It was manufactured to be as cheap as possible. There were the plus editions that had much better keys.

> It was manufactured to be as cheap as possible.

Exactly. The membrane keyboards weren't aesthetic choices, they were one of a number of compromises that were necessary to achieve the price point set by Clive Sinclair. He intuited that a sub-£200 colour computer would sell in huge quantities, and he was right. My (middle class) parents couldn't countenance the cost of a Commodore 64, but they were prepared to buy me a ZX Spectrum.

Computers were a luxury item then, beside that lots of people had no idea what to do with one too. Only the most computer curious people would spend around $900 (inflation corrected) on a fancy calculator ;)

Seems like the approach Apple is taking by soldering storage directly on the mainboard or using proprietary modules like in the Mac mini.

A buggy firmware will brick an SSD and block every option for recovering at least part of the data.

To me it screams more like an organization not wanting to assume blame and risk paying for their errors.

Doesn't really matter if you're using an old Spring version with the old Java version. Spring offers enterprise support for Spring framework 5 which still supports Java 8.

But organizations still using Java 8 will most likely use some kind of Java Enterprise application server with vendor support. IBM will support Websphere with Java 8 until at least 2030 and maybe longer if customers keep paying. I'd guess Oracle has a similar policy.

I don't think kernel-level anti-cheat is a big problem on company managed PCs.

Nintendo is also becoming worse. Some Switch 2 games are so big you need to juggle with the internal storage and expansion SD express cards above 256Gb are simply unobtainable or priced outrageously. While you can obviously delete and redownload titles that takes a while and it's a shame the console storage can be completely filled with 4 AAA titles. That in combination with 'key carts' that are just a download key and still require internal storage has put a big brake on my game collection ambitions for the time being.

How much are you willing to donate before concluding it's more efficient to just buy a new MacBook? Even the cheapest models now are faster, more energy efficient and more secure. You don't have to throw the old one away if you can find a use case for running old software but I don't think there are many people running 'power user / developer' like tasks on old hardware, especially if their jobs depend on it.

We're talking about 5,25 inch floppies. It was easy to insert those in any way imaginable including several wrong ones ;)

Yep, my memory was bad.

In my defense, so were 5.25" floppies. Literally the worst.

The Apple II used single-sided floppy disks so it was possible to insert a double sided disk upside-down to story data on the other side.

If the other side contains other data it should be easy to detect the disk was inserted upside down just by reading it.