I’ve been pretty decent about being more deliberate in my computer purchases since I’ve bought some really crap motherboards and components in the past. I think my PC collectively around ten years old. It’s kinda funny to imagine I could easily have the highest specs right now but honestly games like Path of Exile and Stellaris don’t hit the GPU that hard (you can get away with a decent midrange GPU if you can find one at a reasonable price… Thanks Bitcoin). It’s more they hit the CPU at times (Stellaris especially for the AI scripts). But even then Intel has made the i5 series (current and past generations) so good they’re just good enough. So I can’t even get myself to buying anything for my PC. The last thing I bought was mechanical keyboard which was around 80 dollars if I remember right.
If only there was something to buy to cure my boing boing addiction.
Yeah, this hit home hard for me. Thank you for writing the post and allowing a thread to develop full of helpful commiseration.
I own an iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and iMac. I like Apple products too but please don’t let us delude ourselves.
Truer than ever.
Compared to Facebook and google? It’s not even close, and showing up on a PRISM slide has nothing to do with it.
Thunderbolt 3-only, unfortunately.
I recently had a declutter expert in to help me downsize and organize my home workspace. It was cathartic and absolutely the best money I’ve spent in a long time.
Great article, and a refreshingly honest and perspective-laden approach to something we tend to take for granted. While I wouldn’t say I’m an addict in any true sense, the connection between tech interest(/obsession) and consumerism and addiction really could stand further exploration. I admire both your honesty in writing about this and your self-awareness and courage in identifying this pattern.
It does when you’re representing Apple as “probably the most privacy respecting big tech company out there”.
Personally, when comparing two laptops in a treatment such as this, I vote more opinions of any kind. As long as the piece isn’t being represented as “just the facts ma’am” journalism, which this of course isn’t.
Please name another that does better. Out of the actual big tech companies.
I don’t see how Apple’s position on user privacy is relevant to an article that mostly deals with hardware. There’s a few criticisms of Apple hardware above, which you seem to have countered by saying that Apple is very good at respecting user privacy therefore they shouldn’t be criticized. Granted that’s a simplification, but it’s the idea.
Personally I have lots of criticisms of Apple that have nothing to do with their position on user privacy. The biggie at the moment is that I have a hard time forgiving them for the shinanigans they were pulling with iPhone batteries. As a refresher, they were slowing down iPhone CPUs to sometimes unusable levels when the OS detected that the battery was old. That wouldn’t be such a big deal except for one big problem: they didn’t give the user any indication that this was happening or that it was caused by a bad battery, which meant people would simply assume they needed a new phone. And they didn’t disclose it until someone busted them for it. Apple’s offering $30 battery replacements is all but an admission of guilt in my opinion. But that wouldn’t be relevant to a discussion of MacBooks either.
Anyway no big deal and I don’t expect everyone to agree with my criticisms of Apple, especially people who are obviously super fans, but it’s an example of how Apple is far from beyond reproach. And there’s plenty of others.
But again, it’s mostly beside the point in this hardware comparison. And, back to your original question, I’ll continue to use Ubuntu and variants, possibly on the laptop reviewed here, without the slightest fear of user privacy.
Yeah… I was responding to a specific post that put Apple on equal ground specifically with privacy-related issues as firms such as Facebook and Google. Which I say is ridiculous.
See this thread, if you’re wondering if I’m capable of having critiques of Apple:
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