Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

In theory, phones would be cheaper if they had longer shelf life.

Similarly, we don’t need new cars every year, but the beast must be fed, right? Right?!

We’re comparing it to gen 1 to emphasize how far it is from being competitive.

Not really new; this has been the case with all the Tensor chips. I kind of assumed Google was going to step up their game at some point, but I don’t think Samsung can produce chips on par with TSMC. Google is switching to TSMC for next year’s Tensor 5, so maybe we’ll see a big jump then.

That said, I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker. I’m running a Pixel 7 and it’s “fine”. The Pixel 6 had bad throttling/overheating problems, but the 7 and 8 are better. We’ll see what the Big Problem is with the 9 series. There’s always something.

Please, you need to be more specific. Android has half a dozen distinctly different share menus, and there are distinctly different reasons why each one is garbage.

Or about a quarter of a single Super Smash Bros fanfic.

That’s like 10-20 adult novels. Respect.

I explained why that data does not contradict what the previous commenter was trying to say.

Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we’re much slower than our prey anyway.

I don’t know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It’s not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men’s distribution curve is almost the same shape as women’s, just shifted up a few inches.

I don’t have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.

One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it’s really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.

I’ve read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I’ve read that women might have an advantage in running, though.

I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I have a different Boox product, the low-end Poke Lite (I think version 4?).

Pros:

• E-paper display is easy on the eyes
• Customizable backlight temperature and brightness
• Runs arbitrary Android apps
• Battery for days
• Can install open-source reading apps like Librera
• Still receiving software updates after a few years

Cons:

• Only runs Android 11
• Installing Google Play requires jumping through some weird hoops, because it’s not Google certified. I recommend using F-Droid instead, or using a throwaway google account to avoid this security liability.
• Built-in apps kind of suck in general
• Home screen strongly pushes their own ecosystem, shoving regular Android apps into a different section
• Most apps look like ass on a B&W display
• Most apps look like ass on a 4:3 display (not applicable to the Palma)
• The various display refresh modes are unintuitive

The newer models, from what I understand, use faster-refreshing display tech, and some even support color.

This is why I refuse to buy e-books with DRM. Amazon should have no say in how, where, or when I read my books.

ebooks.com has a searchable DRM-free section, so that’s my go-to: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free

For anything not available without DRM, I will pirate it without a second thought.

My first thought was “that’s insane”, but when you put it that way, it seems less insane than driving a car.

Normalize golf carts! I guess?! 🤷

Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don’t know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.

Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.

I’ve never been in such a situation, so I’m genuinely curious how this plays out. Can they really say this after all the paperwork has been signed? Isn’t this something they should have checked before selling him the car or approving the loan? Is this actually his problem or is he getting bullied by the lender?

Most of Apple’s history, actually.

Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That’s reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you’re into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple’s specs as closely as possible, you’d find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from “okay” to “so bad it feels like a personal insult”), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple’s own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let’s say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

As for the “does more”, well, that’s debatable. Considering this is using Apple’s 90s logo, I think it’s pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its “beleaguered” period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don’t think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn’t boil down to “we’re used to it” or “we’re locked in”.

We’ve always safeguarded your data with an integrated stack of world-class secure infrastructure and technology, delivering end-to-end protection in a way that only Google can

This is weaselly even by marketing standards. Most of Google’s services are still not end-to-end encrypted, and none of them were until recently. Oh, but they said “end-to-end protection”, which means absolutely nothing, so I guess it’s not technically a bald-faced lie.

Anyway, aside from their attempt to rewrite history, it sounds a lot like Apple’s promise with their secure and verifiable AI servers. Google’s blog post references Project Oak, which I’m not intimately familiar with.

I’m still skeptical of these supposedly-private cloud platforms, but I have a lot of reading to do if I want to develop an informed opinion.

How bizarre.

In America, all things are about profit.

Something to that, for sure. The only problem is if the choices are overwhelming. People like choice when it’s immediately comprehensible and meaningful, and hate it with a vengeance when it’s not. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Mastodon is already pretty good about this with the official app and nevertheless, the most common complaint I heard during the Twitter exodus was that signing up for Mastodon was too complicated. Lemmy is far worse in this regard. The closest thing to an “official” Lemmy app doesn’t even have “Lemmy” in the name, and doesn’t pop up on the first screen of results in Google Play.