5 vs 9, ok, 1.8 times. Yes, I over stated it based on the 2015 comparison I did, where the XPS15 only ran at best 4 hours. Dell apparently figured out that battery life does matter.:) I don't buy the 7 hours for the stock internal battery, but didn't look at the test configuration. It's possible they compared the extra large battery configuration or even external configuration setup, both which are options for that laptop. I'll also mention that the weight goes up significantly with each of those larger options.
Between 5 and 7 hours are the longest I found, during comparison tests. I actually looked this up, because I did the same comparison lookup 2 years ago when I was laptop shopping. MBPs run up to 9 hours in those same comparison tests. Nothing, and I mean nothing, touches MBP battery life on equivalent weight and performance laptops in real side by side tests. Heck, one of those XPS15's actually weighs in at more than a pound more than the MBP competitor, including power brick. A more than half-pound difference if you exclude it.
are you claiming the MBP runs for 22 hours? And if Apple didn't use LPDDR couldn't they do 16 GB per stick? So it's Apple - not Intel - who is to blame here.
LPDDR is part of the reason the runtime is so much better on MBPs than, for instance, the Dells. And, as mentioned elsewhere, the real thing that will get you is that 16GB is actually an acceptable runtime environment for all but a tiny handful of tasks. With at least the last 4 iterations of OSX, I have ceased to swap on existing hardware, and my 16GB laptop has never had memory issues. And I am anything but a typical user. Web browsing and document handling are the smallest least resource impacting parts of what I do daily with my systems.
Microsoft was instrumental in making the modern spreadsheet the powerful business tool that it is.
Um, no.
The spreadsheet was the first application that gave typical businesses an advantage from using computers, and MS was who made that happen.
While your statement about spreadsheets is correct, you are wrong about who made that happen. You might want to check out Visicalc. MS didn't even come into the picture for years. And before you go on, MS didn't invent word processing, email, calendaring, chat, presentation software, project management software, scheduling software, banking solutions, or a host of other things you might think they came up with if you were born into and only used MS software. They did come up with MS Bob, though. And Clippy!
They also proved you can make a good ergonomic keyboard for under $100.
That is highly subjective. Is it a good keyboard? Is it ergonomic? (Hint, think of chairs - what's ergonomic for one person isn't for another) The only objective thing is it was less than $100.
The iMac can still have SSDs upgraded, and has upgradable RAM. Not sure about the CPUs on the new ones, but older ones can be upgraded within the limits of the socket. As for the motherboard/logic board, well, that's part of the reason you bought the iMac. There's a limit to how much hackery I'm willing to do to accomplish an upgrade. Mac Mini's might be easier to upgrade selected logic boards for, I haven't really looked, although I have 4 different models in house, so I suppose I could check them out when I pull several of them apart in a few weeks. It's just a box with a power brick and a pretty much self-contained unit. It just needs to match the mount points. Internally it's more like a laptop than a white-label PC.
The 2013 MacPro was a mistake, Apple has admitted as much, finally. I'm hoping they come out with a double or triple NUC sized box with the ability to host up to 2 CPUs and 4 GPUs. The NVMe drives don't take much space, and spinning or extra drives should likely be external, allowing them to reuse the Tbolt arrays and equipment created for the 2013 MacPro.
Intel has been doing it since the 80s, partly out of need. Different cores required different pinouts. That hasn't been true in a while now. PCIe has been standard for a while, the number supported has been fixed within a couple of groupings, and even memory busses have only been of 2 family types in the past decade. So the only arguments for varying sockets given the variance in number of cores supported by any given modern socket is how many PCIe lanes and memory channels are being supported, which would drive the pinouts. Older southbridge chipsets shouldn't even be affected in a properly designed socketed motherboard, since at worst they'd just run the CPU in a suboptimal configuration compared to newer chipsets or be missing some newer chipset supported feature. You should ask yourself why that's not being done.
iPods: see Apple paying Creative millions and millions for stealing the idea and even violating patents.
Really? You need to read up on that. It was a settlement with a potential deal for $100M to prevent a long protracted and expensive court case with uncertain outcomes in the especially notorious patent troll Eastern District of TX. Creative, once hit with Apples countersuits, walked away with a company ending $100M "settlement", otherwise known as a nice C-level payoff, rather than risk losing everything.
