Once you have it you can maintain it if you desire. It's a cost item. Just because you have it doesn't mean you get any access to anything, it merely means the government keeps tabs on a whole list of things on you and you will have some reporting requirements.
But if not now, and they had moved it up the beach past the generations-old high water markers, then it would just have been later due to sea level rise effectively moving the markers.
Odds are that if they had done that, the site would have been closed down by that time. Nuclear reactors have finite lifetimes, and that would likely be much shorter than the sea level rise timetable barring any massive increase in levels due to unforeseen events.
If you're only getting 3-4 hours, I have to wonder what you're doing. My 2014 running anything you care to name that I'd run disconnected gets 6 hours minimum. That's if I'm running mobile phone builds at a client. Now, the phone does need to be fully charged to get that much out of it. If it's near empty, then the power draw is pretty significant to charge the phone while running, and I may get 4-5 hours. Presentations, movies, coding, etc, 7-10 hours.
You have no clue - pre-existing clauses with continuous coverage only existed since 1996 via HIPAA. Again, the unbridled insurance industry was screwing people badly enough that that clause was codified into law over what I'm sure was vigorous industry objections. ACA took it a step further because the discriminations in insurance pricing and availability essentially barred almost 30% of the population from getting insurance if they needed to buy it privately. The insurance industry is not there for your benefit.
As for employer policies, some are self-funded, others are done via group bargaining with insurance companies. Ideally, insurance shouldn't be a who can cut a better deal with a company, because in a regulated market like insurance where profits are limited to a percentage of policy costs, when 1 group lowers their price (hint - the costs to the insurance don't change) another group can be increased to cover the spread, so that the final numbers work out.
Well, they did solder in the 2013 or 2014 MB. But I didn't think that mattered. And, IIRC, Apple was using NVMe drives before they were commonly available. Yes, I would love it if they moved to a standard socket. Hopefully they'll see the light this coming year.
Hence the statement elsewhere that USB-C sources that have TB capability should be fully USB-C compliant.
Except that most Thunderbolt 3 devices don't fall back to USB if Thunderbolt isn't available. Therein lies the problem for the lay consumer who doesn't know the difference.
The entire reason for stating sources must be fully compliant. Anything you plug into your laptop USB-C port should work. Again, you don't expect your printer to work properly when connected to your monitor or harddrive enclosure.
And here's what a lot of people don't understand: I spent a little over $4k building my current workstation and, yes, Apple does sell a machine that will work for me today in that price range. However, they don't sell anything that comes near touching my $4k build, which means I'll get at least 5 years out of that $4k investment before I need to upgrade, where the machine that just covers what I need today will likely need to be upgraded (we're talking Apple, so replaced) next year. Most likely, the Mac Pro I could buy today would represent a $4000/yr cost of ownership; at best I'd expect it would represent an $800/yr cost. That same $800/yr cost is the projected worst case for my Ryzen build, half that if it manages to last the decade I designed it to last.
My current build would have cost me roughly $3K with all new parts when I built it. It easily bested any single CPU mac pro until the 2013 one came out. If I dropped an additional $300 on it today, it would match pretty much any $5K mac pro easily, and more. That's just sad.
Honestly, a single CPU high end mac pro should cost maybe $3-4K tops - that includes 1TB NVMe drive with the potential for a second, a min 6 core CPU, and maybe 16GB RAM (aftermarket upgradeable to 128 or 256, of course) and a discrete graphics card. I do think I see why Apple thought they needed a change, not realizing that the real value lay in the potential added by the mini (prior to them nerfing it) Besides being a nice little desktop box for non-gaming use and a great HTPC, they also make a nice extensible compute or server farm. Instead we got a pretty design and no real functionality. For your use case, a single system probably would be in the $7-10K range. Mine might be less now.
Generally employer-provided insurance is cheaper because they pay some portion of the premium for you (and get a tax deduction for doing so). That's why people get sticker shock when they leave the company and sign up for the COBRA extension: It's the exact same insurance but now they have to pay 100% of the premium themselves.
