nathana

I have much the same wishlist as you, and also haven't found anything that ticks all of the boxes. My day job is network/sysadmin/IT, which mostly involves remote connectivity to other hosts, so my local CPU grunt needs are not particularly heavy.

That said, given the dearth of good options out there right now, I just replaced an old MacBook Air with a Surface Book 2, and with a few exceptions, I couldn't be happier right now:

1. This touchpad is just as good as pre-Force Touch ones from Apple. No joke. (If you must have the super-size ones with the Force Touch feedback instead of the "spring-board" style real button click, sorry...nobody else has that. But the non-Force Touch ones were "best in class" before, and that wasn't very long ago...)

2. The keyboard is easily the best laptop keyboard I have ever used. And that's coming from someone who used ThinkPads (I had the 770, the T42p, and the T60p) before switching to MacBooks, and who uses a Model M daily while at my desk. :-P

3. I have the base-model Surface Book. It's only a dual-core i5. But, again, I'm fine with that. The CPU is also housed in the screen, since the screen is made to be detachable from the keyboard. And since I have the base-model, I don't have the dGPU in my keyboard base either. So the base of the laptop stays cool while I use it on my lap. Oh...did I mention that the entire device (both keyboard base and screen) on the non-dGPU model is fanless? So no moving parts in the entire thing, noise-free, and isn't constantly sucking dust from the surrounding environment into itself.

4. There is a battery in both the screen and the keyboard base. Combined, I get amazing battery life, easily 8 hours or more depending. (I use it in laptop-mode 90% of the time.)

5. Screen on this is fantastic. Higher DPI than my 15" Retina MacBook Pro from 2012, way brighter, and the backlighting is more even. (I have the Samsung LCD on my 2012 rMBP...the model that never developed "image retention". I think the SB2 panel is made by Panasonic.)

6. It's got 2 USB-A, 1 USB-C (sadly no Thunderbolt, but it can handle DisplayPort), and a full-size SD.

7. Repairability is one area where it really falls flat, and in even bigger ways than the past MacBooks I own. :-( This thing I think got a repairability index of 1 (out of 10) from iFixIt. It's a sealed box for all intents and purposes. What really pisses me off, though, is that the SSD is not soldered onto the mainboard (it's a standard M.2 module), but there is absolutely no way of accessing it without basically destroying the computer in the process. If there was ONE area where I wish Microsoft had NOT taken any cues from Apple...gah, don't get me started. (And even then, at least with pre-2016 MacBook Pros, you could take the bottom cover off and get at the storage module in an emergency.)

8. The particular model I purchased ranges from $1,100 - 1,500 USD depending (list price is 1,500 but it's usually on sale). Don't know how that translates to your specific market.

9. I have not tried to use "desktop" Linux on it. I have booted SystemRescueCD off of a USB flash drive, though, in order to make a bit-for-bit image of my current Windows installation, and that worked fine (though to be fair I never bothered to start up X11). My understanding is that a lot of the hardware is supported even on current models; you can check out https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren... for more details.

Anyway, just FYI.

I jumped on the Apple bandwagon circa 2007ish, when I bought a Mini. Prior to OS X (and its nix underpinnings) + x86, I paid them no mind, but both of those things put together plus their reputation for solid hardware engineering finally won me over. Shortly after that, I got myself an Air. Before that I bought and used ThinkPads exclusively. I also have the original 15" Retina MBP from 2012, which still runs great.

But I have slowly found myself leaving the Apple ranks over the years, and the 2012 Retina was the last Mac I spent money on. I also ditched iOS (and iPhone along with it) for Android (long story) well before macOS began to take a back seat for me.

In January, I requisitioned a Surface Book 2 from my employer, and it has been fantastic so far. Easily the best laptop keyboard I have ever* used.

If you told 20-years-ago me that I would be buying PCs manufactured by Microsoft and praising them, I would have had you committed. But it has been fascinating watching a hungry Microsoft compete in this space...

At least with the MacBooks, you do have the option to downgrade back to a previous version of the OS, if you find the performance of the new one not up to par. So why not go back to the version of the OS on your Air that you were once happy with?

