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The base model at 256GB is either to advertise an artificially low price, or a deliberate move to ensure that most of these end up in e-waste within 18 months.
by xp84 8mo ago
The base model at 256GB is either to advertise an artificially low price, or a deliberate move to ensure that most of these end up in e-waste within 18 months. Go ahead and explain to the target market of teens, college kids, and 'regular people' how to resolve the problem when their Photos library (or like 1-2 video projects if they are into content creation) fills the disk and the whole computer stops working correctly due to 'disk full'.
"Sure, just buy a paid iCloud plan"
Great. Of course, now you have to wait for it to download any photo you want to use. And you're stuck paying a monthly subscription (Yay, services revenue!). And the cloud is not any solution for the video people, at all. I've seen someone try to edit a video that's being stored in iCloud Drive and only cached locally with Apple magic... it wasn't pretty.
Apple's quest to kill off any understanding of the filesystem by doing everything inside hidden, conceptually-monolithic "libraries" means the only way to be happy on a Mac or iOS device is to buy way more internal storage than you think you'll ever need... at Apple's hilarious prices. Oh well, at least for a moment now their prices look similar to everyone else's that just tripled.
- KPGv2 8mo ago> Of course, now you have to wait for it to download any photo you want to use. I don't think the use case for this laptop is content creation. Most people have no problem with Google Photos, which stores almost every photo in the cloud. Why would this be any different? This is an iPad with a laptop-style human interface, isn't it?
- xp84 8mo agoAbsolutely it is. And honestly, yes, the only person who will be able to use this device successfully and be happy is the person who would also consider, and (from a software perspective) be completely satisfied with the capabilities of, a Chromebook. Everything stored exclusively in cloud services, and preferably not the Apple ones, since iCloud Drive will just end up wasting more of their disk space. I guess I'll agree that as a direct Chromebook replacement (And I mean literally, just download Chrome after first boot and ignore everything else on there besides maybe the Messages app), this can be a decent device.
- foldr 8mo agoA laptop is e-waste because someone filled up the HD? Odd take.
- xp84 8mo agoWritten like an enthusiast who knows what the filesystem is. The target market of this laptop includes almost no one like you and me. This is for grandmas and teens, and even Gen Z, who is basically 30 now, never learned to use the filesystem, since they grew up using Google Docs and "apps" where all your data is just "in the app." Apple makes it incredibly difficult to manage usage of the disk, for instance, they only offer you two choices for Photos: All photos locally, or "Optimize disk storage" - i.e. Apple Magic. iMovie too uses a "Library" which is code for "Apple Magic." If you have a project in progress and want to move it to a USB disk because you need the space on your tiny SSD to download a single game, good luck actually getting that simple task done, because everything including your imported clips and your project files, is in a "Library." Basic users have no idea how to handle these "libraries," and honestly, neither do I, beyond being able to forcibly move the entire library "bundle" to an external drive, which may as well mean deleting it, since this stuff expects to be left alone in-place.
- foldr 8mo agoI mean there are already lots of MacBooks out there with 256GB storage. They haven’t become e-waste because of some mythical inability of users to manage storage (which they already do just fine on phones with even less space).