You don't think that locking up information and media behind ever-extended copyright and DRM is a step backward? Every time they extend it, that's just one more step. You do realize the dark ages were the result of knowledge being removed from circulation, kept to a select few who eventually perished, taking what they knew with them. Of course, we have ways around today's DRM, so some would say it is a non issue; I find it difficult to agree when there exist places where circumventing DRM is a criminal offense that can lead to incarceration. They want their knowledge, they want their information, and they want to either not share it or price it such that only the elite few can have it. And no, I'm not talking about $20 blu-rays and 99 cent music tracks, there are many more important resources kept under lock and key.
There's one example, and I didn't even have to try hard to find it. While I could provide a few more, it's best left as an exercise for the reader; it'll sink in better if you do the work yourself.
Autonomous flight capabilities. If it loses connection with the user controls, does it hover in place, land safely, return home, or crash? If it does anything other than crash in that scenario, it's a drone. This has already been defined.
A free market relies on an informed and rational populace. We have an uninformed populace who, as a result of that lack of accurate and actionable information, are incapable of acting rationally. That is to say, what we have here is not a free market, so the transactions taking place are far from perfect.
where buyers have complete information, act rationally, and have a near-infinity of choices to weigh
There is no need for near-infinite choice, two choices is plenty, we just need to work on the information and rationality aspects. An informed and rational people will pick the best of two options, forcing the worse option out of the market and making room for someone else to offer another, better option. This is progressive enhancement and it's how the world worked leading up to the dark ages, and how it's worked again since then until recently when we've started legislating ourselves back into the dark ages. and before you make the argument that we're not seeing any sort of dark-ages-level regression, let me highlight that I said "started"; we've a ways to go yet, but you can't deny we're taking steps backward every single day.
Rather than saying it can't work because people are neither informed nor rational, I would say we need to work in informing people. And rather than saying there's no point because people will remain irrational, even in the face of enlightenment, I posit that better-informed people tend to behave more rationally overall. So, really, the one problem we seem to have is a generally uninformed or purposely misled populace.
Let's fix that.
It's not just about free market democracy, either; regardless of the system of government or economy put in place, the only thing that can prevent it from collapsing into tyranny is an informed populace.
Indeed, poor thing probably found his way out of his own yard to go exploring after being left outside alone all night by an irresponsible owner and got lost. Don't blame the dog in these instances, blame the moron who doesn't deserve the dog in the first place.
It sounds like you have absolute shit neighbors. I live in a condo, there are 7 units in my building and 4 identical buildings a stone's throw away (there are many more buildings in the complex, I'm just limiting to the immediately neighboring buildings to clarify my point), that is a total of 28 households, with 13 dogs distributed across 9 owners. In the 8 months I've lived here, I've heard one dog barking, and it was not one of those 13. This is in part because the HOA does not allow dogs to be left outside alone, but it is mostly because I live near 9 responsible dog owners.
The one dog I've heard barking here was being walked and got a little excited at meeting someone new when I introduced myself. Not a big deal, it was a couple of "hey, hi there, who are you?" barks, followed by a little jumping up and licking, then some sniffing as the dog discovered that I smell like my two cats, than a 45 minute conversation with the dog's owner about unrelated things, like the lack of late night parties and construction noise in the neighborhood. This was the week I moved in.
I guess the takeaway here is that these things aren't problems in communities populated by respectful neighbors who aren't assholes to each other.
There is a fair bit more that a dog might perceive as wrong than what you might think to consider. For starters, their owner leaving; to a dog, it's wrong that their owner is leaving and will never be coming back, but, eventually, the dog remembers his owner returned every other time they left and it suddenly stops being wrong, thus the dog stops barking. That is but one of many examples. Personally, I prefer cats, they only meow at me when there is an exception to the norm; if something new comes along, they eventually get used to it and stop meowing whenever it happens, but for rare events... well, one of my cats is an earthquake early warning system. When I see him riding low and latching on to the ground for dear life, I know it's time to pull the breakables down off the shelves. They don't freak out when cars drive by, though, because they're smart enough to have gotten used to them.
