normm

GlobalFoundries is a practicing entity, though not nearly as large as TSMC. It's a conglomerate of a bunch of formerly-US chip companies, now completely owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.  TSMC is ranked in the top 10 of all patent assignees in the US and so they undoubtedly have a lot of ammunition to fight back with against a company that makes stuff.

Apple tends to solder the processor to the board directly, rather than using any sort of holstering system, as a means to prevent processor changes after purchase, as well as potentially saving space by not needing the slotting mechanism.

The main reason to solder chips rather than socket them is the increase in reliability.  Each contact in a socket adds a potential point of failure in the future.

Soli said:

3) Instead of paying for a service like LoJack I've wondered if just using an old iPhone that has Find My iPhone on it and then hiding it in the car and wiring it so it can get continuous power. What I don't know is if I can wire it directly to the DC with a properly spliced USB connector or if I'll need an inverter. So far all the inverters I've sen need to be switched on after the car losing power and they do tend to give off some heat due to the conversion. Is there any solution here that would allow a $10/month cellular charge for a DIY "PoJack" setup?

You need 5 volts DC, and a car battery supplies 12.  Recent cars have built-in USB ports.  If yours doesn't, you could use a cigarette-lighter USB power port, which contains a voltage regulator (rather than an inverter).  If you only charge the phone when the car is running, there's no concern about constant power drain (which is tiny anyways).  If someone steals your car, the car will be running.

I removed the Siri button and remapped the Caps Lock key to be Esc.  My four general touchbar keys (on the right) are brightness, volume, mute, and play/pause.  These are all pretty useful.  Brightness and Volume are much nicer than real keys, since you can slide continuously to get exactly the value you want in a single motion---you just slide on the buttons themselves, without moving to the slider.  TouchID is also useful, but should work in more situations---I still have to type my password too much.  In general, I think more slider buttons will be the killer app for the touchbar, at least for me.

SpamSandwich said:

The media covers this moronic non-story that is a bunch of politically overblown hype, meanwhile Congress has done exactly nothing over the Equifax hack which affected half the country in a very real way.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is running that investigation, but these days it's being run by its biggest critic, and has completely stopped all actions.  Its head, Mick Mulvaney, requested a budget of $0 for the agency, which returned about $12 billion to consumers for illegal and fraudulent activities in 2016.