Spoken like someone who never owned an Aluminum-era laptop. I had one PPC and two Intel of those, all 17", so I know all about them. Those cases were shit, they came loose internally, and the worst part was when the optical drive would go out of line with the slot, you would have to take it apart to remove the disk. The metal surface in front of the keyboard reacted badly with the skin oils in my palm and pitted like crazy. The latch was weak and would barely hold the lid shut. One of them I took in to be repaired when the screen freaked out few months before the warranty expired, they replaced it with a full HD screen (obviously having run out of the regular screens), and even replaced the keyboard. And that replacement screen developed a bad column.
The best were from 2010-2012, at the end of the optical drive Unibody era, I'm still using one of those, and have spares set aside.
2008: Core2 Quad Q6600 - 2.4GHz / 4 core / single thread 924 / CPU mark 2958
2010: i5 2500K - 3.3GHz / 4 core / single thread 1898 / CPU mark 6474
2017: i5 8600k - 3.6GHz / 6 core / single thread 2517 / CPU mark 12802
It took two years to get an honest doubling in performance.
It took seven years to get a doubling in performance with 50% more cores, but only 50% more single thread performance. And this explains why I am happily using Intel CPUs from 2010-2012 without giving a fuck about getting something faster.
Yet somehow they can afford to accelerate their OS production to have a new major version every year, with little more to show for it than it looks different from the one before.
Service? They're freaking glued together, "service" would mostly consist of re-imaging your data to another unit (if you're lucky that it still works, do they even still use removable storage, and if they do is it glued down as well?) and throwing the bad one on a pile to maybe be salvaged for a few of the bigger parts.
Through Apple? Nvidia was making bad GPUs back in the 2010-2012 era, in that the chip carrier part would eventually go bad. This is probably a big part of why Apple are using Radeon now. So you probably got a replacement logic board with a similarly flawed GPU chip on it.
I have a Late-2011 17", and when its GPU failed in early 2016 (a not long after the warranty extension ended), I shipped it to a guy in NYC to rework replace the chip with a similar but later GPU that (hopefully) won't have that problem. It cost me about $250 or so. But at that time I also had the keyboard go bad. Fortunately it wasn't fucking glued on (only 70 or so tiny screws holding it in place) and was able to get a replacement relatively cheaply.
I'm looking toward Linux in the future, especially when Windows 7 goes off support, and I need to do something about my PC games computers. As long as this MBP17 holds out (and I've got an Early-2011 17" in reserve), I've got two years before things start to get really bad.
Then, Apple basically bricked my nice multi-head docking station in macOS 10.13, only about 30 days after I purchased it.
Apple didn't brick it, the company that made the proprietary ad-hoc (and apparently not a very good design under the hood) interface that supports GPUs over USB dropped the ball and didn't test it after Apple changed around things to support a good design for GPUs over Thunderbolt.
And, you know, CPUs and chipsets too. Switching to AMD would be the equivalent of firing IBM and Motorola for not being able to create a desktop-class PowerPC. Motorola wanted to make embedded chips, IBM wanted to make server chips. All that came out of the "alliance" was for them to use the same instruction set.
They need to get with AMD to design a decent laptop, then fire Intel. But that still won't fix Apple's other problem, which is their anorexic obsession with "thin".
As I understand it, one of the problems is that Intel hasn't yet supported LPDDR4 with laptop chipsets. You know, the "low power" version? Apple can't put in 32GB of regular DDR4 because it would kill battery life, at least with the THIN!!1! obsession they've been on lately. So the problem isn't just Apple, it's also Intel.
Even doing away with the glowing apple on the lid has an effect, when you could formerly see multiple glowing apples up on the DJ table, now they're only the die-hards who refuse to buy the current models with inferior engineering.
So far I have definitely encountered the clock date problem with the 10.10 installer. The problem is that they used a crypto certificate to sign the internal install image. The certificate has an expiration date, and the installer will refuse to install and will give an unhelpful error message if your computer clock is set to past the expiration date.
In some ways, it's not just Apple, it's Intel that has been slacking. I use a "Late-2011" 17" (which I got in 2012 when it was announced that the 17" size was ending), and a handful of Mac Minis from 2010-2012, along with a couple of i7 PCs from around the 2012 era, one W7, the other Linux/MythTV. I found a used Optiplex 790 cheap, which is also from 2012, and was able to add a power supply and graphics card to turn it into a decent mini-tower games system.
2012-era computers are still very usable with 8-16GB of RAM, and Intel has (AFAIK) so far failed to create an up-to-date laptop chipset with support for 32GB+ of LPDDR4. Both the CPUs and the rest of the chipsets are not significantly better than six years ago, only discrete GPUs. And what was the first thing that Apple stopped keeping up with? Discrete GPUs.
