Infuse is not free. It’s not Open. Its devs are a bit obscure.

But, hands down, it’s the best option for tvOS. It’s the only subscription I pay for.

As always, with any questions about Political Economy:

Follow The Money

Free, except for the amortized R&D and construction costs.

how would you know which places to patrol, and when?

This is an extremely regional problem to solve. Where I am, which is a village and exurban-ruural, you would go to the electronics recycling depot and see if they have any choice items. Also you could call the various independent pc repair people to see if they have anything no longer supported but functional for free or cheap.

Also there’s various thrift stores that sometimes have computers cheap.

The closest big city is Vancouver so to curb cruise there I would pick upper middle class neighbourhoods with alleyways, and drive around on garbage collection days. I wouldn’t really dumpster dive unless I knew of a likely source from hearsay.

I do basic video editing, transcoding, front end coding and graphics, and usually push my machine pretty hard. But not for really long stretches. It’s bursty work, so an Air is ideal. If I were to need a desktop replacement I would get a 15" Air with 24 GB RAM.

Long compiles? Renders of 4k video over 30mins and on the clock? Get a pro.

You’re being downvoted but it’s true, they are very difficult to repair and non modular so some parts are crazy expensive. Broken display ribbon cable? $20 replacement cable? Nah it’s a whole new hi-res aluminum shell display for you!

But to be fair I don’t expect to be repairing many of the M1 Airs, it’s a very mature design, 10 years of form factor iteration and a small low power logic board. I’ve hardly worked on any of them, though I own one myself. A few abused batteries are starting to need replacing. It’s just the freaking batteries are glued in, so so stupid; not a reliability problem but an extra half hour of work over screws when replacing the battery.

Yeah it’s been in the ‘best deal going’ category since it came out. Very capable yet fist-sized.

It’s not just the low sticker price. It will save on electricity bills over its lifetime, and it is expected to be reliable like all the mac minis. Get less storage and add a nice fast external SSD drive to save money.

The base 16GB RAM is probably fine for most, but if you’re going to try and get 8-10 years out of it, like a lot of Mac owners do, go for 24 or more.

It can do moderate gaming and the emulation and virtualization future looks good.

It is very possible to limit your interaction with apple, avoid the App Store, not get an apple account, limit the telemetry leakage somewhat, and run software that’s open source or direct from its publishers.

Also: Asahi Linux will work. Eventually.

I have a bunch of old macs here with different distros onthem, mostly Mint, that I have been trying to give away to locals (without being obligated to provide support, which is the stickler apparently). They all run great. One could dumpster dive or curb cruise, or around here, lurk at Recycling.

Au contraire, the rage-perp needs to stop at the third beer, and definitely would benefit from a couple of bong hits and an hour of introspection.

I repair Macs. Just use basic lithium battery practices:

• mostly keep charge between 30-80%
• charge fully if you are about to use
• long term storage with a 70% charge
• don’t run down to empty if you can help it
• don’t leave plugged in all the time
• avoid prolonged temperature extremes
• avoid shitty chargers, Apple chargers are expensive but generally worth it

Beware of add-ons that access hardware, for various reasons.

Apple batteries are rated for around 1000 cycles, or around 5 years of average use. Follow the above advice and you might eke out 1500 or so.

Good point. I hope it rotates to vertical orientation!

A lot of Windows users moving to macOS leave apps running due to just clicking on the red button to close the window.

Check to make sure you don’t have an app running that is keeping the computer active, even in the background.

e.g. some data syncing apps, navigation device connections, wake-on-lan enabled with an active network-reliant app running

Use Activity Monitor in the /applications/utilities folder to explore all the stuff running.

OK but what if you have a lava lamp that is synced to the moods of a sarcastic and greedy AI?

Security is about to get really weird. It used to be the Internet of Things we had to worry about, but now we have Things in Internet.

Thanks I will check it out

I’ll com back to the game when there’s more than 3 space stations in an infinite universe.

Wait didn’t MEC collapse into / get bought by a regular corporation?

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I have to use an AppleTV for various reasons, so I settled on a simple SMB share on an old mac mini server and the (subscription) Infuse app, it’s been rock solid as a player on all devices and very low effort.

Not in Canada last time I checked, but pretty sure they do in the States.

Yeah that was a lemon. New one seems good though.