That's the thing. Even when you consider the hardware benefits. Let's say they're 10% better (I feel but happy to be corrected, that feels understated).

There isn't a single machine out there that's even moderately close in terms of build quality. Either at the dollar cost for an entry series MacBook Pro or Air with 36GB (38?) memory.

I don't think there's an OEM Linux or Windows laptop with Linux as a first class citizen laptop out there even moderately close for value, performance and build quality.

Shit I'm not sure if there's even one out there if you spent considerably more than on a MacBook. MacBook Pro's are pretty good value now.

From personal experience, laptops that cost $30000+ (yes, USD) still come nowhere close to even a macbook air in terms of build quality. They have much better specs, but if you run Windows on it, the effects are much less pronounced. I have moved from a new Dell to a macbook with half the cpu and ram and for me t least it "feels" like the macbook is twice as fast and as responsive. I don't know if it is just better architecture or fine tuned software, but that's my experience.

Apple used the whole "economy of scale" effect to invest in specialized tooling/machining that would be too costly to recover the ROI for other OEMs. Keep in mind that consumer laptop makers to the most part don't make a profit (or have a low profit margin - last i checked at least) on laptops and printers. No one else has made the economics of using quality material, top of the line design, and specialized machining/tooling work like Apple.

I think for generic OEMs that may hold , however for manufactures like Huawei with their matebookX line the build quality is pretty much on-par while the components and options being offthe shelf standard means it should be easier to upgrade/support and port Linux to than MacBooks.Also the price is pretty much competititve for the kit that one gets. The blocking isseu would be getting one as the whole US attack on the company means their kit is pretty much limited edition within China at the moment currently.Maybe in a year or two they should be available at previous volumes.

I had a Huawei Magicbook for years that finally died last year. It was as close to Apple quality as I'd ever seen in hardware (except for the damn touchpad again - although the Huawei one was head and shoulders above any other non-Apple one).

For hardware quality, Huawei is solidly in second place, with the rest trailing pretty far behind.

My 2000 euro Thinkpad has better specs, I run Windows 11 on it, get to do CUDA and Vulkan natively, and there is DirectX 12 Ultimate as well.

Macs are great as an OS with UNIX infrastructure, aa graphical laptops relevant for workloads besides Photoshop and Sketch, not so much.

And then there’s battery life and sleep drain. Only a handful of competitors come close, and those have caveats like significantly reduced peak performance and the usual papercuts so common in the x86 laptop world.

It’s such a problem that if I were to switch away from Apple, I’d try to find a way to go desktop-exclusive and not use a laptop at all, because everything else on the market is so compromise-ridden as to not be worth the trouble. And I say this as the owner of an X series ThinkPad, which are among the better options in that world.

It’s as if most laptop manufacturers can’t be arsed to take their products seriously. So frustrating.

Not too dissimilar to what I and some colleagues went through with our local dev tooling yesterday. Not related to DNS, but the frustration was on par.

Went around in circles deleting the repo, deleting packages from homebrew, reimporting the tool chain from our private repo, constantly got HTTP 400 errors from the Rails Console when we were attempting to use our local dev instance to talk to third party APIs.

Eventually found out it was because of a recent release of OpenSSL:

1. https://github.com/ruby/openssl/issues/949#issuecomment-3367... 2. https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/28758#issuecomment...

Had to rollback OpenSSL to a prior version, we were dangerously close to "time to wipe the Mac".

With sources.

Exactly. If you can avoid having to do _any_ patches except those that have a security purpose you've already reduced your risk to supply chain attacks considerably.

This isn't trivial to organise though since semver by it's self doesn't denote when a patch is security related or not. Of course, you can always review the release notes but this is time consuming, and doesn't scale well when a product grows either in size of code base or community support.

This is where there's a fairly natural place for SAST (E.g., Semgrep, Snyk (many more but these are the two I've used the most, in no particular order)), and supply chain scans fall in place, but they're prohibitively expensive.

There is a lot of open source tooling out there that can achieve the same too of course.

I've found there's a considerable linear climb with overheads/TOIL and the larger the number of open source tools you commit to create a security baseline. Unfortunately, this realistically means most companies where time is scarcer than money, means more money shifts into closed source products like those I listed, rather than those ran by open source products/companies.

You don't need to get sun burns to get skin cancer, but there is of course a strong correlation.

Australia does have the highest records of skin cancer diagnosis per capita though, and it has for some time. [1] The reason for it is for a few reasons.

A prevalance of outdoors focused lifestyles, exasperated by a higher amount of UV penetration to the ground due to proximity to the equator, and a much smaller/thinner O-zone layer than anywhere else in the world. This applies to both Australia and New Zealand btw.

