JTTR

Is there any particular reason you use a Pro as opposed to an Air?

I work in the live events industry, and like many of my colleagues I use my old 15" Pro every day, often in some pretty wildly varying conditions. Within the past few months I've used it on beaches, in underground tunnels, and in the roof of dusty old church. I take it to client meetings to talk about graphic design work, it's running presentations when people forget their own, it's with me underneath outdoor festival stages configuring show-control networks. It's simultaneously standardised enough that I never have to worry about device drivers when an artist needs to replace their own on stage at the last minute, but with enough flexibility to make it an enjoyable programming experience in my spare time.

It's over five years old now, and starting to feel the strain, but I'll get a few years out of it yet. Some colleagues deeply regret "upgrading" to the newer MBPs. The keyboard and the constant dongle switching are the main bugbears, but there's other build quality issues as well.

Either Apple gets it right with this revision, or ours is one industry that will inevitably move to other machines. There's not that many of us, but Apples dominance of the creative industries has been a huge part of it's marketing appeal to a more general audience. It'll be interesting to see if they'll regret alienating it down the line.

While there's certainly mark-ups, the most popular modules are made by their manufacturers rather than outsourced to China. Doepfer in Germany, Make Noise in the US, Intellijel in Canada, ALM in the UK, Mutable Instruments is outsourced but only to another part of France. Long lead times on certain modules are par for the course when they're being made by one person. Of course, when it's one person making everything, the total output of stock is going to be low, and thus the economy of scale that something like a Raspberry Pi is able to take advantage of is reduced, especially with moving parts like potentiometers, which can cost more per unit than a micro-controller.

There are people making modules for dirt cheap with razor thin margins, mostly as a side job, and there's always the DIY route if you want to save a few pennies.

The scuttlebutt is that as the primary creditor, he's likely to get the lions share of Sears' real estate portfolio when the company defaults.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lampert-to-bid-for-sears-real-e...