You might want to try that out some time. The sticker shock is what "private" insurance now costs, compared to COBRA, and what you get for it. Even in 2000, COBRA was no more than 50% of free market provided you were young enough. As soon as you were 40 it is a wash. Which just goes back to the health insurance industry not charging the young enough for what should be a lifetime amortized cost. (I didn't do the careful comparisons I in the past decade, where what you get on the private marketplace is absolute crap compared to employer based insurance, even the gold level plans suck compared to what I thought was a relatively mid-level employer based plan, which cost at least 30% less)
A single payer base system would remove a lot of issues. Base systems only deal with minor things, broken bones and accidents, annual checkups, prenatal care, vaccinations, basic dentistry and vision care. Things that are easily quantifiable and able to be estimated. Yes, this leaves things like cancer, large swaths of chronic diseases, etc, still in the hands of insurance. If they can be properly quantified and brought under the single payer umbrella, great. Otherwise, leave it to supplemental insurance or other organizations, which is no different than today. The reason for the split is that the goal is to get basic health care to all without breaking the budget or large new taxes, both of which wouldn't float in congress. What would happen is that insurance's revenue flow would be significantly reduced, and providers would have a much simpler billing system for 90+% of what they do.
And the problem with health insurance as it was before ACA is it was designed to maximize profit within legal limits from those of low risk (that'd be young you, unmarried, male) and charge them some rate low enough to get you to pay it with virtually no large risk payout. They really should have been charging you 1/45th of your estimated lifetime risk (since they really only cover from 20 through 65) and that should have been a yearly charge. But if they do, no one in their 20s, and few in their 30s would take coverage, and you're a shining example of that full misunderstanding of how insurance is supposed to work.
That said, ACA didn't effectively tackle the other aspect of the insurance/provider collusion. So while the pool was increased, the insurance/provider price fixing is still in full force. Note that COBRA policies are now actually much better deals than the marketplace plans, and generally cover more as well. So the marketplace isn't all that great at this time. I have good ideas of how to fix it, but doubt politicians have the stomach to deal with the fallout from insurance providers and large swaths of health care providers if they were to do what was needed.
I understand exactly how insurance is supposed to work for it to provide the type of service people want/need as healthcare. It's a general risk pool with people paying in. The thing ACA did was attempt to force everyone into the pool. It seems to have been somewhat successful at increasing the general pool. Single payer fixes it by having everyone in the pool. Your scenario would hold more water if there was a credit system for paying into the pool. But what happens with insurance is they're happy to take your money while you're healthy, but as soon as you develop something where they have to pay, they kick you out based on "pre-existing" conditions, because every year you need to sign up like you're a new person.
Now, if they couldn't kick you out, but you got a credit for every year you were in, the rate charged could be indexed to your credits. This would address the in/out scenario adequately in your scenario, and prevent exclusion for pre-existing conditions. If you stayed out during your 20s and 30s, you'd come in at a 5 or 10 fold higher rate in your 40s than someone who paid in the entire time. Now - everyone pays the same at 40, whether they were in or not. Pre ACA, you paid more at 40 than 20, unless/until you fell into the "pre-existing" condition loop hole, where you could be charged 10 times more or be kicked out entirely.
Finally, employment policies have nothing to do with personal policies at all. That's just a red-herring.
You fill those out with numbers as they represent what you're wanting from the folks you're applying too. I've never given an accurate number to a prospective employer because a) it's none of their business and might even be prevented by your employment agreement and b) why give them something to build on in their negotiations with you? You might as well start from a good position of strength in negotiations. Now, saying you made $100K per year as a burger flipper would obviously mark you as less than truthful, but stating you made 95K instead of 80K as an engineer, especially if you're moving into a higher cost area, is certainly not overly misleading.
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA...
You never could trust something made by someone else. You always verify if material quality matters.
What a wonderful world you live in. Before ACA, the insurance industry would charge you significantly more, if they would even cover you, for a litany of "pre-existing" conditions. If you go through some of those lists referenced, you'll see interesting things listed, like acid reflux. In fact, ACA came about because getting health insurance as a private citizen was basically impossible unless you were in the top 10%, and only then if you were "healthy" as defined by the insurance company. Single payer would be better for essential coverage because it would just cover everyone and knock out a large swath of basic care that's needed. Supplemental coverage (wow, does this ever sound like medicare...) could cover all those extras you'd want covered the government doesn't cover. So it's not the government deciding who lives/dies, they only cover certain basic functions. After that, it's you/your supplemental insurance that decides.
you do realize the NVMe drives are "standard", they're just soldered in, IIRC
I've had my rMBP open, the m.2 drive is replaceable, actually, held in with a single screw. The soldered RAM is really annoying, though; my PC with RAM sockets is thinner than my rMBP and "thinness" is the excuse I always hear, so there's really no excuse for it.
Yeah, they started soldering them in the touch bar MBPs in 2016, and the 2015 MBs. Another reason to only buy non-touch bar MBPs.