Maybe this is a good excuse for Apple to go with AMD? In any case, the failure of Apple to create useful computers coincides with the death of Steve Jobs. Perhaps it's the "Disney Effect", where the company locks course for years on whatever they were doing when the visionary leader passed away. In Disney's case it was creating animated 1960's musicals. In Apple's case it was making "thin" computers, but instead of having a line of thin/lightweight computers, they applied it to everything at the cost of usability and repairability.
I bet you could have gotten an even better deal on a 1080 TV if you had checked around pawn shops. People are buying new TVs faster than they can break, so there's going to be a glut of extra TV sets somewhere.
These fonts were rather uninspired. The one that looks a bit like Bodoni isn't too bad, and the Joschmi looks like a geometric stencil with a black letter feel, but the others are basically My First Geometric fonts, with weirdnesses imposed by trying too hard to keep to the geometry. That one where all the curves were arcs of a circle had trouble with e, C, and G that I noticed right away.
This. Actually I think it's Visual Studio that causes this. Every new version of VS is likely to drop support for the API of a really old version of Windows. And since MS is in charge of VS, they can use this to snuff out whatever old versions of Windows they want nobody to be able to support. For those bitter clinger developers who try to keep support for old versions of the OS, the older versions of VS become unsupported. That's what must be happening now.
I remember long ago when API deprecation in a game that I played meant I had to give up W2K on a games-only PC, and I'm still using the W7 that I replaced it with. I've even gotten two more W7 machines since then that were old Dells from 2012 with a W7Pro COA sticker, easy enough to reinstall on a fresh HD. Vista can rot for all I care, but I'm surprised that XP squeaked by for this long.
When W7's time comes in a few years, I hope that whatever online games I play will have a Linux version. (My current main one already does.) I'll still keep my W7 boxen for older games.
This is clearly talking about a work e-mail address.
When you have your own domain, the domain name matters more. I've had a 3-character dot-com domain and also a "cool word" domain (but that one is a dot-net) since 2000, and I've been running them from my own static-IP DSL the entire time. So of course I use my first name for the e-mail address.
Employee ID numbers can be like this too. I worked for Cisco back in the early 2Ks. They had just changed their employee number system from sequential to a random unused five digit number to avoid an even more obvious pecking order situation.
Slashdot Mirror
2013 also added USB 3.0. The 13" was the only one to have both an optical drive and USB 3.0.
Spoken like someone who never owned an Aluminum-era laptop. I had one PPC and two Intel of those, all 17", so I know all about them. Those cases were shit, they came loose internally, and the worst part was when the optical drive would go out of line with the slot, you would have to take it apart to remove the disk. The metal surface in front of the keyboard reacted badly with the skin oils in my palm and pitted like crazy. The latch was weak and would barely hold the lid shut. One of them I took in to be repaired when the screen freaked out few months before the warranty expired, they replaced it with a full HD screen (obviously having run out of the regular screens), and even replaced the keyboard. And that replacement screen developed a bad column.
The best were from 2010-2012, at the end of the optical drive Unibody era, I'm still using one of those, and have spares set aside.
That's because Apple bought out the company that made the touchpads. PC users had to live with the crappy ones from Synaptics.
It was Pyramid 2000.
So we have:
2008: Core2 Quad Q6600 - 2.4GHz / 4 core / single thread 924 / CPU mark 2958
2010: i5 2500K - 3.3GHz / 4 core / single thread 1898 / CPU mark 6474
2017: i5 8600k - 3.6GHz / 6 core / single thread 2517 / CPU mark 12802
It took two years to get an honest doubling in performance.
It took seven years to get a doubling in performance with 50% more cores, but only 50% more single thread performance. And this explains why I am happily using Intel CPUs from 2010-2012 without giving a fuck about getting something faster.
Yet somehow they can afford to accelerate their OS production to have a new major version every year, with little more to show for it than it looks different from the one before.
Service? They're freaking glued together, "service" would mostly consist of re-imaging your data to another unit (if you're lucky that it still works, do they even still use removable storage, and if they do is it glued down as well?) and throwing the bad one on a pile to maybe be salvaged for a few of the bigger parts.
I've had to replace the logic board
Through Apple? Nvidia was making bad GPUs back in the 2010-2012 era, in that the chip carrier part would eventually go bad. This is probably a big part of why Apple are using Radeon now. So you probably got a replacement logic board with a similarly flawed GPU chip on it.
I have a Late-2011 17", and when its GPU failed in early 2016 (a not long after the warranty extension ended), I shipped it to a guy in NYC to rework replace the chip with a similar but later GPU that (hopefully) won't have that problem. It cost me about $250 or so. But at that time I also had the keyboard go bad. Fortunately it wasn't fucking glued on (only 70 or so tiny screws holding it in place) and was able to get a replacement relatively cheaply.
I'm looking toward Linux in the future, especially when Windows 7 goes off support, and I need to do something about my PC games computers. As long as this MBP17 holds out (and I've got an Early-2011 17" in reserve), I've got two years before things start to get really bad.
Then, Apple basically bricked my nice multi-head docking station in macOS 10.13, only about 30 days after I purchased it.