For the record, I have the same rMBP 2012 model that the person you're replying to talked about, and it still runs great. But I'm typing this reply to you on a MacBook Air from 2010, running macOS 10.12 Sierra, in Chrome. Still works surprisingly well...

If you're targeting Apple platforms with your builds, just how does a Threadripper workstation address the problem? (And don't say Hackintosh...)

For most consumer PCs, I have no problem with most things being soldered on like RAM, CPU, etc...but soldering on the storage is unforgiveable. And it has nothing to do with being able to upgrade it, but rather it's about the problems this introduces (and the options it limits) when it comes to data recovery when your machine inevitably @#$@#s up.

It's still not showing up for me. Checked on 3 separate Mavericks machines. So I downloaded the Software Update catalog (sucatalog) straight from Apple and did a case-insensitive grep for "bash" and there is absolutely nothing in there with that string. As far as I can tell, Apple has never offered this as anything but a standalone download that you need to fetch from them manually. Are we both talking about the same thing? (Apple Menu -> Software Updates)

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing. I've been beating the same drum for years within my circle of friends, and I always tend to get the "huh?" reaction. It's always refreshing to discover somebody else who seems to be running on the same wavelength. :)

I miss USENET. Nowadays, my digital identity has been spread to the four corners, across Facebook, Twitter, various unrelated phpBB-based sites, and places such as /. and HN. Even if I wanted to, there is no possible way that I could re-locate every digital utterance I have ever made publicly. Not only that, but I don't truly "own" anything I write anymore. It's stored in some unmarked server somewhere, stuffed into a schema that has no published documentation. I still have e-mail archives going back 10+ years, but if Facebook ceases to exist 10 years into the future, it will be like the (admittedly few) worthwhile written conversations and interactions I had with people on there never happened. There will be no record of it.

There's got to be a better way.

You may be right, but I think your comment has also demonstrated that I'm not a good story-teller yet. :) Thanks for the constructive feedback.

The most interesting part about this to me is the $0.20/min voice price. Not because it would have a direct impact on me or anything like that, but mostly because it seems like in the US, carriers are falling over themselves to offer "unlimited voice" while restricting the data. This is the exact opposite.

That doesn't solve the problem of people who have existing @gmail.com e-mail addresses and who would gladly pay a little extra for access to the account via ActiveSync, but aren't interested in paying for a full-blown Google Apps set up, getting a domain, changing their e-mail address, etc.

E-mail verify is a GOOD THING. They're going to need your e-mail address anyway, for the inevitable password resets and such. And almost nothing drives me more nuts than sites that take down an e-mail address during registration/account creation and then DON'T verify it. Why? Because I've discovered that there are thousands of idiots out there who either don't know their own e-mail address and accidentally type in mine, have a personal vendetta against me (so they sign me up for crap sites using my e-mail address), or want to sign up but use a disposable e-mail address to do so (and again they use mine). Apparently I have a common-sounding-enough (err, you know what I mean) username on GMail that people are constantly signing up for crap and using [myusername]@gmail.com to do so, and I am SO TIRED of receiving it all.

If more websites would verify, then this wouldn't be a problem.

Buy yourself a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. $200 USD. The LEGO NXT programming environment is a scaled-down version of LabVIEW.

I'm glad to hear that companies such as yours that are doing this are not necessarily considering making it permanent. I read PG's original article, and although you make reference to it, I felt he was addressing a different sort of issue than it sounds like you are. In your case, you actually went out of your way to engineer internal systems that let you do things manually, and you probably could have spent the same time and engineering resources you used to do that to instead develop the automation you don't have yet.

I may be in the minority, but let me give you some perspective as a potential customer who has experienced this kind of hands-on "service" from other SaaS-y outfits: I WANT automation from your service. I have worked with 2 companies that made me jump through all kinds of hoops to get an account set up with them when I could have had a usable account provisioned and active in 5 minutes had they automated their processes. As a result, it took days, because (surprise) their employees have their hands full, and I also have better things to do (you know, actual work responsibilities and customers of my own to respond to) than to have my hands held jumping through all of your contrived and artificial hoops just to use your service. That's just a waste of my time and yours and something that only ends up causing unnecessary delays to service turn-up, and in both cases, it seriously soured my taste for the service and almost made me contemplate throwing in the towel and going with a different solution.

