zoetmb

hammeroftruth said:

After all, people were bitching about spending $29 for a battery a year ago and today they are bitching about a $1k iPhone, but they want something cutting edge for a modest amount.

I don't know anyone  who bitched about a $29 battery.  As far as I'm concerned, that was the deal of a lifetime. it enabled me to keep using my iPhone6 and because of that, it raised my admiration of Apple.   On the other hand, it hurt Apple's iPhone sales because without that deal, I probably would have been forced to buy a new phone, but Apple will eventually get my money anyway, probably this Fall.  The problem isn't so much the list price of the phones (although I do bitch about a $1K phone) -- it's that the carriers mostly no longer subsidize them.  I used to be able to walk out with phone for $200 or $300.  (And no, I wasn't paying out the cost of the phone with the service, because my price never went down after the phone would have been paid for.)

And I also believe that Apple Care is mostly unethical.   Apple charges a LOT of money for their products - more than most everyone else.  Base configuration of a MBP (16GB/256GB SSD) is $2399 and with a 512GB SSD $2799, but I don't consider those machines well equipped.  With a 1TB drive, it's $3299 and with a 2TB SSD, it's $3999.    For that money, Apple should have enough faith in the reliability of its hardware to provide AT LEAST a two year warranty.   They should't be relying upon Apple Care as a profit center when most of the repairs are due to Apple's own design failures.   

My MBP screen failed under warranty.   Didn't cost me anything to have it fixed and Apple fixed it in a day, but if it had been out-of-warranty, it would have cost something like $800.   If that ever happened to me, it would be my last Apple machine.   

Back in the day I owned an Acura, which came with a 5-year warranty.   The cars were so reliable, Acura increased the warranty to six years for existing customers at no charge.  It didn't cost them much because the cars weren't breaking down anyway, but you really felt that the company had your back.   The one time the car did break down, it was because of a part that had been recalled, but I hadn't gotten the notice yet.   I had to have the car towed from New Jersey to my home in NYC and then towed from my home to the dealer.   Acura paid all of those costs as well as the repair costs without any hassle whatsoever.   Now that's service and I didn't pay for any kind of extra warranty.

racerhomie3 said:

Fatman said:

They need to open an office in NYC! Tremendous talent out East and no earth quakes, fires, mudslides.

City of AOC . No thanks. I thought she said NYC has enough jobs.

I disagreed with those who opposed the Amazon deal because Amazon was promising 25,000 $150,000 jobs ($3.75 billion in annual salaries which could potentially generate $21 billion annually in economic activity), plus land for a new school (although I think they should have donated the school building as well), but in Cortez's defense, it's absolutely ridiculous that the State and City had to give $3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives to one of the most profitable corporations in the world - one which just announced a record quarter and yet, didn't pay any Federal income taxes last year.   

There is absolutely NO new housing being built for lower-income or middle-income people in NYC (unless you consider an $800,000 2-bedroom apartment in the outer boroughs to be something the middle-class could afford), so residents of LIC, which is already highly gentrified, feared they would be pushed out, valid fear or not.

In Coney Island, about as far from the core of the city as one can get, a 3-bedroom apartment in a 53-year-old building in desperate need of renovation goes for $630K if it needs to be shelled and rebuilt and $800,000 if it's already renovated.  Those same apartments rented for $210 a month (including gas, electricity, parking and a swimming pool) when the building opened in 1966 ($1680 per month in current dollars) under a State program that gave tax breaks to developers who built for the middle-class.  Unfortunately, the State later let the developers buy their way out of the program. 

While Cortez was vocal about opposing the Amazon deal, it's not in her district and she had little power to stop it.   Her district is the East Bronx (of which about a third is park land) and Corona, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Woodside and Steinway in Queens.  I notice you're not complaining about the white, male, non-Hispanic LIC congressman who actually was the far bigger factor in stopping the deal.

Amazon is also an easy company to hate - a company that has a reputation for treating its warehouse employees quite badly and being anti-union (although this facility was not a warehouse) and a company that has all but destroyed physical retail of book and record stores (although high rents didn't help either).