Music store? Napster and others were selling well before iTunes. DRM-free music? Hello Napster!
How successful was that Napster store? Was it even legal? (It's a little too long ago and I wasn't a fan of Napster anyways) And what distribution entity was allowing Napster to sell anything legally DRM free? Prior to Apple reaching a DRM free agreement, that is. <crickets>
Everything you've talked about from Apple was literally created elsewhere, and refined nicely by others but weren't "shiny" so we get Apple!
By that token, nothing done by MS or Google was original either. You can contort anything they came up with that might be considered innovative as being based on something else that existed prior, or stole someone's idea that was in development and then presented it as their own creation. But perhaps you need to see what "innovate" actually means, because then you might understand that creating a refined package that's easy to use over something clunky and difficult qualifies as innovation. Or, are you going to argue that a Bugatti Veryon is nothing more than a wooden cart with some metal replacements and some smelly fossil fuel energy storage system to help move it along?
And as far as font scaling - you mean like iOS - FOR YEARS - required a fixed resolution for all iOS devices (and even made their bigger screens an even integer of the base resolution) because they couldn't scale? At least TrueType is supported across the Microsoft world... Apple's trying to push (yet again) a proprietary format to try to lock in its ever-shrinking marketshare...
Yeah, I guess I'm smokin something. Apple doesn't handle scaling at all (which is why I have 30 different font sizes in different windows on screen right now - wait, they're all pretty much consistently the same and they're set to a size I prefer on this non-apple hi-res screen. Damn, I thought you had me) There's design reasons for what Apple did, and the integer scaling for iOS screens actually is a help on iOS, developers only have to supply 1 or 2 scaled images. Oh, and all those old apps? They scaled just perfectly in the new screens. I should also mention that the iPhone 4->5 screen resolutions definitely were not an integer multiple, nor is the new iPhone X. So, I guess you're just wiffing left and right now.
As for TrueType, what makes you think it's unsupported? I'm running MS TT fonts right now because people keep sending me damn Calibri and other fonts in Word documents, and I got tired of seeing the warnings pop up that blah blah blah fonts were converted to default font family messages. So another fallacy. Actually, you do realize the reason desktop publishing reigned supreme on Apples was that TT and the like were supported by Apple and, more importantly, Apple actually properly renders documents consistently, because their OS actually controls the rendering of the document. As of W7 at least, MS offloads it to the GDI/Printer driver. AFAIK MS still can't consistently render a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document the same across multiple printers, even from the same vendor, unless you output a PDF first (PostScript goes direct to most printers, so either the printer handles it direct, or the conversion driver has to follow PS rules) And And of course you never need those documents to be consistent.
My kind suggestion: If you don't know what you're talking about it's usually better to just shut up and let us think you're ignorant, instead of proving it.
Ahh, so APPLE chose to use RAM that cannot be upgraded because it meets their specific niche. It's not the Intel processor, it's APPLE'S choice of LPDDR memory that's the culprit?
First, LPDDR in the current state of the art is limited to 8GB per stick. Second Intel limits this class of CPUs to a maximum of 2 channels for RAM. If Intel doubles the number of channels, allowing for 32GB, then the power consumption of the CPU goes up some and the RAM consumption obviously doubles. Considering that in real life, the SSDs used by Apple and the memory compression scheme they've implemented handily deal with the supposed limitations of 16GB RAM footprint, so there's been no pressure from the biggest purchaser of these CPUs to increase the maximum RAM capacity.
I mean - other laptops can go beyond 16 GB (Dell's XPS15, for example can run at 32 GB - and it's not a big laptop at all).
With a runtime less than half an equivalent MBP.
So which is it - is it because "Intel can't create a new CPU without changing the socket so older motherboards won't work with it" or is it because the "RAM Apple uses for its low power and battery based systems are maxed out"?
False dilemma. The parameters are for long running laptops on batteries (ie, low power consumption) LPDDR RAM uses on average 2/3s or less power when fully active compared to DDR RAM. When in sleep mode, it uses less than half as much. It's also much faster reacting from sleep to active, but LPDDR costs more.
You do realize that you can download and upgrade the EFI firmware yourself, right? It's just the automated install doesn't notify you. I don't disagree that's a bug, but is it a "problem"?