This isn't the feeling that you want to leave your new customers with who are trying very hard to give you their money. You mean every time we need to make a change to service parameters, I need to submit a spreadsheet with my change request to somebody that's going to plug it in on your side by hand? MAYBE 24 hours later, if I'm lucky? Forget that: I'll go with somebody that gives me an API or a web portal that I can use to make the changes myself in a matter of minutes.

:%s/Something Awful/Hacker News/g

That's "iPhone 5s", the plural of "iPhone 5". "iPhone 5S" is the unreleased product.

Right, so the Brazilian SIM card was issued by a carrier that has a carrier profile included with iOS that is set to block access to that menu, while the European SIM cards you have either were issued by carriers with carrier profiles in iOS that don't block access to that menu, or those European SIM cards were issued by a carrier or carriers that the iPhone knows absolutely nothing about (no built-in carrier profile(s)).

In my case (and in the case of some other customers of other MVNOs), my carrier, Straight Talk, is really just a company that buys wholesale access to AT&T's network and then resells it as a prepaid service to customers. Thus a Straight Talk SIM card looks identical to an AT&T SIM card to the iPhone. And AT&T's iOS carrier profile blocks access to the APN editing submenu. So my situation is different from yours because in your case, your Brazilian service provider and your European service providers had no corporate connections with each other, nor did they share a singular common network, as is the case with AT&T and Straight Talk.

There is next-to-nothing Straight Talk can do about this, at least without both AT&T's and Apple's co-operation.

Maybe I'm displaying some extreme naivete here, but I thought Apple did a spectacular job during the original iPhone launch proving to the carriers (and to the world) that they really didn't need them in order to move phones. Despite the fact that the original iPhone didn't even have any subsidy and yet STILL required you to sign a 2-year contract with AT&T (what!), Apple moved units like CRAZY via their own direct sales channels (Apple retail stores and store.apple.com).

It seems to me that given this fact, there really is no reason why Apple has to continue to kowtow to the carriers. Apple should stop sucking up to them and push direct sales of unlocked phones harder than ever. People will still buy them. They should then show a complete and fearless disregard for carriers by discarding the concessions they have made to them in the hardware and software design. Just throw stuff like carrier profile restriction features completely out. Sell iPhones to and for your end-users again.

If Apple decided to actually do this, what could any of the carriers really do about it? Nothing, that's what. Ban the iPhone from their networks? They wouldn't dare. (Or at least the GSM ones wouldn't...IS-95/CDMA2K is a slightly stickier subject, I'll admit.) There always seems to be a lot of talk (especially State-side) about carriers being open-access and what that means (remember the rider on the 700MHz auctions that Google convinced the FCC to sneak in which Verizon is now bound to as the winner of that spectrum block?), but GSM carriers have always mostly been "open" with respect to devices. Part of the promise of the SIM "personality module" is that it brings to the wireless industry what modular plugs in the home brought to the wireline industry following events such as the FCC's Carterphone ruling: a decoupling of the carrier and the end-user's device. I want to see the wireless industry move in that exact same direction. Sure, AT&T could decide to block iPhones from their network, but then they'd be turning down revenue from potential customers solely out of spite, and they aren't going to do that.

So far, the only company to have the balls to pursue a strategy like this, surprisingly, is Google. For some time now, you've been able to buy an unlocked Galaxy Nexus phone from them at a very reasonable price, and the Nexus 4 continues that tradition and even goes a step further: the ONLY sales channel (at least at this time) for the Nexus 4 is direct from Google. There are no subsidized or carrier-locked versions of this phone sold through carriers. There's a single SKU (well two, really, if you count the two fixed storage capacity options) for an unlocked GSM/UMTS phone. Google may have consulted with AT&T and T-Mobile here in the States out of courtesy before releasing the phone; I don't know. But I don't think that there's anything that says they had to get their approval to make and sell the phone, and there's nothing that says a user can't buy one without consulting their carrier first and put their own SIM card in it once it arrives.

