I'm glad they've made a more affordable and repairable laptop but I can't help but notice (in addition to what the author's said) they can put a cell phone into a laptop's body, but not a cell modem into a laptop. If the macbook pro max had a cell model that would go like hotcakes
as someone who did this for a week, it's nice until you need to install an app to check your bank statements or manage your insurance. Maybe that will get better as agents do, however
You don't have a laptop or desktop for those things?
Whilst I may not represent the average person, I have no need to check bank statements or manage insurance immediately, so I can wait until I'm at a 'real' computer to do it more conveniently and easily and with a bigger screen and keyboard and mouse.
GPs point about the 'relationship with the smart phone' seems to be pertinent. "need to install an app" to do these things only makes the point stronger.
My bank only has two options for authentication: Either you use their mobile app or buy an authentication device from them that's the size of a small phone. Either way I need a handheld device.
I can't say I'm happy with the direction of things. They used to offer slips of paper with single-use codes that worked fine, but those are now deprecated in favor of the smartphone app.
You can use a lot of those authentication / bank apps on a tablet without issue. Obviously it’s worth verifying before making the swap to a flip phone, but I like having minimal apps on my smartphone so I still have a backup if needed.
Then your bank is garbage and you should switch to a better one. My main bank (USAA) lets me use a one time code sent to my email as a second factor (or SMS, or a code from their app). If they started requiring me to use the app I would drop them immediately. Why is "but my banking app" treated like a valid objection every time user freedom comes up?
Because it's most banks that are like that. If you don't have this problem, then you're lucky your bank is actually technologically incompetent by industry standards.
The fact that they are easily spoofed is of no consequence for this use-case: entering an invalid 2FA code will simply fail to log you in into your banking. You should obviously not follow a link from an email that is not obviously coming from your request (and you should validate the top-level domain is what it needs to be even in that case), but you should be entering the bank web site directly.
The bigger problem is SIM swapping, which is more of a social engineering attack.
Maybe GP choses to not use it? What about your "relationsip with the PC"?
For me, time I have in front of my PC is quality time I'd rather not waste on bullshit like banking, or worse, rearrange my life to make activities in that quality time that I could've made on the go in the "time holes" during the day.
Fuck apps, alright, but phones are finally getting useful (despite vendors' attempts to undo that). I switched to a foldable phone 6 months ago, and since then I haven't used my personal laptop for anything, not even once. Foldables are what tablets couldn't be, and despite the toy OS, my Fold7 managed to take over ~all tasks I used to do on the laptop or PC, that don't strongly benefit from physical keyboard and sitting stationary (and a good chunk of the latter too, plugged to a screen via USB-C).
Right, I agree on that, I usually do my banking on the subway or in idle moments in a lobby somewhere. It is frustrating to me the juvenile interface provided by many a banking app but perhaps phones like your fold 7 have ways to bypass this for the "first-class" interfaces a computer grants you? I do understand where the reply to my posts' point is coming from, but I don't know many people now who aren't in the "laptop class" or "gamers" that have a computer anymore, it's a shame to me that something as homogeneous as banking is not yet more abstract and like SMS(not that it's a good role model) rather than the archaic mess with a colorful interface that it is now
> You don't have a laptop or desktop for those things?
> Whilst I may not represent the average person, I have no need to check bank statements or manage insurance immediately
I think a lot of people check to make sure how much money they have before they make some purchases, especially big ones. Or, they check with this card declined (might need to move some money from one account to another or use a different card).
I teach high school and see students doing this all the time when buying food for lunch. I can't imagine it's any less prevalent amongst adults of a certain generation.
I certainly need to know how much money I have at any given time when I'm shopping. Seems fairly privileged (not in a bad way) to not need to think about that.
I take your point, but I'll also make the point that I'm organised and relatively self disciplined when it comes to spending. If I have to check my back account before any big expenditures, whilst on the go and requiring a smart phone, then that represents some kind of failure of self discipline (outside of emergency health situations).
Having said that, I do have an app that tells me how much is left on my debit card, but I only recharge it from laptop / desktop at home - I tend to not let it get low enough that I can't get through a day.
Can't deny a certain level of privilege, but will say it's been earned through self discipline. Everyone's situations are different, however.
but to make a binary for it? You do. Even if it's not-for-profit. Why do you think web interfaces are so popular for OSS, a lot easier for the code to be JIT'd and run in a browser than pay a $99 vig for something you did in 10 days to speed up a process for yourself etc.
