GamingChairModel

Also fiddly controls.

Education and enterprise still have a need for a lot of group-managed laptops. Not all of them will be power users, either. Some of them won't even have sophisticated IT departments (thinking about elementary schools and the like where their IT needs might not run very high).

I agree that we're probably seeing the waning days of the casual laptop user who administers their own system as an independent device. Everyone will either be further up the enthusiast/power user ladder or will have switched to phones and tablets.

I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target.

This is huge. Apple has traditionally supported its laptops for at least 5 major OS versions and 2 more years of security updates, so they're essentially telling us that the MacOS version they release in 2034 will not require more than 8GB of RAM to function is gonna be a good thing for all users, who will mostly presumably have much more memory available.

I switched to Macbooks specifically for the 11" Air. I do wish they'd bring that form factor back.

Macbook build construction (ever since they've moved off the plastic entry level Macbook to all aluminum for all their models) is really solid but not necessarily rugged. The hinges and ports seem to hold up better than a lot of other devices from HP and Dell or whoever, but some models are more susceptible to drops, dust/sand, moisture, etc., than the solid construction would lead you to believe.

So it depends on use case. I think they hold up very well to normal indoor use, for many years, but might not be the ideal device for clumsier people or those who might be routinely using it outdoors or in more rugged environments.

I think TouchID isn't a priority for them, but looking at the supported M1 and M2 devices and features, it seems like it could be a daily driver. It has things I never got to work on my first Linux laptop (webcam, microphone, speakers, suspend, keyboard backlight, wifi, bluetooth), although it's 2026 so those are basically all expected. No thunderbolt, touchID, or display port alt mode, though, does make it a step behind MacOS, with some doubts it'll ever fully catch up even on this 5-6 year old hardware.

Still, these were very popular devices, so I think they'll stay on the used market for a long time. I might pick one up if it's cheap enough.

I tried reading a book once, but the controls were too fiddly and my progress through the main quest was too slow.

and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice.

You're talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like "bump" and nothing else. I'm talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from "bump" to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.

Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn't shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.

The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn't scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar's number), which is why any decent forum today doesn't do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.

Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.

I'm talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can't look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.

Jevon's Paradox is that when there's more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.

More specifically, it's when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.

So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.

Chromium is basically Tyrone Biggums asking if y'all got any more of that RAM, so bundling that into Electron is gonna lead to the same behavior.

The targeted court cases are to argue that the previously passed legislation already covers these particular facts.

If the legislature passes a law that says "making false statements to another in order to obtain something of value is fraud," you can expect litigation about the actual contours of what is or isn't fraud.

Same with legislation against driving at an unsafe speed, causing a nuisance to your neighbors, discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, etc. Court cases decide the edge cases.

If the legislature passes a law banning gambling outside of licensed institutions, and banning gambling for minors, you can expect litigation about what actually is or isn't gambling.

Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn't love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.