Some may point out that Google isn't moving very many phones by themselves at the moment with this sales system, so doesn't that prove that this is not a viable business plan? I would counter that Google doesn't have quite the cachet that Apple does in this market at this time for reasons completely unrelated to how phones are sold, and that Apple, unlike Google, is in a position right now where it hold all of the cards. And for the sake of the consumer, Apple should take advantage of that position. That they don't appear to be ready and willing to do this (and in fact seem to be trending in the opposite direction) worries me.

I definitely salute Google for their move, and wish other phone manufacturers would follow in their footsteps. C'mon guys: take your destiny into your own hands rather than leave it in the trust of the carriers. Seriously.

Well, that all depends on what Apple's internal corporate culture's value system is, doesn't it? If they want to continue to give off the impression that the end-user is their direct customer and that they prize that end-user's experience above all else, then they need to distance themselves from things like this.

I think that Apple has worked very hard to cast this image of themselves as the champion of the end-user. If that's the case, then they need to start proving it with mobile devices like the iPhone, which occupies a market segment where users have traditionally not been regarded as much more than pawns. I feel as though Apple here is treating this situation like their ongoing business relationship with AT&T and other carriers is more important than satisfying the needs of their customers whenever the two are in conflict. I suspect that Apple wouldn't want that kind of press.

The menu lock/unlock is controlled by whichever included carrier profile your SIM card IIN is associated with. My Straight Talk SIM card has an AT&T IIN, so it automatically uses the AT&T carrier profile (to my great annoyance, as if that weren't already clear to everybody :-)). A carrier might decide to not lock the menu for their customers, and if you have a SIM card that has no associated carrier profile, you will automaticall be granted open access to the menu.

I asked the same question elsewhere, and someone came up with this hypothesis: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16266984#post16...

...I still think APN blocking is entirely irrational on the part of the carrier. There's no way a user can subject their carrier's network to fraud or abuse by having access to the APNs (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16266682#post16...)

But that's the case with any software update. So that makes it my responsibility to make and keep a comprehensive backup of my system and app data before I initiate the update, if I want to be able to go back. Either that or I accept the possibility that I'll have to start over with my data. So what? How is that any different than software on a personal computer?

Both of these options (backup or clean start) are burdens I am more than willing to accept and bear in exchange for having the freedom to backlevel my software as I see fit. Apple doesn't need to support people's downgrading efforts (as in, hold their hand, explain how to do it, etc.), but they've gone way beyond "not supporting" it. Going out of your way to develop a system that prevents downgrading? WTF?

I've said this on other forums, so I apologize if it sounds like I'm repeating myself, but the way I look at it is that if Apple is going to insist that I can never, ever reinstall an older version of the OS, then they are absolutely on the hook to deliver 100% bug-free software every single release. That's impossible, even for Apple (:-P). People aren't perfect, and they make mistakes. So it is absolutely imperative that they give their customers an "out" that they can elect to take if a bug or shortcoming of a software update introduces an undue burden for the user, and they need that functionality to work the way it did before while a new version (hopefully with a fix to your problem) is developed, tested/QA'd, and finally shipped. That kind of thing doesn't happen overnight, and it is not reasonable for software companies to expect people to live with certain classes of bugs or other problems while the fix takes 2-3 months to ship.

Enterprise system operators wouldn't stand for that kind of behavior from a vendor; if Cisco has a showstopper regression in their latest code that ends up biting people in the butt, there is NO way an admin worth his salt is going to keep running that version until the fix is in.

Heck, PC users wouldn't stand for that kind of behavior, either: can you imagine the outcry that would have resulted if Microsoft had told everybody who upgraded their PCs that were previously running XP to Vista that they're not allowed to undo the upgrade, even via a format and reinstall? Or what would have happened if, once Vista had been released, Microsoft told people that if anyone still running XP ever needs or wants to perform a clean-install of Windows, they would be forced to install the latest available version of Windows (Vista)? (Technically they could kind of do this if they elected to shut down the product activation servers for XP, but to Microsoft's credit, they have not done so and have shown no indications that they are even thinking about doing this.)

