They dumped all the debt on Asmodee and are IPOing it to transfer that to the public.

The RAM being on-die doesn't bother me. As long as you choose the right amount when you buy the machine, that's okay. I'm currently using an Intel iMac, one of the older models where you can replace the RAM, and a) I haven't ever needed to upgrade it, plus b) it's DDR3 RAM anyway and I can no longer find any at the same speed anyway. Just out of interest, I'm running 32GB RAM and the machine typically uses 18GB for my use cases, maybe more if I'm doing video encoding. On the Apple Silicon Macs the RAM doubles as VRAM so you really want as much as you can afford. 8GB is probably okay for web browsing but if you wanted to play pretty much any game, trying to share 8GB between system memory and graphics is going to be a struggle. The SSDs are way overpriced though, but happily you can just run cheap NVMe via a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure.

I'm using a Mac right now and I'm able to buy software from other stores such as Steam, Itch, Humble, etc. There's even an open source Mac package manager. iPhone, sure, that's a walled garden.

If getting the time and date right is crucial to your business (and I imagine that's most businesses) AND you have to run Windows, use a time server. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

[quote]I figure the answer is "because concerts are frequently massive". If you go to a small venue that seats 5 to 10 thousand people, you won't need earplugs. If you go to a stadium venue and get cheap seats in the back half, you won't need earplugs. It's when you go to a stadium venue and sit close to the stage, where all the speaker stacks are that you're in danger of hearing-damage.[/quote] I go to concerts frequently, and I think the reason they are loud is just to drown out people talking. My experience is that smaller venues are louder, because there's nowhere for the sound to go, and also because the whole PA tends to be one or two speakers. With a really large venue you get speakers spaced out above the audience so there isn't the need for that super loud volume. Yesterday I went to a 30 capacity venue and had to wear earplugs.

Oh yah, I had one of those! I think if you wanted to do that today it's easy enough. The current batch of iMacs have an HDMI output, and there are a number of options for big chunky UI and for bluetooth remotes / gamepads.

I wouldn't use it on a prod server yet -- it's an alpha. If you just want to get a cheap M1 Macbook Air and play around though, it's ready for that.

Apple's long term plan has always been to have all their products running on the same stack. Top end iPads now run on M series chips, for example, so iPhones can't be too far away from running on a low end M chip (say a hypothetical M4 Lite). I imagine after a few more macOS iterations we'll have all Apple products running on the same OS, which will be fantastic. For example, the Apple TV could just be macOS running in a kiosk mode, with access to all the desktop Mac apps and iPad apps. It would make a great system for emulated games.

Check out Asahi if you want to run Linux on an M series Mac: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fasahilinux.org%2F

Australian banks use Osko which is a free service that has similar capabilities to cheques, Venmo, Paypal, etc. Basically if you know someone's phone number you can do an instant bank transfer to them (as in, sub 5 seconds from your account to their account), regardless of which bank they use. Banking in the US is pretty primitive compared to the rest of the world.

Apple completely dropped 32-bit support in 2019 and people got over it. You might be thinking 'well Apple has a small market share anyway', but they did the same thing on iOS in 2017 (the 'appocalypse') and there wasn't a mass exodus to Android. I think if Intel did this, developers would pretty quickly follow and they'd end up with an advantage over AMD a few years down the track.

This is what the Apple neural engine cores in their M1 / M2 SoCs are aiming at. It's early days yet but it's the right track for this sort of consumer ML. You can imagine a future Mac Pro or high end Mac Studio starting to play in this space.

Ahh, so the idea is that everyone who was in the market for a new PC bought one during the lockdowns and the market is saturated. I would guess inflation is hitting them too.

The HI-SEAS habitat was menaced by lava in December when Mauna Loa erupted, so they may be reluctant to use it again.

Came here to say this. I think they've also had to drop the prices a bit though to shift units, so he might be copping the blame for that.