I wish it’s not a sponsored video as well but FWIW I looked hard into this half a year ago and decided that ASUS is probably still the best lineup in terms of being consumer friendly and privacy focused.

For example, eero requires an internet connection to use which to me is anti-privacy and very anti-Apple, which has usually focused on making their products workable without mandatory internet connections (e.g. no mandatory iCloud signins unlike Windows 11, etc).

ASUS routers also allow you to mix-and-match routers of different models for use in a mesh network whereas a lot of the other mesh routers require you to use only from the same lineup, which means you have to replace all your routers wholesale if you later on want to get new routers.

(I’m not sponsored by ASUS. Just summarizing what I concluded on when upgrading routers for my parents)

The thing is, even if the Sunbird app was properly implemented, it would still be a security nightmare because you are relaying people’s iMessage messages on random Mac minis. The messages have to exist in plain text on the server before it’s re-encrypted to be sent to the user. An attacker or malicious admin could easily find a way to log those messages. So no amount of due diligence by Nothing is really necessary here. The entire idea is bad.

But then, if Nothing or the Sunbird developers were actually competent to begin with they would probably have realized that this was a terrible idea and wouldn’t have gone down this path.

I think outside of iMessage, Apple just gets the US market, which isn’t a surprise I guess because Apple is an American company. The way they advertise their phones and design their features feel like they are all optimized for the US market first. A lot of new features like Apple Card and redesigned Apple Maps always come to US markets while other big markets have to wait a long time before Apple brings them over.

There are other small things like the heavily app-focused design, which favors a lot of different apps that each does one thing and one thing well. This is different from how a lot of emerging markets have superapps (e.g. WeChat) that will dominate your daily life. A quick example: iOS has built-in non-customizable QR code scanning (either as a quick action from Control Center, or automatically from the camera app). This is useful let’s say you want to scan a restaurant menu or an URL link. But let’s say you live in China, most of the QRs codes you see are usually WeChat / Alipay links that you have to open the specific app and scan the code from there, making a built-in OS feature completely useless.

And of course iMessage itself is also a uniquely N American thing because a lot of other countries moved organically to other apps like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat and so on.

The iPhones are also priced expensive enough (Apple doesn’t do price differentiation across markets) that in a lot of lower income countries they are just too expensive compared to lower-priced Android devices, whereas in US, the general income level is high enough that they are affordable (but still expensive) to a lot of folks.

I do wonder about the specific markets like Japan, since iPhones are also really popular there, and I wonder what Apple is doing specifically right there comparatively? (iPhones are popular everywhere but I feel that in Japan specifically it’s even more popular. Maybe because of a lack of good local competition?)

The issue with having so many yearly releases is also just the explosion of OS versions you have to think about. I release an open source app and it’s always kind of a pain that I have to think about all these different OS versions, each with its own quirks and minor bugs (some of which aren’t directly visible to the end user), and it makes testing annoying.

Apple would probably just say “just update to the latest OS”, but you can’t just get all users to do that because each new macOS version stops support for some not-too-old hardware (7 years is not that old for a computer) and sometimes people don’t want to upgrade to a new OS for random reasons (stability, or some software stops working in a new OS version, or they just prefer the older UI). I do agree that at at least switching to a 2-year cycle would probably help a bit. Right now there’s just too much churn, and not enough concrete improvement in each macOS release to justify the churn.

So a useful MBA would come with 16GB,1TB and then you’re at the 14MBP base price already.

That’s only because you picked a 1TB config for comparison with the base 512 GB 14" MBP model which is not apples-to-apples at all (I don’t think someone who actually needs a 1TB drive would be comparing laptops like this). If you picked 512 GB (the same as the base config for 14MBP), the MBA is still $300 USD cheaper, and you get a larger screen, lighter computer, and arguably better battery life. All of those factors are non-trivial and may matter more to a consumer. And some people may decide they don’t need the 512 GB SSD or 16 GB RAM anyway depending on their use case.

But Apple has always been pretty annoyingly devious in pricing like this. It’s always a couple hundred USD increase for the next thing and then there is another couple hundred USD better option but if you keep adding it up you soon end up spending $1000 more…

Can users really tell the difference between a 15" MBA and MBP?

People can definitely tell the difference in price tag. Remember that it’s $1300 USD for the entry 15" MBA, and $2000 for the entry 14" MBP. (There is no 15" MBP)

People who can’t tell the difference would just get the MBA, whereas people who know the difference in hardware would get the MacBook Pro. The MBP aren’t for people who don’t need the power.

The actual confusing part is 13" MBA vs MBP since they are very similar and I do agree that Apple should fix that.

An M1 vs M2 chip?

Again, it’s really just a price thing. Apple only sells M1 for their lowest-level entry MBA. It’s probably targeting education related purposes. Otherwise Apple doesn’t really want you to get an M1 anymore.

Or are you saying people wouldn’t know the difference if they upgrade from M1 to M2? Sure, but who upgrades their computer every 1-2 years? Obviously a computer that’s just one generation ahead wouldn’t be insanely different.