I think what you're trying to get at (whether you realized it as you wrote that or not) is that shitty people shouldn't have the ability to be in control of another life. On this, we certainly agree. It's hard to be a shitty cat owner, as a cat just won't leave you alone until you take care of them and they tend to not bother the neighbors at the same time they're bothering you; perhaps most dog owners should have cats instead?
The thing about "gun nuts" (advocates, actually, but that's another discussion) is that they advocate for ownership of firearms. By way of this, they assume everyone owns and carries, though they may intuitively know that most people do not; not knowing who is and is not carrying, it's safest to assume everyone is. In light of that, gun advocates typically try to avoid confrontation and are generally very polite people until you try to take away their protection piece.
Please share whar you're on. The transducer, perhaps; the cop, though? Tell me you're joking. And then share whateber you're on, I want to be as funny as you.
Yup, dog thinks there's something wrong when you're not there, he's afraid you're not coming back, then he remembers you always come back and stops worrying and, thus, making noise.
Ignoring the needs of your pet is abuse. If your pet needs space to run and execrise so they don't spend all night loudly complaining thet they aren't getting that, then you need to give them that. Not doing so is abuse.
I know, right? And they don't meow at each other (they scream when playing or fighting, meowing is reserved for their caretakers, we humans) so there is no issue wih them trying to talk to other cats like dogs do. I mean, keep the little precious angels (I mean demonspawn from hell, but I still love them) away from leather furniture and anything you don't want shredded, but at least we cat owners are the ones who bear the brunt of our pets' tantrums, and not our neighbors. Amirite?
I got your joke, you seem to have missed mine. That said, yes, Ms. Inverse was meant to be flawed, but you still got the flaw wrong.;P As for not good not bad people, I'd say the majority who just live their own lives without helping others don't really qualify as good people while they're not really bad either if they aren't going around causing trouble for others. I know a lot of people who fit that mold.
It's one thing for a dog to bark a couple of times (because the owner is not neglectful of the animal and responds to the barking); that's fine, whatever, dogs bark when something is wrong or when they perceive that some thing is wrong. If a dog barks for more than a minute or so and the owner hasn't responded, that's a neglectful owner and they need to, as you say, fuck off. Right off, in fact.
Ms. Inverse: Hello you little kids, I'm Ms. Inverse. I put the word "not" in front of both halves of a logical statement, to come up with something that looks right but isn't true. Let me give you an example... White people are good, therefore black people are bad. Isn't that easy?
Well, it is easy, but you still failed at it. Putting "not" in front of both halves of the logical statement "white people are good" would result in "not white people are not good" which, adjusted for proper grammar, would read as "people who are not white are not good", black people are only a subset of "people who are not white" and bad people are only a subset of "people who are not good", so even if your original statement had been correct (which I don't believe it to be), your corollary was improperly formed even according to your own rule.
Dogs bark when something is wrong, or when they perceive that something is wrong. Letting your dog keep barking for any length of time (I think 10 minutes is too long in this case) is animal abuse. Either the dog needs something, is afraid of something, or is trying to warn you of something; ignoring it and letting it keep barking is not the answer. So yes, calling the cops over ANIMAL ABUSE is perfectly reasonable and only a narcissistic asshole dog owner would argue otherwise.
So you're saying that it would be literally impossible for ARM to stop licensing to Apple? Sorry, no contract is interminable. It may be that they never would stop, and I don't think they would (nor did I ever claim to), but the fact remains they could. You can sit here and tell me I'm pulling "evidence" out of my ass, but facts aren't simply pulled from one's own rectum, they exist on their own. It's really and truly not my fault you can't see them yourself.