I compile and run utilities on my Mac all the time, and I've never spent a penny on dev tools or unlocks.
Yes, there's a fee to get access to the App Store, but almost nobody on the Mac uses the App Store... the fee is mainly for putting stuff on iOS (and likely watchOS, tvOS).
The fee also gets you the absolute latest Xcode, but go back one version, and it's entirely free.
On Mac, you can install brew, and use it to install gcc, clang, qemu, whatever utilities you want.
You used to need the developer fee to put stuff on your iOS device at all, but these days you can put stuff on your personal devices without a fee, but the binary expires in a week... enough to learn and debug, but not ideal for a personal tool. That's about the only annoyance where the fee comes up... long term deployment to iOS.
> you can put stuff on your personal devices without a fee, but the binary expires in a week... enough to learn and debug, but not ideal for a personal tool
This sounds like dystopian cyberpunk written in the 80s
You're sort-of right, I think, because you do need an Apple account to sign in to the Mac App Store to get current Xcode in the first place - but the $99 is entirely optional!
For distributing your program without the fee, you'll probably moan about the hoops that people have to jump through to run your stuff: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40616/mac - and I can't say I love this myself, but people can run your stuff, and no fee necessary.
(I've got a couple of (somewhat niche) FOSS things for macOS, and I build the releases using GitHub Actions with whatever default stuff the thing uses, then make up DMGs that people can download from the GitHub releases page. I added a bit in the documentation about visiting the security dialog if you're blocked - and that seems to have been sufficient.)
it's wild to me that Apple has retained SMB as the default option on macos for over a decade. There are plenty of faster/more secure protocols that are still widely recognized, yet they're still encouraging use of a protocol that could expose user data without so much as an Apple-y bother dialog about the consequences
I think the Edison motors approach will be the most future-proof, using drop-in power supply bricks, one can abstract the power source to the point where it won't matter if it's a fuel cell, natural gas turbine or a new battery technology, to the truck it's just electricity (plus or minus some metadata for things like regen breaking or engine gear)
This has been tried a few times. The sticking point has always been twofold
0- this is a massive upfront investment for what amounts to a small time savings (having extra batteries on hand, charging them and the equipment to remove / move / install the heavy units
1- unless manufacturers agree to share a specification, you're tied to a single brand and risk being shut out of replacements when that inevitably goes away because it didn't catch on or got deprecated
2- for individual consumers, the battery is the most expensive component of their vehicle, and trading it for a used one of unspecified origen to save a few minutes instead of charging is not appealing.
Given one and two, overcoming the expense of 0 is not at all economical for many situations. The ones that most need it can't afford it, or could be satisfied with relatively short high voltage charging.
The point of the Edison motors approach is that you can just drop in a diesel engine - their initial goal is to electrify trucks used for industrial work in Canada by making them series hybrids.
It will work great for them because these trucks are designed to be modular and easily repairable (they are driven hard and WILL break when their owners need them). I would not be surprised at all if it develops into an impromptu standard just because so many eyes are on the system all the time.
Battery swaps are not practical, but the guy you're replying to is making the point that an electric vehicle could be built with a modular, removable power source, and converted between gas/hybrid/battery/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever later in life depending on the needs. That's just not possible with a vehicle which directly connects the powerplant with the wheels - there's too much nonsense like transmissions and differentials to deal with when you do that.
I think it makes a ton of sense for trucks, much less sense for cars.
I think the problem with this, especially amongst younger people, is having spent so much time online, they don't know where to draw this line anymore.
My parents took the same approach and it helped, but I will anecdotally point out that kids have played video games under covers for a while, even when I was young, I remember getting in trouble for playing this spyro game n' watch clone from mcdonalds at night, or gameboy with one of those lamps that plugged into the serial port. When I become a parent, I think I'd feel understanding of something like this, but would likely still only give them access to hardware like cell-enabled apple watches or DSes. The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful, and push you to spend real money on fake things. I've seen many peers who were engaged in CoC as kids get into online gambling and sports gambling recently, it doesn't sit right.
> The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful
Precisely. I am not saying I am perfect as a parent or that this was the best possible approach to the situation we had. Nobody is and perfect parenting is an absolute myth.
