shapetables

I get that Google is offering to provide me with a free web-browser that cost them many millions of dollars to build --if I let them spy on me for whatever purposes (presumably to relentlessly market to me) and I politely reject their offer. If some companies like AT&T's DirecTV subsidiary want to use the contract I generously gave them to pressure me into take the deal with Google, then they can let me out of the contract or compensate me for the loss of that feature and all of the hassle related to dealing with it.

They have to. What this clip does not mention is that the Governor of California announced California will be joining with many other states and countries to implement a new accord of their own and that will be binding upon Apple because it is HQ'ed in California.

This will keep the MacBook Pros from six months ago relevant for a long time. The only real features of the new MacBook Pros shipping next week are about 300MHz added performance (which isn't thermally sustainable for very long anyway because: these are laptops) and a next generation GPU (huuuuge for some applications). The ability to drop in desktop-grade GPUs (for vector processing neural nets, 3D/VR/AR modeling, etc) in a macOS-beta-kind-of-supported-way will be great (except for the UltraFine bullshit causing system crashes if the RFI from the external GPU enclosure bleeds into its circuitry, but I digress).

Home automation for the masses is something that has to work 100% of the time (like electrical outlets themselves) and be secure from hackers (not just for the benefit of their owner's privacy, but also to prevent the owner's devices from being weaponized against others, in other words, the common good), so I do totally understand the real value that Apple is bringing with its mandated quality assurances and chip-level encryption in their ecosystem vs. say the junk that the local big box peddles for half the price. But most people don't understand that value proposition and so it was brilliant to kick it up a notch with the inclusion of a high fidelity digital speaker that cosmetically appeals to their sense of luxury and ego. Apple is truly way ahead of the game and hopefully will be an example for the government to hold up to others when it eventually reigns in all of the get-rich-quick-and-worry-about-consumer-safety-later players peddling very dangerous home automation peripherals programmed in Asia by electrical engineers concerned mainly with pinching pennies and passing UL/FCC certification.

Excellent price/performance! Every Small/Medium-sized Business (not running on web-based apps) will _NEED_ at least one of these for their office because of the ECC memory (not to mention TB3 and 10GbE compatibility for fast RAID-based file/database serving and Apple's new CoreML-instrumented GPUs to, with third-party app support, privately analyze those files/databases at astonishing speeds).

Great seeing them pull out of a nosedive like this