dewme

Since the processors in question aren’t competing for the same platform this is all just for bragging rights. But it’s good for Apple and good for the personal computer industry in general to keep raising the bar. 

Why is anyone surprised to see capitalism in action? When you peel back the ideology and chest-thumping comparisons to other economic system alternatives, remove the sugar coating, and disregard the have-nots and losers ... this is kind of what happens at the raw execution level with capitalism. Fairness? Social considerations? Humanity? Bah humbug. There is no crying in baseball, nor is there any in business.

Honestly, I say this with a grain of salt because most decent companies do factor in fairness, social concerns, and humanity into their business execution, at least to some degree. The hope is that the boards and shareholders share the same priorities and are comfortable with the actions they take or implicitly approve of when it comes to employees. But their #1 priority, and the one instilled in their leaders and CEO is maintaining the viability and profitability of the business. This is never the same as employee's #1 priority, which is maintaining their career and the financial safety and security of themselves and their families. In most cases there is a reasonable balance and symbiosis between these two concerns, but when push comes to shove, capitalism steps in, and we all know whose priority will determine the outcome, which in Google's case is Lord Farquaad. It's good to be king.

This is a great feature but also one that you hope you'll never have to use for an actual emergency. 

This isn't the first listening device that can recognize the sound from smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) alarms going off. The universal challenge with all of these devices is what do you do when the thing goes off? If the only indication is a notification to your phone and you don't have your phone or Apple Watch on you, the outcome could be pretty bad.  In the case of CO alarms that are triggered while you are at home you may not have any detectable indications that something is wrong. You may be incapacitated before you can respond to a notification on your phone. 

Some listeners like the one Ring sells automatically call the fire department when the listener device hears the smoke/CO alarm go off. These automated calls, unlike security alarms, are non-revokable. So if you overdo the microwave popcorn and the smoke alarm triggers, be prepared to greet the fire squad in a few minutes. Maybe make an extra unburned batch of popcorn to share with them. The Ring listener has the added "feature" of being active all of the time in every mode, with no bypass switch. Better keep that in mind if you want to test your smoke/CO detector, say after changing the main batteries or backup batteries.

Of course having first responders show up for false alarms is 1000% better than not having the extra protection that these listening devices can offer. But be prepared ahead of time. You have to at least do a mental walkthrough about how you are going to deal with the limitations of these devices, how you are going to respond when they go off while you are home, and how you are going to respond when they go off and you are away from home. You don't want to be trying to figure out this stuff the very first time the device gets triggered. For example, if you're away from home calling 911 from where you are is probably going to create a lot of confusion. You may want to have the phone numbers for the first responders in your home location very handy. Similar advanced preparation is required for security alarms, freeze/water leak detectors, etc. 

One general thing to keep in mind when you’re talking about using redundancy strategies, like the 3-2-1 one mentioned in the article, is to be aware of what kinds of failures you’re trying to protect yourself from when using redundancy. Having redundant backup drives is a good hedge against a single drive failure, but it has one gaping hole - if you’re using the same backup software to write to all of your redundant copies you can still be at risk of a flaw in the backup software itself corrupting all of your backups.

One way to avoid this type of single point failure in a redundancy based strategy is to use different backup software or different backup strategies for some of your backups. For example, you can use Time Machine, with or without multiple disks, for some backups and also use Carbon Copy Cloner (or similar software like SuperDuper) that creates a full and optionally bootable backup of your entire machine.

I’ve had excellent recovery success using Time Machine, but I also keep copies of my data and content, but not applications, in iCloud and I also make a full bootable backup of my machine every few days to a separate disk using Carbon Copy Cloner. I also make archives of related data, e.g., everything associated with a project or event that occurs at certain time increments, for example, weekly, monthly, or yearly and copy those zipped archives to a separate storage media. 

If you’re only keeping a single backup of your data up to date, say on TimeMachine, you are probably doing a whole lot more than what most people do. Beyond that it’s a personal choice and depends on how much you value your data and understand the full cost of losing it or having to recreate it from scratch, if that’s even possible. Now that external SSDs are so affordable it’s easy to justify having one permanently attached to one of your desktop Mac’s built-in ports or on a docking station that you plug your MacBook Pro into every day or so and having TimeMachine backing up to the SSD.