That's the fun thing about retail in America, just because they're selling "house brand" Aloe at $7.99 for a 6 oz bottle doesn't mean that it isn't, literally, sugar water.
Branding doesn't mean anything anymore... any good brand will eventually sell out to someone who is willing to devalue that brand in exchange for some quick profit.
CVS and Walgreens reputation isn't for quality, it's for convenience, and ripping you off - ask anyone walking into one of those places "do you expect to get good value for your money here?" Anyone who says "yes" is just jerking your chain - markup of a minimum of 100% is expected there, I guess they're so crowded because people are just too time/attention poor to bother buying their products from more consumer friendly outlets - even the local monopoly ripoff grocery chain sells virtually everything you can find in a CVS/Walgreens and at better prices.
>Next time they'll choose a more reliable supplier.
Ya think? WalMart is known for leaning on all their suppliers, hard, to cut costs. I'm 99% sure the suppliers wouldn't have quit buying Aloe altogether for their formulation except that it costs more money than maltodextrin and they couldn't keep the WalMart contract without cutting that last 0.5% corner.
I suppose that WalMart et.al. are the labeling retailer and that the consumer is putting their faith and trust into these dubious corporate entities when paying $2.99 for some gel to smear on a sunburn - there should be liability there.
I also feel that there should be liability and accountability at the supplier level, if the supplier represented to WalMart that they were still supplying product "worthy" of the Aloe gel label, they should be held accountable for that, preferably at the same time that WalMart settles for their fraud and negligence.
Don't buy cosmetics and toiletries from Dollar General and the like?
Really, these places should be like "off license" restaurants in England, everybody knows they sell crap, but there's not really an official notice posted anywhere.
They can, but will they? They barely inspect small medical device manufacturers once every 10 years, and even then it's not the kind of visit that would detect this kind of issue.
I'm all for sticking it to WalMart, CVS, and Walgreens whenever possible, but in this particular case... shouldn't we be going after the supplier that manufactures the product and sticks their labels on it for these companies, too? Probably the same factory for all 3. Sure, Wally and friends should have better supplier controls in place, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Walton family and their employees simply didn't know, didn't care.
The defensive claim is that maltodextrin in gel "works like" or "works as well as" Aloe gel - they just put the Aloe name on the label because people want to see it and will buy Aloe gel before they will buy "soothing gel."
Rubbish, all rubbish, time for a class action lawsuit and free lollipops to everyone who ever bought "Aloe" gel from the fradulent outlets.
Agreed that TPP is bad, unfortunately, I think once you actually become privy to all the details of the situation, it may be the least of available evils.
Those details should be public knowledge, but they're not. Trump will be getting a look at the details, the question is: is he mature enough (at his age!) to rationally explain why he was wrong, or will he actually make things worse for America just so he doesn't have to publically waffle?
I agree, they suck and should wither back away to the BeBox days... However, I will never understand the cult of Jobs - how he wooed the money out of yuppies' wallets and how he was able to maintain a fashion fad through his entire natural life. It's one of the strongest evidential cases for a deal with the Devil I can think of, right down to the wasting cancerous death.
Anyone who tried to follow Jobs was doomed to failure - no one else could be such a self centered prick and get away with it. Even he didn't get away with it the first time, but they gave him a second chance and he made it work. A leader could be installed in Apple who is better than Jobs, create better products, but they will never "click" with the market the way he did. Even he shouldn't have been able to click with the market the way he did. Selling overpriced MP3 players, dysfunctional touchscreen phones on a bad wireless network, and nothing-special computers, all at double market prices and higher... I guess it was Coco Chanel style marketing at a price point that lots of people could afford. The ever-plummeting cost of electronic tech also played well into Apple marketing - if you just closed your eyes to the market and compare what you just bought to something similarly spec'ed from 5 years earlier, you just got a good deal - that's kind of slowed down since he passed, too, making any successor's job even harder.
I will give him credit for riding herd on the UI teams, only a genuine hard-ass prick could have gotten tech software interfaces to be as simple as he did... I guess it's appropriate that the router group is abandoning ship, since they never really pulled off a good router interface.
When they only sell for $180 and they're expected to last for 5 years or more, that's less than $40/year per household gross... not even iPod territory, not worth the time and support hassles.