I run a 2005 G5 Tower at home as a Surveillance, FTP, and iTunes Server, FFS!!!
A 2010 mini used to do that for me, at a fraction of your power draw. It used to serve as my HTPC as well. Now it's a 2012 quad i7 to handle all that and more.
However, you need to buy very very specific RAM for the 2010 - PC3-8500 CL7 DIMMs for stable 16GB operation. Oh, and mine is at the current EFI level for that platform, as are my other systems. I checked them all.
For Microsoft: Other than mainstreaming the tablet nearly a decade before Apple?
Really? Would that be like Apple mainstreaming the tablet (Newton) prior to that?
Or pioneering immersive video conferencing in the mid 2000s with RoundTable?
You mean PictureTel that I was using back in 94? Or a handful of others that existed and were established far prior to MS's attempts. Or Apple's FaceTime before patent troll nerfing that mainstreamed it?
Or laser mice? Or real-time multi-language translation? Or tool suites? Sharepoint?
On mice, I can't recall if Logitech was first or not, but I don't recall people rushing to buy MS mice... Logitech, now there were lines when they went on sale. Language translation - rings no bells. Tool suites like that incredible cluster known as Visual Studio? No thanks. Sharepoint is the antithesis of anything a software system should ever aspire to.
For Google: Other than revolutionizing how search is done?
No such thing. They just had clean results returned, that was their only differentiator back when they started. Then they added ads better than their competitors.
Google Glass? Autocomplete?
Have you seen anyone using Google glass in the last 7 years? Seems like it's almost as successful as the Newton. Autocomplete was interesting, I can't recall who did something like it first, but you do realize that was actually a MS browser extension, right? (You missed this one, that actually was an MS innovation)
Google Translate?
Wait, didn't you just credit MS with translation? They can't both get credit for something.
Self driving cars? Google Earth? WIFI balloons?
I have yet to see a Google self-driving car. Teslas, meanwhile, can virtually drive themselves. But even Teslas pale compared to Volvo, which has self-driving trucks for underground and above ground available now. Google Earth, meh. You might have mentioned Google maps, but that was just a clone of the collected mapping data stores sold by what used to be the 3 main map source companies that I can't recall off-hand. Are WiFi balloons just like Google self-driving cars? I haven't seen one anywhere.
Here's a hint, just coming up with what seems to be a neat idea isn't innovative. Musk alone has been more innovative than both MS and Google together. Why? Because he's actually achieving visions (Tesla, SpaceX, GigaFactory, and SolarCity) Hyperloop right now is merely a neat idea. It's in the category of Google Glass. POCs appear to work, but until it's actually fully realized, implemented and functioning, it's nothing more than a pipe-dream.
Now what about Apple? Other than rounded corners, of course...
Yeah, Apple hasn't done a thing. iPods, online music store, DRM free music all failed, the iPhone didn't destroy Sony/Nokia/MS/Ericsson mobile phone business, iPads didn't create a whole new market segment, and then we're still stuck with floppies and optical drives on laptops, we don't have ultra-light notebooks, we're still stuck with PS/2 and USB 1/2/3 connectors instead of moving the ball forward with IEEE1394, ThunderBolt, USB-C, we still have 100dpi screens instead of high res screens, and GPUs that can't do above 4K video (Apple was the first 5K commercial solution)
Speaking of screen resolution, why can't MS after 30 years handle proper font scaling for screen resolution within the OS itself? We don't live in a 19" 1024x768 monitor anymore. Maybe they'll get the faxed memo this year?
So in this world you live in, what innovative Google/MS products are not mere copies of others work that you're using?
You're missing several points there and drawing false conclusions. The socket changes aren't affecting Apple any differently than any other manufacturer. They are, however, affecting the real functional upgradability for a consumer of a piece of hardware. The RAM Apple uses for its low power and battery based systems are maxed out. There's no point not soldering them, as they cannot be upgraded.
Exactly. Perhaps if allow each victim to hit him exactly once, with no weapons allowed. Given 90 million people he won't last. Better yet, maybe we keep finding upper managers until all 90 million have had their chance.
Well, if you start the line with people like Dwayne Johnson....
Given that Microsoft spends a little over $13 billion a year, yeah - Apple is lagging. Google also out-spends Apple on R&D. Maybe that's why all the good ideas these days are coming out of Google and Microsoft?