To be fair, that's probably where the ones who can't handle the workplace belong. As is evident by the fact that there have always been women in the workplace, the role of "housewife" isn't something that was forced on women, it's a choice women made for themselves; as a result of that choice being made my a majority of women, education for women (and, as a result, rights that require some level of education in order to exercise reasonably) were more or less ignored. After all, if she's most likely going to end up staying at home, cooking and cleaning, why waste the resources to teach her math and science? She can learn everything she needs from her mother, at home.
Now I'm not saying this is the fault of women; I think women should have, and should always have had, the opportunity to pursue education and work, and believe the rights women were denied at the same time they were being denied an education should, in fact, be dependent on completing a certain level of education. After all, if we're going to say women shouldn't be allowed to vote because their place is in the home, which we said because they were largely uneducated as the result of an educational system that sought to exclude them, are we not saying they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are uneducated? If we distill that thought, should the result not be "the uneducated should not be allowed to vote"? I think it should.
And here we are, at a time where women have the same educational opportunities as men, and many women take those opportunities, and they excel, often outperforming many of the men in their fields of study. Why are women not yet viewed as our equals? And, perhaps as importantly, why is someone who can't pass a GED test at 30 allowed to vote? Wasn't women being too dumb to follow politics precisely the reason we didn't allow them to vote in the past? Now that this has been disproved, they are allowed to vote and, in fact, are allowed every right afforded to a man, why are they still not our equals? And yet the uneducated, both men and women, are being allowed to vote this country into the ground.
I'll tell you why. We've got a subset of men and women, a relatively small group, probably less than 1% on either side, who love to cause problems. Whether it's a woman who really doesn't belong in the workplace, going out of her way to eavesdrop on a personal conversation in the break room and using what she hears to get someone fired because the thing the shouldn't have been listening to in the first place offended her, or a man talking about something a little too loudly in the break room and offending a woman who shouldn't have had to hear it, those situations are problems. In the first example, the woman was the problem, she went out of her way to hear something that was not meant for her and had no right taking offense to what she heard while eavesdropping; in all likelihood, what was said was only said because she was eavesdropping on the conversation, scooting closer to hear the quiet conversation she was not a part of. In the second example, the man was the problem, the woman likely had no interest in what was being said and just wanted to enjoy a quiet lunch without hearing about someone's sexual conquest or hunting trip or... pick any of a large number of things some people find offensive.
So, if both men and women are causing these problems at roughly equal rates, why do women get all the blame? Well, it seems that the minority of women who cause problems have pushed for workplace protections for themselves, such that if the situation were reversed and it was a woman talking loudly about something offensive in the break room and a man taking issue with it, it's still the man's problem. And don't even get me started on sexual harassment, something that many believe can not happen to a man.
Even if the above only happens in a small number of workplaces (and I believe that to be the case as I've never seen it firsthand), the fact that it happens at all means that
Sadly, no, the guys I know are working on iOS and iTunes. I'd definitely be interested to hear from one of the chip devs, as well, though I'm sure there's nothing they can legally tell us that we don't already know (or can't find through Google). NDAs tend to suck like that.
All of that said, I actually haven't been watching the phone market, for the first time since the iPhone came out, since I got my Nexus 6. Plain and simple, this is the first time I've ever been satisfied with a phone I've owned. I'm sure the iPhone 6 Plus would have scratched that same itch for me if I were in the iPhone camp; it's certainly doing the trick for my wife, she didn't even watch the keynote where the 6s models were announced because she simply doesn't need any more than she's got now... for the first time in as long as I've known her.
Being firmly entrenched in the iPad camp, though, I do still think Apple screwed the pooch when they broke compatibility with all of the active styluses (e.g. pressure sensitive) in the iPad Air 2. Anything to make the iPad Pro look more attractive, I guess. My Air is working fine for me still and there are now active styluses on the market that work for the Air 2, so it would seem they didn't get the iPad Pro out fast enough if that's what they were going for. And I'm not sure what else they possibly could have been going for, there is no benefit to the developer, nor to the end user, in the changes they made to the touch screen on the Air 2. But, I digress, that's an old argument; it still hurts me, though, because the end result was that I bought a $700 product that ended up being useless to me for the purpose for which I bought it until a year after it was purchased, by which point I had moved on already.