There were mag-safe cables on the 2006 MacBook Pros - like I said, pulled out by the connector, not the cable, carefully folded into the notebook bag... Now, I did carry the notebook in and out of the office daily, so it's not like it just sat on a desk and never got inserted/extracted. I think it was just the flexing of being put in the notebook bag that eventually frayed it - the strain relief was kind of a joke back then.
First gen iPads had a similar looking design, much more sturdy, but it eventually died too (shortly before OS upgrades essentially bricked the iPad) - by the time we replaced it they had a new looking design - Genius at the Genius bar tried to tell me that I was using an aftermarket cable because of the difference in design.... no, Genius, this is the cable that came in the original box from Apple... plus, if it were an aftermarket cable, that probably would mean that the OEM cable had died even faster....
I'm aware of the time-scale, though less impressed by the passage of this decade than the previous. File-Vault like things were obviously too hot to handle in 1995, then fooled me into burning myself in 2006 based on the logic: "it's been 10 years, they're promoting it as part of their 'it just works' OS, surely they've got it sorted by now."
If ever the need for an encrypted storage scheme comes along again, I'll look at the modern whole disk systems - in my product design work we handle the problem by simply not storing anything that might need encrypting on the drive.
You know, I thought that... my colleague was a boorish slob and when he was on his 4th replacement cable I thought "man, what a careless jerk." But, I had the same model (15" MacBook Pro, 2006) and after less than 1 year of very careful use - with his cautionary example that care was required, mine fell apart too.
But, it's all good, I never needed a 2nd replacement because my graphics chip overheated itself into uselessness within less than 2 years.
They did, however, replace the inflating batteries under warranty.
I used, and walked away from, my first home folder encryption tools in the mid 1990s... by 2006 I figured the tech should have matured to some kind of plateau, but FileVault's issues in 2006 were very reminiscent of the Windows' encryption tool issues from 1995. I guess they finally got it right with FileVault2 - good to know, but mostly academic for me today... I'm running 40% Linux desktops, 45% Windows desktops, and 15% legacy OS-X stuff for very niche applications, FileVault isn't much of a potential player for me anymore - after decades without it, I've learned to accept that people with physical access to my hardware can see my open files.
My experience has been 50/50 - 50% of our Apple products crap out due to build defects (or, in the case of iPad minis, weak materials) well before expected, the other 50% have severely underpowered computer capability rendering them mostly useless- for example, the previous generation to the 1st intel mac mini - yeah, it still works, just not with anything you'd consider modern software.
It's the pro desktop - which doubles as a vacuum cleaner.
To be used as a vaccum cleaner, it would need to waste more power to generate noise and heat. Yes, this seems the most important feature of vacuum cleansers if you listen to consumers. All they care about is power consumption; it does not matter how well it actually cleans.
Fire up any serious number crunching task and the MacPro will make heat you can feel, and fan noise you can hear from three rooms away.
I think that Apple's engineering staff is not sufficiently resourced to "value stream" their designs to fail just after warranty - some stuff (like the iPad 1 physical case and screen) is bulletproof, but later iPads have gotten more and more fragile, even as they advertise using stronger materials. But, they did manage to kill the iPad 1 with OS upgrades.
I also have a pre-Intel (was that G5?) MacMini that "works as well as it ever did", but again the software has left it in the dust, kids run TuxPaint on it just fine, but it can't browse the modern internet.
So, summing up my experience of the last decade or so: 3 computers have lasted forever, but become useless due to inadequate processor/RAM/etc., a notebook, and several iPad minis have died due to weak hardware design, and a couple of intel generation mac minis are still spinning strong - but they're roughly equivalent to double-priced intel NUCs...
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That's the fun thing about retail in America, just because they're selling "house brand" Aloe at $7.99 for a 6 oz bottle doesn't mean that it isn't, literally, sugar water.
Branding doesn't mean anything anymore... any good brand will eventually sell out to someone who is willing to devalue that brand in exchange for some quick profit.
CVS and Walgreens reputation isn't for quality, it's for convenience, and ripping you off - ask anyone walking into one of those places "do you expect to get good value for your money here?" Anyone who says "yes" is just jerking your chain - markup of a minimum of 100% is expected there, I guess they're so crowded because people are just too time/attention poor to bother buying their products from more consumer friendly outlets - even the local monopoly ripoff grocery chain sells virtually everything you can find in a CVS/Walgreens and at better prices.