Yes, I know. Hence the statement elsewhere that USB-C sources that have TB capability should be fully USB-C compliant. I'm not too worried about accessories. Those could be USB3, 3.1 or TB whatever, and be perfectly fine. You're not going to connect your monitor to your drive array or printer after all.
and a bigger battery (to enable that extended load and long-term use). We might even consider 4mm and a full pound if it means workstation-class graphics, or at least a current-gen gaming GPU.
7-10 hours seems pretty significant to me already, and by far outpaces all but the most recently available non Apple products. As for thickness, 2-4mm doesn't bother me. Weight, however, does (yes, more thickness generally equates to more weight, pretend it's hypothetically "free") I don't even like carting around the power brick if I don't need to.
I actually had someone tell me, here on Slashdot, today, that Apple (and only Apple) cares about the consumer. My 3 line response to that took longer to type than the rant you see above, because I couldn't stop laughing for long enough to type it.
I don't know.... they might care more than others, but I'd say the primary care they have of late is revenue, image, growth, ensuring products stay ahead of others in usability (one place they care about consumers because this leads to more revenue) app store growth, music store growth (again - both consumer oriented because consumers make this growth happen)
But yes, I'd say a lot of their recent decisions killing products like Aperture, Final Cut Express/Pro, etc without adequate better replacements ready to go, along with the mini/pro changes and the disabling of hardware fixes/upgrades are all anti-consumer. We'll see what their redesigned mac pro brings, that will either herald a new approach or nail the coffin shut.
The 2013 IIRC didn't use NVMe drives. My 2014 is twice as fast as the old 2013 I had.
It's funny this came up today, actually. Having bought it in January 2014, I assumed it was a mid-2013 model, but "About This Mac" lists it as a mid-2014. I just happened to need to look that up to drop the info at the bottom of this post just a few minutes ago. F me for never having actually looked at that dialog in the over 3 years I've owned this laptop;)
I find that quite amusing. Reading that comment, you do realize the NVMe drives are "standard", they're just soldered in, IIRC. Which is stupid, IMHO, as there's little to no reason for that. The connectors are pretty solid for those, and shouldn't be a source of significant (or even insignificant) problems with laptops. The soldered memory I get when it's 16GB. There's also the "consumer's too stupid to buy the right RAM" issue.
Moving on, yes, they totally screwed up both the mac pro and mac mini in 2013. They've finally admitted it in 2016, at least on the mac pro. I'm hopeful they'll also correct their mac mini mistake this year. Coming out with a nice tower and a mini block that can be put into a grid was where I thought they should have gone in 2013. Instead we got design over technology. It's a computer, make it do neat computer things. Imagine if I could automagically hook up a MBP to a network with a couple of pros/minis on it, and when I want to edit/render video, it automatically allowed me to utilize the other machines on the network, provided I had access to them, of course. That 2 hour rendering job on a single machine could be cut down to tens of minutes, at least in my house.
NVMe will inherently be faster than SATA m.2 based systems because 1 layer of protocols has been removed. But you're talking 1 or 2%
You're going from 6gbps (768MB/s) to 985MB/s per lane. That's a bit more than 1-2%, my friend. SATA can't reach 1GB/sec, while m.2 PCIe can just about hit 4GB/sec. In fact, if the drive supports protocol compression, as the 960 PRO appears to with the latest firmware, you can break 4GB/sec in data throughput; the 960 PRO in my Ryzen build peaks over 4GB/sec on sequential reads, which surprised the hell out of me because I didn't know that was possible until I saw it with my own eyes, which teared over with joy at that moment. In all honestly, I'm only assuming compression is a factor in that; but, somehow, my 960 PRO managed a sustained transfer rate (during a benchmark) in excess of the bandwidth available in 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
I'd have to ask over what time frame and amount transferred. I'm guessing you accounted for the up to 4 or so GB caching utilized within a machine? It's pretty impressive what goes on within the OS. I'd run a full HD+ 25GB+ file through that test, that will really tell you how things go. Also, it seems odd even with on the fly compression that you could get 4GB/s throughput. What would be doing the decompression? If it's the CPU, you'd be able to easily determine that via CPU performance monitoring compared to a non 960 PRO test. I'd guess the data on disk is compressed, which would explain the much slower write speeds.
Just color me skeptical
Sadly, Apple has hitched its wagon to Thunderbolt at this point. I wish it wasn't so, but I just don't see Cook changing course. We can hope and dream, though. This is one instance where I'd certainly love to be proven wrong.