What good idea is coming out of MS, ever? Google had some interesting things pop up here and there, but overall, they're a data aggregation and advertising seller. Remove Waymo and what's their investment look like?
But some region of the world are going more conscious about all the electronic waste.
European countries have putting effort to bring the "Repair instead of throw away" idea into the public radar.
Upgrading RAM and SSD is a good way to insuflate a few more years into a laptop and avoid the whole thing going to a landfill.
So even if grandma has the slightest idea what an "SSD" is and thinks that "RAM" is a male sheep, it's still good for the environment if her old laptop can be upgraded/refurbished instead of thrown to trash.
You can't upgrade past 16GB of LPDDR RAM, which is in all newer MacBooks and minis. You can blame Intel for that, partially. In fact, looking at the upgrade paths, you can blame Intel for 90% of the lack of upgradeability. 1156, 1155, 1366 sockets, about every 2 years a new one comes out. The reasoning? Because Intel can't create a new CPU without changing the socket so older motherboards won't work with it. As for the SSD upgrade, those are possible, at least in everything I own, although average Joe(an) wouldn't tackle the job.
Then Experian may truly be more incompetent than Equifax. All my financial institutions allow me to setup security question/answers per my pairing, not some external pairing.
That might not jump out as insecure; security questions exist for a reason. But the questions themselves are easy to answer, particularly if you know how to use the internet and a search bar. Krebs says sample questions include asking users to identify cities where they've previously lived and the people that resided with them.
Security questions are fine, it's people who answer them with easily checkable facts that are morons. For instance, "Who's your best friend in first grade?" Answer: Empire State Building. "What's your mother's maiden name?" A: Queen of the Moon! etc.
Yes, you have to keep a list, mine's even worse than that, individual answers for every site that requests them.
At the very least, check the references before you discount what I'm saying, you might just learn something.
Oh, I don't discount what you're saying. And I see what those links say falls in line with my experiences. The "canvas" being larger is somewhat irrelevant in my experience, I'm only concerned about the viewable real estate. It's obvious you delve in areas I don't tread.
Depending on the control or element being tapped on,...
Yes, all of that makes sense and would be what I'd expect. I understand it makes life harder for what you're doing, but I fully get why it works that way.
Regarding the underlying engines, I was under the impression they were all different for mobile, primarily because of what you're limited to in the mobile realm.
That hasn't been the case for some time now. On every browser I've used in recent memory, except Safari, the rendering engines are the same; or at least close enough that neither I nor my clients have spotted any difference that required a tweak for mobile. The javascript engines sometimes differ; the iOS Safari javascript engine necessarily differs because iOS registers touch events instead of clicks, while macOS Safari does not.
So the difference in Safari is primarily attributable to the additional interface options available, and the fact that they're not easily dropped back to desktop equivalents. You're also basing your statement on the external behavior of the engine, not the actual engine. I haven't had to dig into those, so I can't speak definitively on whether they're the same or different, but I'd hazard a guess that they are likely to be different.
If you're referring to the ability to be "pixel perfect" I truly feel your pain.
That's often a requirement on the major browsers and yes, it's absolutely possible (and even easy if you can convince the client to limit to current versions of FF, Chrome, and Safari, IE11, and Edge). If you can't, you get the client to agree to an hourly rate for any other browsers they want to specify, or you pass up the job. I've never had to pass up a job (though I've had to start getting up from the table once) and those hourly invoices sure make a nice bonus.
I can tell you I design and work to HTML standards and use Safari/Firefox/Chrome, and then throw it to the testers for MS. If it's broken in MS, well, first we decide if it is MS being broken or not. Usually, our set of standards we work to means MS is broken.
I don't do pixel perfect because usually those people that want that also want exact color matching for their images. I had one customer that was griping about how an image looked different on 1024 x 768 monitor than on a 4K monitor, because it became fuzzy, and then the color shift was a whole different topic. Led to a discussion about people viewing the world through rose tinted glasses. But they were willing to pay.
