temperor

The real kicker is the 6GB of memory for the complete lineup, it will greatly accelerate multitasking, no need to suspend apps ...

Real world performance will be much better, the memory bump is way more important, the 8 core cpu was more than powerful enough. The extra GPU core will make gaming and AR a much better experience ...
Synthetic benchmarks are a indication but only real world usage is important.

On the people who complain about low dividends ... it's easy or you sell 2-5% / year of your shares or even better write call's on your shares, no dividend will every beat that return ...you can make easily 5% a month and if you get called away then you write puts to get back in ...
A year ago the dividend was "OK", let's see what they do in february ... though I'm in the camp of buy backs or even better stop returning cash till the market goes in reverse ... it will, probably not this year, but surely next. 

dysamoria said:

As a person who cares a lot about these issues, I was at first totally impressed by this recycling robot stuff at Apple. I love robots and I love the notion of reclaiming materials.

However, as a person who really does care a lot about these issues (and therefore pays attention to the finer details), I realized Apple’s robots are indeed largely a publicity thing.

Apple are not the good guys here. They just market themselves as the good guys, and we believe them, because the marketing is powerful and because they do some good things. However, Apple don’t do most of the good things they could and should be doing. They fall well below the image they seem to be buying with marketing.

There’s so much waste by Apple:

• Apple sells short-life products, per their own efforts to get us to buy new things as rapidly as possible. They intentionally and arbitrarily abandon software updates on older devices (Snow Leopard is proof that a new version of an OS can be more compact and more efficient than all of its predecessors, and Apple hasn’t repeated that since, because Snow Leopard was merely the side-benefit of developing iOS). Apple are one of the typical cases of computer industry efforts at focusing only on selling new products, not on making existing ones continue to operate effectively. OS “Upgrades” are tools to sell more product, not improvements to the existing products.

• Apple has environmentally-horrible packaging. Their luxurious packaging uses too many (and wastes new) materials. They present PR that’s basically about subsidizing the logging industry, rather than using post-consumer paper. They use needless piles of non-recyclable plastic films (while technically recyclable, there’s almost zero infrastructure for plastic film recycling in the USA, because of capitalism) to wrap products and accessories.

• Apple’s products are designed-as-disposable. Yes, that’s what you’re making when you sell products that depend on sealed-in rechargeable batteries, which are inaccessible to customer replacement (even making it impossible to replace without literally rebuilding and refurbishing the product with some brand new materials). This is especially egregious in products that don’t need to be wireless! It’s not just batteries, though: the non-modular, and inaccessible nature of their products means that any failure of any kind means a likely monolithic replacement if not a replacement of the entire device. There is proof that fewer connectors and joints results in better reliability, but the environmental impact here of disposable electronics is worth backing off a bit on the monolithic design.

• IFixit (yes I know people here despise them, but they make relevant points we need to consider about Apple’s environmental impact), recently wrote about iPhones/iPads being shredded or disassembled instead of being resold for second-hand ownership due to activation lock. Macs with T2 chips are in line for the same treatment. This is a problem. We cannot trash the environment for the sake of absolutist data security. I know you guys malign iFixIt as having self-interest in the second-hand market, but this is still a relevant issue. Manufacturing new devices serves Apple, while second-hand ownership does not. Manufacturing new products to sell to customers uses far more more materials and energy than does the reuse of existing, intact products.

Some of the problem is the culture of waste in the USA. It’s not just the obsession with having new gadgets; we barely recycle anything anymore. I don’t just mean people are lazy jerks about recycling (my neighbor is a perfect example of that). As a nation, we literally do not have recycling systems in place for most materials. Incinerator-selling corporations are actively competing against recycling systems. The collected materials aren’t going anywhere now that China has decided to stop taking our single-stream waste (basically the recyclable materials were useless the way we collect and ship them out; it’s entirely our own fault). The recycling we were doing was minimal even before that. Most plastics don’t get reused. Recyclers don’t want them because buyers of these plastics aren’t interested in most of the types of plastic going through the system (and manufacturers are a huge part of the problem by choosing the cheapest and least recyclable materials for packaging). The incinerators want to burn it, as it makes “great fuel” to keep incinerators burning (“waste to energy” is a propaganda meme; it’s just waste, and it’s incredibly damaging to the environment).

Our recycling efforts have sucked due to capitalist laziness and greed in the actual recycling business, and, yes, also because of citizens not giving a damn... But Apple, and every other manufacturer (and most businesses that have any kind of consumables), does far more damage in this regard than individual citizens. The sheer scale of waste put out by businesses (who aren’t usually required by their regional governments to do recycling at all, when the citizens areexpected to) far eclipses the waste put out by individuals.

Ad Council propaganda on recycling and “good for the planet” activities is always aimed at individual citizens. That’s how the Ad Council protects corporations from responsibility; that’s what they exist for: propaganda. It literally was founded as a propaganda department; it used to be called “The War Council”. Despite their PR efforts, reality stays the same: the largest abuses of the environment, and the actual places that could make the most impact in halting our environmental destruction, are at the corporate level.

Apple are not just an example of this; Apple are a major part of the problem.

If this feel-good PR (disassembly robots, data centers powered by batteries and carbon offset credits, etc) leaves you content, you’re not paying enough attention. You are allowed to like Apple and Apple products if they make your life better in some way, but you really ought to be demanding more from them on environmental issues than expensive PR.

On the packaging, they are using recycled paper + they give money to NGO's that manage the forest for the part where they need raw material ... so the packing is made of part recycle and part "sustained forest". All in the goal of moving towards a better world, are they there yet, NO, are they working towards it absolutely. 

I just saw the first of Episode of See, if all the content is of the same quality, I'm in! Just amazing ... what a relief!