I'm not sure about that, with them going all full USB-C or USB-C only on the latest laptops. Add in that they're completely redesigning the mac pro this year....
There are a handful of use cases, but almost none of them apply to the lay consumer....
Which brings me to the one use case the lay consumer might be interest
Also worth noting, the 960 PRO benchmarks nearly 4x as fast as the SM0512F in my 2013 rMBP. Yes, faster drives than this were available in 2013 and yes, the PC laptop I bought shortly after the rMBP for roughly $700 less (with a manufacture date within a month of the rMBP) includes a pair of them and benchmarks more than twice as fast. It's hard to say that Apple uses the fastest drives after seeing that, though it may be true today when m.2 drives have reached their theoretical maximum performance and those drives have come down considerably in price.
The 2013 IIRC didn't use NVMe drives. My 2014 is twice as fast as the old 2013 I had. The 2015 was 50% faster still, and the 2016 hits your maximums. I don't know for sure, because I haven't gone through the specs with this in mind, but IIRC, NVMe will inherently be faster than SATA m.2 based systems because 1 layer of protocols has been removed. But you're talking 1 or 2%, I'm guessing, with the bandwidth being discussed, although the latency will also be reduced (likely also just a tiny bit). But I admit freely that I have not recently gone through the specs, and this is merely from memory and impressions of reading it years ago.
This makes me hopeful for an AMD-based Mac Pro;... I have my doubts as I don't think Apple would be willing to give up Thunderbolt, despite the fact that it's markedly less useful in a desktop/workstation scenario than it is in a portable or all-in-one.
I'd love an AMD based Mac Pro. Preferably with options for up to 8+ CPUs.... (if we're dreaming, might as well dream big) The reason this may be appealing from Apple's viewpoint is that AMD's ThreadRipper architecture actually ties into their GCD architecture better than Intel's Core architecture, and AMD's technology for multi-CPU support works better than Intel's approach (Why they didn't just license hypertransport eludes me - it blew Intel's doors off, just like AMD-64, so why not eat crow just once and get both?)
As for Thunderbolt, it's a great tech still looking for a real use case. DisplayPort is fine for 5K monitors, and for the next couple of years I suspect that's as high as we'll go. It doesn't matter past that, because the GPUs connect to monitors, likely with HDMI 2.1+, so no TB there. 10Ge ethernet is available over copper, higher over fibre, so I don't see (network type) connectivity going to TB. External disk housing for 99.99% of users will be slower than what USB-C offers, so no TB needed there either. In fact, the more you look at it, the less reasons you can find for TB. And overall I like TB, but I just can't find reasonable uses for it anymore that justify the Intel tax.
Well, both of those configurations target a different use case. You can't carry around your enclosure, so the MBP comparison is invalid, and the iMac is effectively a monitor with a computer within it, really, which you can drop all of what your talking about into an external enclosure.
And let's be 100% fair, the NVMe drives Apple uses are top notch, likely faster than the multiple m.2 systems (maximum dual in every case I've seen although I'm sure you'll pull something with more out of your hat;)
But yes, Apple needs a real MacPro, which address the use case you're talking about. It's a reason I haven't bought any macs for my main desktop either.
No - it's less than a year old, and a laptop. He's likely got AppleCare on it, but it would be covered even without it. Apple will fix or replace it for free. They swapped out a 9 month old mini when the HD wouldn't test correctly no questions asked, and it wasn't under AC either.
AFAIK, they're GUI controls ontop of the OS libraries, usually. Sometimes, they slap an additional configuration library ontop to control their hardware, but generally this is not needed. In fact, whenever a relative mentions they've installed the latest sadistic utility, my first move is to remove said "utility" and just go through whatever their version of windows pain inflicts. I should note that none of these folks run Win10, so I have close to 0 experience with that version's wireless connectivity.
It's one thing to get the courts to look at them, it's another to convince a bunch of people that know nothing about astrophysics that the earth is 4B years old....
Slashdot Mirror
Why?
There's already a file on you and the gov never ever throws anything away.
Once you have it you can maintain it if you desire. It's a cost item. Just because you have it doesn't mean you get any access to anything, it merely means the government keeps tabs on a whole list of things on you and you will have some reporting requirements.
But if not now, and they had moved it up the beach past the generations-old high water markers, then it would just have been later due to sea level rise effectively moving the markers.
Odds are that if they had done that, the site would have been closed down by that time. Nuclear reactors have finite lifetimes, and that would likely be much shorter than the sea level rise timetable barring any massive increase in levels due to unforeseen events.