5 vs 9, ok, 1.8 times. Yes, I over stated it based on the 2015 comparison I did, where the XPS15 only ran at best 4 hours. Dell apparently figured out that battery life does matter. :) I don't buy the 7 hours for the stock internal battery, but didn't look at the test configuration. It's possible they compared the extra large battery configuration or even external configuration setup, both which are options for that laptop. I'll also mention that the weight goes up significantly with each of those larger options.
The XPS15 runs for 11 hours
Between 5 and 7 hours are the longest I found, during comparison tests. I actually looked this up, because I did the same comparison lookup 2 years ago when I was laptop shopping. MBPs run up to 9 hours in those same comparison tests. Nothing, and I mean nothing, touches MBP battery life on equivalent weight and performance laptops in real side by side tests. Heck, one of those XPS15's actually weighs in at more than a pound more than the MBP competitor, including power brick. A more than half-pound difference if you exclude it.
are you claiming the MBP runs for 22 hours? And if Apple didn't use LPDDR couldn't they do 16 GB per stick? So it's Apple - not Intel - who is to blame here.
LPDDR is part of the reason the runtime is so much better on MBPs than, for instance, the Dells. And, as mentioned elsewhere, the real thing that will get you is that 16GB is actually an acceptable runtime environment for all but a tiny handful of tasks. With at least the last 4 iterations of OSX, I have ceased to swap on existing hardware, and my 16GB laptop has never had memory issues. And I am anything but a typical user. Web browsing and document handling are the smallest least resource impacting parts of what I do daily with my systems.
Microsoft was instrumental in making the modern spreadsheet the powerful business tool that it is.
Um, no.
The spreadsheet was the first application that gave typical businesses an advantage from using computers, and MS was who made that happen.
While your statement about spreadsheets is correct, you are wrong about who made that happen. You might want to check out Visicalc. MS didn't even come into the picture for years. And before you go on, MS didn't invent word processing, email, calendaring, chat, presentation software, project management software, scheduling software, banking solutions, or a host of other things you might think they came up with if you were born into and only used MS software. They did come up with MS Bob, though. And Clippy!
They also proved you can make a good ergonomic keyboard for under $100.
That is highly subjective. Is it a good keyboard? Is it ergonomic? (Hint, think of chairs - what's ergonomic for one person isn't for another) The only objective thing is it was less than $100.
The iMac can still have SSDs upgraded, and has upgradable RAM. Not sure about the CPUs on the new ones, but older ones can be upgraded within the limits of the socket. As for the motherboard/logic board, well, that's part of the reason you bought the iMac. There's a limit to how much hackery I'm willing to do to accomplish an upgrade. Mac Mini's might be easier to upgrade selected logic boards for, I haven't really looked, although I have 4 different models in house, so I suppose I could check them out when I pull several of them apart in a few weeks. It's just a box with a power brick and a pretty much self-contained unit. It just needs to match the mount points. Internally it's more like a laptop than a white-label PC.
The 2013 MacPro was a mistake, Apple has admitted as much, finally. I'm hoping they come out with a double or triple NUC sized box with the ability to host up to 2 CPUs and 4 GPUs. The NVMe drives don't take much space, and spinning or extra drives should likely be external, allowing them to reuse the Tbolt arrays and equipment created for the 2013 MacPro.
Intel has been doing it since the 80s, partly out of need. Different cores required different pinouts. That hasn't been true in a while now. PCIe has been standard for a while, the number supported has been fixed within a couple of groupings, and even memory busses have only been of 2 family types in the past decade. So the only arguments for varying sockets given the variance in number of cores supported by any given modern socket is how many PCIe lanes and memory channels are being supported, which would drive the pinouts. Older southbridge chipsets shouldn't even be affected in a properly designed socketed motherboard, since at worst they'd just run the CPU in a suboptimal configuration compared to newer chipsets or be missing some newer chipset supported feature. You should ask yourself why that's not being done.
iPods: see Apple paying Creative millions and millions for stealing the idea and even violating patents.
Really? You need to read up on that. It was a settlement with a potential deal for $100M to prevent a long protracted and expensive court case with uncertain outcomes in the especially notorious patent troll Eastern District of TX. Creative, once hit with Apples countersuits, walked away with a company ending $100M "settlement", otherwise known as a nice C-level payoff, rather than risk losing everything.
Music store? Napster and others were selling well before iTunes. DRM-free music? Hello Napster!
