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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • To be fair, it was a pretty vague anecdote with dubious relevancy. If someone joined the Hyundai community and said commented on the 2024 Elantra thread that they hate the Elantra because their 2002 Elantra broke down, they’d probably get downvoted too.

    Apple has been making the Mac mini for 20 years, across 3 different processor architectures and 3 different body styles. With no details or timeframe, your anecdote is pretty pointless.

    If you’re at all curious, the M4 Mini benches absurdly high for a computer of its size & power draw, and is one of the best performance per dollar products that Apple has ever put out according to pretty much all reviews. So you might give it another go if your entire opinion of the product line is based on an i3 Mac Mini you owned 10+ years ago.


  • I never said it couldn’t be interpreted as patronizing, but it’s also a fact. Apple absolutely thinks it knows better than their customers what they want, that’s the “courage” thing they were referring to in eliminating the headphone jack on the iPhone.

    That’s what I mean by opinionated design. I’m not espousing it or defending it, I’m just explaining it. I would take issue with calling it “stupid” though, it’s actually very considered. Whether or not you agree with the reasoning or conclusion is your own business, but stupid implies a lack of consideration or an oversight. It’s definitely not that.

    If after all that you still feel it’s stupid or patronizing, then this is not the product or company for you. Which is also totally OK. Not everything has to be for you.


  • It refers to the low power consumption of the chip, conventional wisdom is to shut down old, large or power hungry desktop computers because they generated a lot of heat and consumed a lot of power while idle.

    Whereas if you think of the Mini more as a laptop in terms of the heat it generates and the power it uses, then it makes more sense why they think you don’t need to shut it off.

    The enforcement is breaking bad habits that make your experience worse. There is no reason to wait for the computer to boot every time you need it, but people still do it because old habits die hard. But if they just stopped, they would enjoy and use the product more.




  • shinratdr@lemmy.catoApple@lemmy.worldI saw the New Mac Mini on display
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    Which is exactly why they made this change. The Mac mini is essentially a screenless laptop in a tiny case. You don’t fully shut down your laptop between uses, so why would you shut this down? It probably costs $2/year in idle power costs. There is no common reason to regularly shut it off other than habits and personal preference.

    Rather than Apple enforcing this through nag screens or other methods, they just make a simple design change to try and break this habit.


  • Yes but it repeatedly discharges and recharges that 5%, which generates heat and causes swelling. I’ve had to repair enough laptops left constantly plugged in to know this is an extremely common issue.

    I never said I thought Apple was accounting for every use case here or that it was the best way to achieve this, so you’re arguing with the wrong person. I’m just explaining what they do and why they do it.


  • shinratdr@lemmy.catoApple@lemmy.worldI saw the New Mac Mini on display
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    Because they don’t want you to. It’s not just for those reasons, those are just primary ones. They also don’t like the look of having it connected to a charge cable all the time, and users don’t “change the function” of anything on average so a solution that involves user choice doesn’t really work for them either.

    If you’re looking for choice for the sake of choice when there is an obvious solution they can enforce through design instead, you’re looking at the wrong company.

    You identified the issue right there, using the power button regularly is “normal” for similar devices. So how do they make it clear that it’s not “normal” for this device? Simple, make it hard to do.

    I’m not saying you have to like it or even appreciate it, this is one of the most divisive things about Apple. I completely understand why people don’t like it and choose another solution as a result. It is the reality of how they design things though.


  • Because Apple design is opinionated. The charge port is on the bottom of the Magic Mouse because they want you to charge it and disconnect the cable rather than leaving it connected all the time and causing the battery to swell. The power button is on the bottom of the Mac mini because they want you to leave it on because it idles at essentially nothing.

    People have decades of habits built up from time, and Apple’s designs have choices made to try and break those habits through negative reenforcement.



  • Do you really think people who casted their votes this way are blameless?

    The Democrats have their fair share of responsibility for not dealing with the reality of what they have to work with and advocating better positions and trying to solve their problems. Significant blame.

    But that doesn’t make Trump voters or non-voters not culpable for cutting off their nose to spite their face. It’s still wildly ignorant at best and evil at worst.


  • Why is that a worrying attitude?

    They’re criticizing her for saying “he’s facist hitler” through the campaign as the sole message, and then when they lose, shrugging and treating it like any other loss. “Oh well, better luck next time!”

    Babylon Bee’s point is that the rhetoric doesn’t match the actions. If he was Hitler, then why are you handing him the reigns like this is just any other election? Their implication is that the campaign dramatized his impact and demonized him. They’re right about the criticism but wrong about the reason.

    He DOES represent the evils they’ve been espousing, and they are laying down and doing fuck all about it except paving him a clear path. Babylon Bee has managed to accidentally write their most non-partisan headline ever by accident, and a scathing indictment of spineless liberalism.




  • Yeah there is a ton of analysis to be done, but I really think the average undecided voter looks at the one choice they have and basically just asks themselves “am I doing ok right now?” If yes, they stay the course. If no, they pull the lever and flip to the other guy.

    The bad economy killed them. Kamala breathed some life into the campaign but it wasn’t enough. Is the bad economy their fault? Not really, inflation is bad worldwide post-COVID. But when people can’t feed their families, they blame the people above and use the only tool they have to punish them: cutting off their nose to spite their face.

    The real question is, where are all the Democrat voters who didn’t show up, that did show up for Biden? I think a combination of deep rooted misogyny, racism, and a weak message watered down to cater to “centrist” Republicans really hurt them.

    The Democrats tend to focus on the undecided voter. They shouldn’t, because those people are basically just motivated by their personal good fortune at that exact time. They should focus on the occasional voter, because that’s who wins them elections.





  • I needed instructions on how to downgrade the firmware of my Unifi UDR because they pushed a botched update. I searched for a while and could only find vague references to SSH and upgrading.

    They had a “Unifi GPT” bot so I figured what the hell. I asked “how to downgrade udr firmware to stable”. It gave me effective step by step instructions on how to enable SSH, SSH in and what commands to run to do so. Worked like a charm.

    So yeah, I think the problem is we’re in the hype era of LLMs. They’re being over applied at lots of things they aren’t good at. But it’s extremism in the other direction to say there aren’t functions they can do well.

    They are at least better than your average canned chat/search bot or ill informed CSR at finding an answer to your question. I think they can help with lots of frustrating or opaque computer related tasks, or at least point you in the right direction or surface something you might not be able to find easily otherwise.

    They just aren’t going to write programs for you or do your office job for you like execs think they will.


  • Because it all routes through one digital storefront without the possibility of competition, so digital pricing on console storefronts is artificially high.

    Plus, they’ve already shut down stores on older consoles and people have lost games. That’s less likely as console companies learn how to make competent digital storefronts and account systems, many have felt the burn of losing all your digital purchases on console and won’t let it happen twice.