Honestly, though, I've kind of bittered on the whole Apple experience. My Windows testing machine died a month ago and needed to be replaced. I've used my MacBook Pro 3 times since the replacement arrived; Apple simply doesn't make a laptop that performs the way this new one does. I say that as an owner of the fastest laptop they currently produce (which strangely remains the fastest laptop they sell since I bought it in January). I'm definitely not the typical laptop user, though; for most, anything in any manufacturer's mid-range is more machine than they'll need in their lifetime. For me? I need something that doesn't choke on my daily workload, and the MacBook Pro was doing just that.
To each their own. I certainly do miss the native Unix environment at times, but Cygwin does well enough on that front, as the majority of what I do on the command line is done on other machines via SSH anyway. I certainly enjoyed my time using an Apple machine as my primary desktop, but it is clear where their focus is now, and that focus has shifted to products I don't use, to the detriment of products I (and many others who don't use an iPhone) do use. For reference (to illustrate my point), the Windows laptop I am typing this on is a model that was first released several months before the MacBook Pro line refresh that resulted in the MBP model I currently own; that is to say that, while the Windows laptop is a more recent purchase than the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Pro is actually the newer machine, by several months. The Windows laptop is not the highest-end machine in its line when it launched, while the MacBook Pro was and still is. To put it another way, Apple's best laptop was lagging behind MSI's mid-high laptops when it launched, and they haven't done anything about that, nor does it look like they intend to.
But at least they make the fastest mobile processor. So... there's that, I guess. Doesn't really make up for the end of a glorious 5 year run, though.
Slashdot Mirror
KGill actually addressed that...
You don't think that locking up information and media behind ever-extended copyright and DRM is a step backward? Every time they extend it, that's just one more step. You do realize the dark ages were the result of knowledge being removed from circulation, kept to a select few who eventually perished, taking what they knew with them. Of course, we have ways around today's DRM, so some would say it is a non issue; I find it difficult to agree when there exist places where circumventing DRM is a criminal offense that can lead to incarceration. They want their knowledge, they want their information, and they want to either not share it or price it such that only the elite few can have it. And no, I'm not talking about $20 blu-rays and 99 cent music tracks, there are many more important resources kept under lock and key.
There's one example, and I didn't even have to try hard to find it. While I could provide a few more, it's best left as an exercise for the reader; it'll sink in better if you do the work yourself.
We can at least agree on your last point. :)
Autonomous flight capabilities. If it loses connection with the user controls, does it hover in place, land safely, return home, or crash? If it does anything other than crash in that scenario, it's a drone. This has already been defined.
Simply put, nothing.
A free market relies on an informed and rational populace. We have an uninformed populace who, as a result of that lack of accurate and actionable information, are incapable of acting rationally. That is to say, what we have here is not a free market, so the transactions taking place are far from perfect.
where buyers have complete information, act rationally, and have a near-infinity of choices to weigh
There is no need for near-infinite choice, two choices is plenty, we just need to work on the information and rationality aspects. An informed and rational people will pick the best of two options, forcing the worse option out of the market and making room for someone else to offer another, better option. This is progressive enhancement and it's how the world worked leading up to the dark ages, and how it's worked again since then until recently when we've started legislating ourselves back into the dark ages. and before you make the argument that we're not seeing any sort of dark-ages-level regression, let me highlight that I said "started"; we've a ways to go yet, but you can't deny we're taking steps backward every single day.
Rather than saying it can't work because people are neither informed nor rational, I would say we need to work in informing people. And rather than saying there's no point because people will remain irrational, even in the face of enlightenment, I posit that better-informed people tend to behave more rationally overall. So, really, the one problem we seem to have is a generally uninformed or purposely misled populace.
