elijahg

Well in the 2020 version Lenovo is slightly ahead but Microsoft is far above Apple for reliability, MS getting one support call per 387 computers, Lenovo 192 and Apple 186. Apple and Lenovo are way above Samsung though with 95. Seems the 2021 version is not publicly available, making actual comparisons impossible, but Apple's repair score was 665 in 2018, which means they've become much less reliable recently if the stats are to be believed - 3.7 times more support calls in 2020 than in 2018. Maybe the MacBook keyboard issue hasn't helped, though I've had to have all but one of my Macs repaired - and more recent versions of macOS are definitely buggier.

2003 G5 was the only Mac I've not had repaired. 2004 Powerbook was repaired multiple times, 2006 Mac Pro's PSU then GPU died, 2009 MBP came with nonfunctional keyboard backlight then had GPU issues, 2012 iMac was replaced within 7 days of receipt due to noisy PSU, then later the replacement had its hinge replaced, 2015 13" MBP has had a new display 3 times, 2019 iMac had its logic board replaced. So from my experience, Macs aren't particularly reliable. That said, the service every time has been absolutely miles above anyone else i've had repairs with.

crowley said:

elijahg said:

crowley said:

JWSC said:

blastdoor said:

darkpaw said:

Literally, don't do it. Do not do it. The UK is a terrible place to do business. Brexit has destroyed the many to enrich the minuscule few. The Tory governments of the last ten years have ruined us. Build the Apple Car somewhere else. Please.

Serious question — who is enriched by brexit? 

My impression has been that it’s bad for everybody, that it’s a collective delusion among older, less educated English (certainly not Scottish) nationalists mourning the long lost empire. 

Brexit has been popular among all classes of British society outside of London.  It wasn’t just Conservatives who supported it.  Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party was conspicuously silent when it came to campaigning for the Remain movement.

He really wasn't, the conspicuous silence was the UK media's silence in reporting it.  Corbyn went up and down the country campaigning for remain, far more than any prominent Tory.

I'm not at all a Corbyn supporter and never voted for him, but the press treated him abominably, either ignoring his message or focusing exclusively on the worst possible reading, while leaping on any inclarity or slight gaffe with glee.

It's well known he was anti-EU. Always has been. No one was convinced by the sudden facade of neutrality, another reason he was so unpopular.

Why then, if he was campaigning for remain as you claim, would he refuse to be drawn in interviews on whether he voted to remain or leave, always claiming it didn't matter what he thought or did?

No it isn't well known.  It's well known that he has mixed feelings on the EU, as any sensible person would.  But he campaigned solidly for Remain and was not "conspicuously silent", as you claim.

That might be your view, but few others think that. Which is one of the big reasons the northern Labour voters didn't vote for him, he wasn't being truthful.  And even if he was campaigning for remain, as I said, people knew it was a facade. Let me help you with some cherry picked facts out of the 17 here about how much he disliked the EU:

• Jeremy Corbyn voted for Britain to leave the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1975 European referendum.

• Jeremy Corbyn opposed the creation of the European Union (EU) under the Maastricht Treaty
• Jeremy Corbyn voted for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU in 2011 (breaking the Labour whip to do so).
• In 2011 Jeremy Corbyn also opposed the creation of the EU’s European Stability Mechanism, which helps members of the Euro in financial difficulties.
  
• In 2016 his long-time left-wing ally Tariq Ali said that he was sure that if Corbyn was not Labour leader he would be campaigning for Britain to leave the EU, whilst his brother Piers Corbyn also said that Jeremy Corbyn was privately opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Union.
• Jeremy Corbyn went on holiday during the 2016 referendum campaign and his office staff consistently undermined the Remain campaign. He refused to attend a key Remain campaign launch and also attacked government ministers for publicising the Remain case, saying they should also have promoted arguments in favour of Leave vote.
  

Yup. Assuredly a committed Europhile and hard remain campaigner. More like an inner tyrant trying to do as much as possible to damage remain.

"Jeremy Corbyn is a “friend” of Brexit, an anti-EU Labour MP has reassured eurosceptics."

Regarding your assertion that he "refuse(d) to be drawn in interviews on whether he voted to remain or leave", that's pretty much untrue (bar some unsubstantiated claims from Chris Bryant about private meetings).  He voted Remain, as was upfront about that. He had some hesitance in saying where he'd vote in an (unannounced and never held) second referendum, as such talk would have been divisive and unhelpful in the immediate aftermath of the first referendum, but as the situation got worse and worse he eventually said he'd vote Remain again: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-jeremy-corbyn-remain-vote-second-referendum-eu-negotiations-theresa-may-a7996996.html

No significant Tory did that.

You have been misled by a media that was hostile to the man pretty much from the start.  He wasn't a great leader, played the political and campaign management game badly, and I disagree with him on many things, but he stood for Remain and was nevertheless terribly misrepresented by the gutter press.