You're referencing things that happened more than two decades ago? Get with the times.
Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.
If you're only getting 3-4 hours, I have to wonder what you're doing. My 2014 running anything you care to name that I'd run disconnected gets 6 hours minimum. That's if I'm running mobile phone builds at a client. Now, the phone does need to be fully charged to get that much out of it. If it's near empty, then the power draw is pretty significant to charge the phone while running, and I may get 4-5 hours. Presentations, movies, coding, etc, 7-10 hours.
You have no clue - pre-existing clauses with continuous coverage only existed since 1996 via HIPAA. Again, the unbridled insurance industry was screwing people badly enough that that clause was codified into law over what I'm sure was vigorous industry objections. ACA took it a step further because the discriminations in insurance pricing and availability essentially barred almost 30% of the population from getting insurance if they needed to buy it privately. The insurance industry is not there for your benefit.
As for employer policies, some are self-funded, others are done via group bargaining with insurance companies. Ideally, insurance shouldn't be a who can cut a better deal with a company, because in a regulated market like insurance where profits are limited to a percentage of policy costs, when 1 group lowers their price (hint - the costs to the insurance don't change) another group can be increased to cover the spread, so that the final numbers work out.
Yeah, they started soldering them in the touch bar MBPs in 2016, and the 2015 MBs. Another reason to only buy non-touch bar MBPs.
Actually, no, but they did come up with their own form factor.
Well, they did solder in the 2013 or 2014 MB. But I didn't think that mattered. And, IIRC, Apple was using NVMe drives before they were commonly available. Yes, I would love it if they moved to a standard socket. Hopefully they'll see the light this coming year.
Hence the statement elsewhere that USB-C sources that have TB capability should be fully USB-C compliant.
Except that most Thunderbolt 3 devices don't fall back to USB if Thunderbolt isn't available. Therein lies the problem for the lay consumer who doesn't know the difference.
The entire reason for stating sources must be fully compliant. Anything you plug into your laptop USB-C port should work. Again, you don't expect your printer to work properly when connected to your monitor or harddrive enclosure.
And here's what a lot of people don't understand: I spent a little over $4k building my current workstation and, yes, Apple does sell a machine that will work for me today in that price range. However, they don't sell anything that comes near touching my $4k build, which means I'll get at least 5 years out of that $4k investment before I need to upgrade, where the machine that just covers what I need today will likely need to be upgraded (we're talking Apple, so replaced) next year. Most likely, the Mac Pro I could buy today would represent a $4000/yr cost of ownership; at best I'd expect it would represent an $800/yr cost. That same $800/yr cost is the projected worst case for my Ryzen build, half that if it manages to last the decade I designed it to last.
My current build would have cost me roughly $3K with all new parts when I built it. It easily bested any single CPU mac pro until the 2013 one came out. If I dropped an additional $300 on it today, it would match pretty much any $5K mac pro easily, and more. That's just sad.
Honestly, a single CPU high end mac pro should cost maybe $3-4K tops - that includes 1TB NVMe drive with the potential for a second, a min 6 core CPU, and maybe 16GB RAM (aftermarket upgradeable to 128 or 256, of course) and a discrete graphics card. I do think I see why Apple thought they needed a change, not realizing that the real value lay in the potential added by the mini (prior to them nerfing it) Besides being a nice little desktop box for non-gaming use and a great HTPC, they also make a nice extensible compute or server farm. Instead we got a pretty design and no real functionality. For your use case, a single system probably would be in the $7-10K range. Mine might be less now.
Generally employer-provided insurance is cheaper because they pay some portion of the premium for you (and get a tax deduction for doing so). That's why people get sticker shock when they leave the company and sign up for the COBRA extension: It's the exact same insurance but now they have to pay 100% of the premium themselves.
You might want to try that out some time. The sticker shock is what "private" insurance now costs, compared to COBRA, and what you get for it. Even in 2000, COBRA was no more than 50% of free market provided you were young enough. As soon as you were 40 it is a wash. Which just goes back to the health insurance industry not charging the young enough for what should be a lifetime amortized cost. (I didn't do the careful comparisons I in the past decade, where what you get on the private marketplace is absolute crap compared to employer based insurance, even the gold level plans suck compared to what I thought was a relatively mid-level employer based plan, which cost at least 30% less)
A single payer base system would remove a lot of issues. Base systems only deal with minor things, broken bones and accidents, annual checkups, prenatal care, vaccinations, basic dentistry and vision care. Things that are easily quantifiable and able to be estimated. Yes, this leaves things like cancer, large swaths of chronic diseases, etc, still in the hands of insurance. If they can be properly quantified and brought under the single payer umbrella, great. Otherwise, leave it to supplemental insurance or other organizations, which is no different than today. The reason for the split is that the goal is to get basic health care to all without breaking the budget or large new taxes, both of which wouldn't float in congress. What would happen is that insurance's revenue flow would be significantly reduced, and providers would have a much simpler billing system for 90+% of what they do.
