Regarding market share and your friends and family recommendations, you’re thinking first world. Rest of the world wants and can only afford sub-$500 laptops.
I’ve found that the $1000 Mac laptop is worth about $500 after 3 years and the $500 laptop is worth $50. The price difference over time really isn’t that big and the Mac is going to have a better trackpad and display and longer battery life.
Yeah but in the longer term the price trends to $0 either way, and Windows will get software support for longer.
My mom is happily using a Lenovo from 2013 and looking to upgrade because it doesn't support Windows 11 and Win10 is running out of support. A contemporary Mac would have been the 2012 Mac Mini which would have received its final OS update with 10.15 Catalina in 2019, and would have received its final security update in 2022. (Desktop, so no difference in peripherals, etc.)
Incidentally, I actually purchased both the Lenovo and a 2012 Mac Mini (refurb) so I have the pricing data - the Lenovo was $540 and the Mac Mini was $730 - and then both took aftermarket memory and SSD upgrades.
That just means that the not-Mac is way more accessible. The high resale value makes Macs more expensive overall for everybody.
Also a lot of people prefer windows. It’s got a lot more applications than Mac. It has way more historical enterprise support and management capability as well. If you had a Mac at a big company 20 years ago the IT tooling was trash compared to windows. It’s probably still inferior to this day.
The Mac can (legally) run more software than any other computer. Aside from macOS software, there's a bunch of iOS and iPadOS software that you can run, and you can run a Windows, Linux, and Android software via VMs.
Yeah…I don’t think so. Moving the goalposts to include Parallels/VMs and iOS/iPadOS apps that lack a touch screen on on Mac and are frequently blocked from being run on Mac by developers doesn’t count.
Let’s not forget that you’re now talking about buying a $100/year license; in just a few years you could buy a whole Windows computer with a permanent license for that money.
And if you’re going to talk about how great VMs are on Mac we can’t leave out how it’s the worst Docker/podman platform available.
If your $1000 MacBook breaks after a year you need $1000 to repair it.
A 500 laptop is probably more repairable and worst case you pay $500 to get a new one. Not to mention battery replacement etc.
The expected total cost of ownership is very high for a Mac. It’s like owning a Mercedes. Maybe you can afford to buy one, but you cannot afford maintenance.
As a sibling comment said, what maintenance? The only problem I’ve ever had with any Mac was a bad keyboard on my M4 MBP, and that showed itself so quickly that even without AppleCare it would have been covered.
Between work and personal, I’ve had an Intel Air, 2x Intel Pros, M1 Air, 2x M3 Pros, and an M4 Pro. My wife has an M1 Air. My in-laws have an M3 iMac. My mom has… some version of an Apple Silicon laptop.
That is a decent amount of computers stretching over many years. The only maintenance required has been the aforementioned keyboard.
Oh, come on. Laptops are mobile devices that live in bags and backpacks and they break all the time. I've had more laptop failures than cracked phones, even. You absolutely need an answer for "what happens if my screen gets cracked", just ask any college student. Windows junk is cheaper, it just is.
In pre-college education, the answer is often "use any other junky Chromebook from anywhere in the world", which is cheaper still.
The very existence of the Genius Bar falsifies your point, though. The fact that you, personally, are exceedingly careful about your devices isn't an argument against the clear truth that (1) the rest of us yahoos clearly aren't and (2) macs are expensive to repair.
larger initial purchases are harder on the lower income earners regardless of the long term value they offer; that's one of the hard parts about being poor, it also makes positive economic decisions harder to accomplish.
It’s all relative. I’m at 24.4% but I have quite a few devices like Wemo light switches at the top of my DNS queries. Only have one Amazon Alexa device but that’s near the top as well.
IoT devices which constantly phone home will skew things.
There’s not many free as in open source alternatives out there. There’s traditional CAD such as Fusion 360 which gives you a limited amount of designs and is “free” for non-commercial use.