As for Apple, I also don't get what they need 80,000 U.S. employees for.   They don't have a particularly large line of products and the updates to those products, which aside from the iPhone, aren't on an aggressive schedule and are largely incremental.    Their quality control seems to be declining and I'm seeing more bugs and new incompatibilities in MacOS updates than I've ever seen before.   So what the hell is everyone doing?   If Apple has been secretly working on A.I. and Robotics and has a ton of employees dedicated to that, then fine, but it's not like we're seeing Apple develop totally new product lines (aside from HomePod, which seems like a bust) or seeing products with tons of innovation.   When Apple's TV ads of last year had to emphasize "stickies" - cartoon characters that you could incorporate into texts, you know something is drastically wrong.   

  

If Apple REALLY cared about environmental responsibility, they would make their computers and other devices with user upgradable memory, storage and the ability to replace the battery like they used to.   Ivy prioritizes making a computer 1/16" thinner over making them last longer.  I dropped some electronics off at a recycling fair a few weeks ago and it's astonishing how many computers are dumped that probably wouldn't have had to be if they were upgradable.    Now since it was a recycling fair, at least the parts will be broken down and supposedly recycled, but a lot of what's there is still going to wind up in dumps.  

It's not that Apple doesn't want to be environmentally responsible, it's that they care more about forcing people to upgrade to new hardware.   From a business standpoint, I understand why they'd want to do this, but I just wish they'd stop the hypocritical bullshit that comes out of there.  And if Apple really cared about "social duties" beyond a product's launch, they would also make the machines easier to repair.   

StrangeDays said:

anantksundaram said:

For all those folks that berate and denigrate the "billio-nayahs" and "millio-nayahs", I hope they can pause a bit and reflect on -- heck, perhaps even thank? -- all those Bs and Ms that have stepped up to already fund almost half a billion euros for the reconstruction and restoration of Notre Dame. With possibly more to come.

Doesn't make up for decades of poor economic policy that favors the billionaire class and creates an ever-widening wealth gap where there are more billionaires minted every year and the middle-class shrinks and the poor get poor. A few good deeds (tax write-offs to boot) aren't a course correction.

True, but it's Congress that makes that policy, although admittedly at the push of lobbyists who represent the rich.   We're never going to get out of that situation until we get money out of politics and the current Supreme Court is never going to do that.    If the B's and M's would do more like this (and pay their fair share of taxes), I would have less of a problem.   The Gilded Age rich were largely horrible people, but at least they left us with some great public spaces:  libraries, museums, opera houses, railroad terminals, parks, university buildings, etc.  And most of the big tech companies pay most employees quite well (although a lot of that high compensation goes into ridiculously over-priced housing).   

Without Congress getting money out of politics, I don't know what the solution is to restore a strong middle-class in the U.S.   At least unemployment levels are relatively low and for the poor, at least many states and cities are taking action on their own to raise the minimum wage.   In NYC, the minimum wage is now $15/hr for almost all employees.   With two people in a household making that wage full time, that's about $60K a year and while still tough, they can live okay, especially if they're already in affordable housing.    I believe that when housing is built for the rich, the developers should have to build X units for the middle-class and poor.   And the real middle class - an $800,000 2 bedroom condo is not viable for the middle class as I define it.     I'm sure plenty here who only believe in letting capitalism and the markets define pricing will strenuously disagree, but all the homeless living along California highways says that our current system doesn't work anymore.   Every new building constructed in NYC is only for the rich and sales prices on old units are also only for the relatively wealthy.    Archie Bunker would be a rich man today because he could have sold his little crappy house in Queens for close to $1 million.   Of course after selling, he would have had to move to somewhere where housing is a lot less expensive.  

I'm a little surprised because bed bugs normally like soft surfaces and I don't think that store has any with the possible exception of some small couches in the section for kids (although I don't quite remember if that location includes that).    There's no carpeting, no soft wall treatments, all the tables are hard wood, etc.

Some NYC movie theaters had problems with bed bugs for awhile.

And I wonder why the "real" store next door is taking so long to rebuild.   It feels like it's already several years.  Entire office buildings get built in that time.