swineone

many of the best new macOS Monterey features will only work on Apple Silicon. And so they should.

Planned obsolescence much? Indeed that's the case as will be clear from the breakdown below.

You may or may not like blurred backgrounds in FaceTime calls, but if you do like the effect, you'd better buy an Apple Silicon Mac.

Google Meet has done that for a while already. On a web application, no less.

M1 Macs will be able to use Live Text in macOS Monterey. With any image, whether it's on a website you're browsing or your own photos from five years ago, M1 Macs can read the text there.
That's intensive pattern recognition that's done on-device. 

Ooh, sounds like a super-complicated thing that would be impossible to do on-device in an Intel Mac. Wait, not really. Probably Intel hardware was what Apple used to transcribe conversations behind the scenes on their cloud servers.

Conclusion: yeah, it's all marketing, and Apple pressuring us into an upgrade we don't really need. So much for being so "green", it's all about the greenbacks (as well it should be, but let's not pretend Apple is a saint).

Either way, I don't care, my hardware is still quite new (2018 MBP) and it'll have to last long to recoup my investment in it, even if Apple is forcing my hand on this by not allowing me to make a FaceTime call with a blurred background -- and, as mentioned, if I really need that feature, I'll just use Google Meet which miraculously is capable of doing that in my supposedly underperforming Intel Mac.

I'll probably stay out of the market for another 3 or 4 years, and in the meanwhile I'll be monitoring whether someone decides to tackle the Windows virtualization issue (hell, there was Virtual PC back in the PowerPC days, you're telling me Apple Silicon is so underpowered it can't emulate the supposedly low-performance Intel Macs?) If nobody does, this will probably be my last Mac.

foregoneconclusion said:

swineone said: "A lot of rank file or workers" (or is it you?) really have no idea what the life of a CEO is like.

I was responding to a comment about the company needing to know whether or not an $180,000 a year software engineer was "spending the whole day in the bath". Unless you think it's logical to believe that $180,000 software engineers are inclined to be in the bath all the time rather than working when they're at home, I'm not sure what your point is. My point is that it's just as likely a high level exec could spend all day in the bath as the software engineer. Same difference. 

A CEO of a large company that spends all day in the bath wouldn’t last the first week, hell, perhaps not even the first day. Plus he wouldn’t ever get employed again in any high level position.

foregoneconclusion said:

Marvin said: When thousands of employees are being paid as much as $180k per year, it's understandable the company would want some assurance they aren't just spending the whole day in the bath.

A lot of rank and file workers in the U.S. wonder the same thing about high level execs prior to the pandemic. The vast majority of the time they're unseen and you have no idea if the occasional communication that goes out to the staff with their names on it was even written by them. Some of the execs may be hard working, some may not. It's not really any different. 

"A lot of rank file or workers" (or is it you?) really have no idea what the life of a CEO is like.

As much as these people would like to believe a CEO gets unfairly compensated, it's quite clear that Tim Cook is ultimately responsible for the $90 billion in sales last quarter while making a measly $14 million. Proportionately speaking he's probably the least well-compensated employee of the entire company (with respect to the value each employee creates for the company). And Tim doesn't merely answer to a half-competent middle manager with a non-technical background who is easily gamed. Tim answer to the SHAREHOLDERS, and he has to answer over things he has little control of (such as semiconductor shortages). At this level, you have to have answers or a good strategy even with regards to these things you don't control. And you're a lunatic if you think that doesn't mean living and breathing the job 24x7x365.

But really, if these "rank and file workers" think they can do better than Tim while making say 5% of what he makes, why don't they make the case to the shareholders that they should be hired for the job, to see if the shareholders agree. I'm sure they wouldn't pass up the opportunity to save almost $14 million/year.

It's high time the leadership tells people to get with the program and do the work they get paid to do, rather than revolting against a new hire, demanding Apple take a position in middle eastern wars, and now complaining they have to return to work.

Unbelievable -- is everyone in here an Apple shareholder?

There's no other possible explanation for people begging on their knees to be restricted of their freedom to install any apps they please on their own device, paid for by them.