DAalseth

firelock said:

“ without a functional public health system”

Oh please. I generally like DED articles but this is just a hyperbolic political screed.

I grew up in the US, lived there until I was in my 40s. I know the US healthcare system very well. We live in Canada now. A few years ago I was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Together Canada’s health care system and I beat it. I am absolutely convinced that if I had still been in the US when I was diagnosed my family would today be bankrupt and I would be dead. The US healthcare system has some good people trying to make it work. But at it’s heart it’s about money not care. If you have money you get care. If you don’t then the insurance companies and the HMOs can’t profit so you don’t.

harry wild said:

So...they just swapped out the keyboard, LED screen and the CPU and memory!  It probably took Apple engineer in charge about 1/2 hour to do and have it go to quality control.  Will Apple give us a gold MacBook Pro color?

You obviously have no idea how much engineering goes into even "minor" changes.

In this case the updated MBP does not use the same keyboard and screen as the 16". They had to be designed from scratch for the smaller chassis. Then they were tested and then redesigned and retested to make sure they worked properly. As far as the CPU, that likely at least required fresh firmware, if not board level changes, either of which would have had to be designed, tested, adjusted to fix any unexpected problems, adjusted again, and so on. Even minor changes are a hell of a lot of work by a team that put in a lot of hours to make it work right. In some ways it's harder to update an existing product than it is to blue sky design a new product without any legacy constraints.

This is the time of year when the Macsphere is always full of stories about upcoming product releases. They always range from will ship early, to ship on time, to be delayed, to won't ship at all. In reality nobody outside of the top end of Apple has any idea, and, to be honest, it's really too early for them to have hard dates yet either. So it might ship late, it might not. We won't know for sure until somebody on stage says "This is the new iPhone 12 shipping today". Until then everyone's crystal ball is foggy.

Grayeagle said:

Since Verizon simply cannot keep wires into my home, wireless is the only solution available for me.

Currently I have two 8s - - one for home use, the other for business and fund-raising.
I'll keep both 8s until the local Apple store reopens, then I'll trade both 8s for the new SEs, avoiding the hassle of personally attempting to transfer stuff from the 8s to the newer SEs. I'll let the Apple Store employees do the work. 

When the SE+ comes out next year, I'll take a good look at it. 

FWIW when I went from an SE to the 11, and when my wife went from her 6 to the 11, I was shocked at how easy transferring the data was. You boot the phone. After a couple of steps it asks if you want to transfer data from your old phone. Click yes. It says keep them close together, I put one on top of the other, and walked away. In like ten minutes it had moved everything from Apps right down to wallpapers and ringtones to the new phone. I was just amazed I moved the SIM card and I was done.

sirozha said:

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

All of Apple's services thus far are just meh. Music, TV, Arcade, News. Just meh. None of them are an awesome deal or must have content. They are just meh. Apple Pay would be OK but it only works a few places so it too is meh.

Apple Pay works in a lot of places. Any place that takes a contactless payment takes Apple Pay even if they don't advertise or know it. When I travel to Canada, Apple Pay works pretty much everywhere without exception because all of their credit card terminals are enabled for contactless payments unless the terminals are 10 years old. 

ApplePay is an interesting one. I really was intrigued with the idea. I wanted it to work. But as I mentioned earlier in the thread I had very poor luck with it and abandoned it after a couple of weeks and several attempts. 
There are supposed to be two benefits to ApplePay:
Increased security, but I haven't had a problem with this. Chip and Pin is quite secure so any improvement is theoretical. 
Improved convenience, this was something I did not see at all. I'm either pulling out my wallet, getting the card, and tapping or I'm pulling out my phone, fiddling with it, and tapping. There really is, for me anyway, no difference or advantage to ApplePay over what I'm doing, what I KNOW is going to work every time.
In the end I saw no reason to continue the experiment.
I might have fought harder to get ApplePay to work for me but it was going to be a fair amount of hassle and retraining old habits, for essentially nothing.

Oh and for the record I'm in Nanaimo BC. I had one successful transaction and three flat out failures.