And the problem with health insurance as it was before ACA is it was designed to maximize profit within legal limits from those of low risk (that'd be young you, unmarried, male) and charge them some rate low enough to get you to pay it with virtually no large risk payout. They really should have been charging you 1/45th of your estimated lifetime risk (since they really only cover from 20 through 65) and that should have been a yearly charge. But if they do, no one in their 20s, and few in their 30s would take coverage, and you're a shining example of that full misunderstanding of how insurance is supposed to work.
That said, ACA didn't effectively tackle the other aspect of the insurance/provider collusion. So while the pool was increased, the insurance/provider price fixing is still in full force. Note that COBRA policies are now actually much better deals than the marketplace plans, and generally cover more as well. So the marketplace isn't all that great at this time. I have good ideas of how to fix it, but doubt politicians have the stomach to deal with the fallout from insurance providers and large swaths of health care providers if they were to do what was needed.
I understand exactly how insurance is supposed to work for it to provide the type of service people want/need as healthcare. It's a general risk pool with people paying in. The thing ACA did was attempt to force everyone into the pool. It seems to have been somewhat successful at increasing the general pool. Single payer fixes it by having everyone in the pool. Your scenario would hold more water if there was a credit system for paying into the pool. But what happens with insurance is they're happy to take your money while you're healthy, but as soon as you develop something where they have to pay, they kick you out based on "pre-existing" conditions, because every year you need to sign up like you're a new person.
Now, if they couldn't kick you out, but you got a credit for every year you were in, the rate charged could be indexed to your credits. This would address the in/out scenario adequately in your scenario, and prevent exclusion for pre-existing conditions. If you stayed out during your 20s and 30s, you'd come in at a 5 or 10 fold higher rate in your 40s than someone who paid in the entire time. Now - everyone pays the same at 40, whether they were in or not. Pre ACA, you paid more at 40 than 20, unless/until you fell into the "pre-existing" condition loop hole, where you could be charged 10 times more or be kicked out entirely.
Finally, employment policies have nothing to do with personal policies at all. That's just a red-herring.
You fill those out with numbers as they represent what you're wanting from the folks you're applying too. I've never given an accurate number to a prospective employer because a) it's none of their business and might even be prevented by your employment agreement and b) why give them something to build on in their negotiations with you? You might as well start from a good position of strength in negotiations. Now, saying you made $100K per year as a burger flipper would obviously mark you as less than truthful, but stating you made 95K instead of 80K as an engineer, especially if you're moving into a higher cost area, is certainly not overly misleading.
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA...
You never could trust something made by someone else. You always verify if material quality matters.
What a wonderful world you live in. Before ACA, the insurance industry would charge you significantly more, if they would even cover you, for a litany of "pre-existing" conditions. If you go through some of those lists referenced, you'll see interesting things listed, like acid reflux. In fact, ACA came about because getting health insurance as a private citizen was basically impossible unless you were in the top 10%, and only then if you were "healthy" as defined by the insurance company. Single payer would be better for essential coverage because it would just cover everyone and knock out a large swath of basic care that's needed. Supplemental coverage (wow, does this ever sound like medicare...) could cover all those extras you'd want covered the government doesn't cover. So it's not the government deciding who lives/dies, they only cover certain basic functions. After that, it's you/your supplemental insurance that decides.
you do realize the NVMe drives are "standard", they're just soldered in, IIRC
I've had my rMBP open, the m.2 drive is replaceable, actually, held in with a single screw. The soldered RAM is really annoying, though; my PC with RAM sockets is thinner than my rMBP and "thinness" is the excuse I always hear, so there's really no excuse for it.
Yeah, they started soldering them in the touch bar MBPs in 2016, and the 2015 MBs. Another reason to only buy non-touch bar MBPs.
Who said anything about much slower write speeds? I'm seeing sequential writes in excess of 3GB/s, which also exceeds the performance level specified by Samsung for the drive in question.
