years that it’s used.

blah blah blah

I already said that I’m talking about the Vision Pro as a first step in the direction of a fully-realized AR workstation. As it currently stands, it’s got some really cool tech that’s going to be a lot of fun for the guinea pig early adopters that fund the development of the tech I’m personally interested in.

What purpose does a MacBook serve that an office from the 1980’s wasn’t equipped to handle?

AR devices in an office serve the same purpose as existing tools, but there are ways that they can improve efficiency, which is all the justification office tech needs. Shit, my monitor costs 2/3 the price of the Vision Pro, and an ideal piece of AR hardware would be immeasurably better. Meetings in virtual space would negate how much meetings suck remotely. Having unlimited screen real estate would make a huge difference in my line of work. Also, being able to use any area in my home or out of it with as much screen real estate as I want would be huge.

I’m not saying that the Vision Pro does all of those things, but it does some of them, and I’m 100% okay with it being the thing that introduces the benefit of AR to those without imagination.

I use windows for ~10 hours per day, 5 or 6 days per week because my team is currently maintaining a legacy .NET framework codebase. I’m sure there are people on earth who use windows more than I do, but I think it’s extremely unlikely that you’re one of them.

Sure.

MacOS is an excellent workspace operating system, largely due to its near-POSIX compliance and the fact that it has access to the enormous body of tools developed for UNIX-like OSs. For development work in particular, it can use the same free and open source software, configured in the same way, that Linux uses. Aside from the DE, a developer could swap between Linux and MacOS and barely realize it. Everything from Node, to Clang, to openJDK, to Rust, along with endless ecosystems of tooling, is installable in a consistent way that matches the bulk of online documentation. This is largely in contrast to Windows, where every piece of the puzzle will have a number of gotchas and footguns, especially when dealing with having multiple environments installed.

From a design perspective, MacOS is opinionated, but feels like it’s put together by experts in UX. Its high usability is at least partially due to its simplicity and consistency, which in my opinion are hallmarks of well-designed software. MacOS also provides enough access through the Accessibility API to largely rebuild the WM, so those who don’t like the defaults have options.

The most frequent complaint that I hear about MacOS is that x feature doesn’t work like it does in windows, even though the way that x feature works in windows is steaming hot garbage. Someone who’s used to Windows would probably need a few hours/days to become as fluent with MacOS, depending on their computer literacy.

People also complain about the fact that MacOS leverages a lot of FOSS software, while keeping their software closed-source and proprietary. I agree with this criticism, but I don’t think it has anything to do with how usable MacOS is.

I’m not going to start a flame war about mobile OSs because I don’t use a mobile OS as my primary productivity device (and neither should you, but I’m not your mom). The differences between mobile OSs are much smaller, and are virtually all subjective.

You’re welcome.

Having the highest market share doesn’t mean that windows uses logical conventions, it just means that lots of people are accustomed to the conventions that it uses. The vast majority of professionals that I’ve interacted with strongly dislike having to work on a windows machine once they’ve been exposed to anything else.

Off of the top of my head, the illogical conventions that Windows uses are: storing application and OS settings together in an opaque and dangerous, globally-editable database (the registry), obfuscating the way that disks are mounted to the file system, using /cr/lf for new lines, using a backslash for directory mappings, not having anything close to a POSIX compatible scripting language, the stranglehold that “wizards” have on the OS at every level, etc. ad nausium. Most of these issues are due to Microsoft deciding to reinvent the wheel instead of conforming to existing conventions. Some of the differences are only annoying because they pick the exact opposite convention that everyone else uses (path separators, line endings), and some of them are annoying because they’re an objectively worse solution than what exists everywhere else (the registry, installation/uninstallation via wizards spawned by a settings menu).