Let's fix that.
It's not just about free market democracy, either; regardless of the system of government or economy put in place, the only thing that can prevent it from collapsing into tyranny is an informed populace.
Indeed, poor thing probably found his way out of his own yard to go exploring after being left outside alone all night by an irresponsible owner and got lost. Don't blame the dog in these instances, blame the moron who doesn't deserve the dog in the first place.
It sounds like you have absolute shit neighbors. I live in a condo, there are 7 units in my building and 4 identical buildings a stone's throw away (there are many more buildings in the complex, I'm just limiting to the immediately neighboring buildings to clarify my point), that is a total of 28 households, with 13 dogs distributed across 9 owners. In the 8 months I've lived here, I've heard one dog barking, and it was not one of those 13. This is in part because the HOA does not allow dogs to be left outside alone, but it is mostly because I live near 9 responsible dog owners.
The one dog I've heard barking here was being walked and got a little excited at meeting someone new when I introduced myself. Not a big deal, it was a couple of "hey, hi there, who are you?" barks, followed by a little jumping up and licking, then some sniffing as the dog discovered that I smell like my two cats, than a 45 minute conversation with the dog's owner about unrelated things, like the lack of late night parties and construction noise in the neighborhood. This was the week I moved in.
I guess the takeaway here is that these things aren't problems in communities populated by respectful neighbors who aren't assholes to each other.
There is a fair bit more that a dog might perceive as wrong than what you might think to consider. For starters, their owner leaving; to a dog, it's wrong that their owner is leaving and will never be coming back, but, eventually, the dog remembers his owner returned every other time they left and it suddenly stops being wrong, thus the dog stops barking. That is but one of many examples. Personally, I prefer cats, they only meow at me when there is an exception to the norm; if something new comes along, they eventually get used to it and stop meowing whenever it happens, but for rare events... well, one of my cats is an earthquake early warning system. When I see him riding low and latching on to the ground for dear life, I know it's time to pull the breakables down off the shelves. They don't freak out when cars drive by, though, because they're smart enough to have gotten used to them.
I think what you're trying to get at (whether you realized it as you wrote that or not) is that shitty people shouldn't have the ability to be in control of another life. On this, we certainly agree. It's hard to be a shitty cat owner, as a cat just won't leave you alone until you take care of them and they tend to not bother the neighbors at the same time they're bothering you; perhaps most dog owners should have cats instead?
The thing about "gun nuts" (advocates, actually, but that's another discussion) is that they advocate for ownership of firearms. By way of this, they assume everyone owns and carries, though they may intuitively know that most people do not; not knowing who is and is not carrying, it's safest to assume everyone is. In light of that, gun advocates typically try to avoid confrontation and are generally very polite people until you try to take away their protection piece.
Please share whar you're on. The transducer, perhaps; the cop, though? Tell me you're joking. And then share whateber you're on, I want to be as funny as you.
Yup, dog thinks there's something wrong when you're not there, he's afraid you're not coming back, then he remembers you always come back and stops worrying and, thus, making noise.
Ignoring the needs of your pet is abuse. If your pet needs space to run and execrise so they don't spend all night loudly complaining thet they aren't getting that, then you need to give them that. Not doing so is abuse.
I know, right? And they don't meow at each other (they scream when playing or fighting, meowing is reserved for their caretakers, we humans) so there is no issue wih them trying to talk to other cats like dogs do. I mean, keep the little precious angels (I mean demonspawn from hell, but I still love them) away from leather furniture and anything you don't want shredded, but at least we cat owners are the ones who bear the brunt of our pets' tantrums, and not our neighbors. Amirite?
Wow, I love how you seemingly aimed that hate cannon at me, a cat owner.
I got your joke, you seem to have missed mine. That said, yes, Ms. Inverse was meant to be flawed, but you still got the flaw wrong. ;P As for not good not bad people, I'd say the majority who just live their own lives without helping others don't really qualify as good people while they're not really bad either if they aren't going around causing trouble for others. I know a lot of people who fit that mold.
