jeeves staub

And now in the US we're letting judges and other power-hungry politicians replace tech- and science-savvy officers with themselves and their cohorts. To them, their beliefs (emotionally-induced decisions about what is true or false) are superior to factual knowledge (that which has been determined to be true or false). What could go wrong?

When I bought my Studio Ultra I knew day would come when I could get comparable power and specs for less. Good for those who avail themselves of this stellar product. Other peoples’ good fortune is not your own misfortune.

entropys said:

It does not matter how expensive macs were in the past. Heck I paid over USD$4000 for a PowerBook G3 “Wallstreet” back in the day.  
What matters today is the price of a Mac compared with comparable windows machines.

What mattered most to me "back in the day," and continues to matter most to me, is the return on investment I get. And while it is less true than it was in the days of, say, Windows 3.0 or 3.1 (when ironically Macs were pooh-poohed to a far greater extent than they are now), there is no question that I get more back from my Macs than I ever did, or could, with PCs. Considering just one small part of the picture—hardware price—is a mistake.
The equation to think about is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) = Initial Price + Cost of Additional Hardware and Software Needed To Make It Productive - Resale Price - Value of Things Produced. For me, with a Mac the resulting number is so negative any dispute is absurd. I'm talking about many thousands of dollars per year per machine. 
Why buy one if it doesn't do that for you? This is not a religious icon, or a toy. It's a tool. A blameless, emotionless, feeling-less, even if possibly enjoyable tool.
Quibbling over hundreds of dollars of difference in price of a tool with such potential is for people who won't get past thinking small. PCs are a tool too, but (for me, anyway) it's been a TCO wash at best with those. In that case a few hundreds of dollars are significant. That lends itself to small-mindedness. If you don't mind fiddling around with your machine the way PCs demand that you do, fine—but you should be aware of how much you pay for the privilege. It's an expensive indulgence.

I have 2018 and 2012 minis and might replace at least one of them with an M4. Despite having large fingers I don’t see this as being a big deal at all. I’m sure the location of the power button is due to engineering constraints, and for people like me a suitably shaped spudger could be all that’s needed to access and press the power button. I might even leave the spudger in place, affixed to the power button with non-adhesive silicone tape and cleverly hidden from view. Or something like that. It may not be the most elegant of placements or solutions, but one of the reasons I get on well in life is that I don’t let insignificant issues become giant obstacles (aka, make mountains out of molehills).

araquen said:

1Password - I was NOT a fan of moving to a subscription, and there was one update that “broke” attachments. If Apple’s native password manager lets me maintain parity between my Mac and my frankenbox (though with Microsoft screwing up Windows 11 as it is, I may not need the frankenbox anymore), I don’t mind removing another subscription from my budget.

Like you, though I had used and loved 1Password from the time AgileBits was a two-person Macintosh-only company, I exited 1Password when AgileBits got too greedy.
Key to transferring any database, particularly one with heavy security requirements, is file compatibility. How cleanly and completely will Passwords import your data from your current password manager? Will it be a time-consuming exercise in recovering from minimal file compatibility, like it was when I imported from 1Password?
Fortunately, much of the password data I had was old and could be stored satisfactorily using “Notes” templates, a time-saving if kludgy arrangement.
If data compatibility is again a problem, it will take a long time to migrate over to Passwords (“just copy and paste the data in every field!”), regardless of Passwords’ feature set. At least we have a head start in that the process has already begun with the existing Passwords app and Keychain Access.