Obviously that's a very messed up and broken system. I'm not defending it at all.

The usual reality with these kinds of payments is that the downstream social costs of not paying them - the strain on emergency services, increased crime and vagrancy, and other negative economic multipliers - are much higher than the nominal sticker cost.

But the UK and US particularly run on the moral assumption that the weak and poor must be punished for being weak and poor, because you can't be weak and poor without also being immoral. It's an entirely reactive and emotional mindset.

This isn't exaggeration. This is exactly the attitude you see in regular editorials and articles from the far-right press.

Someone has to get the big stick, and it's either the disabled, the poor, immigrants, or small groups who don't fit in in other ways.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/bMYANpDU2AGDKVQN7

In England, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.

So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.

Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.

You mean "In England".

The issue (apart from my Mac mini still having the old, bigger form factor back then) is that this requires a full shutdown (obviously), and that is more friction than opening a closed laptop lid. It just takes a moment for every app and background service etc. to settle back in after, and depending on how your brain works, you might not like that a whole lot.

It absolutely is a cool feeling to carry a pretty mighty desktop in the backpack, though.

(Apparently the laptops do a suspend to disk depending on battery remaining, so the OS does support it. It'd be nice to have it available! The disk space required could become annoying if you only bought the 1 TB SSD for your fancy 512 GB Mac though.)

The mini sips a truly tiny amount of power. I wonder what the smallest/lightest UPS could could bundle it with would be.

But at this point.. you’ve got a shit laptop.

The shutdown thing didn't bother me, and in fact the Mini was lighter than a Macbook Air at the time. So all in all it was pretty convenient.

It will get worse with the MacBook ultra rocking a M5 too.

Apple’s marketing department is gonna kill me.

I want a 2026 pickup truck. The dealer also sells a 2027 hatchback.

I am not shopping for a hatchback.

To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”

Then, like you said, on the WAN side you’ve got the monthly internet bill.

1Gbps is the sweet spot, especially since 6Ghz WiFi runs at something like 600Mbps in the real world a reasonable distance away from the WiFi router in an ideal deployment. Saturate your wired, and you get a slight benefit over a 500Mbps plan for your wireless.

The Mac Studio is Apple’s realization that the best Mac Pro was actually the Mac mini with some slight modifications.

Lock-in to x86 or ARM is painful from an operator like AWSs perspective. With x86 you end up with two vendors to play off against each other, which isn't great. ARM gives you the ability to design your own silicon, but you're still beholden to a single licensor -- arguably worse. On top of that, some customers mandate a specific ISA or even a specific vendor, so none of it is truly fungible outside vertically integrated workloads like S3.

The ideal scenario for a hyperscaler is an open architecture at the core with 10+ competing implementations -- including potentially their own.

This is what Arm actually is. Arm primarily functions as a talking shop for random insights to get back from integrators into the ISA and architecture, then cleared and released for everyone to use. The reason there are so few novel implementations of it is it just isn’t worth the trouble unless you are pushing mobile levels of units.

I would be very interested to be a fly on the wall when a customer attempts to mandate to AWS they must support an ISA that AWS doesn't have plans to support out, say, a decade[1]. That would be almost as amusing as the many, many times I've heard clients say "we spend $X million dollars with Microsoft! We're a Big Company! We have leverage! Of course they'll do what we want!". And the local M$ salesthing just smiles nods and says "I'll get back to you on that..." and for some reason Nadella doesn't return their calls.

[1] Maybe if one of the big nations says "thou shalt only use our glorious domestic processor, and the processor of thine enemy shall be verboten, for all the data things" or some such...but not a commercial enterprise.