There was no need for the press to berate or misrepresent him. He incessently did things that were detrimental to his leadership and Labour's chances.

avon b7 said:

elijahg said:

avon b7 said:

JWSC said:

darkpaw said:

anantksundaram said:

Brexit certainly didn't hurt its vaccination efforts, considering the disaster that the EU is on that front with its suboptimal common purchasing agreement: the UK leads all major countries of the world, with nearly 20% of its population having got at least one dose. (US is second best -- again among major countries, with ~13%). Plenty of reporting on all this for those interested, so I am not providing cites. 

This was possible whilst in the EU, and actually, the deals for the vaccines were done whilst in the EU. Brexit has nothing to do with this. We merely authorised the vaccines first and earlier than the EU. From this article:

Under European law a vaccine must be authorised by the EMA, but individual countries can use an emergency procedure that allows them to distribute a vaccine for temporary use in their domestic market.

Britain is still subject to those EU rules during the post-Brexit transition period which runs until the end of the year (2020).

The UK's own medicines regulator, the MHRA, confirmed this in a statement last month.

And its chief executive, Dr June Raine, said on Wednesday that "we have been able to authorise the supply of this vaccine using provisions under European law, which exist until 1 January".

So, nothing to do with Brexit.

Au contraire mon frere, Brexit certainly played its role.  Several E.U. nations such as France and Germany initiated their own negotiations with Astra Zeneca a month or so after the U.K. finalized their deal with the company.  But before they could finalize their deals the European Commission stepped in and said, “Hold up.  We need to be in charge of this at an E.U. level.”  That delayed negotiations by an additional two months.  The U.K. was not constrained in any way.

And now the E.U. is upset with Astra Zeneca because they are honoring contracts in the order in which they were negotiated and received.  Comical.

Is that actually correct? The EU said hold up? 

There was bloc negotiation for the entire EU programme and, AFAIK, freedom for member states to negotiate their own supplies too (supposedly at worse rates).

I'll admit to not following much of this as things progressed so it would be nice to know one way or another. 

Yes, it is correct (Halfway down here), the Commission leaned on states to go with them instead. Germany also then bought more vaccines anyway when they saw the EU was making an absolute mess of it.

That link is a quite nice summary of the situation but nowhere does it states can't go alone. The EU pushed for a common front with member state participation for the EU plan (with all the negotiating benefits of acting as a bloc) but makes it clear that member states were free to purchase extra doses on their own terms if they saw fit. The fact that four states banded together to order more doses didn't really fall into the spirit of things but that was sorted. 

At the moment I don't see this as a planning issue but more of a production issue and that's where the 'contract conflict' arose. 

As stated in the article, the EU has one of the best vaccine portfolios in the world AND has more legal weight behind it if something goes wrong with one of the vaccines. 

According to the Guardian,  “It’s legally binding,” Von der Layen had said. “We have all agreed, legally binding, that there will be no parallel negotiations, no parallel contracts … We’re all working together.”

So that doesn't really align with "member states were free to purchase extra doses if they saw fit". Which Germany did anyway. But the EU ignored it because the EU doesn't criticise Germany.

The quality of the vaccine portfolio is irrelevant when tens of thousands of people have died in the time the EU has been wading through its beloved bureaucracy, they at one point hadn't even ordered enough of their own vaccine...

Oh, and "Brussels threw at AstraZeneca the fact that it had invested more than €300m (£265m; $364m) to help it develop the vaccine and to produce it in mass quantities. In reality, Brussels has yet to hand over a substantial lump of the promised amount." More lies from the Von der Layen camp. The legal weight is irrelevant when they're trying to use contract clauses in their arguments against the drugmakers that don't, in fact, exist.

narwhal said:

coolfactor said:

The fact that Apple is returning nearly one half of the original fee is more than generous, i say. Again, how can someone complain about this? It's a gift.

Just out of curiosity, are you a small developer who ported his apps to Apple Silicon using the DTK, and is now faced with going without an Apple Silicon machine for a month? I have to PACK UP my DTK, wait for apple to issue a coupon, then order an M1 Mac mini (wait time is 3 weeks now for 16 GB version). It would make a LITTLE more sense if we could replace the mini before sending it back; but going a month without an AS dev/test machine is CRAZY!

That's another point regarding the Intel DTK, the free iMacs sent out were also delivered before the DTK had to go back. So devs could transfer data and not have downtime. Doesn't seem too well thought out this time around.

Considering Apple has all but abandoned VR support in macOS (and the probable external GPU requirement for all but the highest end Intel Macs) I don't think this is too likely. There aren't any games to play anyway since Valve is the only major publisher of real (i.e. non-mobile-esque) games on the Mac, and Valve abandoned Mac VR support since Apple was entirely disinterested.

Apple seems to be under the impression their announcement of a major new technology or API will cause devs to flood to the Mac specifically to use it, and when that doesn't immediately happen they leave the devs that are using the new tech in the lurch for a few years, then all mention vanishes from Apple's website and the API gets deprecated for the next shiny new thing. Ultimately this makes devs even less likely to begin development for the Mac in the future.