What’s next, Apple creating budget systems?

According to our IT department at work, a Mac is now on-par for price in the Q1 2026 numbers we have for our region with the Lenovos we have been getting and cheaper than comparable (hardware spec enterprise type) HP models, so kinda, yeah.

Currently it sounds like any member of our workforce that wants a Mac can get one now, where previously it was deemed cost-prohibitive and required an exception and approval.

Who knows if that will hold, though, those numbers might be based on Apple’s existing stock of RAM and subject to change when they need to re-up.

I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?

Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?

If nobody can afford anything with more than 8 gigs of ram for their office workers, they’ll all just pay for more AI tokens because otherwise the 900ms keystroke latency in MS Word would make it impossible to work, right?

I would be shocked if that wasn’t on some AI company’s brainstorm board as a positive side effect (for them) of all of this.

These features are unwanted by many, keep increasing, and the methods used to turn each individual piece off keep changing, growing, and moving, and that’s JUST on the user level.

It’s at least an order of magnitude worse to have to pull the unwanted stuff back out if you’re forking Firefox.

Mozilla could make this straightforward and easy.

They are specifically NOT doing that ON PURPOSE.

Why do you suppose that is?

My eyes are such that I can’t tell if the script on that cardboard container is Tamil, Thai, AI, or something else.

This is made more difficult by google search continuing to suck out loud and returning results that include nicknames for people and TikTok home recipe challenges instead of historical facts on international menu items.

Even “verbatim” barely works anymore.

Anyone know what other names the McTaco may have gone by in the past?

I was actually impressed when I took a bus across state lines in the U.S. recently.

Someone was complaining about the charger on their seat not working.

Turns out that the driver has full control of the power to the USB ports on the bus and can turn them off and on at will… and they apparently they turn them off BY DEFAULT.

If someone WERE to figure out a way to get from the USB port in the seats to the CAN Bus on the vehicle itself, having a hard-wired physical switch that cuts power/signal to the ports is potentially a fairly effective security measure as long as there’s not a memory buffer you can compromise and run stuff from.