Sure. Tim Cook was great at driving costs down and selling more devices and services.

Design is how it works, not just how it looks. Apple has focused much more on the looks instead of functionality and usability since Cook took over. You can even see it on Apple’s website. It’s looks flashy and elegant, but finding technical information is a hassle. The user interface is optimized to look clean and elegant in screen shots, not for usability.

I recently used an older Mac and was delighted with using it.

macOS has gotten noticeably worse in many aspects. The Human Interface Guidelines are often ignored. Some system applications like Disk Utility were rewritten with less features than before. QuickTime only has a fraction of the features of QuickTime 7. Hiding UI elements like scrollbars, excessive transparency made usability worse. The new System settings are a convoluted mess compared to the old one. The way permissions and app notarization are implemented is user hostile, while giving only marginal security improvements.

Also on the technical side it has been meh. Swift if a good programming language but it suffers from endless feature creep. Compile speed and debugging is still worse than Objective-C.

Apple used to dogfeed new APIs in house first for a few years and then open it up once it was working. They have changed this completely. New APIs are first introduced for public use while in an unfinished state.

SwiftUI being a major example. It’s a giant framework introduced with the idea of being cross platform between all of Apple’s platforms. However, it hasn’t managed to do that. SwiftUI is different on all of them. It even makes it harder to write proper Mac apps. All while being much slower, more buggy, and more limited than UIKit and Appkit.

Or look at the options for scripting and automation. Shortcuts is cross platform. However it’s limited and can’t do everything that’s possible with Automator, AppleScript, and shell scripting. It also doesn’t integrate with the existing Services menu in macOS. The share menu still feels kind of alien on macOS.

iPadOS is held back by lots of limitations. For example the file manager is a joke compared to Finder on the Mac. It’s still bogged down by design decisions that were made for the first iPhones that had extremely limited memory and no swap. The windowing and multitasking are clunky and inelegant.

Liquid Glass is so bad usability wise, the guy who lead it left the company.

The yearly releases of major versions for operating systems led to a less stable platform. Every year millions of developers spend time to test adjust to the new version. This means they can’t work ok features or other bugs. This has lead to lots of abandoned software especially on iOS, that could still work if Apple didn’t break stuff every year.

Steve Jobs gave a shit and is the reason Apple products had good design. Since his death Apple has been coasting and iterating aimlessly.

There have been major protests by key members of the military like pilots against the planned judicial reforms before October 7th. That event unified the country like nothing else since the Yom-Kippur-War.

Israel is loss averse because of their citizens army. That bleeds over in their tactics as well. This manifests for example in destruction of whole houses and roads instead of clearing explosive traps, mines, and IEDs one by one at a higher risk to soldiers.

A large part of the secular left in Israel hates sending their children to defend fanatical settlers in the West Bank.

The war against Hezbollah in 2006 was cut short because of losses and protests.

Universal conscription isn’t a perfect solution, but it creates stronger bonds between military and the general population.

Mac Studio is a Mac mini with better cooling and better all around specs.

The trash can MacPro was kinda cool when introduced, but then they never bother to upgrade it.

That’s one of the better ideas in the paper. It could lead to lower willingness to go to war.

The user experience and user interface has suffered.

The MacPro line has been finally canceled after being neglected for years.

Leather can last for many decades if treated well. Vegan leather aka plastic lasts a few years tops.

Jupiter contains lots and lots of Helium that just needs to scooped up from the atmosphere.

I still use a Brother laser printers, that’s at least 15 years old. Got it for free a decade ago. It just keeps printing.

Color laser printers have been around for a while. Color quality is worse than an ink jet. So if you’re printing high quality photos, it’s not ideal. It’s good enough though and the other advantages of laser remain.

Garuda is a great and very polished Arch distro. The bling in their riced themes is not so great for old machines, but a recent one has no issue. The documentation and community is also pretty good. Their dotfiles and choice of terminal tools were also great.

Back to sourceforge it is then.

1% of people are ambidextrous maybe?

Does Omarchy count as Arch?

The school IT department is often the math teacher’s side hustle or a badly paid gamer dude with Microsoft certifications.

Surveillance and tracking is the least of their concerns.

Users

The long update has the advantage of providing an opportunity to touch grass.

MK3S is noticeably better, I’d say.

Buying second hand usually means more tinkering and repairs, which can be a hassle.

Other than that Prusa makes good stuff.

You can always export stl or dxf files and use them with other software.