• 0 Posts
  • 214 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 10th, 2024

help-circle






  • I’d need to see what comparable x86 processors and graphics are to the M4, but yeah, this seems like it could be one of the first Macs in a while to be really competitive on price. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Fifteen years ago, a couple years after Macintosh went to Intel, I bought a Mac Pro. I had a hard time comparing prices at first, but once I finally realized I needed to be looking at workstations instead of desktops the Mac Pro actually came out to be about $300 less than identically spec’d workstations from Dell and HP. That was about the price of a full retail license on Windows Vista Ultimate (or later Windows 7 Ultimate). With Boot Camp and feeling like I could find Windows on sale for less it actually seemed to make the most sense with the added benefit of access to both Windows and OS X. It was frankly the best Windows machine I’ve ever used. No bloat, and all the drivers worked.


  • I wasn’t thinking about it in this way, but that makes sense. When I was a teenager I was going to a dermatologist for acne treatment. When I started college for whatever reason I wound up with appointments on Mondays a few times. This was probably around 2005 and while computerized calendars were a thing, mobile calendars were not widespread except with PDAs like Palm Pilot and I wasn’t using them, nor did I use a paper calendar to organize my schedule. In retrospect this was a bad idea with my then-undiagnosed ADHD. Anyway, the doctor’s office had this helpful automated phone reminder system that would call you the day before your appointment so if you needed to cancel/reschedule you could do it enough in advance that there wasn’t a penalty for late cancellation. The only problem was it didn’t take into account the weekends, so if your appointment was on a Monday it would call you on Sunday and if you canceled no one from the office would know until Monday morning and you’d get hit with a late cancellation fee. I think I actually did that 3 times and they sent me a letter saying they were dropping me as a patient. I felt that was unfair because their system should’ve been smart enough to call on Friday, but also I wasn’t really doing the prescribed acne treatments much at that point and I think I was getting old enough it kind of went away on its own around then anyways, so I didn’t mind not paying for the visits and medicine anymore. I’m still annoyed as an adult in my 40s, though, because I think that practice is supposed to have some of the better doctors in the area for skin cancer and I’m not sure if they’d still remember and not let me come if I ever needed treatment or screening for that.








  • I’m assuming the purchase came from outside Brazil, then? How was the import process? I used to work for a device manufacturer and we had some customers in Brazil. It seemed like import duties were often quite high and there was a good likelihood the customs inspector might want a bribe. Most customers would have us ship to someone in the US and it seemed like they weren’t freight forwarders, just someone they knew traveling to Brazil soon who would bring the device with them. Actually, most of Central and South America was like that.




  • I was wondering why anyone would go to the trouble when you can just buy a different brand.

    In Brazil, you can pick any e-reader you want, as long as it’s a Kindle. (Kobo, Boox, and other brands don’t sell their devices here.)

    That’s too bad, and surprising since later in the article it mentions that Kobo does have a store in Brazil to sell EPUB files, but not their readers.