sunman42

Department of niggling and redundant trivia department: Kendall Square, like the MIT campus, is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. But it's all part of the greater Boston area, a.k.a. the Hub of the Universe.

ascii said:

Isn't aluminum the most common metal in the Earth's crust? So common we make cooking foil and drink cans out of it? 

So not exactly the most urgent thing to recycle, but a step forward nonetheless and better than wasting it.

Almost all aluminum in the earth's crust is found in bauxite, and removing the metal from it used to be so energy intensive that aluminum was worth more per unit weight than gold. The Bayer process (1888) made extraction less expensive, but still energy-intensive. It still takes somewhere between 63 and 95 KWh to produce 1 kilogram of aluminum, however. Probably much cheaper to make the shells for MacBook Airs and Mac minis out of old iPhones and Macs.

regurgitatedcoprolite said:

Vadim, it's better to say, "the number of cores" not "the amount of cores". 

Ditto for the number of ports.

Sorry to be all didactic, but amount refers to something that's either continuous (say, a liquid or a dollop of mashed potatoes), and number refers to something that's discrete and countable.

The discussion I've seen indicates Apple is focusing on enterprise-scale management, and eliminating support for services that (1) as indicated in the article, most sys admins replace with hand-configured, more up-to-date versions, and (2) can be implemented on the cloud (Office 365, &c.) to focus instead on enterprise device management, which supposedly is what its big corporate customers have asked for. All second- and third-hand, though, except for (1), which has been our situation for several years.

Oh, puh-lease. Apple most certainly did not pay $1,185 per chair if they ordered 12,000 of them. Try half that figure for a ballpark number.

I work for a large outfit that is distinguished by its ownership of thermonuclear devices, among other things. Aeron chairs have never cost us much more than 60% of list. And for what it's worth, Aeron chairs have been my place of calm (and slouching) for the last twenty years. The Pacific may be much better in many ways, but I will never go back to an upholstered chair. The upholstery wears out much faster than the chair (or the Aeron webbing) does, and is far less comfortable on warm days.