I knew full well just how addictive gaming could be because I experienced it in my 20's. Needless to say that the "shock and awe" consequence to their deceit was not the result of a single data point. We had been seeing changes in behavior over time (six months or so). The objective was three fold: Take away the device that delivered the addictive behavior. Take away something of value to them. Make them earn it back with positive behavior.
The decision was not planned and the consequences were not communicated in advance. Few things in life are like that. Sometimes people discover the consequences of their actions (or understand them) when they are sprung on them because of something they did. Drunk driving being one possible (though not perfect) example of this.
In this case, it worked. Perhaps we got lucky. Not sure. I also did highlight that I cannot speak for all parents. I did the best I thought made sense at the time. Based on the outcome, many years later, I can say it worked.
To the critics on this thread: Your mileage may vary. Some of the comments sound juvenile, perhaps you'll understand if you ever become a parent and face similar circumstances. Then see what you think of someone who thinks they know better from behind a keyboard than you did in the moment and without having to be responsible for the outcomes (which is a multi-year commitment).
You probably figured, but I am likely the same age to your kids, I agree that the similar "shock and awe" nature with which my parents treated this stuff was warranted, and in fact I wish they went a little further, but even hiding the batteries to all devices and only allowing them out for a couple hours a day was progress. The problem I see coming my way is that the cultural monolith has degraded to the point where an online kid and offline kid can't coexist, it was already pretty strained when I was a high school student in the '10s, isolation isn't the answer, and in my own experience while one can tolerate being "weird", the lack of a shared culture is often dislocating. At this point I'm just hoping there's somewhere I could find with with like-minded parents
What you highlight here is a vexing modern problem. Today, my kids, between 20 and 27, actively socialize with friends through gaming. Seen in isolation gaming is a monumental waste of time. However, there's this social element that I think is pervasive today that cannot be ignored.
Dating myself, I fully experienced the negative side of gaming back around the time of games like Duke Nukem, etc. I worked nights for a few years. I'd get home at 2 AM fully awake from having driven home. I'd sit down and play for four hours, maybe more. No social element at all in those days. I quick when I started to have nightmares and realized it was because of the games. Decades later, with kids, there was no way I was going to let a ten year old destroy their brains with an addictive substance in the form of a game.
Going back to culture and socialization, I don't really know what the answer might be today, much less in the future. Maybe AI friends will be crucially important (I shudder to think this could be true). Some of it comes down to family structure and dynamics. Our cultural makeup means that we are very often in family-and-friends gathering with 20 to 50 people. That does help kids relate to humans more than keyboards, yet the danger is still there.
Maybe this is where schools might need to become far closer to community organizations than (sorry, I have to...) centers for indoctrination. I attended private school most of my young life. One of the interesting aspects of this is that the parents all knew each other and socialized. We would go to each others homes, throw parties, travel together, etc. This is very different from the (again, I'm sorry, I must...) typical US school-as-a-cattle-ranch approach where you have a high school with 4000 students. I know I am being very opinionated and maybe a bit elitist due to my young experience, it should be noted that this was in a third world country...so, when I say "private school" the reader should not imagine what that might mean in the US.
My point is that things are becoming very complex at a social level and we, as a society, need to make sure that kids grow up to be solid adults. Today there are so many opportunities for them get lost in screens that I truly don't know what social problems might come out of this mess. Games are but one part of it.
It's true, having gone to public school and seeing other public schools, you're basically either getting austerity curriculum forced on teachers served in a new deal skeleton with 50 coats of paint or you're at some cargo-cult charter school run like a private prison. I'm sure in a decade or so when I'm ready the answer will be more clear, especially as it seems we're in the middle of several paradigm shifts, but I appreciate your answers. I just hope by then we'll see an end to this pointless peacocking with extracurriculars and activities. I still remember the feeling of wanting to be treated more like an adult as a kid, to do adult things like own a cell phone or use power tools and being given facsimiles, if I could put my kids in a Montessori school maybe that'd be good but they feel like the kind of place that exposes are posted about on HN, maybe worth more research. As the role of college changes from one that makes taste to one that makes money, learning motivation and moderation will be the most important.
The target demographics for Nintendo products have shifted from kids to.. kidults? Most kids nowadays play on phones or in rarer cases PC/Xbox, Nintendo's lost much of their cache (in my visible experience) save for children parented by the "mindful milennial" types
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