colinng

Rolanbek said:

Colin, 

I don't expect you to be able to parse this...

Rolanbek, thanks for making my day. That was truly hilarious! Really made me laugh. 

Since we're trading jokes about parsing, here's my favorite one: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! 

Colin

alexonline said:

I was an early supporter - Jan 15 2015. I waited two plus years, but Mark’s unethical behaviour and that of his ethics-challenged cheerleaders put me off. 

You _were_. You cancelled. I believe they even let you reinstate your order without losing your place in line. To cancel is your choice. Not receiving the gift is the unfortunate but understandable consequence. 

Asking people to reveal the gift is not ethical. Don't charge others of being "ethics-challenged" until you stop doing that yourself. 

You are also the person, in your latest post at Waytools, to bully and discriminate against the punctuationally voice-to-text challenged. 

The message was clear - and your put down and dismissal of that message was also clear. 

Shame on you, ColinG, for being punctuationalist!

I acknowledge that I am nowhere near as kind as DaBigKahuna, or Mark. It's something I could improve upon. 

But spewing a paragraph without punctuation?

I was taught this: when writing, think of the audience. Were you also taught this? Weren't we all taught this? 

How does "think of the audience" becoming spewing random garbage and hoping others would take time out of their busy day, to reconstruct salient sentences from mishmash? And I didn't shame him. I offered specific, actionable criticism. If you want people to read your thoughts, write them in a way that shows you care that the thought is read.

Or put another way, don't view your time as more important than the time of all the collective readers. 

Is that not "common courtesy"? Of has that also gone the way of "common sense"? 

Hi Alexonline, 

You've used the word "ethics/ethical" 11 times in your post, but we don't agree on its definition, because you said:

Let's hope someone out there is ethical enough to reveal the free gift, especially someone that knows but who isn't bound to an NDA and who doesn't want to cross the great and powerfully pompous Markus Aurelius Knightonius. 

Those who feel it is unethical to reveal the gift due to NDAs need not make any responses, it is not wanted or desired to hear from those ethical types of people, even though they will tolerate MK's diabolically unethical behaviour. 

To ensure I am using a commonly accepted definition, here is one one from dictionary.com that several other dictionaries agree with:

The first definition is about "principles" and "morals", and "pertaining to right and wrong in conduct". 

What does WayTools say about the gift? 

It is a:

- Surprise Gift. A special Thank You for early adopters. 

and:

A Gift, and a Principle.

---

When something is entirely new, there are those forward thinkers who see its potential before all others.

Those who understand TextBlade and enthusiastically order it before general release, and share it with their friends – they are an important part of its success. The perceptiveness to recognize what distinguishes TextBlade, and the patience while we work to assure quality, deserve recognition.

When you receive your TextBlade, you'll discover a nice surprise. Every pre-order customer receives a gift. The earlier your order, the more substantial your gift. This progressive principle reflects our gratitude, and ensures that the earliest customers get the best deal. That is the way it should be, and we shall make it so.

For what it's worth, I heartily support giving "A special Thank You for early adopters" who have "the patience while we (WayTools) work to assure quality". So even if I were not bound by an agreement, I think the principle is correct. 

TREG units ship in a Production Box, which has the gift printed on it. We are asked to keep the gift a secret, in case it isn't obvious what the following mean:
- a "Surprise Gift"
- "A special Thank You for early adopters"
- "our gratitude"
- "ensures that the earliest customers get the best deal"

Before choosing to accept being part of TREG, we are given the agreement in writing. No pressure. We can read it over and decide whether the terms are reasonable (they are) and whether we can operate under those terms (heck yeah).

The right thing to do is to follow the agreement (in letter and in spirit), because that's what an agreement is. 

Why do you criticizing others for being unethical (factual or otherwise) and at the same time, explicitly demand that TREGgers do something clearly unethical? Isn't that hypocrisy? 

Kindly reflect on your words:

MK's - plus why reward an unethical person for whom it was no trouble to be unethical to start with?

1. No personal attacks on members of AI.

I mean, does MK still beat his wife, as the well known question goes?

Actually, this is not a well-known question or allegory of which I am aware. May I suggest better language? 