Both due to the location, and man made causes (e.g., CFC's) [2]. Though fortunately, the O-zone layer is getting much better and quite quickly. The article I linked states the ozone layer will be at pre-1980 levels by 2050. Taking this at face value without much scrutiny though.

Australian's statistically have fairer skin. I'm half Cypriot by mother's, Norweigan. I did not get my fathers complexion ;-).

Throw in the sheer number of people who travel here from places where the ozone is much stronger/better, means people enjoying our lifestyle without the same level of protection warranted. I thiink this risk is overstated though, I made the mistake of not using enough sunscrean or clothing once, and got the most hellish skin burn. You only ever make that mistake once.

[1] https://biologyinsights.com/which-country-has-the-highest-ra... [2] https://cyclimate.com/article/does-australia-have-an-ozone-l...

This is what's strange to me, I've never, ever heard anyone here in QLD say "buy banana boat products", it's always said that it is shit though.

So, we, as a community knew to avoid them for an awful long time. I can't be specific about when I heard this first but I'm almost certain some one said this to me in the first 12 months I moved to Brisbane (from the UK) 17 years ago.

So, there's been an urban myth for almost, if not longer than 2 decades. And we're only finding out now that it's true? That's the most surprising part of this to me IMO.

Edit: sentence structure, words.

Queenlander here too. Yep, absolutely.

And the "water proof" sunscrean is even worse. I know it states on the label that it doesn't last forever, but the average person assumes it'll just persist and relayering it isn't needed as often as you'd think.

Sunscrean does work, absolutely. But if you need to be in sun for an awful lot of time, follow the advice of lifeguards, cricket players. Which is exactly what you said.

Clothing + zinc. In that order. Sunscrean every 1-2 hours for anywhere zinc or clothing can't be used.

What is zinc in this context? (As an American I would assume zinc oxide, which to me is just an ingredient in some sunscreens.)

It’s a kind of product that makes completely opaque barrier. Often used in the most high-risk spots like on and either side of your nose.

Yep, the stuff cricket players wear is one of the more obvious examples. You'll see surfers wearing the same some times too.

https://kagi.com/proxy/Nathan-Lyon.jpg?c=ORiVIG1iR-yXL_2BLhX...

I have absolutely zero knowledge about the science and/or biology of skin, I read your post expecting it to end with something stupid like "don't know, I made all of this up". I'm glad it didn't!

I love HN because, for every snarky comment that's made or said on a misunderstood, or incorrect basis of knowledge that would set off an alarm on QI, followed by a stern telling off by Stephen Fry.

There's some one like you, who has an endless pit of knowledge to aritculate or better inform with a whole lot of insight thrown in for good measure. Thank you, your post's awesome. :)

Small edit: I immediately thought "Your skin can't be that good as a barrier, nicotine and caffeine patches work through the skin?" when I saw the post you replied to, and loved that you made reference to it too.

Thank you, I truly appreciate your kind words!

I just woke up when I saw the submission, and when I scrolled through the comments I saw the one to which I replied because it did provoke me enough (you can even say it triggered me :D) to make such a reply.

I am glad it was a useful read to some at least! Of course if there are mistakes, I expect them to be called out and corrected, it has been a while since I last studied this. :)

> to articulate or better inform

I hope I did it right, I was still just waking up, and English is not my first language to begin with, but to see you write this does make me glad I made the comment.

FWIW your comment is quite motivating, thank you again, I mean it. You made my day. :)

(I try to encourage or motivate people as well who articulate my thoughts way better than I could ever hope to!)

Aww dude, nothing to thank me for, thank you though! :)

I had no idea English was your second language! That's awesome.

I'm dyslexic so language is really hard for me, I have to put a lot more effort than most. I'm pretty intolerant of people who get annoyed at others when spelling or grammar is incorrect when we don't know their personal context (I had to triple check my spelling of grammar at least three times there XD).

I never got that impression from your post English wasn't your first language though! But I also wouldn't have stepped in to correct you even if you had. I nearly always find my own errors after a second or third visit, if I want cristicism of how I wrote something. I'll ask for it. If I didn't. I don't. I assume the same for everyone else.

Not doing anything wrong, different flavours for different folks. I tried Adguard Home but, found myself liking PiHole a little more. They're both excellent, and both are open source. I'd suggest, anyone that says AdGuard Home or PiHole is betterm, is as objective as saying "starberry is the most superior flavour of ice cream". :)

That said! I haven't used AdGuard Home in a very long time, might be time for me to revisit.

I don't think this would help, if a site or SPA performs terribly on a high end machine, the only conclusion I can draw is performance testing isn't tested or validated at all.