“It’s popular so it must be good/true” is not a compelling argument. I certainly wouldn’t take it on faith just because it has remained largely unquestioned by marketers.

The closest research I’m familiar with showed the opposite, but it was specifically related to the real estate market so I wouldn’t assume it applies broadly to, say, groceries or consumer goods. I couldn’t find anything supporting this idea from a quick search of papers. Again, if there’s supporting research on this (particularly recent research), I would really like to see it.

If there is any research from the last 50 years suggesting this actually works, I’d love to see it.

Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don’t know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.

Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.

Most of Apple’s history, actually.

Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That’s reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you’re into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple’s specs as closely as possible, you’d find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from “okay” to “so bad it feels like a personal insult”), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple’s own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let’s say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

As for the “does more”, well, that’s debatable. Considering this is using Apple’s 90s logo, I think it’s pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its “beleaguered” period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don’t think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn’t boil down to “we’re used to it” or “we’re locked in”.

In America, all things are about profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.

It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.

“Experts Exchange” is like the opposite of “cellar door” — the two most rage-inducing words in the English language.

The tech is there for sure, just not in any format major studios are interested in. The market is too small. Hell, we don’t even get Blu-ray releases for a lot of stuff anymore.

I mean, we’re talking about an industry that hardcodes black bars in streaming movies. They don’t give a shit about the tech.

We are all SEO Engineers on this cursed day.

My job title has changed 5x more than my actual job. I honestly don’t even know what my current title is.

I wonder how many man-hours (and at what average salary) has been spent deciding on title changes that have literally zero impact at my company. I’m sure every change involves meetings full of highly-paid executives.

The only way I’ll ever watch the theatrical release again is if it’s re-released in HFR 3D. Watching them in that form was amazing, even though the movies themselves were not good.

I’m curious about what the original caption said. I can’t explain this clusterfuck of typesetting with normal meming conventions.

Anyway, for context:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-s-new-stalin-center-evokes-pride-revulsion-n1267521

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/06/25/aeroflot-still-flying-abroad-despite-russias-international-travel-ban-vedomosti-a70694

Definitely not the start of the joke, but I couldn’t tell you where it did start. I think it long predates the internet. I would guess that it goes back to cultural conflict between British and French aristocracy in centuries past, but at this point I think it’s very far removed from the origins.

In the US, I think using France as the butt of random jokes got a boost during George W. Bush’s presidency because France publicly opposed the US’s invasion of Iraq, which caused some absurd and petty reactions from US politicians, like renaming “French fries” to “freedom fries”.

I have no idea why Disney decided to change that line. Perhaps it has more to do with the suggestion of interracial partnerships than with France specifically? Either way, Jesus Christ, Disney…

France is not suitable for children! Just ask Disney! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2SGSQsLF9I&t=101s

Which is the greatest use case for ChatGPT.

It’s been a while since I picked up a new language, but I remember the last time I did, the hardest part was just figuring out how to do trivial things. It’s crazy how long it took me to figure out how to do a simple thing like split a string into fields by a delimiter. I can literally paste a line of code into ChatGTP and say “convert this Python line into JavaScript” and it’ll just do it. Fantastic.

Or yeah, I could spend five minutes reading the man page to remind myself of strptime’s date format every time I need to format a date. Orrrrrr I can just ask the bot something like How do I format this date to look like "YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS" in python? Wed Oct 25 05:37:04 PDT 2023.

Never heard of this before. I just searched for “dubai meme” and got my answer safely. From https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dubai-porta-potty :

About
Dubai Porta Potty is a slang term for a woman who purportedly allows Dubai billionaires to defecate into her mouth for large sums of money. In late April 2022, an NSFW and NSFL video of a man defecating into a woman’s mouth began trending on TikTok and Twitter, generating discussions, memes and reaction videos referencing the viral video. According to the rumored backstory, the clip depicts a billionaire committing the act on a prostitute. Discussion of the video was shared under the hashtag #DubaiPortaPotty.

Origin
Rumors of models agreeing to perform deeply scatological and fetishistic sex acts in exchange for large sums of money have appeared online since roughly 2015. Mentions of “Dubai Porta Potty” have appeared as early as December 29th, 2015, on 4chan.[2] The blog “TagTheSponsor” operated from 2015 to 2019, and the runner would pretend to be a Dubai billionaire offering women money in exchange for sex, sometimes including scatological sex acts, and post the conversations.[3] On April 24th, 2019, Redditor Dhall15 posted a Starter Pack meme about women returning from Dubai smelling poorly (shown below).

I don’t think a lot of these places “expect” tips. It’s just that they’re all using the same e-commerce kiosks now, and it’s a standard thing with a tipping screen everywhere you go.

I’m a generous tipper when it comes to bars, restaurants, or food delivery, but if it’s something that nobody tipped for 5 years ago, I ain’t tipping for it now just because there’s a kiosk in my face.

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