macOS’s compatibility degradation is already an issue
I find it very hard to believe that apple will cut prices, especially if they have a clear performance lead.
i’m still surprised they put an a13 in a £350 phone
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They learned their lesson with the iPhone 5C that if they make a mediocre phone, people won’t buy it just based on the Apple brand
with the exception of the 5C, they’ve never staggered their ARM CPUs across the lineup; even when they use insultingly little storage, the new phone always gets the new CPU
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this part I get, because it’s just scale. probably cheaper for them to dump an A13 in the SE than to fire production back up on a chip they aren’t selling anymore. what I don’t really get is why the A13 exists at all to begin with. apple is cheap as fuck and they love their margins. they give you no storage on anything because that extra storage might cost them $5 and they can just sell it for a $200 premium to a third of their customers, so that’s what they do. but then they turn around and put all this R&D and production costs into making a new more powerful chip every year that literally zero percent of iphone users need and a trivial amount of iphone users care about. if they just, like, update the chip every two or three years instead, who would care? things are a little different now that they’re dumping versions of these chips in macs, and I can only assume that’s one of the primary reason they’re making that transition to begin with, but they’ve been pumping these irrelevant performance gains in iphone chips for 5 years now
web developers will eventually figure out how to shit on all performance gains
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Experimenting with turning off g-sync and turning on black frame insertion/low motion blur mode. Definitely better motion resolution despite dropping from 144hz to 120hz. Apparently only ASUS makes monitors that allow VRR and BFI at the same time. (Also apparently this Dell has held about 2/3 of its value over four years which strikes me as odd.)
The 240hz/1440p field is really small and full of caveats still, though I’d like to try one. The 360hz/1080p field seems like overkill unless you’re getting paid by the frame.
My company’s IT logistics remain overwhelmed by the Covid situation and they’re locking down supported categories of BYOD even harder so I remain stuck with a dual-core 2016 butterfly-keyboard MBP even as my need for a heavy-duty laptop has increased more than ever. I was expecting the logistics problems to clear out in a few months so I could get one of them sweet 16" MBPs, but it seems they don’t perceive slowed-down hardware refreshes as being a crisis enough to hire more IT staff or anything, and they’re still only replacing broken or comically ancient laptops. I even wonder if I’d be happier if I still had my 2012 15" MBP right now, but that was kind of a forced “upgrade” because it was starting to kernel panic alarmingly often.
One of the reasons I’m curious about the whole ARM Macbook thing is because I wonder whether or not this delay will have a silver lining.
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I am absolutely terrified of my 3570k / Z77 situation going south before I plan to replace it because any of the components failing basically means like $1200 of stuff minimum I need to buy for a replacement to feel worthwhile
Luckily the most my 2018 MBP needs is an occasional compressed air attack to the keys, and thanks to apple’s disaster engineering, it gets a free new battery every time I’m willing to part with it for a couple days because the keyboard is perpetually eligible for replacement
my wife has a 2013 Macbook Air of Theseus, the storage, logic board, and battery have all been replaced (up to like the highest-end possible haswell configuration), and she’s pretty pumped for ARM. It really is wild how much IT policy assumes that computers will meet a certain baseline of reliability and how much Apple was able to undermine that.
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dril candles but for nvme storage?
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I mean, maybe I’ll be able to get an aftermarket 5900x in a few months, but I’d really rather wait for DDR5…
and I sure hope these bitcoin psychos are right about the USD being on its way down
IMO the US govt is not even close to spending enough money to cause USD inflation in these short-term deflationary and long-term slow-population-growth conditions, and it’s hard to imagine oil prices (and therefore CAD) ever recovering given the clean energy bonanza, so you might be waiting a very long time.
Like not to say it absolutely cannot happen but delaying any plans in the hope of a dramatic currency swing is setting yourself up for frustration IMO
yeah, I know
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the dollar is already in a six month downtrend. idk if it’s likely to stick in the short/mid term, smarter people than me have lost a lot of money trying to figure that one out.
the AUD/CAD/NZD have gone nowhere though; it’s just real currencies like the EUR and JPY that have gone up. I would be extremely happy to get the chance to convert my savings at .85 at some point in the next couple years, but who knows!
mostly it’s annoying to pay a premium for patreon and such now that that’s such a common funding model for people I’d like to support; I have a trickle of USD still that I can use for that + travel + computer stuff, but I’m unreasonably anxious about it drying up.
I’m also in an irritating position wherein I’m actually relatively well paid for my industry and the amount of work I do even taking into account the exchange rate (which is 50% a psychological trap and 50% Actually What Things Cost given how much local industry has been devolved) because American archivist salaries are shit, but if I head back south I won’t be too happy with my compensation for the kind of work I do without having to change industries, and my cv is fairly academic, so it’s another stressor
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if you’re a gambling man you could try to arb with crypto. buy a bitcoin or ethereum dip in CAD and wait for a mildly favorable move to sell in USD
I already did that and I do not respect myself for it
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If I wind up moving back to Canada I was planning to do https://www.finiki.org/wiki/Norbert’s_gambit to convert USD to CAD. It’s similar to that Bitcoin scheme but less yolo
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admittedly one of my least favorite things about living here now that I’m no longer broke is that it leads to constant preoccupation with pennies on the dollar schemes
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