For basic usability functions, see the lack of functional multi-desktop support 20 years after it became mainstream elsewhere. There is actually no way to switch one monitor to a 2nd workspace without switching every monitor, which makes the feature worse than useless for any serious work. In addition to that, window management in general is completely barebones. Multitasking requires you to either click on icons every time you want to switch a window, or cycle through all of your open windows with alt-tab. The file manager is kludgy and full of opinionated defaults that mysteriously only serve to make it worse at just showing files. The stock terminal emulator is something out of 1995, the new one that can be optionally enabled as a feature is better, but it still exposes a pair of painful options for shells. With WSL, the windows terminal suddenly becomes pretty useful, but having to use a Linux abstraction layer just serves to support the point that windows sucks.

I could go on and on all day, I’m a SWE with a decade of experience using Linux, 3 decades using Windows, and a few years on Mac here and there. I love my windows machine at home… as a gaming console. Having to do serious work in windows is agonizing.

Of the three major desktop operating systems, windows is by far the worst.

The only advantage windows has is that Microsoft’s monopolistic practices in the 90s and 00s made it the de-facto OS for business to furnish employees with, which resulted in it still having better 3rd party software support than the alternatives.

As an OS, it’s hard to use, doesn’t follow logical convention’s, is super opinionated about how users should interact with it, and is missing basic usability features that have been in every other modern OS for 10+ years. It’s awesome as a video game console, barely useable as an adobe or autodesk machine, but sucks as a general purpose OS.

It’s been super clearly demonstrated that you have to have thumbnails like that for your videos to be successful on YouTube.

You can be annoyed by it, and in fact, a ton of creators hate it. But it’s really not the creators’ fault that they have to do this.

I’m just like this too, but you have to remember that for every person like us, there’s a person like my wife, who’s buying garbage that she sees on instagram ads nearly every week.

I beg her to at least search for the item and buy it directly so that the website she’s on isn’t getting revenue for ads. It’s petty but makes me feel better.

Yeah and if you really want it to be accessible from WAN, just forward port 80 on your router to the phone.

If you’re sticking an old device into a closet stuck to a charger, a phone is like the worst thing for that. Heck, even an old laptop running Linux would probably allow you to charge it, have an external HDD, and Ethernet at the same time, which already puts it miles ahead of a phone.

Android is open source, so if you really want to do this with an old device, you can build yourself a custom rom and do so. But there is no way that it’s a good play for Google to spend engineering time and resources to build something that is at best a poor replacement for countless existing solutions.

What are you talking about? GitHub pages is just one example of a web page host that’s free for everyone, super fast and reliable.

Even if you need to host something that has a backend, there are free options with significantly fewer downsides than hosting on your phone.

Cloud servers may be a bad solution for things like pinhole, but your phone would be dead in four hours if you were forcing it to stay awake to respond to every DNS request on your network.

If you’re talking about using your phone as a stationary server that you leave plugged in, isn’t that just an extremely overpriced raspberry pi with no free IO ports?

It’s an interesting idea, but it’s just so much worse than any other option that I can’t imagine anyone seriously wanting to do it.

That is false.

Cops aren’t investigating misdemeanor thefts for the same reason that they don’t investigate anything that they’re not forced to. They don’t care.

It’s funny that you blame prop 47 for the fact that cops are refusing to enforce prop 47.

Are you mixed up? Prop 47 reduces jail time for nonviolent and non serious drug and property crimes.

Seems pretty disingenuous to represent that as preventing the police from doing their jobs. Unless you honestly think cops’ job is to maximize the amount of time that drug addicts spend in jail.

Which CA ballot initiative are you talking about stops the police from doing their work?

Sorry but it’s very uncommon for the people who are making a place into somewhere that the underprivileged hate to be the same people that are moving to other places.

If you’ve got the power to drive up housing prices in the state that you currently live in, you’re not going to be in the group that’s moving across the country to have a shot at being successful.

Of course when people can’t earn enough to be successful in CA and move to CO for a better life, the uncreased housing demand in CO is going to bring prices up a bit. But those people aren’t the ones who made CA so expensive. In fact, they’re actively making it less expensive by leaving the state.

Those are great examples of why I, as a progressive Californian, am often really frustrated by California’s laws.