It's one thing for a dog to bark a couple of times (because the owner is not neglectful of the animal and responds to the barking); that's fine, whatever, dogs bark when something is wrong or when they perceive that some thing is wrong. If a dog barks for more than a minute or so and the owner hasn't responded, that's a neglectful owner and they need to, as you say, fuck off. Right off, in fact.
Ms. Inverse: Hello you little kids, I'm Ms. Inverse. I put the word "not" in front of both halves of a logical statement, to come up with something that looks right but isn't true. Let me give you an example... White people are good, therefore black people are bad. Isn't that easy?
Well, it is easy, but you still failed at it. Putting "not" in front of both halves of the logical statement "white people are good" would result in "not white people are not good" which, adjusted for proper grammar, would read as "people who are not white are not good", black people are only a subset of "people who are not white" and bad people are only a subset of "people who are not good", so even if your original statement had been correct (which I don't believe it to be), your corollary was improperly formed even according to your own rule.
Dogs bark when something is wrong, or when they perceive that something is wrong. Letting your dog keep barking for any length of time (I think 10 minutes is too long in this case) is animal abuse. Either the dog needs something, is afraid of something, or is trying to warn you of something; ignoring it and letting it keep barking is not the answer. So yes, calling the cops over ANIMAL ABUSE is perfectly reasonable and only a narcissistic asshole dog owner would argue otherwise.
This is why we moved to a place with hardwood.
So you're saying that it would be literally impossible for ARM to stop licensing to Apple? Sorry, no contract is interminable. It may be that they never would stop, and I don't think they would (nor did I ever claim to), but the fact remains they could. You can sit here and tell me I'm pulling "evidence" out of my ass, but facts aren't simply pulled from one's own rectum, they exist on their own. It's really and truly not my fault you can't see them yourself.
Not when the novel is written from a first person perspective with an eye toward the future.
so, cows go APP now?
To be fair, that's probably where the ones who can't handle the workplace belong. As is evident by the fact that there have always been women in the workplace, the role of "housewife" isn't something that was forced on women, it's a choice women made for themselves; as a result of that choice being made my a majority of women, education for women (and, as a result, rights that require some level of education in order to exercise reasonably) were more or less ignored. After all, if she's most likely going to end up staying at home, cooking and cleaning, why waste the resources to teach her math and science? She can learn everything she needs from her mother, at home.
Now I'm not saying this is the fault of women; I think women should have, and should always have had, the opportunity to pursue education and work, and believe the rights women were denied at the same time they were being denied an education should, in fact, be dependent on completing a certain level of education. After all, if we're going to say women shouldn't be allowed to vote because their place is in the home, which we said because they were largely uneducated as the result of an educational system that sought to exclude them, are we not saying they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are uneducated? If we distill that thought, should the result not be "the uneducated should not be allowed to vote"? I think it should.
And here we are, at a time where women have the same educational opportunities as men, and many women take those opportunities, and they excel, often outperforming many of the men in their fields of study. Why are women not yet viewed as our equals? And, perhaps as importantly, why is someone who can't pass a GED test at 30 allowed to vote? Wasn't women being too dumb to follow politics precisely the reason we didn't allow them to vote in the past? Now that this has been disproved, they are allowed to vote and, in fact, are allowed every right afforded to a man, why are they still not our equals? And yet the uneducated, both men and women, are being allowed to vote this country into the ground.
