If you're talking about the VESA mount, there was a lot of tech that went into that that explains the price, including sensors that auto-rotate the display when the display is rotated. It wasn't just price gouging.

I'm not sure why people are surprised by this. In a lot of ways, Apple was a pandemic darling that didn't take as big a fall as the other pandemic darlings did when the pandemic ended. When the pandemic started, there was a big splurge in tech spending that benefitted Apple + the other pandemic darlings (Zoom, Fiverr) as the whole world was going remote.

But then the pandemic ended, and so tech sales went way down as everyone started to step outdoors again.

They released the first ARM Macs with the M1 chip during the pandemic, which were a big step up in performance and power efficiency over the Intel Macs they replaced. That further raised their sales as people upgraded their old laptops.

But the M2 and M3 had the majority of their work go into improving the GPU for apps used by hardcore gamers and creative pros; the non-graphics processing increases are not as substantial. The majority of their customers are not gamers or creative pros; they just use their computers for email, social media, and word processing or sometimes spreadsheet use.

So this is not surprising at all. Not when the pandemic ended, and the M1 was good enough for most of their users. I suspect their Mac sales will go up again in a few years when the M1 is obsoleted.

They are good enough for the vast majority of their customers. You have to remember that the vast majority of laptop users only use their laptops for email, social media, and occasionally word processing; they aren't using Baldur's Gate III or Final Cut Pro or some other app that needs the extra RAM. You don't need more than 8GB of RAM for that.

Yes, the volume controls on the USB-C EarPods work with Android.

The playback controls work as well, but they're a little different on Android than they are on iOS. Holding in the middle button summons Google Assistant, for instance, instead of fast forwarding. But the all-important pause/resume control works the same way.

Looks like the new M3 chips are a significant upgrade from the M1 chips, a very significant upgrade from the Intel/Radeon chips, and a super significant upgrade from the Intel Macs with no discrete GPU. Except for 3D content creation, gaming with games that actually support Metal ray tracing, and video production, it's not that significant an upgrade from the M2 chips.

And I see people on social media bashing it for the default configuration only having 8GB of RAM. It's like they don't realize Apple intentionally keeps a low end, compromised, and cheap configuration around for the large amount of MacBook users that just want a cheap-but-not-uselessly-so laptop for email, social media, and the occasional word processed document. The people bashing it on social media are free to buy a less compromised model; Apple does sell them.

Please ignore cloud; they have been posting inaccurate flamebait throughout this thread.

I would never not buy a laptop from Apple. Not only are they the last PC maker that hasn't fallen to the Microsoft Monopoly Machine, but their laptops are well-built†, futuristic, and have incredible value and battery life for what you get. Especially since they migrated off of Intel.

† I know someone will inevitably come up with a counter-example, but the last time they had a widespread quality problem was a little more than ten years ago.

Downvotes don't work on Beehaw-hosted forums.

Define "irony": the company that got into their current position by pushing almost all of their competition to the sidelines now complains that someone else pushed them to the sidelines.

Ars Technica also has a pretty detailed write-up of the attack. That was pretty crazy.

And it's also a reminder that, if you are running for some high-profile political office or are working for someone who is running for that office, you should enable lockdown mode on your iPhone/iPad/Mac. Lockdown mode wouldn't have stopped what happened to John Podesta in 2016, but it would've stopped this attack.

All mobile phones use radios; if they didn't, then they wouldn't work as wireless phones. There are country-specific regulations on the power and radio frequencies used by these phones, so they don't generate excessive heat or ionize, both of which (but especially ionization) would be bad.

Contrary to what the health influencers on Instagram say, commercially available mobile phones have zero effect on human health. That said, apparently the iPhone 12 was caught violating France's limit on how much power its radio was using. How it took them years to notice is not mentioned anywhere.

Steam Link: yes; there's an app for that.

Emulators: the tvOS App Store doesn't allow them, but you can weasel around that if you have a Mac, and install the developer tools, so you can build and deploy apps directly to the TV. Emulators for iOS will also work on tvOS, unless they depend on WebKit to run.

Not anymore. The PS3 would tell everyone on the PSN what you were doing at the time, including running streaming apps. They put a stop to that, and improved the PSN ID privacy settings, on the PS4 and PS5.