How successful was that Napster store? Was it even legal? (It's a little too long ago and I wasn't a fan of Napster anyways) And what distribution entity was allowing Napster to sell anything legally DRM free? Prior to Apple reaching a DRM free agreement, that is. <crickets>
Everything you've talked about from Apple was literally created elsewhere, and refined nicely by others but weren't "shiny" so we get Apple!
By that token, nothing done by MS or Google was original either. You can contort anything they came up with that might be considered innovative as being based on something else that existed prior, or stole someone's idea that was in development and then presented it as their own creation. But perhaps you need to see what "innovate" actually means, because then you might understand that creating a refined package that's easy to use over something clunky and difficult qualifies as innovation. Or, are you going to argue that a Bugatti Veryon is nothing more than a wooden cart with some metal replacements and some smelly fossil fuel energy storage system to help move it along?
And as far as font scaling - you mean like iOS - FOR YEARS - required a fixed resolution for all iOS devices (and even made their bigger screens an even integer of the base resolution) because they couldn't scale? At least TrueType is supported across the Microsoft world... Apple's trying to push (yet again) a proprietary format to try to lock in its ever-shrinking marketshare...
Yeah, I guess I'm smokin something. Apple doesn't handle scaling at all (which is why I have 30 different font sizes in different windows on screen right now - wait, they're all pretty much consistently the same and they're set to a size I prefer on this non-apple hi-res screen. Damn, I thought you had me) There's design reasons for what Apple did, and the integer scaling for iOS screens actually is a help on iOS, developers only have to supply 1 or 2 scaled images. Oh, and all those old apps? They scaled just perfectly in the new screens. I should also mention that the iPhone 4->5 screen resolutions definitely were not an integer multiple, nor is the new iPhone X. So, I guess you're just wiffing left and right now.
As for TrueType, what makes you think it's unsupported? I'm running MS TT fonts right now because people keep sending me damn Calibri and other fonts in Word documents, and I got tired of seeing the warnings pop up that blah blah blah fonts were converted to default font family messages. So another fallacy. Actually, you do realize the reason desktop publishing reigned supreme on Apples was that TT and the like were supported by Apple and, more importantly, Apple actually properly renders documents consistently, because their OS actually controls the rendering of the document. As of W7 at least, MS offloads it to the GDI/Printer driver. AFAIK MS still can't consistently render a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document the same across multiple printers, even from the same vendor, unless you output a PDF first (PostScript goes direct to most printers, so either the printer handles it direct, or the conversion driver has to follow PS rules) And And of course you never need those documents to be consistent.
My kind suggestion: If you don't know what you're talking about it's usually better to just shut up and let us think you're ignorant, instead of proving it.
Ahh, so APPLE chose to use RAM that cannot be upgraded because it meets their specific niche. It's not the Intel processor, it's APPLE'S choice of LPDDR memory that's the culprit?
First, LPDDR in the current state of the art is limited to 8GB per stick. Second Intel limits this class of CPUs to a maximum of 2 channels for RAM. If Intel doubles the number of channels, allowing for 32GB, then the power consumption of the CPU goes up some and the RAM consumption obviously doubles. Considering that in real life, the SSDs used by Apple and the memory compression scheme they've implemented handily deal with the supposed limitations of 16GB RAM footprint, so there's been no pressure from the biggest purchaser of these CPUs to increase the maximum RAM capacity.
I mean - other laptops can go beyond 16 GB (Dell's XPS15, for example can run at 32 GB - and it's not a big laptop at all).
With a runtime less than half an equivalent MBP.
So which is it - is it because "Intel can't create a new CPU without changing the socket so older motherboards won't work with it" or is it because the "RAM Apple uses for its low power and battery based systems are maxed out"?
False dilemma. The parameters are for long running laptops on batteries (ie, low power consumption) LPDDR RAM uses on average 2/3s or less power when fully active compared to DDR RAM. When in sleep mode, it uses less than half as much. It's also much faster reacting from sleep to active, but LPDDR costs more.
It's all part of Intel's eco-system to increase cash flows.
You do realize that you can download and upgrade the EFI firmware yourself, right? It's just the automated install doesn't notify you. I don't disagree that's a bug, but is it a "problem"?
I run a 2005 G5 Tower at home as a Surveillance, FTP, and iTunes Server, FFS!!!