For sequential, that seems too fast and is 50% over the max.
Thunderbolt 3 uses the USB-C port. Check the specs on the newest laptops to which you refer:
Yes, I know. Hence the statement elsewhere that USB-C sources that have TB capability should be fully USB-C compliant. I'm not too worried about accessories. Those could be USB3, 3.1 or TB whatever, and be perfectly fine. You're not going to connect your monitor to your drive array or printer after all.
and a bigger battery (to enable that extended load and long-term use). We might even consider 4mm and a full pound if it means workstation-class graphics, or at least a current-gen gaming GPU.
7-10 hours seems pretty significant to me already, and by far outpaces all but the most recently available non Apple products. As for thickness, 2-4mm doesn't bother me. Weight, however, does (yes, more thickness generally equates to more weight, pretend it's hypothetically "free") I don't even like carting around the power brick if I don't need to.
I actually had someone tell me, here on Slashdot, today, that Apple (and only Apple) cares about the consumer. My 3 line response to that took longer to type than the rant you see above, because I couldn't stop laughing for long enough to type it.
I don't know.... they might care more than others, but I'd say the primary care they have of late is revenue, image, growth, ensuring products stay ahead of others in usability (one place they care about consumers because this leads to more revenue) app store growth, music store growth (again - both consumer oriented because consumers make this growth happen)
But yes, I'd say a lot of their recent decisions killing products like Aperture, Final Cut Express/Pro, etc without adequate better replacements ready to go, along with the mini/pro changes and the disabling of hardware fixes/upgrades are all anti-consumer. We'll see what their redesigned mac pro brings, that will either herald a new approach or nail the coffin shut.
The 2013 IIRC didn't use NVMe drives. My 2014 is twice as fast as the old 2013 I had.
It's funny this came up today, actually. Having bought it in January 2014, I assumed it was a mid-2013 model, but "About This Mac" lists it as a mid-2014. I just happened to need to look that up to drop the info at the bottom of this post just a few minutes ago. F me for never having actually looked at that dialog in the over 3 years I've owned this laptop ;)
I find that quite amusing. Reading that comment, you do realize the NVMe drives are "standard", they're just soldered in, IIRC. Which is stupid, IMHO, as there's little to no reason for that. The connectors are pretty solid for those, and shouldn't be a source of significant (or even insignificant) problems with laptops. The soldered memory I get when it's 16GB. There's also the "consumer's too stupid to buy the right RAM" issue.
Moving on, yes, they totally screwed up both the mac pro and mac mini in 2013. They've finally admitted it in 2016, at least on the mac pro. I'm hopeful they'll also correct their mac mini mistake this year. Coming out with a nice tower and a mini block that can be put into a grid was where I thought they should have gone in 2013. Instead we got design over technology. It's a computer, make it do neat computer things. Imagine if I could automagically hook up a MBP to a network with a couple of pros/minis on it, and when I want to edit/render video, it automatically allowed me to utilize the other machines on the network, provided I had access to them, of course. That 2 hour rendering job on a single machine could be cut down to tens of minutes, at least in my house.
NVMe will inherently be faster than SATA m.2 based systems because 1 layer of protocols has been removed. But you're talking 1 or 2%
You're going from 6gbps (768MB/s) to 985MB/s per lane. That's a bit more than 1-2%, my friend. SATA can't reach 1GB/sec, while m.2 PCIe can just about hit 4GB/sec. In fact, if the drive supports protocol compression, as the 960 PRO appears to with the latest firmware, you can break 4GB/sec in data throughput; the 960 PRO in my Ryzen build peaks over 4GB/sec on sequential reads, which surprised the hell out of me because I didn't know that was possible until I saw it with my own eyes, which teared over with joy at that moment. In all honestly, I'm only assuming compression is a factor in that; but, somehow, my 960 PRO managed a sustained transfer rate (during a benchmark) in excess of the bandwidth available in 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes.
I'd have to ask over what time frame and amount transferred. I'm guessing you accounted for the up to 4 or so GB caching utilized within a machine? It's pretty impressive what goes on within the OS. I'd run a full HD+ 25GB+ file through that test, that will really tell you how things go. Also, it seems odd even with on the fly compression that you could get 4GB/s throughput. What would be doing the decompression? If it's the CPU, you'd be able to easily determine that via CPU performance monitoring compared to a non 960 PRO test. I'd guess the data on disk is compressed, which would explain the much slower write speeds.
