Of the big three I would say that Apple is the lesser of three evils.

David Graeber might have something to contribute to this subject.

We could call it the Intel Principle. ;)

To be pedantic, value is in the eye of the beholder. Cost is how much goes into something, Price is how much someone wants to pay, Value… that is much more subjective.

Oil costs $50 a barrel to pump, priced at $100 on the market but when it comes to value could be seen as providing $20,000 of human labor.

Not trying to defend AI junk, like seriously people, just do the work yourself. But value is such a hard thing to quantify.

About the only time I have been like ‘Yeah alright, I get it’ is if you have a sort of writers block. Get a rough draft spat out but then bounce of that, but do not rely on LLM junk for anything more than that.

Five figure!? That’s a bargain. many are going well into six figure territory nowadays.

Have said it for ages, it is End to end encryption, the question is if they are the end or you are? Is it Your end to Apple, Apple to them? Plausible but hard to verify.

For all the problems of Steve jobs, he at least kept the company fairly honest in this sense. But the instant he died, Tim cook immediately rush ed to install PRISM backdoors into all their systems while still carrying the image of privacy.

To answer what other have missed, if you run Linux then that will fix this.

I had always wondered why so many people have had compatibility issues with Linux systems, that was until I realized that because I am basically a computer scrap-man, I almost always a decade behind and everything had been long hardened by then.

I will not post a link to it for privacy reasons, but I wrote an article on this the day before the original M1 was announced warning of this situation. Apples move to their own chipset meant that any attempts at maintaining compatibility would always end up behind the curve.

I am surprised that Apple manage to keep their chips constantly changing as much as they do between generations. Most others seem to be on the ‘same but more’ path nowadays but Apple is still shifting the baseline almost yearly.

The real issue will come if they lock down the boot loader.

Ram man Sam should fall into a Dam.

To be fair to the 1980’s, a Hercules video card in 1982 adjusted for inflation would only be about $1700. We are way beyond that point.

An original Macintosh 128K would set you back $8100 in today’s money, so I guess in that regard Apple hasn’t changed. ;)

At least the Macbook Neo comes with a lot more flashy stuff.

It is starting to feel like it. Might not see price decline for a while yet, but the upswing on pricing is nearing breaking point.

I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.

I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on pricing but was blown away the other day. The Nvidia RTX 5090 launched at $4090 here in Australia, that was already obscene. Nowadays almost 2 years later, you are lucky if you find one under $12,000!

For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex’s could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.

But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.

Debian the foundation of the modern world. Or at least we wish it was.

A situations like this makes me use a form of Malapropism one would expect of a Dickensian society to bring about almost Orwellian situation. Makes you wonder when someone will use Chekhov’s Gun before it all gets Bowdlerized. Alas this Machiavellian paragraph is reminiscent of a Lovecraftian creature.

But seriously, that paragraph above reads like the scene in Blackadder when they meet the writer of the Dictionary.