A 2010 mini used to do that for me, at a fraction of your power draw. It used to serve as my HTPC as well. Now it's a 2012 quad i7 to handle all that and more.
However, you need to buy very very specific RAM for the 2010 - PC3-8500 CL7 DIMMs for stable 16GB operation. Oh, and mine is at the current EFI level for that platform, as are my other systems. I checked them all.
2012 mini and pro for sure. MacBook Pros are 2016.
For Microsoft: Other than mainstreaming the tablet nearly a decade before Apple?
Really? Would that be like Apple mainstreaming the tablet (Newton) prior to that?
Or pioneering immersive video conferencing in the mid 2000s with RoundTable?
You mean PictureTel that I was using back in 94? Or a handful of others that existed and were established far prior to MS's attempts. Or Apple's FaceTime before patent troll nerfing that mainstreamed it?
Or laser mice? Or real-time multi-language translation? Or tool suites? Sharepoint?
On mice, I can't recall if Logitech was first or not, but I don't recall people rushing to buy MS mice... Logitech, now there were lines when they went on sale. Language translation - rings no bells. Tool suites like that incredible cluster known as Visual Studio? No thanks. Sharepoint is the antithesis of anything a software system should ever aspire to.
For Google: Other than revolutionizing how search is done?
No such thing. They just had clean results returned, that was their only differentiator back when they started. Then they added ads better than their competitors.
Google Glass? Autocomplete?
Have you seen anyone using Google glass in the last 7 years? Seems like it's almost as successful as the Newton. Autocomplete was interesting, I can't recall who did something like it first, but you do realize that was actually a MS browser extension, right? (You missed this one, that actually was an MS innovation)
Google Translate?
Wait, didn't you just credit MS with translation? They can't both get credit for something.
Self driving cars? Google Earth? WIFI balloons?
I have yet to see a Google self-driving car. Teslas, meanwhile, can virtually drive themselves. But even Teslas pale compared to Volvo, which has self-driving trucks for underground and above ground available now. Google Earth, meh. You might have mentioned Google maps, but that was just a clone of the collected mapping data stores sold by what used to be the 3 main map source companies that I can't recall off-hand. Are WiFi balloons just like Google self-driving cars? I haven't seen one anywhere.
Here's a hint, just coming up with what seems to be a neat idea isn't innovative. Musk alone has been more innovative than both MS and Google together. Why? Because he's actually achieving visions (Tesla, SpaceX, GigaFactory, and SolarCity) Hyperloop right now is merely a neat idea. It's in the category of Google Glass. POCs appear to work, but until it's actually fully realized, implemented and functioning, it's nothing more than a pipe-dream.
Now what about Apple? Other than rounded corners, of course...
Yeah, Apple hasn't done a thing. iPods, online music store, DRM free music all failed, the iPhone didn't destroy Sony/Nokia/MS/Ericsson mobile phone business, iPads didn't create a whole new market segment, and then we're still stuck with floppies and optical drives on laptops, we don't have ultra-light notebooks, we're still stuck with PS/2 and USB 1/2/3 connectors instead of moving the ball forward with IEEE1394, ThunderBolt, USB-C, we still have 100dpi screens instead of high res screens, and GPUs that can't do above 4K video (Apple was the first 5K commercial solution)
Speaking of screen resolution, why can't MS after 30 years handle proper font scaling for screen resolution within the OS itself? We don't live in a 19" 1024x768 monitor anymore. Maybe they'll get the faxed memo this year?
So in this world you live in, what innovative Google/MS products are not mere copies of others work that you're using?
You're missing several points there and drawing false conclusions. The socket changes aren't affecting Apple any differently than any other manufacturer. They are, however, affecting the real functional upgradability for a consumer of a piece of hardware. The RAM Apple uses for its low power and battery based systems are maxed out. There's no point not soldering them, as they cannot be upgraded.
OK, you're doing it wrong...
But that would ruin the parody.
Exactly. Perhaps if allow each victim to hit him exactly once, with no weapons allowed. Given 90 million people he won't last. Better yet, maybe we keep finding upper managers until all 90 million have had their chance.
Well, if you start the line with people like Dwayne Johnson....
Bernie and Bannon are the only two really trying to get the average American to a better spot.