Just color me skeptical
Sadly, Apple has hitched its wagon to Thunderbolt at this point. I wish it wasn't so, but I just don't see Cook changing course. We can hope and dream, though. This is one instance where I'd certainly love to be proven wrong.
I'm not sure about that, with them going all full USB-C or USB-C only on the latest laptops. Add in that they're completely redesigning the mac pro this year....
There are a handful of use cases, but almost none of them apply to the lay consumer. ...
Which brings me to the one use case the lay consumer might be interest
Also worth noting, the 960 PRO benchmarks nearly 4x as fast as the SM0512F in my 2013 rMBP. Yes, faster drives than this were available in 2013 and yes, the PC laptop I bought shortly after the rMBP for roughly $700 less (with a manufacture date within a month of the rMBP) includes a pair of them and benchmarks more than twice as fast. It's hard to say that Apple uses the fastest drives after seeing that, though it may be true today when m.2 drives have reached their theoretical maximum performance and those drives have come down considerably in price.
The 2013 IIRC didn't use NVMe drives. My 2014 is twice as fast as the old 2013 I had. The 2015 was 50% faster still, and the 2016 hits your maximums. I don't know for sure, because I haven't gone through the specs with this in mind, but IIRC, NVMe will inherently be faster than SATA m.2 based systems because 1 layer of protocols has been removed. But you're talking 1 or 2%, I'm guessing, with the bandwidth being discussed, although the latency will also be reduced (likely also just a tiny bit). But I admit freely that I have not recently gone through the specs, and this is merely from memory and impressions of reading it years ago.
This makes me hopeful for an AMD-based Mac Pro; ... I have my doubts as I don't think Apple would be willing to give up Thunderbolt, despite the fact that it's markedly less useful in a desktop/workstation scenario than it is in a portable or all-in-one.
I'd love an AMD based Mac Pro. Preferably with options for up to 8+ CPUs.... (if we're dreaming, might as well dream big) The reason this may be appealing from Apple's viewpoint is that AMD's ThreadRipper architecture actually ties into their GCD architecture better than Intel's Core architecture, and AMD's technology for multi-CPU support works better than Intel's approach (Why they didn't just license hypertransport eludes me - it blew Intel's doors off, just like AMD-64, so why not eat crow just once and get both?)
As for Thunderbolt, it's a great tech still looking for a real use case. DisplayPort is fine for 5K monitors, and for the next couple of years I suspect that's as high as we'll go. It doesn't matter past that, because the GPUs connect to monitors, likely with HDMI 2.1+, so no TB there. 10Ge ethernet is available over copper, higher over fibre, so I don't see (network type) connectivity going to TB. External disk housing for 99.99% of users will be slower than what USB-C offers, so no TB needed there either. In fact, the more you look at it, the less reasons you can find for TB. And overall I like TB, but I just can't find reasonable uses for it anymore that justify the Intel tax.
Macs come second, Linux third in the desktop order. Although certain types of games now come on all 3 simultaneously because the toolsets exist.
Well, both of those configurations target a different use case. You can't carry around your enclosure, so the MBP comparison is invalid, and the iMac is effectively a monitor with a computer within it, really, which you can drop all of what your talking about into an external enclosure.
And let's be 100% fair, the NVMe drives Apple uses are top notch, likely faster than the multiple m.2 systems (maximum dual in every case I've seen although I'm sure you'll pull something with more out of your hat;)
But yes, Apple needs a real MacPro, which address the use case you're talking about. It's a reason I haven't bought any macs for my main desktop either.
The best multiplayer game I've played is still HalfLife.
No - it's less than a year old, and a laptop. He's likely got AppleCare on it, but it would be covered even without it. Apple will fix or replace it for free. They swapped out a 9 month old mini when the HD wouldn't test correctly no questions asked, and it wasn't under AC either.
And yet we have these (and other) stupid patents that continue to pollute the pool.
AFAIK, they're GUI controls ontop of the OS libraries, usually. Sometimes, they slap an additional configuration library ontop to control their hardware, but generally this is not needed. In fact, whenever a relative mentions they've installed the latest sadistic utility, my first move is to remove said "utility" and just go through whatever their version of windows pain inflicts. I should note that none of these folks run Win10, so I have close to 0 experience with that version's wireless connectivity.
Also... Religious fanatic followers actually believe that Apple invented anything...
I "thank" Apple for kiling the physical keyboard
Compute...errorrrrr....
It's one thing to get the courts to look at them, it's another to convince a bunch of people that know nothing about astrophysics that the earth is 4B years old....