davgreg

Vermelho said:

FLAC support?! It is baked into mac os for a few generations now (play them from finder with preview). Licensing isn't an issue (and they do license dolby atmos etc) ALAC didn't catch on, and has a few minor disadvantages from FLAC, not to mention availability on 3rd party purchase sites including HDtracks.

Every track I have purchased from HD Tracks offered ALAC (Apple Lossless).

mr. h said:

Starting price isn't too bad. A serious machine and a serious display. I think there's no room for the whiners here!

The entry price is too high. There is a gap between the Mac mini and the Pro for headless Macs. Either offer a mini with a discrete GPU or this new workstation with a less expensive CPU.

eGPUs are not living up to the hype on the Mac OS.

I have an ecobee 4 which I got for free from Entergy- my electric utility. I am quite sure other utilities offer a similar program. It is not income qualified- all you have to do is consent to the monitoring and rare dial back of your cooling. Also in the deal is a year of prepaid service contract for the HVAC system to include a complete system cleaning. They also throw in a small cash rebate on your bill each December. You can leave the program at any time- they pay for the installation but if you drop out of the program it is on you. If you live in the parts of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi or Arkansas served by Entergy this should be available to you.

They have a program where you give them permission to monitor your power consumption after coming in and analyzing your system and home for efficiency. They also have permission to override your settings remotely during peak load events and you do have the ability to opt out. Last summer they ran programmed dial-backs maybe a half dozen times for a few afternoon hours. My normal setting is 73 in the summer and they pushed it back to 76. Every time the dial-back ended at 4 PM so your house would be back to normal by the time most come home from work or school.

I think Apple created some level of demand destruction with the ever escalating price of the iPhone. They have had to give away financing to get people to swallow a thousand Dollar throwaway device to boost average selling price because raw numbers had plateaued.

As to Mr Trump’s trade wars, they are easier to start than they are to fix. There are reports that China is preparing to weaponize access to rare earth minerals that are critical to every device Apple sells. America does have some deposits of the rare earths, but they are inferior stock that is much more expensive and dirty to process as they are usually found along with radioactive materials- unlike China’s supply.

paisleydisco said:

I love Spotify and feel more connected to it. Better algorithms, better recommendations. Knows me better. My AM year expired in April, didn’t care to renew. 

👍🏻

I use iTunes- do not rent my music and think artists should be paid properly, but Spotify has better sound quality than Apple Music. Apple streams lossy, compressed files.