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One very important topic that this otherwise excellent article does not touch on is "international transaction fees."  There are a good number of us Americans who reside outside the USA but who still have bank accounts in the US and we of course want credit cards that tie into those US accounts.  It behoves us to consider credit cards which we can use both in the USA and abroad without getting hit with silly foreign transaction fees.  

Having research many, many cards, I find that the Apple Card is pretty much the only one that offers NO FOREIGN TRANSACTION FEES while also offering us the card itself with no annual fees.  Many cards, like certain AMEX cards, also offer no foreign transaction fees but only if you pay a hefty annual fee.  For that reason, I cannot give an immediate nod to Reward Cards over the Apple Card because the key consideration for me is the no foreign transaction fee part.  For truly, if a rewards card gives me slightly more rewards than the Apple card, and yet that rewards card charges me foreign transaction fees, there's no merit to the rewards card. 

I could have told you that, even before Mr. Lee's findings.  A lot of people who embrace butterfly keyboards and impossibly thin designs don't give much consideration to thermal throttling.  But it is a reality.  Another sad fact is that it has been shown that Apple uses vastly inferior thermal paste between GPU and CPU chips and their heatsinks.  It would only cost them pennies more to use a half-way decent thermal paste.  So in addition to the fact that the thermal cooling in super thin designs like the 2016 and later MBP is inadequate to prevent throttling, thermal paste used does not transfer heat as well is it could.  Here's a SnazzyLabs Video that might help convince some of you.

I've long called for the thinning of the MBP to end.  The thickness of the 2015 MBP is quite thin yet not too thin.  It allows for a good sized battery and for better cooling.  And while I think Apple should continue to strive for thinness, that doesn't mean it has to be the MBP.  Supreme thinness and lightness is what the MacBook is for.  Butterfly keyboards too.  But the MBP needs to be "Pro" all around in terms of cooling, thermal performance, battery size, ports-a-plenty, an internal SD card slot, and thick enough to accommodate a great keyboard with sufficient key travel that (a) will satisfy pretty much all users and (b) won't be harmed by specs of dust under the keys.  Indeed, on my 2015 MBP 15" I can remove the keys.

These important considerations need to be made more serious by Apple engineers in future designs.  Take everything you want away on the MacBook, but put the beefy stuff in the MacBook Pro.  Make the MacBook Air a hybrid of the two, and then you have 3 product lines that can please every Mac notebook buyer.  Seriously.  It's not that hard.  It's just a matter of Apple rethinking its design decisions.

jeffharris said:

Boo Hoo.
We ALL die. So what?

Curious if that is what you publicly declare at the funerals of your own loved ones.  If it is, may I suggest those two lines as the perfect inscription for your own tombstone.  It would certainly make your stone the most popular in the cemetery! :-) 

The article makes it sound like a bad thing, which it isn't.  And crazy comments like "what a nightmare" are... well... just downright crazy.  It's almost like people want to be given the boot out the door immediately after paying $3500! Patience is clearly a virtue missed by both the article author and many posting here in the comments.  

If I were buying one, I would relish in such a 25-minute session, showing me more about the expensive device I am there to buy.  What some label a "sales pitch" I call a "helpful product overview session."  And for that high price, I should be given one!  And because it is totally new and not something people are accustomed to, it shouldn't be optional.  Making it optional would only result in more after-sale phone calls to figure out the very basics that 25-minute session will likely explain!

Why in THE WORLD would I NOT want such personalized attention and help?

Imagine yourself going out to buy a house, then you complain about the fact you had to talk to a realtor for 25 minutes!

People who are complaining about a 25-minute session with Apple probably shouldn't be buying one of these in the first place.

Most of you people probably want to find a full service gasoline station so you can complain they cleaned your front windshield and aired up your tires.

Cut Apple some slack.  And cut buyers some slack.  Sounds more like an envy session by people who can't afford one, and then who are here complaining on behalf of would-be wealthy buyers, which is all the more laughable.

I suspect most of you are too young to know the early days of Apple, when Macs came with a little tutorial on disk that taught people how to use a Mouse.  In like manner, this is a new product category, teaching people new tricks about an expensive new toy/tool.

But regardless of all that, one thing rings true...

PEOPLE COMPLAIN WAY TOO MUCH.

Somewhat embarrassing Apple's latest and greatest is even a tiny bit behind the likes of Huawei, but the main camera on the Huawei looks enormous!

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/Huawei/P60-Pro

geekmee said:

jgreg728 said:

And here is a major reason why this technology will not be replacing any current devices anytime soon.

Yes, it will be a utter failure…
just like Apple’s other failures.

You mean like...

• Pippin
• Hockey Puck Mouse
• Butterfly Keyboards
• Lisa 1 with Twiggy Drives (even though UI elements of the LISA OS made their way into the Mac)
• Apple III
• eWorld
• Newton & eMate (no, it did NOT evolve into the iPhone)
• Macintosh Portable (totally different from the PowerBooks which came later)
• iTunes PING
• AirPower (hyped, but never released charging pad)
• Pretty much the entire PERFORMA line
• Copland, Cyberdog, Open-Doc, QuickDrawGX, and...
• QuickTimeVR, which I always felt was outstanding tech, but where is it today?

I do not say this to suggest VisionPro will fail.  I say this to combat flippant replies.  There are people who, without using their brain at all, casually claim VisionPro will fail, and then you have the opposite extreme who mock and say it absolutely will not.

Merrick Garland's take:
"Our beloved and caring DOJ is appalled Apple continues to make money on Apple stores, now with AI.  Whenever Apple comes out with something new, consumers pay higher prices.  The DOJ cannot stand by and let this happen. Using every blood-sucking attorney at our disposal, the DOJ will work hard to ensure Apple makes as little profit as possible so that consumers are not harmed. 
—The DOJ. When you make it big, we come after you."