So then under the open source, own your designs umbrella you have stuff like FreeCAD which is similar to traditional CAD which means you have a learning curve.
OpenSCAD is programmatic which suits someone with a software engineering background. Plus being free in the sense of owning your designs.
> OpenSCAD is programmatic which suits someone with a software engineering background
Perfect. I already knew how to code, so it was just a question of minutes to learn the basic stuff of the language and then I could just do what I wanted.
Fusion360, AutoCAD and organic modeling tools like Blender you need to learn several concepts, keybindings, navigating through menus, panels, tabs, workspaces, etc, etc. So many things _before_ doing something. In OpenSCAD you can even code in the text editor you're already familiar and then use it only to render the object (which can also be done through CLI!)
Good point, you are absolutely correct. Then I suppose life “with the possibility of parole” would have been a more appropriate sentence, though I don’t know if that’s typically given. In any case, I feel prisons ought to release prisoners if they demonstrate exceptional rehabilitation and remorse, as Ross has, though of course that’s a difficult line to draw in practice.
Life imprisonment – with or without parole – for a non-violent crime still seems excessive. If they'd convicted him of conspiracy to murder for hiring the hitman then that's a different matter.
> He acted as an enabler to countless violent crimes.
I don't like this argument of imputing transitive guilt. If guilt is imputed indirectly, then all of us are guilty of many things, like atrocities that our countries have perpetrated during war.
> Also punishing a people for actions of their government is a war crime
Right, because we recognize that indirect, transitive blame is ethically problematic.
> He actively and deliberately enabled those activities for self benefit.
So did the Sacklers with the opioid epidemic, arguably even more directly than Ulbricht. Which of them is in prison?
"Enabling" is exactly the kind of weasel word that I find problematic. It has no strict definition and can be broadened to suit whatever is needed to condemn an action you happen to dislike in any given scenario.
He only allegedly needed to hire a hitman because the government invented the whole blackmail scenario behind it. You can't make this shit up, Silk Road was extra evil because it lead to the government creating hitmen and reasons to use them.
We need gangster hoodlums on the street because lookie here sonny, an online marketplace is dangerous and if it isn't dangerous enough well feds will make it that way.
As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.
A sentence must balance the gravity of the offense with the circumstances of the offender, while still allowing for hope and redemption. A life sentence without parole forecloses this balance.
It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada's explicit rejection of life sentences without parole (LWOP) through decisions like R v Bissonnette more closely aligns with Jesus's teachings about redemption and mercy. In Canada, even those convicted of the most serious crimes retain the possibility of parole - not a guarantee of release, but a recognition of the potential for rehabilitation that echoes Jesus's teachings about transformation and second chances.
This philosophical difference manifests in several ways:
- In Canada, the emphasis on rehabilitation over retribution is reflected in the term "correctional services" rather than "penitentiary system"
- Canadian prisons generally offer more rehabilitative programs and education opportunities
- The Canadian system places greater emphasis on Indigenous healing lodges and restorative justice practices that align with Jesus's focus on healing broken relationships
- Canadian courts have explicitly recognized that denying hope of release violates human dignity, which parallels Jesus's teachings about the inherent worth of every person
The contrast becomes particularly stark when considering multiple murders. While many US jurisdictions impose multiple life sentences to be served consecutively (effectively ensuring death in prison), the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled this practice unconstitutional, maintaining that even the worst offenders should retain the possibility - though not guarantee - of earning redemption through genuine rehabilitation.
This doesn't mean Canada is soft on crime - serious offenders still serve lengthy sentences, and parole is never guaranteed. But the maintenance of hope for eventual redemption, even in the worst cases, better reflects Jesus's teachings about grace, transformation, and the limitless possibility of spiritual renewal.
The irony is particularly pointed given that the US has a much higher proportion of self-identified Christians than Canada, yet has adopted a more retributive approach that seems less aligned with Jesus's teachings about mercy and redemption.