California is very liberal, but we are also very wealthy. So we get a lot of policies that seem to tick liberal boxes on the surface, but do so in a way that is heavily protective of the interests of the wealthy. We get plenty of laws outlawing plastic straws and bags, but nothing to discourage property investors from making it impossible for families to own a home.

I love my state and I’m really happy here, but I also make enough money to be comfortable here. It’s sad that even someone earning the median wage is effectively locked out of the housing market, and is likely forced to live with roommates.

Also, the gun laws are largely performative garbage. So many things on the books that only serve to be a stick in the eye to people who want to lawfully and safely own firearms. Making it a legal requirement for me to configure my AR 15 in a way that makes it awkward to use doesn’t do anything at all to prevent someone from taking an allan key to theirs and spending 30 seconds to make it an “assault weapon”. I’m all for gun laws that make the world a safer place (for example, mandatory free safety classes and free registration for handgun), so it’s super frustrating to see all of the laws that we have that don’t even seem like they’re intended to make an actual difference.

This is a really good point, and I’m glad that someone who’s got a decent understanding of basic economics is replying to me.

The 95% profit margin was definitely to make a point, as you pointed out. And as you said, according to conventional thinking on capitalism, market forces should push that down to a fair equilibrium.

I think that the issue I was hinting at is that there is a fair amount of contemporary thinking that provides pretty convincing arguments that the nature of capitalism necessarily tends towards consolidation and monopoly over time. The classical model of a baker charging too much on an island, so someone else opens a bakery, doesn’t really work too well when we’re talking about telecom companies and media conglomerates. Once a high-tech segment has consolidated enough, it becomes impossible for anyone other than large companies to enter the market. And when those large companies are actually owned by a larger parent company, we start to see the failures of the classical market forces to produce a ‘fair’ equilibrium due to monopolization.

We definitely aren’t at the point of total failure yet, but in my opinion the trend line isn’t hard to spot. And I think the bigger issue is that due to regulatory capture, there’s not much we can do to patch the sinking ship.

Of course the market forces that are naturally present in a purely capitalist economy require there to be workers and employers.

In the scenario that you described, are you suggesting that instead of 10,000 people working at TSMC, we’d have 10,000 semiconductor factories that are built, operated, maintained, cleaned, and supplied by 10,000 individual people?

We can use an even simpler scenario. I believe that you’re suggesting that instead of the way that the food service sector currently works, it would instead be possible under capitalism for all food-service workers to individually sell served food to customers, presumably from their own kitchens.

In that scenario, what happens when Bob McDonald offers 10 of his friends to come work in his kitchen for an hourly wage, and they’re able to produce better food (due to specialization) for a lower price (due to lower overhead per worker)? Bob (and the countless other people who will undoubtedly copy his success) will outcompete the slower, more expensive kitchens. Individually owned and operated kitchens will be driven out of business. Then small, 10-person kitchens will start to struggle against larger kitchens and chain kitchens that have been able to spread the costs over multiple locations.

Before long, it will be impossible for a Sally Jones to open and run her own kitchen alone. In order to just break even, Sally’s prices would be significantly higher than the food sold at Bob McDonald’s chain. The cost of her premises will be higher relative to the amount of food she can produce on her own, the cost of the ingredients themselves will be higher because of bulk purchase prices vs retail, the cost of preparing the food will be higher because she doesn’t have access to an industrial onion chopper that can peel and chop a 50lb bag of onions in 30 seconds.

Market forces make it impossible for an individual to compete, due to the economies of scale. This is the same reason that over time, corporations under capitalism merge and restructure as they tend toward a monopoly.

I might be totally misunderstanding what you’re suggesting. If what you meant was that instead of the 10,000 TSMC workers each having their own chip foundries, that they’d all still work at the same factory, but that they’d have collectively funded and built the factory, and that they each individually work for themselves at the factory and share in the money they get from selling chips, then I’d agree that that’s an awesome system. It’s still not really possible under capitalism, because if that’s what you’re describing, it is actually called socialism.