Sorry, but all the defenses of Apple on this are total poppycock.  I'm a huge defender of Apple, and have been since 1984.  People who go around doing nothing but trashing Apple are trash themselves.  But let's face it, folks, RAM is one area Apple has ALWAYS failed the consumer on.  Apple Silicon and RAM efficiency talk is garbage.  What matters is PRACTICAL USABILITY.  Does somebody online talking about efficiency magically make 8GB good enough for YOU?  No.  No, it does not.

I purchased an M1 MacBook Air with that "efficient" 8GB of RAM for my daughter as she entered college 3 years ago.  (I knew she would need more storage space than the default too, so I ordered 512GB of SSD space.)  I based that 8GB decision largely on what others were saying and based on my own online research about have special "unified memory" is.  Skip forward a few months and one of the biggest issues she's had is with inadequate RAM, and I've had to spend a lot of time with her to bring her so-called "modern" Mac back to 1984 days.  That's right, I've had to tell her to launch only a single app at a time.  Remember those days when you could only do that with System 1.0 all the way up to MultiFinder?  Well, it's back in a different form today.  When your 8GB Mac slows to a crawl or has apps that exit due to inadequate RAM, you have to quit all apps but the RAM hungry one you need to run, and then and only then your 8GB RAM-constrained M1 Mac starts to work well.

Having had that ridiculous experience with my daughter's M1 MBA, when my son needed a new Mac for school, I purchase him the current Air out at the time, which was an M2 13" MBA, but this time I didn't play the idiot consumer.  I spent extra money so it would come with 16GB RAM, and I also ordered the more reasonable 512GB storage too.  Guess what?  Not a single memory issue, and he uses pretty much the same apps his older sister does.  That practical experiences takes everyone who defends 8GB of RAM and kicks them square in the fanny.

Moral of the story? Don't listen to Apple.  Don't listen to Cupertino-worshippers in Apple-centric forums like this one.  Listen to practical experiences from people like myself who have loved and known Macs for years.  And consider well you will likely need more RAM than you think, either immediately or soon down the line.  And that more RAM means anything more than 8GB.

Full disclosure, I am against all these crazy and pathetic lawsuits against Apple, especially because I am an AAPL investor.  I want to see Apple succeed because I believe in Tim Cook, Apple engineers, their design team, and their great products. I laugh every single time I hear the name EPIC or Merrick Garland because these idiots are seeking to trash Apple and force it to do things that really don't positive impact me as a consumer much at all.  However, nobody is trying to force Apple to put more usable amounts of RAM and storage in its baseline products.  I guess you can argue it's impossible to do that in a free market society, so oh well.  But let's face it, too little RAM is what we've been faced with since the 128K Mac, and it needs to change.  And while not as important, I think the same is true of baseline storage too.  The manufacturing cost differential between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM and 256GB vs. 512GB of storage in 2024 is so insignificant that Apple is totally insane for charging all the money it does for those RAM and storage upgrades, especially so on machines that cannot be consumer-upgraded after purchase.  Yes, my friends, Apple can still be a wildly profitable company even if they start offering 16GB of baseline RAM and 512GB of storage, and nothing less than that.

I love Apple and its products, but RAM and STORAGE amounts are as infuriating as the mindless people who defend "8GB is enough." But I say, efficiency be darned!  Give us more RAM and STORAGE in baseline product models!  And bump baseline iCloud storage from 5GB to at least 15GB too.  It's 2024 for crying out loud!

Checked the comments and sure enough there were falsehoods.  I purchased two G4 Cubes back in the day, was an active member of Cubeowner.com and read most of the Cube related info about that machine.  It's been my avatar for over two decades.  They WERE NOT CRACKS!  They were indeed mold lines.  And any lines on my two Cubes are not that prominent.  You had a bunch of people grabbing their magnifying glasses back in the day to scrutinize every last thing because it was a pricey computer for what you got.  Then you had the silly media trashing it over price and how unpopular it was, in part because the media trashed it.  And yet, the G4 Cube to this day continues to be an incredible piece of industrial design.  It's truly fantastic.  So get over the "they were cracks" line.  G4 Cubes were not cracking at all.

Now this news report about VISION PRO could be something very different than the G4 Cube, because like I said, those lines on the Cube are MOLD LINES, not cracks.  Furthermore, the G4 Cube's case was thick plastic, whereas the glass on the VISION PRO is extremely thin and even has a thin film on the outside which is highly prone to scratching.  The two really cannot be compared.

Honestly, it isn't too surprising that there are reports of cracked glass.  Anything wearable needs to be made durable.  Apple couldn't make the glass any thicker because even now it is a bit heavy.  And just like when you put those thin glass protectors on your iPhone, cracks occurring during normal use happen.  The thinner the glass, the more likely it is to happen.

This is upsetting news to be sure.  We have too many people unnecessarily trashing Apple's ground-breaking VISION PRO as it is, so news like this will no doubt make some would-be buyers reconsider.  Not sure how best Apple should address this, but addressing people's concerns is paramount if sales of the device are to lead to future models and new innovations over time, no unlike the iPhone.  But as was the case with the G4 Cube, if few people buy it, Apple could abandon it.  And that would be yet another crying shame.

The upside to the AppleInsider on FaceBook is that Comments are never banned under Articles posted there, even when comments are banned under a particular article here.  And when you read them today, you can see that I am not alone in having a "what the...!" reaction to the "How to delete your Twitter account..." article, even if it was inspired by requests.  Consider the fallout...