Apple didn't brick it, the company that made the proprietary ad-hoc (and apparently not a very good design under the hood) interface that supports GPUs over USB dropped the ball and didn't test it after Apple changed around things to support a good design for GPUs over Thunderbolt.
And, you know, CPUs and chipsets too. Switching to AMD would be the equivalent of firing IBM and Motorola for not being able to create a desktop-class PowerPC. Motorola wanted to make embedded chips, IBM wanted to make server chips. All that came out of the "alliance" was for them to use the same instruction set.
They need to get with AMD to design a decent laptop, then fire Intel. But that still won't fix Apple's other problem, which is their anorexic obsession with "thin".
As I understand it, one of the problems is that Intel hasn't yet supported LPDDR4 with laptop chipsets. You know, the "low power" version? Apple can't put in 32GB of regular DDR4 because it would kill battery life, at least with the THIN!!1! obsession they've been on lately. So the problem isn't just Apple, it's also Intel.
Even doing away with the glowing apple on the lid has an effect, when you could formerly see multiple glowing apples up on the DJ table, now they're only the die-hards who refuse to buy the current models with inferior engineering.
So far I have definitely encountered the clock date problem with the 10.10 installer. The problem is that they used a crypto certificate to sign the internal install image. The certificate has an expiration date, and the installer will refuse to install and will give an unhelpful error message if your computer clock is set to past the expiration date.
In some ways, it's not just Apple, it's Intel that has been slacking. I use a "Late-2011" 17" (which I got in 2012 when it was announced that the 17" size was ending), and a handful of Mac Minis from 2010-2012, along with a couple of i7 PCs from around the 2012 era, one W7, the other Linux/MythTV. I found a used Optiplex 790 cheap, which is also from 2012, and was able to add a power supply and graphics card to turn it into a decent mini-tower games system.
2012-era computers are still very usable with 8-16GB of RAM, and Intel has (AFAIK) so far failed to create an up-to-date laptop chipset with support for 32GB+ of LPDDR4. Both the CPUs and the rest of the chipsets are not significantly better than six years ago, only discrete GPUs. And what was the first thing that Apple stopped keeping up with? Discrete GPUs.
Maybe this is a good excuse for Apple to go with AMD? In any case, the failure of Apple to create useful computers coincides with the death of Steve Jobs. Perhaps it's the "Disney Effect", where the company locks course for years on whatever they were doing when the visionary leader passed away. In Disney's case it was creating animated 1960's musicals. In Apple's case it was making "thin" computers, but instead of having a line of thin/lightweight computers, they applied it to everything at the cost of usability and repairability.
I bet you could have gotten an even better deal on a 1080 TV if you had checked around pawn shops. People are buying new TVs faster than they can break, so there's going to be a glut of extra TV sets somewhere.
These fonts were rather uninspired. The one that looks a bit like Bodoni isn't too bad, and the Joschmi looks like a geometric stencil with a black letter feel, but the others are basically My First Geometric fonts, with weirdnesses imposed by trying too hard to keep to the geometry. That one where all the curves were arcs of a circle had trouble with e, C, and G that I noticed right away.
Isn't that why Germany had so many U-boats in WWII? Because there weren't any... submarine... patents to worry about?
Now I want to see articles about submarine marine patents.
Sure you have an option to tell MS to go fuck themselves. It's called Linux. Then instead, it's Poettering that you can't tell to go fuck himself.
That won't help, those ATMs are still running OS/2!
This. Actually I think it's Visual Studio that causes this. Every new version of VS is likely to drop support for the API of a really old version of Windows. And since MS is in charge of VS, they can use this to snuff out whatever old versions of Windows they want nobody to be able to support. For those bitter clinger developers who try to keep support for old versions of the OS, the older versions of VS become unsupported. That's what must be happening now.
I remember long ago when API deprecation in a game that I played meant I had to give up W2K on a games-only PC, and I'm still using the W7 that I replaced it with. I've even gotten two more W7 machines since then that were old Dells from 2012 with a W7Pro COA sticker, easy enough to reinstall on a fresh HD. Vista can rot for all I care, but I'm surprised that XP squeaked by for this long.
When W7's time comes in a few years, I hope that whatever online games I play will have a Linux version. (My current main one already does.) I'll still keep my W7 boxen for older games.
Tell me again who exactly gets to see these certificates? I'm sure that advertisers are making a mess of their underwear over the thought of this.
That's funny, I'm sure "Red Hat" was in there somewhere.
Linux from 2018 is way worse than Linux from 2008.
Just say it: systemd
This is clearly talking about a work e-mail address.
When you have your own domain, the domain name matters more. I've had a 3-character dot-com domain and also a "cool word" domain (but that one is a dot-net) since 2000, and I've been running them from my own static-IP DSL the entire time. So of course I use my first name for the e-mail address.
Employee ID numbers can be like this too. I worked for Cisco back in the early 2Ks. They had just changed their employee number system from sequential to a random unused five digit number to avoid an even more obvious pecking order situation.