Not sure what this would accomplish anything positive or these brands would find ways to dodge. And some brands seem to be ok to use.
What about Amazon own brand products? I find it unbelievable with their own reviews and ratings. For example, a Fire HD 8 tablet have almost 120k reviews with 4.6/5 stars. It doesn't make any sense. These tablets are junk quality with crappy software.
I find Costco product reviews are way more trustworthy. Even though they're 3-star, I still buy them sometimes.
Don't conflate ratings and quality. The Fire HD 8 having a 4.6/5 and the iPad Mini having a 4.8/5 doesn't mean they are about the same quality of device it means they met the expectations of the buyer about equally.
Many get the Fire tablets because they wanted a cheap way to access Kindle on a color screen. Even more love it because there are dirt cheap options to hand their kids. At 1/6 the price of a base iPad Mini it can even arrive DoA and be rated well since Amazon will just RAM without asking questions. People aren't always looking for solid metal frames with high quality software, many are happy to find the cheap piece of plastic that lets them watch a movie in the car and will give good ratings to the product that let them do that for the price of eating out for a night.
I'm not saying they're the same. Wouldn't you think the reviews reflect anything of the quality? If I look at other products else where, a 4.6 rating would tell me a lot about the quality of the product.
I think maybe there's a conflation of ratings and usability of some people.
The 4.6 is telling you it's great for being less than 100 dollars not that it's a great overall. Few options in the 100 dollar space are going to give you OS updates for years but every single one will have crap hardware.
As for other places it has a 4.5 or higher at every place I see on Google shopping including target and best buy.
You wouldn't rate a McDonald's a 1 star because it was shit compared to the steakhouse down the street you'd rate it based on how it performed against similar competition.
I have a 2015 Macbook Pro 15. I had a swelling battery issue twice. My Macbook wasn't part of the battery recall but it had the exact same issue detailed in the recall.
The first time I had to call the customer service and in the end they let me be part of the program and replaced it for the 1st time.
The replacement also included a screen replacement that cost $400+. The total cost was ~$600.
However, after exactly 12 months, the battery was swelling again and it wasn't covered any longer because it has passed a few days when I called in.
Then I recently I have both of the Macbook speakers broke and made lots of static sound. It would cost ~$300 to replace them. I'm debating whether I should just buy a new M1 or wait for another M1X coming.
Having & maintaining a Macbook is costly over years. It does break just as often or even more often than my Dell Latitude. And the cost to fix is often in the 5x-10x range.
For the past year, I've been getting random calls and texts from a lot of unknown sources. Many times the callers even spoofed different numbers. And sometimes people call me because they said I called them.
I suspect phone user information has been leaking probably in many different ways.
Those are likely simple robo scam calls. Robo dialers call an absurd amount of numbers on various schedules in something of a brute force social engineering scam. To keep their dialers from getting permanently blocked or reported easily, they spoof the caller ID (usually with an area code similar to the recipient's area code in the hopes that someone will be more likely to answer a call from an unknown number if they think it's local), which is why you will sometimes get texts or calls from people who ask you to stop calling them. These kinds of people are just other recipients of spam calls and your number happened to be the number the robo dialer was using as a spoofed caller ID for them; that kind of thing doesn't really have anything to do with leaked info.
For cases like that specifically, it's probable. But those are just like the scam emails where they say "hey, I know your password is ${OLD_PASSWORD}, I recently hacked your account on a popular 'adult recreation' site, remotely put Spyware on your computer, and recorded you 'entertaining yourself' while browsing videos (you have good taste lol). Send me x bitcoins or I'll email this to all the email and linkedin contacts my spyware found in your computer."
It's just an old password found in a breach years ago, they don't have anything else that's real. The difference here is that if they call and leave a voicemail with personal info, go to the police. They're not gonna bother tracking down a social engineering email, but they may be more inclined to go after verbal blackmail.
iOS is undeniably the one that would lead and determine how the future would be. In terms of money, iOS makes almost 5x more money than MacOS excluding all the services and wearables the iOS brings in as well. It makes lots of sense to continue invest heavily on iPadOS to attract more advanced users like devs.
iPad Pro M1 is the baby first step to start bringing in more MacOS compatible pieces to iPadOS. Eventually it would suck some or even most of the MacOS users into the iPadOS.