Apple does both of these things with iOS: technical enforcement of downgrade prevention, and also technical enforcement (through the same mechanism) of forced upgrade to the latest version during OS reinstall, regardless of what you're currently running. I find it crazy that people put up with it.

That's true. But this shouldn't take away from these two facts:

1) iOS does ship with a collection of the latest versions of partner carrier profiles as of the ship-date of that iOS version, as you point out. So you can't try to do an end-run around the AT&T profile restrictions by, say, doing a complete restore of iOS on your phone, followed by activation of the phone using a SIM that isn't from a carrier partner in order to cause it to use the generic carrier profile (for example, T-Mobile U.S.), followed by SIM-swapping back to your AT&T SIM. The AT&T profile is lurking in there, ready to be consulted when you switch SIMs, on every iPhone.

2) This is still a proprietary Apple scheme for pushing APNs for carriers (carrier profiles are plists), and not some universal standard for doing carrier programming updates "over the air." Carriers can build and submit their carrier profiles to Apple, but Apple then centrally distributes the profile updates from their own servers. And AFAIK, if you're a carrier, Apple is not going to host a carrier profile for you unless you have some formal relationship with Apple (become a "supported" carrier).

As far as I know, there is no standards-based mechanism for doing so as SIMs predate packetized cellular data over GSM, so the concept of the APN was not around to be "baked into" the GSM SIM when it was first conceived, and the SIM has seemingly not been spec-bumped since to support it. I have never run into a GSM phone that can automatically pull its APN configuration from the carrier network or from a SIM; it's either been pre-configured for you in the ROM (in the case of locked phones) or manually configurable (in the case of unlocked phones).

Apple provides an automatic APN configuration subsystem that the carriers control, but it is completely proprietary to iPhone, and it is in fact this exact subsystem that is causing me grief.

Some final notes of clarification:

1) Straight Talk isn't a "small carrier" (read: regional carrier with "rural" possibly implied) in the U.S., at least in terms of the size of the network itself. In fact, Straight Talk doesn't actually own any of their own infrastructure: they ride the nationwide AT&T network.

2) This proprietary iPhone automatic APN configuration system is used on ALL iPhones worldwide, regardless of carrier. So this has nothing to do with how carriers in the U.S. do or do not accomplish this vs. how you think other carriers outside the U.S. accomplish this. If you own an iPhone and have a SIM card in it that was issued by a carrier anywhere in the world that Apple has a contractual relationship with, your phone was configured this way, and you could run into the same problem I documented here depending on the situation.

Hmmm...if only it were that easy. When my SIM isn't in the phone, the "Cellular" menu under General in Settings is grayed out and it says "No SIM" to the right of it. If I can't get in that menu, I can't get to the Cellular Data Network submenu.

This is iOS 6, remember. I think the instructions you linked to on the HF wiki were written for iOS 5, since they talk about General -> Network -> Cellular Data, instead of General -> Cellular -> Cellular Data...that menu got renamed in iOS 6. They no workie, at least without a T-Mobile SIM.

It all depends on who the IIN is that issued the SIM card. If it's an AT&T-issued card (which would include all of AT&T's MVNOs, such as Straight Talk), the iPhone just sees an AT&T SIM card, and applies the Apple-signed AT&T carrier profile to it, and in that carrier profile is a bit that controls whether the phone allows access to the Cellular Data Network menu or not, which AT&T has set to "deny."

If you put in a SIM card that the iPhone has no clue about (such as T-Mobile U.S.)., then iOS will fall back to a generic carrier profile, which does allow access to the APN editing submenu.

The problem is that Straight Talk is an AT&T MVNO, and so Straight Talk SIMs are indistinguishable from AT&T SIM cards from the iPhone's perspective. The iPhone engineers made a bad assumption, which is that all cards issued by carrier X should be treated exactly the same.

Maybe because not all of my friends have iPhones and cannot use iMessage to reach me, and have no idea that when they send me an MMS that it's just going to disappear into a black hole, and I'd rather have the option of not missing any communication?