But hey, you just have to wait for the right president to be elected and you might get your chance. So I guess that's something.
> It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada didn't have Prohibition to the extent that the US did, which in turn led to the rise and financing of organized crime. All the rest of it fell out of that: Organized crime was violent and ruthless, so people started demanding oppressive laws and harsh penalties to deal with it.
One of the major problems with this is that the cycle is reinforced by law enforcement. You sensibly get rid of prohibition, but then the mob is still around and starts looking for a new source of funding, so you get more extortion rackets etc. Then a law enforcement bureaucracy is created to deal with it, but long-term the mob was going to die out without prohibition anyway and the law enforcement efforts just speed it up a bit. Except now you have a law enforcement bureaucracy with nothing to do, so they lobby to recreate Prohibition in the form of the Controlled Substances Act, which reconstitutes the mob in the form of the drug cartels.
But now instead of saying "prohibition failed, let's repeal it" they say "we need more resources" -- institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are they solution. So the Feds fight any attempts to legalize drugs because it would put them out of a job, but as long as there is prohibition there is organized crime, and organized crime is violent and terrible and a ratchet to ever-harsher penalties.
> Canada didn't have Prohibition to the extent that the US did, which in turn led to the rise and financing of organized crime. All the rest of it fell out of that: Organized crime was violent and ruthless, so people started demanding oppressive laws and harsh penalties to deal with it.
Canada definitely had (has?) organized crime in that era, although maybe not to the extent the US did. Check out the Papalias[1] (my great great uncle was a quasi-crooked cop on their payroll), as well as the Musitanos and Luppinos, for a couple southern-Ontario examples. There’s still a (relatively) small but fairly influential Italian mafia presence in a lot of smaller southern Ontario cities, and at least a few of the Papalias are still living off of family money (my family’s cottage, ironically not the side with the crooked great great uncle, is next door to one of the Papalia’s cottages).
Hamilton is the way it is today in large part due to the mob activity from the 40s-90s.
The article describes a crime family whose roots started in Canada's shorter and less comprehensive experiment with prohibition, after which they got involved with smuggling heroin into the US.
If something happens to a lesser extent and what does happen has a lot of the consequences spill over into the US, it's not that surprising that the backlash is more severe in the US.
> As an aside, in Canada, a sentence of life without parole is considered unlawful because it conflicts with Section 12 of the Charter guarantees that individuals have the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Courts have ruled that life without the possibility of parole deprives offenders of any hope of rehabilitation or reintegration into society, which could amount to cruel and unusual treatment.
Germany's highest court has held the same thing.
This is right and proper. We need to defend these principles, now more than ever.
On the surface but then they label you a dangerous offender and they keep you in jail. Paul Bernardino is a good example.
The differences in the system probably have more to do with electing vs appointing. Electing is more likely to send someone tougher on crime vs well balance.If officials were elected in Canada you would see the same outcome.
Not to mention private vs public prisons and when you make it a business you have to find new customers vs a cost center you want to limit.
It's very rare to see someone commenting on a HN from a orthodox (small o) Christian perspective. Thank you - some good points.
But I'm very suspect that Trump made his decision on Ulbricht based on Jesus teachings, and even more suspect that the people who vote for him based their decision on Jesus teachings, despite any religious affiliation they may have. I think Paul Graham's recent article on the original of wokeness is very instructive here - there's always someone or some group to look down on, to make ourselves feel better, whatever side of the fence we are on. Cancel culture of the far left or progressive Christians, look them up and throw away the key, lack of grace by conservative Christians, it amounts to the same thing. (I'm a British Christian)
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
I agree with the philosophy of no tabs, but I simultaneously live in an intermediate desktop environment situation where I don't have access to the "right" solution yet. So I'm happy to have terminal emulator tabs, browser tabs and IDE tabs for lack of a more integrated solution.