1. No personal attacks on members of AI.

commenced by extremely unethical behaviour in launching a product that clearly was never meant to launch when initially promised. 

This was covered ad-nauseum: They thought they were close (TextBlade worked for them), but testing with a wider group revealed unexpected scenarios that necessitated fixes. Or just ponder this for a moment: why did even the very first TREG units ship in the Production Box? 

Startups fail all the time due to running out of money before the end of the month, or the sales figures, or the VC funding cycles, so... quite how WT can be kept afloat is a mystery. 

davgreg said:

This gives me reason to pause on ordering one of these.

As much as I want to have a headless desktop Mac that (hopefully) will have a long service life, Apple's propensity for proprietary connectors and stuff is a serious concern. I want to see the thing for myself and see what aftermarket stuff will be possible as Apple charges a king's ransom for memory on everything it sells.

I would love to order one of these and have it on day one, but at these prices, I will have to wait and see.

I would argue that at $6K starting, most of us aren’t in the target market for a Mac Pro. And that is perfectly okay!

They’re aiming at studios with reference monitors, where the Apple $5K/6K display beats the incumbent reference monitor at $43K or whatever that is - so with the $30K+ saved - a very well featured Mac Pro is basically “free” compared to last year’s budget. 

For someone in the market for 28 Core Xeon power (such a CPU alone is $15K) then a few thousand here and there to round out the system, make it crazily expandable and quiet, movable with wheels, etc. - is incredibly good value, or chump change depending on how wealthy you are. 

The Mac Pro is both a very practical powerhouse or workstation, and at the same time an aspirational computer for many, and also tells the industry that Apple (once again, although they kind of said this with iMac Pro) makes seriously powerful computers that are quiet and well-designed. 

If I were in the market for 6 cores I would get a Mac mini 2018 with the minimum storage, plug in a USB-C SanDisk 1TB for cheap, get an LG 43” 4K, and call it a day. Some people on the WayTools forum have tried that with great success, and laughed all the way to the bank with the money they saved. 

If I wanted 8 cores I would wait for the Mac mini refresh. 

StrangeDays said:

dougd said:

Apple greed at work, they will charge 3x what other SSDs cost.

I really doubt that. Apple has shown time & again that their engineers lead with what they believe is the best solution for the product. The pundits and rumormongers just come up with their own invented reasons, which are conjecture only. 

Actually, Apple has been known to just take a standard connector, flip the pins to different locations, and charge you differently. AirPort cards were just PCMCIA cards with 2 pins swapped. They started cheaper than PCMCIA cards but eventually the cost of a PCMCIA card dropped but the AirPort card stayed the same. 

When it comes to flash storage, same thing. 

As proof, here is a simple adapter that turns a standard SSD into one that works in your MacBook Air or Pro. The adapter is tiny because it contains no logic converters - it just, **surprise** swaps the pins! 

https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-2013-2015/dp/B07FYY3H5F/

To courageously innovate around that, in 2016 they soldered the flash straight on to the logic board - giving you no choice but to pre-buy all the storage you anxiously worried that you might need down the road - and they charged handsomely for it. 

Fanboys will say nobody upgrades. Pro users will say they upgrade if they can (that is why the new Mac Pro is the most upgradeable Mac ever - a course correction against the cylindrical Mac Pro). So who is right? Would MacBook Pro users buy less flash to start with, and buy more flash later (when it dropped in price) - if they could? 

A company doesn’t boast a 38% margin (while the rest of the industry struggles to get past single-digit margin) and higher ASP just because they were able to be 38% cost efficient when everyone else was only 9% cost efficient. It is very hard to be 400% better than your long-lived competitors. 

I’m not saying Apple is evil. They’re just doing business. They can compete any (legal) way they want to. 

What I am saying is, some of us have had enough of these shenanigans. And we have proof that is what these actions are - shenanigans. 

While I’m expressing my disappointment, “Apple pays every tax dollar it owes” is mindless drivel. Of course it does! Else they end up in jail! But “what it owes” isn’t some fair number arrived at that is mutually beneficial to the countries it operates in - it is a number arrived at where one country (Ireland) decides to be corrupt and set an artificially low tax rate in hopes of getting some revenue and shutting out other countries.