socaltrojandude

I've lived in the Bay Area and I am familiar with this area as well as the other huge homeless encampment south of downtown San Jose near Coyote Creek they used to call 'The Jungle'. I moved out of the area two years ago but I believe the neighbors living nearby finally pushed law enforcement to eventually disband 'The Jungle'. I assume most of the 500 people who lived there moved over to this area owned by Apple.

What outsiders don't know or seem to understand is most of these people are not local Bay Area residents. Like most of the homeless throughout California they have migrated to CA due to the comfortable conditions year round and the large supply of wealthy do gooders willing to keep them alive. There is also a healthy supply of cheap crystal meth and other drugs flowing through the area.

Please don't tell me these are just poor unfortunates who have lost their jobs and have no family to help get them on their feet and how horrible it is to struggle finding a way to live in the notoriously unaffordable Bay Area housing markets! This is pure bullshit.

The Bay Area is expensive to live in if you choose to try living in say Atherton or in the City of SF or Tiburon or Orinda/LaFayette or any other pricey rich neighborhood!
But there are plenty of 'shithole' places like Richmond, Vallejo, most of City of Oakland, many areas of San Jose or my former neighborhood, Hayward. You can easily find apartments for under $1,500 and even less if you have roommates. Nobody FORCES these people to stay living where they are. They do so because its familiar to them and they know how to maintain the cycle of 'shakedown people for money/go spend it on cheap drugs' where they are. Hell, I've seen some homeless get on the BART and commute to their freeway off ramp or chosen spot on the sidewalk. They ride the train with the rest of the commuters carrying their cardboard signs!

Yes, most of these folks are grifters, addicts or mentally ill. Don't believe me? Take a stroll around City Hall in downtown SF. I spent two years getting off the BART at Civic Center station and I can assure you it has only gotten worse. Ever want to watch a grown woman hike up her skirt and squat on a sidewalk to take a shit while you sit at the McDonalds counter eating your lunch? Or how bout stepping over the sleeping nude body of a grown man covered in filth and blood on your way to that important meeting! Welcome to SF! Or try enjoying a stroll through Golden Gate Park...not without having someone shake you down for drugs, money, sex, etc. That is the state of SF today and sadly when I left the civic leaders were still trying to decide how to make it easier to allow more homeless to set up tents for camping on public sidewalks.

Apple didn't cause this problem, they inherited it when they bought this property. It hasn't been developed yet so it became the 'new Jungle' I don't know what magic wand Apple thinks they can wave at this problem. Nobody else has been able to solve it. But for 'millions of dollars' you would think it would be easier to just hire a social worker to work one on one with these 500 people (at last count!) and get them into housing/detox/cleaned up. Then find them a job in a more affordable area outside of California!

wizard69 said:

Apple absolutely needs an intro machine that is under $2000 and doesn't suck.   They need that price to drive volume and to support the platform so that they can have high performance models.   More so they need to go a step further and make sure the mother board is compatible for other platforms like an iMac Pro or an Xmac.   Literally a multi use motherboard that again drives volume to address the issue of cost or more importantly the perception of value.

I totally agree! I feel like my customer demographic is not being catered too with their current product line. I bought Desktop Towers ever since the first blue and white G3 and stopped in 2013 when they shifted to the 'trash can' design that no longer allowed me to plug in my old SATA hard drives.

Why can't they offer something like this again? I'm sure I'm not the only one that used to regularly spend $2,500 to $3,000 on one of these every few years? And no, I'm not interested in an iMac! There has to be some middle ground between a MacMini and the current Desktop Pro. Why don't they come out with something midway and just call it a 'Mac', no 'mini', no 'Pro' just 'Mac'

I love Apple News! Its become my go to app for whenever I have 5 mins to kill waiting in a line somewhere or I'm just bored. I suppose I'm something of a news junkie so Apple News has become a very reliable dealer. True, the feed preferences don't always give you exactly what you specified but that should evolve over time. I'm always able to find something of interest for a quick hit of reading even as a non-paying customer.

I would gladly pay but see no reason to while there are still so many free ways to get news. It seems like a no-brainer to offer this kind of news aggregator service and I wonder why Facebook has such a hard time doing it. I don't think Apple is going through a lot of trouble with Russian/Chinese propaganda articles sneaking in. Their model seems to rely on letting the sources do that for them. So you kind of know what you're getting for when you see an article from someplace like the Wall Street Journal versus something off Buzzfeed or Page Six of New York Post. In my mind this is a much better way of handling it, because you know what political view a news article is going to have if its sourced from Fox News versus one off Politico or Huffington Post.

I hope Apple News continues to grow and more news outlets join in! It can only get better and its nice to be able to bookmark things or follow up on articles when I get home. Great service!