>Next time they'll choose a more reliable supplier.
Ya think? WalMart is known for leaning on all their suppliers, hard, to cut costs. I'm 99% sure the suppliers wouldn't have quit buying Aloe altogether for their formulation except that it costs more money than maltodextrin and they couldn't keep the WalMart contract without cutting that last 0.5% corner.
I suppose that WalMart et.al. are the labeling retailer and that the consumer is putting their faith and trust into these dubious corporate entities when paying $2.99 for some gel to smear on a sunburn - there should be liability there.
I also feel that there should be liability and accountability at the supplier level, if the supplier represented to WalMart that they were still supplying product "worthy" of the Aloe gel label, they should be held accountable for that, preferably at the same time that WalMart settles for their fraud and negligence.
Don't buy cosmetics and toiletries from Dollar General and the like?
Really, these places should be like "off license" restaurants in England, everybody knows they sell crap, but there's not really an official notice posted anywhere.
They can, but will they? They barely inspect small medical device manufacturers once every 10 years, and even then it's not the kind of visit that would detect this kind of issue.
Throw 'em to the lawyers, it'll hurt more.
I'm all for sticking it to WalMart, CVS, and Walgreens whenever possible, but in this particular case... shouldn't we be going after the supplier that manufactures the product and sticks their labels on it for these companies, too? Probably the same factory for all 3. Sure, Wally and friends should have better supplier controls in place, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Walton family and their employees simply didn't know, didn't care.
Nerds care when people lie to them.
Politinerds care about regulation/deregulation and the consequences.
Pasty white nerds are easily sunburned and Aloe gel is a product they have used before and will use again?
I don't know, I'm having real trouble coming up with a car analogy- but, wait: VW to the rescue!
The defensive claim is that maltodextrin in gel "works like" or "works as well as" Aloe gel - they just put the Aloe name on the label because people want to see it and will buy Aloe gel before they will buy "soothing gel."
Rubbish, all rubbish, time for a class action lawsuit and free lollipops to everyone who ever bought "Aloe" gel from the fradulent outlets.
Agreed that TPP is bad, unfortunately, I think once you actually become privy to all the details of the situation, it may be the least of available evils.
Those details should be public knowledge, but they're not. Trump will be getting a look at the details, the question is: is he mature enough (at his age!) to rationally explain why he was wrong, or will he actually make things worse for America just so he doesn't have to publically waffle?
I agree, they suck and should wither back away to the BeBox days... However, I will never understand the cult of Jobs - how he wooed the money out of yuppies' wallets and how he was able to maintain a fashion fad through his entire natural life. It's one of the strongest evidential cases for a deal with the Devil I can think of, right down to the wasting cancerous death.
Anyone who tried to follow Jobs was doomed to failure - no one else could be such a self centered prick and get away with it. Even he didn't get away with it the first time, but they gave him a second chance and he made it work. A leader could be installed in Apple who is better than Jobs, create better products, but they will never "click" with the market the way he did. Even he shouldn't have been able to click with the market the way he did. Selling overpriced MP3 players, dysfunctional touchscreen phones on a bad wireless network, and nothing-special computers, all at double market prices and higher... I guess it was Coco Chanel style marketing at a price point that lots of people could afford. The ever-plummeting cost of electronic tech also played well into Apple marketing - if you just closed your eyes to the market and compare what you just bought to something similarly spec'ed from 5 years earlier, you just got a good deal - that's kind of slowed down since he passed, too, making any successor's job even harder.
I will give him credit for riding herd on the UI teams, only a genuine hard-ass prick could have gotten tech software interfaces to be as simple as he did... I guess it's appropriate that the router group is abandoning ship, since they never really pulled off a good router interface.
When they only sell for $180 and they're expected to last for 5 years or more, that's less than $40/year per household gross... not even iPod territory, not worth the time and support hassles.
I think the potential victims of such a line of inquiry have a pretty solid handle on the media and have shut that story down hard.
If it really was a story, stay tuned, the news will come out in 11 years or so...
Sorry, but you asked for this one: if you're afraid of numbskulls, Zika should scare you very badly indeed.
