James Brickley

I have the first gen. It depends on what you do with a Mac. The 12" MacBook is meant to be used for extreme portability. It sacrifices high CPU based work. As the CoreM CPU heats up it throttles the clock to slow it down and cool off as there is no fan. So that means it is poorly suited to video editing, conversion, 3D rendering, advanced Photoshop processing, running virtual machines, etc. . I have a Mac Pro for the heavy lifting. If you need that kind of power on the road then the 12" MacBook is not for you. Buy another Mac that suits your need. Nobody says you have to buy this model. That's why there is a range of products. 

If you run basic applications such as Office 2016, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Photos, iTunes, etc. it works very fast. The CPU only spikes for short periods of time so does not generate more heat than can be dissipated. 

For programming tasks that don't require extensive compiling or where you can compile on a remote server it works a peach. Much of what I do is over ssh in tmux where the data is actually on a *nix server. But I can do that on an iPad Pro with the Prompt app and sometimes I do exactly that.

The 12" MacBook is a breeze to travel with and its charger can be used to quick charge an iPad Pro 12.9" with USB-C to Lightning cable. So that means carrying one charger. 

The single USB-C port is frequently bashed but seriously I am not plugging stuff into it frequently enough to worry about it. I have a few dongles and rarely use them. Would have been nice to see if USB3.1 Type C Gen2 was added to the newly updated MacBook. It would double data transfer speed. Again not moving data much. I backup wirelessly to networked TimeMachine and data is backed up to Dropbox. I might plugin a USB3 disk now and then or I might connect to a monitor/TV/Projector. 

No Windows PC can be compared unless it runs Linux Desktop perfectly with full on device support. (Mac bridges the gap between Linux and Windows as many Windows apps run on Mac and ALL Linux apps run) Windows is not UNIX. I cannot run my tool chain and workflow on Windows. Yes I know Win10 has a new Linux layer w/bash and I know they are porting SQL Server to Linux. But that just means the shift to Cloud is causing a loss of developers jumping off Azure and not running Windows. The rock star web/cloud developers and DevOps are demanding Mac when hired or they will not take the job. A titanic shift is underway but it won't be noticed until we hit a highly visible tipping point. 

Lynch said. "We're asking them to do is do what their customer wants. The real owner of the phone is the county, the employer of one of the terrorists who's now dead."

So here's the deal... The City of San Bernardino is the owner of the iPhone 5c issued to the dead employee/terrorist. They not only own the iPhone 5c they owned the Apple ID. The number of city employees is rather large and of that population a large portion likely receive city owned phones as it would be required for their job. That means the city should have been using an MDM (Mobile Device Management) platform. So when they stupidly reset the iCloud password they might have been able to instead, send a lock command remotely to the iPhone and change the passcode on the device. That means they would not have needed Apple's help at all if they were not completely incompetent!

That all being said, the terrorists were trained overseas. The first thing they did prior to launching their attack was to destroy all their other computers and mobile devices to the point where forensic recovery was not possible. That is standard operating procedure and the bad guys tell their operatives to do that before they start a major operation. So that begs the question, where was this city iPhone found? On their person when the SWAT team killed them, in the vehicle, on their bodies? Or was it found in their home in a drawer, turned off? The last backup made to iCloud was in October. The terrorist employee was apparently a part-time employee so maybe he hadn't used it in quite some time. So I doubt very much that he nor his wife used his city iPhone for any terrorist based communications and after all this expended effort and argument there will be zero intelligence earned even if the iPhone is hacked via brute force.

On top of all that, Snowden said they could actually copy the NAND memory chip which holds the key and that would allow them to potentially break into the iPhone. It's a lot more difficult but it's not beyond the NSA's abilities and I am sure someone in the FBI has the skills but not in the CA field office.

All this information is being spun and not clearly communicated to the American public while they do their little song and dance. Since when was Colbert considered a legit newsworthy source? I mean he's a comedian... His ratings are actually in the toilet at the moment as well. We know that since 2014 the NSA lost it's ability to easily and remotely p0wn iOS devices as that is when Apple read Snowden's leaked information and increased security on their products. So it is in the best interests of the intelligence community to regain that ability. When they could remotely control an iOS device it immediately became the most advanced and useful intelligence gathering operation of the last 200 years! I mean they can track the phone via GPS, they can record audio with the microphone, they can take pictures, they can see all communications on the device (chat & email & app data, social media), etc.

Thankfully, the FBI and the NSA really do not collaborate. Right now the NSA are building huge new data centers (public record) and they are definitely working on quantum computing. There are working quantum CPUs and I am sure they are further along then what little public info was released. A quantum computer is capable of being billions of times faster than the fastest super computers. The primary use for a quantum computer in intelligence is code breaking. It would be able to make short work of those million year uncrackable codes. The only way to combat it would be to use quantum computing to generate an encryption key that would change if intercepted. This has been done with laser beam transmission because if photons are intercepted it would be detected and the key thusly invalidated. Also this is why AI gives people like Elon Musk nightmares; they know about the coming of quantum computing and what it could mean for the future. Say hello to your new Artificially Intelligent Sentient Overlords...