Next up gym memberships.
Hopefully they can add a similar rule to allow easy to join gym memberships be as easy to cancel.
Posts by Bill Broadley
5 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2008
FTC drops hammer on unwanted subscriptions with 'click to cancel' rule
AMD reverses course: Ryzen 3000 CPUs will get SinkClose patch after all
With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to
Friday 12th July 2024 05:01 GMT
I'm quite fond of Apple hardware, the m series CPUs are unique. They aren't killer fast, but plenty for the vast majority of uses. They are also power efficient, and in pleasing form factors that make the most of their power efficiency. Sure you can find a MBP competitor, with great battery life, but likely worse iGPU. Or a gaming laptop/desktop with a killer GPU, but MUCH more power hungry. Apple laptops are quiet, efficient, fast, and well designed. Sure some laptops have as nice screens, or as nice keyboards, or as nice touchpads ... but rarely match all the Apple features in the same laptop.
I seriously lusted after a mac studio, but they haven't updated it for the M3 or M4. Even ignoring that, man are the upgrades steep. I almost talked myself into M2 max (base $2k ... without warranty). But 32GB ram standard, really? On a $2k desktop? 96GB brings it to $3k, which requires a CPU upgrade. 2TB of NVMe brings it up to $3,600.
Sure it's beautiful, tiny, near silent, well engineered airflow, decent GPU performance without becoming huge and noisy. But $3,600 without warranty? Not being able to replace DIMMs and the proprietary storage (can't use normal NVMe) gave me serious concerns about repairs or expansion after the warranty is up.
Ended up building a Ryzen 12 core desktop, 96GB ram, 4TB nvme, and Radeon 7800XT for about half as much. Wins benchmarks at most things, is near silent, repairable, upgradable (even to Zen 5 is I want), and should last 10 years or so. My last desktop (still running) is a Xeon E3 I bought 9 years ago. I tried really hard to justify the Apple premium, but failed. Having a professional targeted desktop without replaceable, repairable, and upgradable storage just seems insane to me.
Sure my desktop is larger, takes more power, and is less elegant. But half the price and easier to repair/upgrade/keep for 10 years made it worth it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
