My now 30 year old policy on Apple is to never buy anything from Apple.
They make some good stuff but always at a price premium and they lock you into their ecosystem. It’s now fairly odd, but I know Linux and Unix better than I know the Apple OS.
Basically, I put my first few 386 and 486 computers together piece by piece and I ain’t changing horses now.
Same, I dont understand the MacBook stuff. Like I’m pretty sure I don’t need to pay $2k for a regular laptop
Linux is perfection but for my personal machine I have a mac and a windows PC. i can get by on most operating systems but for tech stuff, linux is superior in just about every way imaginable.
Since mac has a unix(ish) shell it’s a little more fun for me. But my workstation is a windows pc, and the windows linux environment is surprisingly not bad.
If you worked in the entertainment industry on resource intensive material you’d understand it. I bought an iMac Pro at the end of 2018. It was insanely expensive but I firmly believe it’s the best business investment I’ve made outside of my monitoring system. It turned me from someone who had to figure out how deal with computer resource issues frequently that slowed me down to never having to think about whether the 150 tracks with numerous plug-ins I’m using will produce a strain on my system.
I wouldn’t recommend something like that for your average everyday person, but for someone who demands the kind of resource allocation a film, video, or audio project needs, it can’t be understated how much better even a MacBook Pro is over a PC of similar quality. I had an extremely powerful and expensive laptop PC before the MacBook Pro I used prior to the iMac Pro and it just plain couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro on what I was doing.
Def don’t buy a macbook of any kind unless you are a software developer or maybe A/V editor. The markup is flat out insulting. And its not even touch screen still somehow. Weird shit.
Their solution for this is a $1000 tablet with a $350 keyboard accessory, lol.
I don’t like touching the screen. You have to wipe it off all the time. 13" MacPro with keyboard is the perfect ergonomic computer for me. I need a mac for work and switching keyboards daily just won’t ever work for me.
But I agree the markup is stupid. For most I’d recommend a refurbished Toshiba. You can get a nice computer for $400 delivered (or could up to 5 years ago - things may have changed).
PC for computer/laptop and Apple for phone/tv/watch/tablet
The iOS ecosystem is just glorious
MacBooks I’ll use when I have them at work but I can navigate better around a pc and of course do gaming and vr on pc unlike on a mac
I’ve got a Windows Surface laptop and I love it.
Yep. I’ve got a Surface Pro 3 and a Surface Book 2. The Surface Book has the best keyboard I’ve ever used on any laptop.
I waited around all day because Amazon said I had to sign for this. Then of course the delivery person just left the $2k computer at my door w/o even knocking or ringing the doorbell. I found out it was out there by checking my email.
That said, when I ditch this country for good - I will miss being able to make a major purchase online and have it arrive at my door less than 24 hours later on a Sunday. People in Latin America couldn’t even conceive of something like that.
That’s a very, very small price to pay.
We live north of Barrie so we have a relatively good deal on housing. Our mortgage is about $CAD 3,200 per month but we have a 3 acre lot in the woods. Maintenance is relatively expensive because we don’t have municipal service, but our property tax is correspondingly low. If this WFH lifestyle sticks post pandemic I’ve got it made, otherwise I’ll have to go back to shuttling between the country and the city which kind of sucks.
wasn’t planning on doing this but lots of others were open about it so here goes.
Birmingham suburbs
3000 sqft house
myself, wife and 3 kids
Mortgage/propertytax/insurance: 1250
auto insurance: 130
Power: 280
Water/Gas: 100
Internet: 90
Cell Phone: 50
Streaming Spotify/Hulu/Amazon/Hbo/Netflix: 50?
Groceries/House Stuff: 1600?
Car gas kinda all over the place with pandemic, pre pandemic probably 250
Entertaiment/takeout etc: 500?
Home equity loan: 200?
Total : 4250
this shit can swing wildly up though depending on wifes medical bills/school tuition now that shes taking classes again.
We could definitely be saving much more than we are.
Just finished off my student loans after 12 years, those were 400 a month.
Congratulations on this, it helps a lot. If you were making ends meet before why wouldn’t you just reallocate those 400 dollars per month to an investment account?
you mean instead of paying it off or you mean reallocate now that I’ve paid it off?
Now that you’ve paid off. Many years back when I was a young man, when I finished my student loan I immediately set up an equal monthly payment to my investment account. Its a behavioral opportunity to increase savings without feeling like you are sacrificing spending.
Thread useless without incomes but that’s murica I guess.
We’re paying the minimums on our student loans for the tiny chance they ever get forgiven. Interest is pretty low on them and it’s the only debt I don’t really care about.
Mine varies year to year. In my adult life all my jobs have been compensated purely based upon performance: poker, waiting tables, 100% commission sales. I had a salary job 25 years ago, but quit after 3 months because they wouldn’t give me a raise even though I had taken on triple the amount of duties that I’d been originally assigned.