Apple Camp: Fill & Download for Free

There is an episode of The Simpsons back from the 90’s where Lisa learns about a Barbie doll line called Malibu Stacy. Malibu Stacy is the typical dumb blonde girl and appeals to children to be beautiful and shallow.Fed up with how superficial the Malibu Stacy line is and how kids just keep buying it for nonsense reasons, she launches her own product the Lisa Lionheart doll which is an “intelligent inspirational product.” Her doll has Lisa’s ideals embedded in them, it talks and gives you inspirational quotes when you push a button.In response, the Malibu Stacy line releases a model with a new hat. When the crowd is deciding what to purchase Lisa goes to tell them not to be fooled, it’s just a cheap cosmetic change that doesn’t do anything. Then Smithers just says, “But Malibu has a new hat!”And everyone goes over to buy the Malibu Stacy doll.And that sums up how people who still buy iPhones every year are. And that also sums up how I feel about them.It’s a huge waste of money.Companies like Apple want you upgrading every year, and even incentivize you doing so by using a “Planned Obsolescence” philosophy in designing their products. That’s because selling iPhones is their bread and butter and their biggest cash cow.While some younger people might have gotten caught up in that jazz, and I admit I too was caught up in it way back, but not in the Apple camp — I was doing so with Pocket PCs long before the iPhone was born). But as a decade of doing so passes you realize you’re just wasting your money and you don’t need all those new features. By the time the iPhone came around I was already done doing the annual upgrade crap.Especially in the current era where phones don’t really get any new features and you certainly don’t need better hardware every year.This is how I feel about upgrading my phone every year. It’s just a new hat. I couldn’t care less. And thankfully, more and more people are realizing the same.

I personally would lean toward AMD.The 4800H is a monster, and the 5800H is even better in most workflows. For a balance of price and performance, I think the 4600H is almost impossible to beat.With that said, Apple silicon uses about one third of the power and keeps pace with the “big boys” for a tiny package that is almost incomprehensible in how brilliantly it performs.Yes there are bugs and incompatibilities right now. Yes, Apple is still milking a design theme from 2013. Yes, you can’t upgrade a thing inside the machine. But Apple is going to make a killing in the next few years as people either return to the Apple ecosystem, or get up the incentive and motivation to try it out for the first time.If the current M1 chip isn’t enough to woo people to the Apple camp, The rumored twelve-core M1X and its sixteen-core iGPU will probably up the ante with what critics are predicting could be the best laptop ever made.

Speaking from the Apple camp, the metal bodied laptops are supposed to be used on a hard surface. If they’re unable to make contact with a larger surface, it’s difficult for them to radiate the heat properly. They will get hot sitting in your lap versus sitting on a bed desk. The owners manual will say as much, but who ever reads that stuff!