giobox

I tend to draw a distinction - side loading usually infers a supported but not mainstream way of installing applications - this xbox for example cannot side load without you paying a small fee to enable the developer mode, and the vast majority of software will be obtained via retail discs or the Xbox store. It's not a generic "install" mechanism native to the out of the box experience for the console - you have to do some extra work for this avenue to open.

When I think of "install" I think of general purpose OSes which can install software from almost any source no questions asked, or use the native out of the box support for software installations.

The similar distinction exists with android and iOS, and is probably why the term is popular in those communities too.

If nothing else, the term sideload makes very clear on platforms with native appstores or locked down distribution channels (consoles, phones...) that the install did not come from the native channels. Installs from game discs or the xbox store are inherently different from developer mode software and using the same term "install" for both disguises this fact.

Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.

There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e

In all seriousness, given component price increases etc, the Quest 3 remains an incredible deal for PC VR use. Aside from the foveated rendering, the lens/display specifications are very close to Valve's still to ship Steam Frame, which at this stage will almost certainly cost more than the Quest 3 does.

25 PPD VR headset for 499 with inside-out tracking plus controllers etc is amazing value. I've never once used any of the Meta applications, I only use it for VR games on Steam.

I think there is a case to be made one should buy one while you still can, if you want a great value PC VR headset. It's still an excellent choice for stuff like sim racing as well.

I also think the Quest line of hardware is done for. They are clearly much more interested in the glasses lineup, products like the Ray Bans etc, none of which appear to use any of the Quest software stack.

The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route.

There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features:

> https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode:

> https://xboxdevstore.github.io/

Agree 100% with the sibling responses here. This almost never works in my experience. Kids want to play what their friends are playing - I remember feeling this way a long time ago too.

Given you only have 8gb of RAM to share between MacOS and the Windows VM, running a Windows 11 VM in Parallels is not a great usecase for this machine.

It's basically a litmus test for whether you have kids or not at this point. The age at which kids become aware of Roblox from their peers is getting younger and younger in my experiences anyway. Before I had kids, I had very little idea either, and I consider myself fairly well acquainted with PC gaming.

The real test is whether the site believes you to be unique, which is listed separately. It reports me as "Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.", but I'm still uniquely identifiable.

The EFF's fingerprint test is nice in that it breaks down a lot of the bits of data used, and lets you know how you compare etc:

> https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

You quickly discover how difficult it really is to avoid a unique fingerprint.

Lots of folks in this thread are focusing on DNS and VPN to avoid detection, which of course can help, but a huge number of identifiable bits come from your browser's APIs:

User Agent

Screen Size and Color Depth

System Fonts

Hash of canvas fingerprint

Hash of WebGL fingerprint

WebGL Vendor & Renderer

Touch Support

AudioContext fingerprint

Hardware Concurrency

Device Memory

Platform

Language

Timezone

Timezone offset

Browser Plugin Details

etc etc

Honestly I stopped caring once I saw the max output is 4k/60 regardless of what you connect - the output is going to look bad with scaling on anything with 5k or 6k resolution, which is all of the recent standalone displays from Apple. It's certainly not going to be an experience worth the price tag of the displays.

> No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays

Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.

No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...

My only real issue with this design is as far as I can tell there is no markings on exterior explaining which USB-C port is "the good one" - an important point given one port is dramatically slower than the other.

I suspect many users will probably accidentally plug stuff like external SSDs into the slow port without realizing. It's maybe too much to hope for at this price point, but would have been nice for a machine with only two ports to be able to offer the same spec USB on both ports.

My instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port - it's closest to the corner - but in doing so you use up the "good" USB-3 port leaving you with only USB2. It's not a huge deal, but charging in the other port to free up the USB3 one feels slightly weird to me. I suspect most users will charge off the USB3 port given its location.

Reading the spec sheet, it also looks like DisplayPort is only supported over the USB3 port too - again there appears no way to know just by looking at the ports. This has never been a problem on any of the Apple Silicon 2-port MacBook Airs, as those have always had the same specs on both ports and could drive a display over DisplayPort from either.

> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.

While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....

The Apple Silicon fanless MBAs are great until you end up in a workload that causes the machine to thermal throttle. I tried to use an M4 MBA as primary development machine for a few months.

A lot of software dev workflows often require running some number of VMs and containers, if this is you the chances of hitting that thermal throttle are not insignificant. When throttling under load occurs it’s like the machine suddenly halves in performance. I was working with a mess of micro services in 10-12 containers and eventually it just got too frustrating.

I still think these MBAs are superb for most people. As much as I love a solid state fanless design, I will for now continue to buy Macs with active cooling for development work. It’s my default recommendation anytime friends or relatives ask me which computer to buy and I still have one for light personal use.

All through the 2000s Apple developed non-integer scaling support in various versions of MacOS X under the banner of “resolution independence” - the idea was to use vectors where possible rather than bitmaps so OS UI would look good at any resolution, including non-integer scaling factors.

Some indie Mac developers even started implementing support for it in anticipation of it being officially enabled. The code was present in 10.4 through 10.6 and possibly later, although not enabled by default. Apple gave up on the idea sadly and integer scaling is where we are.

Here’s a developer blog from 2006 playing with it:

> https://redsweater.com/blog/223/resolution-independent-fever

There was even documentation for getting ready to support resolution independence on Apple’s developer portal at one stage, but I sadly can’t find it today.

Here’s a news post from all the way back in 2004 discussing the in development feature in Mac OS tiger:

> https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/45544/mac-os-x-ti...

