linkman

Just how does a bank authorize a $1 million transfer overnight? I can't get $500 from my bank without jumping through some serious hoops and I've found it impossible to do a wire transfer of more than $800.

Eric_WVGG said:

substance said:

I've long argued that Apple needed their entry level laptop to come in at under $1K and stay there.  Not only does this latest MacBook Air update achieve that mark, with a retina display and 256GB SSD hard drive there isn't much reason left to upgrade it. 

My one concern is the fact that this (along with all of Apple's entry-level products) only comes with 8GB of RAM.  That seems like a bottleneck to me compared to everything else that comes built-in.  Am I correct that 8GB of RAM isn't much for even basic tasks you would expect to do on a laptop these days?

I agree very much. The old "toilet seat" iBook did a lot to enable "switchers." $1000 is the sweet spot.

I disagree re: RAM, in fact I think it matters less than ever. 8gb is plenty for web + word processing + spreadsheets. Given the fast virtual memory performance of SSDs, I think you'd even find 4gb mostly usable unless you're a web tab fiend or use iCloud a lot.

I have to use Chrome at work (on a Windows-only machine). 8 GB is barely enough even with only a few tabs open. I constantly have to manage memory on it so performance doesn't go down the tubes. Considering how poor a job that most developers do with creating applications that are efficient it is quite necessary to have a minimum of 8 GB and preferably 16+ GB for future-proofing if the RAM cannot be upgraded. Part of the blame with inefficiency lies with the software environments -- I have run across a lot of Visual Basic programs that do very little, take 1 GB of RAM, need 2 GB of install space, plus the environment needed to run them requires a gigantic amount of disk space.    

I'm running Chrome on my Mac right now with two tabs open -- 522 MB of RAM in use. Looking at Safari right now and it's not much better.

razorpit said:

Nice little laptop. I really wish they would have a 16" version. My wife is currently working off of an ancient 15" Pro (2006). She doesn't want a 13" because the screen is just a little bit too small for what she does and understandably doesn't want to be tied in to a monitor.

When she works from home she remotes in to her office desktop. While the new 16" MBP is awesome, it's overkill for what she does.

I also need the larger screen size than the 13" but don't need the power of the MBP (and the hefty price tag that goes with it). A 15" or 16" MBA would be marvelous. I ended up buying a 15" 2015 MBP to replace the 2009 one I had been using.

Is this a possible partial workaround? Use Filevault for full-disk encryption (just to make things a lot harder for the entity trying to access your data) but for your data save everything in an encrypted disk image -- and don't have Keychain save the password for it.

Mike Wuerthele said:

chadbag said:

hentaiboy said:

No iCloud backup?

If you have it set to upload your photos to iCloud, I believe you can set it to only do it with WiFi.  They may not have had a chance to be on WiFi during the time between the Halloween party and the dunk in the lagoon.  

The Disney in-park wi-fi is pretty good. I don't have good numbers on data transfer speeds, but it beats the 4G speed and responsiveness for the most part.

That said, it sounds like the family wasn't using iCloud syncing at all, based on comments that they've made. I'm glad that Disney was able to fish the iPhone out.

I was at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom and still have the results from a Speedtest near Splash Mountain on 7/19/2019 on my iPhone 7: 1.24 Mbps down, 1.77 Mbps up, ping 3 ms, jitter 78 ms, and packet loss 28%. This was on the Disney-Guest SSID.