Until 3 days ago, I had never heard of "FileVault2" - everybody I interact with just calls it FileVault.
There were mag-safe cables on the 2006 MacBook Pros - like I said, pulled out by the connector, not the cable, carefully folded into the notebook bag... Now, I did carry the notebook in and out of the office daily, so it's not like it just sat on a desk and never got inserted/extracted. I think it was just the flexing of being put in the notebook bag that eventually frayed it - the strain relief was kind of a joke back then.
First gen iPads had a similar looking design, much more sturdy, but it eventually died too (shortly before OS upgrades essentially bricked the iPad) - by the time we replaced it they had a new looking design - Genius at the Genius bar tried to tell me that I was using an aftermarket cable because of the difference in design.... no, Genius, this is the cable that came in the original box from Apple... plus, if it were an aftermarket cable, that probably would mean that the OEM cable had died even faster....
FileVault2 came out with OSX Lion, which was previewed in October of 2010... so, like 5 years, man.
I'm aware of the time-scale, though less impressed by the passage of this decade than the previous. File-Vault like things were obviously too hot to handle in 1995, then fooled me into burning myself in 2006 based on the logic: "it's been 10 years, they're promoting it as part of their 'it just works' OS, surely they've got it sorted by now."
If ever the need for an encrypted storage scheme comes along again, I'll look at the modern whole disk systems - in my product design work we handle the problem by simply not storing anything that might need encrypting on the drive.
Cool, and thanks - might just try that. That little box is a tank.
You know, I thought that... my colleague was a boorish slob and when he was on his 4th replacement cable I thought "man, what a careless jerk." But, I had the same model (15" MacBook Pro, 2006) and after less than 1 year of very careful use - with his cautionary example that care was required, mine fell apart too.
But, it's all good, I never needed a 2nd replacement because my graphics chip overheated itself into uselessness within less than 2 years.
They did, however, replace the inflating batteries under warranty.
I used, and walked away from, my first home folder encryption tools in the mid 1990s... by 2006 I figured the tech should have matured to some kind of plateau, but FileVault's issues in 2006 were very reminiscent of the Windows' encryption tool issues from 1995. I guess they finally got it right with FileVault2 - good to know, but mostly academic for me today... I'm running 40% Linux desktops, 45% Windows desktops, and 15% legacy OS-X stuff for very niche applications, FileVault isn't much of a potential player for me anymore - after decades without it, I've learned to accept that people with physical access to my hardware can see my open files.
There's a reason you're the fake Tim Cook...
My experience has been 50/50 - 50% of our Apple products crap out due to build defects (or, in the case of iPad minis, weak materials) well before expected, the other 50% have severely underpowered computer capability rendering them mostly useless- for example, the previous generation to the 1st intel mac mini - yeah, it still works, just not with anything you'd consider modern software.
My last burn was in 2006 - I've got a low tolerance for repeat nuclear meltdowns.
That's a good thing, I suppose - the home folder only method was inherently dangerous the way they implemented it.
To be fair, I was last burned by it in 2006 - that was enough for me to stay away, branding hasn't changed - hard to trust the new versions.
It's the pro desktop - which doubles as a vacuum cleaner.
To be used as a vaccum cleaner, it would need to waste more power to generate noise and heat. Yes, this seems the most important feature of vacuum cleansers if you listen to consumers. All they care about is power consumption; it does not matter how well it actually cleans.
Fire up any serious number crunching task and the MacPro will make heat you can feel, and fan noise you can hear from three rooms away.
I think that Apple's engineering staff is not sufficiently resourced to "value stream" their designs to fail just after warranty - some stuff (like the iPad 1 physical case and screen) is bulletproof, but later iPads have gotten more and more fragile, even as they advertise using stronger materials. But, they did manage to kill the iPad 1 with OS upgrades.
I also have a pre-Intel (was that G5?) MacMini that "works as well as it ever did", but again the software has left it in the dust, kids run TuxPaint on it just fine, but it can't browse the modern internet.
So, summing up my experience of the last decade or so: 3 computers have lasted forever, but become useless due to inadequate processor/RAM/etc., a notebook, and several iPad minis have died due to weak hardware design, and a couple of intel generation mac minis are still spinning strong - but they're roughly equivalent to double-priced intel NUCs...