Lots of of folks (myself included!) in the Mac software world were really excited for it back then. It would have permitted you to scale the UI to totally arbitrary sizes while maintaining sharpness etc.

The depracation of AFP (first announced in 2013) has no real impact on subsequent studies. Here's a more recent one from Cisco with a 130k Mac deployment:

> https://www.ciodive.com/news/Cisco-tests-Apple-MacBook-vs-PC...

The usual suspects like Gartner and Forester routinely run studies on this question too.

Meta have a minority stake in Ray Ban and Oakley's parent company, EssilorLuxottica. The investment was largely to support development of future AI glasses. It does make me a little sad to see Wayfarers end up this way too.

> https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/meta-takes-around-3-sta...

Given one can only run Apple's software on their own machines, whether we talk about OS sales or hardware sales, we are talking about the same thing. Are you really prepared to argue 25 percent of the corporate computer market userbase are sabotaging their careers? I'd argue thats absurd, personally.

I'm not responding to the Samba critique because millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs, every day, just fine. Would I like Apple's Samba implementation to be better? Sure.

There are many studies that prove the opposite of your point, including one from IBM, and find the modern Mac significantly cheaper to support than Windows machines in business environments with less helpdesk tickets to boot:

https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-...

Of course I mean IBM - my point is the sheer volume of hardware Apple have sold to enterprise markets in the last 10 years. If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case. IDC and others have Apple's marketshare in US enterprise markets at 23-25 percent as long ago as 2021 - using a Mac has long ceased to be an unusual or troublesome choice in business environments and I would be extremely unimpressed by any IT staff making these arguments today.

If familiar with Apple's history, the IBM example was deliberately chosen. Once upon a time one would have seen an army of IBM desktops in the enterprise, much like the MacBook today...

> https://osxdaily.com/2011/12/30/young-steve-jobs-gives-ibm-t...

The cynic in me thinks Apple more or less gave up on Time Machine while ramping up on selling iCloud storage as a backup solution for macOS as well as iOS/ipadOS devices.

This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off.

An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.

The Wayfarer style was always bulky, they have been a fashion staple for decades at this point. The Meta gen2 ones aren't really that noticeably larger than "normal" Wayfarers - probably why they latched on this style as it gives the most room to stuff electronics while remaining similar sized to the original Wayfarer design.

I still see folks wearing Wayfarers almost every single day, and have owned various (non-Meta) pairs of them for most of my adult life. It's literally one of the most popular sunglasses designs of all time.

I genuinely view Time Machine as abandonware at this stage, Apple haven't really invested in it for many years and I would recommend a lot of other third party backup solutions first.

I also ended up doing this. With HDMI-CEC powering up the TV and the receiver automatically, then switching to the correct input on any AppleTV remote button press, this is actually a really friction free option if you can stomach buying two devices for the same purpose. I put the remotes in different colored rubber cases (red and blue) to make clear which device is being operated.

At one stage I even had a third AppleTV, that was hooked permanently to a VPN exiting in a foreign country, so I could get TV content and applications restricted to another region I watch a lot of content in. It was so nice to just pick up a remote and instantly have the foreign appleTV experience, rather than juggle VPN apps and foreign Apple Store accounts on the same device.

There are some drawbacks, not everything is supported:

https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager-m/sha...

There are other potential issues as well not listed on that page. Apple could address all of these though if they really wanted to roll the feature out broadly.

"Shared iPad" in Apple marketing speak: https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...

And yes, it's existed for years now. That ordinary consumers can't have it is a business choice, not a technical limitation.

I find this especially galling on the high-price configs, which essentially cost the same as well specified MacBooks. I am in the situation right now where I have 4 iPads in my home which could easily be replaced by 1 to 2 with support for multiple user accounts.

Apple have built much of the software infrastructure to support multiple users on iPadOS, the feature exists for education market customers etc:

> https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...

I also suspect someone at Apple has run the numbers on device sales and has decided the status quo where an iPad is a 1:1 device and makes more money for the company is preferable.

I was pretty surprised when the AppleTV of all things got multiple-user account login support before the iPad did!

I’m not sure it matters in Anthropic’s case that much - even people who use Anthropic models rarely think of the company as “Anthropic”. Their Claude brand is very strong, so much so the website is https://claude.ai etc, and you commonly see discourse about the company’s models where the name Anthropic never even appears. It’s Claude, Claude, Claude all the way down.

Claude has impressive mindshare in many engineering disciplines too, and given how many open source projects are a play on its name I’m not sure I’d argue it isn’t catchy either. Certainly rolls off the tongue easier for me than “chatGPT” does, which even Sam Altman their CEO agrees is an awful product name they are stuck with.

Right? People worry about the amount of LLM slop comments appearing on hn, we humans often do an even better job of writing nonsense. Would be fascinating to see what percentage of hn users only ever read the post title and never the contents of the link.

People often make the mistake of treating .io like a gTLD, when it's actually a ccTLD for the "British Indian Ocean Territory" etc. ccTLDs have always had risks, especially when they are for a really tiny region.

Similar issues to .io happened with the popularity of .tv domains, which again is a ccTLD. The government of Tuvalu sought to increase income from sales of their ccTLD and prices went up. Tuvalu is such a small nation .tv domain sales ended up making a significant part of the State's income.

Another fun example of the mess you can get into with ccTLDs was when the UK left the EU. All UK registered .eu domain names were cancelled following the UK exit from the bloc.

gTLDs generally have some degree of insulation from State-level politics. ccTLDs permit the nation or territory they represent much more say in how they are priced and who they are sold to.