I have this book and I have never looked him up until seeing this post today. All of my three daughters love this book and I didn't quite understand why as I grew up in a different culture.
RIP Eric. You've done great work for this world!
I didn't really understand why kids like it so much at first, but here's what I think, in very few words it explores lots of things: counting, days of the week, day/night cycle, lots of foods, separating fruit from junk food, and of the lifecycle of butterflies. Kids will find something engaging in there.
I have done all of the above except the classical music. I find spending time to do meditation is more useful.
All of the above, I find cooking is an incredible skill that many people underestimate greatly.
Here are the things that I do for my cooking for every week or every two weeks.
+ 30-45 minutes grocery shopping including driving.
+ 30-60 minutes per day to cook daily dinner and prepare breakfast.
+ 10-15 minutes to clean up.
And what I think it solves/helps/improve our family daily life:
+ Food quality is definitely way better than outside. We have good amount of vegetable, fruits, fresh meat/fish/poultry and other dairy products.
+ Lots of time saving for not going out, spending time waiting, driving, moving the whole family around.
+ The cost is very low, probably around 1/3 of eating out.
We do spend a day or two to eat out or eat carry-out food.
While this takes time (months/years) to get a good skill at cooking and minimizing the time, this is so far one of the best skills I have had and I do think people should invest in it.
That's awesome! I forgot to mention this in my top-level comment but if you're ever interested in cooking some Tex-Mex, I have a recipe book for you. My grandmother wrote this in the early 1970s and it was regionally famous in the part of Texas where I grew up. She died when I was young and my aunt inherited the ownership of the book. I asked her for permission to make it freely available and she said OK. I had plans to translate it to TeX but never got it finished. I did put up a PDF scan of the original that you can download:
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. For newcomers to the book, I highly recommend the cheese enchiladas recipe and the anticuchos recipe. Anticuchos are not authentic Tex-Mex but they are very much tied to San Antonio and that recipe is probably the best in the book if you make it with good quality steak.
Agreed, no one in my friend circle cook any more. I learnt it out of necessity - I missed home cooking and then became vegan which made me realise the lack of creativity of the chefs when it comes to vegan food. Now I love cooking just for the sake of it.
It's not the hospital alone. I went to my Kaiser optometry for my wife's glasses yesterday, and they said it would cost $375 for her pair. Her insurance would cover $175 + $100 discount, and the rest she has to pay. She has a Platinum coverage with Kaiser.
We went home and she ordered 5 pairs online for $50. The anti-reflective coating cost $90 at Kaiser, but only $6 online.
Kaiser is actually the best/most European option, if it's available to you. This exact thing happened in my family, but the lesson I took away is being grateful to Kaiser for letting us know the price ahead of time, and all but forcing us to go a different (much cheaper) route for my wife's glasses. Don't hate the player, hate the game, and all that...
I owned the SE for ~3 years and I always loved how capable the phone is. It worked well almost like any new iPhone and it has surprisingly good camera too.
I recently switched to the Pixel 3A when it came out because the camera was the main reason. After a few months, I see that Pixel 3A camera doesn't look as truthful as my old SE. Even though the video has optical stabilizer, it doesn't feel as smooth as my SE, and the quality is actually disappointingly worse than my SE.
I miss my SE. I do wish Apple update the SE with a new version and I would definitely buy it.
What about Amazon own brand products? I find it unbelievable with their own reviews and ratings. For example, a Fire HD 8 tablet have almost 120k reviews with 4.6/5 stars. It doesn't make any sense. These tablets are junk quality with crappy software.
I find Costco product reviews are way more trustworthy. Even though they're 3-star, I still buy them sometimes.