I'll tell you why. We've got a subset of men and women, a relatively small group, probably less than 1% on either side, who love to cause problems. Whether it's a woman who really doesn't belong in the workplace, going out of her way to eavesdrop on a personal conversation in the break room and using what she hears to get someone fired because the thing the shouldn't have been listening to in the first place offended her, or a man talking about something a little too loudly in the break room and offending a woman who shouldn't have had to hear it, those situations are problems. In the first example, the woman was the problem, she went out of her way to hear something that was not meant for her and had no right taking offense to what she heard while eavesdropping; in all likelihood, what was said was only said because she was eavesdropping on the conversation, scooting closer to hear the quiet conversation she was not a part of. In the second example, the man was the problem, the woman likely had no interest in what was being said and just wanted to enjoy a quiet lunch without hearing about someone's sexual conquest or hunting trip or... pick any of a large number of things some people find offensive.
So, if both men and women are causing these problems at roughly equal rates, why do women get all the blame? Well, it seems that the minority of women who cause problems have pushed for workplace protections for themselves, such that if the situation were reversed and it was a woman talking loudly about something offensive in the break room and a man taking issue with it, it's still the man's problem. And don't even get me started on sexual harassment, something that many believe can not happen to a man.
Even if the above only happens in a small number of workplaces (and I believe that to be the case as I've never seen it firsthand), the fact that it happens at all means that
Sadly, no, the guys I know are working on iOS and iTunes. I'd definitely be interested to hear from one of the chip devs, as well, though I'm sure there's nothing they can legally tell us that we don't already know (or can't find through Google). NDAs tend to suck like that.
All of that said, I actually haven't been watching the phone market, for the first time since the iPhone came out, since I got my Nexus 6. Plain and simple, this is the first time I've ever been satisfied with a phone I've owned. I'm sure the iPhone 6 Plus would have scratched that same itch for me if I were in the iPhone camp; it's certainly doing the trick for my wife, she didn't even watch the keynote where the 6s models were announced because she simply doesn't need any more than she's got now... for the first time in as long as I've known her.
Being firmly entrenched in the iPad camp, though, I do still think Apple screwed the pooch when they broke compatibility with all of the active styluses (e.g. pressure sensitive) in the iPad Air 2. Anything to make the iPad Pro look more attractive, I guess. My Air is working fine for me still and there are now active styluses on the market that work for the Air 2, so it would seem they didn't get the iPad Pro out fast enough if that's what they were going for. And I'm not sure what else they possibly could have been going for, there is no benefit to the developer, nor to the end user, in the changes they made to the touch screen on the Air 2. But, I digress, that's an old argument; it still hurts me, though, because the end result was that I bought a $700 product that ended up being useless to me for the purpose for which I bought it until a year after it was purchased, by which point I had moved on already.
Honestly, though, I've kind of bittered on the whole Apple experience. My Windows testing machine died a month ago and needed to be replaced. I've used my MacBook Pro 3 times since the replacement arrived; Apple simply doesn't make a laptop that performs the way this new one does. I say that as an owner of the fastest laptop they currently produce (which strangely remains the fastest laptop they sell since I bought it in January). I'm definitely not the typical laptop user, though; for most, anything in any manufacturer's mid-range is more machine than they'll need in their lifetime. For me? I need something that doesn't choke on my daily workload, and the MacBook Pro was doing just that.
To each their own. I certainly do miss the native Unix environment at times, but Cygwin does well enough on that front, as the majority of what I do on the command line is done on other machines via SSH anyway. I certainly enjoyed my time using an Apple machine as my primary desktop, but it is clear where their focus is now, and that focus has shifted to products I don't use, to the detriment of products I (and many others who don't use an iPhone) do use. For reference (to illustrate my point), the Windows laptop I am typing this on is a model that was first released several months before the MacBook Pro line refresh that resulted in the MBP model I currently own; that is to say that, while the Windows laptop is a more recent purchase than the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Pro is actually the newer machine, by several months. The Windows laptop is not the highest-end machine in its line when it launched, while the MacBook Pro was and still is. To put it another way, Apple's best laptop was lagging behind MSI's mid-high laptops when it launched, and they haven't done anything about that, nor does it look like they intend to.
But at least they make the fastest mobile processor. So... there's that, I guess. Doesn't really make up for the end of a glorious 5 year run, though.