Those 2 names should never appear in the same sentence with an "and" between them. You're going to melt brains.
It's how you target that spending. I'd agree they need to put some serious funds into some desktop revamps.
Given that Microsoft spends a little over $13 billion a year, yeah - Apple is lagging. Google also out-spends Apple on R&D. Maybe that's why all the good ideas these days are coming out of Google and Microsoft?
What good idea is coming out of MS, ever? Google had some interesting things pop up here and there, but overall, they're a data aggregation and advertising seller. Remove Waymo and what's their investment look like?
But some region of the world are going more conscious about all the electronic waste. European countries have putting effort to bring the "Repair instead of throw away" idea into the public radar. Upgrading RAM and SSD is a good way to insuflate a few more years into a laptop and avoid the whole thing going to a landfill.
So even if grandma has the slightest idea what an "SSD" is and thinks that "RAM" is a male sheep, it's still good for the environment if her old laptop can be upgraded/refurbished instead of thrown to trash.
You can't upgrade past 16GB of LPDDR RAM, which is in all newer MacBooks and minis. You can blame Intel for that, partially. In fact, looking at the upgrade paths, you can blame Intel for 90% of the lack of upgradeability. 1156, 1155, 1366 sockets, about every 2 years a new one comes out. The reasoning? Because Intel can't create a new CPU without changing the socket so older motherboards won't work with it. As for the SSD upgrade, those are possible, at least in everything I own, although average Joe(an) wouldn't tackle the job.
I'd argue at least 2-3 years after as well, as his hand was on the wheel and it's hard to turn the ship quickly.
But they didn't work security questions from some external source, did they?
Then Experian may truly be more incompetent than Equifax. All my financial institutions allow me to setup security question/answers per my pairing, not some external pairing.
Security questions are fine, it's people who answer them with easily checkable facts that are morons. For instance, "Who's your best friend in first grade?" Answer: Empire State Building. "What's your mother's maiden name?" A: Queen of the Moon! etc.
Yes, you have to keep a list, mine's even worse than that, individual answers for every site that requests them.
"What's your first car?" A: Ponies!
At the very least, check the references before you discount what I'm saying, you might just learn something.
Oh, I don't discount what you're saying. And I see what those links say falls in line with my experiences. The "canvas" being larger is somewhat irrelevant in my experience, I'm only concerned about the viewable real estate. It's obvious you delve in areas I don't tread.
Depending on the control or element being tapped on, ...
Yes, all of that makes sense and would be what I'd expect. I understand it makes life harder for what you're doing, but I fully get why it works that way.
Regarding the underlying engines, I was under the impression they were all different for mobile, primarily because of what you're limited to in the mobile realm.
That hasn't been the case for some time now. On every browser I've used in recent memory, except Safari, the rendering engines are the same; or at least close enough that neither I nor my clients have spotted any difference that required a tweak for mobile. The javascript engines sometimes differ; the iOS Safari javascript engine necessarily differs because iOS registers touch events instead of clicks, while macOS Safari does not.
So the difference in Safari is primarily attributable to the additional interface options available, and the fact that they're not easily dropped back to desktop equivalents. You're also basing your statement on the external behavior of the engine, not the actual engine. I haven't had to dig into those, so I can't speak definitively on whether they're the same or different, but I'd hazard a guess that they are likely to be different.
If you're referring to the ability to be "pixel perfect" I truly feel your pain.
That's often a requirement on the major browsers and yes, it's absolutely possible (and even easy if you can convince the client to limit to current versions of FF, Chrome, and Safari, IE11, and Edge). If you can't, you get the client to agree to an hourly rate for any other browsers they want to specify, or you pass up the job. I've never had to pass up a job (though I've had to start getting up from the table once) and those hourly invoices sure make a nice bonus.
I can tell you I design and work to HTML standards and use Safari/Firefox/Chrome, and then throw it to the testers for MS. If it's broken in MS, well, first we decide if it is MS being broken or not. Usually, our set of standards we work to means MS is broken.
I don't do pixel perfect because usually those people that want that also want exact color matching for their images. I had one customer that was griping about how an image looked different on 1024 x 768 monitor than on a 4K monitor, because it became fuzzy, and then the color shift was a whole different topic. Led to a discussion about people viewing the world through rose tinted glasses. But they were willing to pay.