lowkj

To be clear, that article is about the base m5, not the m5 pro or m5 max.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macb...

"The new MacBook Pro delivers up to 2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation reaching speeds of up to 14.5GB/s..."

I once asked a cashier about this and they said it saved me money. They said representatives from the large national bank had done a presentation and noted how this is the best option for foreigners. I think they truly believe they are being helpful. Closest thing to legalized robbery.

Designed my entire house around Siri with HomePods in every room. We use it to control the lights, blinds, heated floor, play music, turn on the tv, etc. Would be great if it could do more.

Why would you need to get on the subway to go to the grocery store? When I lived in Paris I was within a five minute walk to at least three general grocery stores plus various speciality shops. Always plenty of parents all around. This is not uncommon in properly designed non-car dependent cities. Not to mention deliveries are just that much easier and all without a car.

I moved from the USA to France and your statement surprised me. Looking around for some data, I'm seeing around 4,600 French nationals who obtained U.S. permanent resident status compared to 13,000 issued to U.S. citizens by France. So about 3x more US -> France and rising.

https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/number-of-americans-moving... https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/Articles/8c273940-72b7-4...

Maybe your specific model? I have a Makita electric mower and the difference is night and day. It's very relaxing and I mow with no hearing protection. I've tested to see how far the noise carries and none of my neighbors can even hear it. Meanwhile, I hear gas mowers from my neighbors on all sides and several lots away from me.

When No Man’s Sky first announced a Mac port, they promised to release on Steam and App Store. I waited a year after the Steam release for the App Store release which never came.

I am a very casual gamer and sometimes weeks go by without playing. My first experience with Steam was with Civ VI. Long flight, no internet, great I’ll play some Civ! But instead of opening up Civ, I was forced to open Steam which would then not allow me to play my own game because I hadn’t authenticated recently enough for them. Or I would try to play and Steam would say, oh first you need to download some huge update before you’re allowed to play your single player entirely offline game.

I know theoretically GoG is supposed to solve this issue but no Mac game I wanted was available there. Finally Cyperpunk 2077 launched on multiple stores and I bought on GoG. Even then, the default option became to use the GoG launcher. If I wanted DRM free download, there was some immediately complicated off putting set of instructions, downloading something like 20+ files, etc.

App Store experience, I click download, it downloads. I open it, it opens the app and not some launcher. Everything just works.

For me it comes down to security and convenience. My phone is secure, if it's stolen or lost, my payment methods are safe. If my wallet or credit card is lost, I'm canceling cards, watching my credit report, etc. I'm an old guy btw from long before the iPhone =)

Do you ever use your phone to pay anywhere? It's possible the process has evolved since you last used it. I use Apple Pay for 99% of all transactions and it's by far the fastest, most convenient for all parties method. They ask how I want to pay, I say credit, I double click the side of my phone and wave it over the reader. The entire process takes approximately 2 seconds.

Sometimes when traveling my credit card will get blocked and only then is there much fussing and apologizing as I attempt to find cash or pay with a physical credit card.

My understanding is, the person simply needs to be in your contacts. Nothing related to iCloud or friend connection.

I had been using JetBrains (Webstorm and PyCharm before that) for years now and just switched to Cursor a few months ago. I never liked the way AI copilots tacked onto the IDE worked and preferred to just use standalone ChatGPT. Been very happy with the Cursor experience, big improvement in UX from my perspective.

If you use Apple CarPlay, any garage door opener you have will appear on your dashboard when you are close to it. No subscription, no need for device to have internet access. Not exactly the same as it's not using hardware in your car and you'll need your phone, but this works nicely for me.

CarPlay doesn't use your car's internet, it uses your phone's internet. That's part of the whole beauty of it.

Siri can be disabled on the HomePod.

I'm not sure that the homepod belongs in this list as by most accounts it's a financial success. Nothing will be as profitable as the iPhone but the homepod enhances the Apple eco-system. Of all the devices I absolutely would not trust Google/Amazon with, it's a smart speaker. With homepods all over the house, it just makes it that much harder to switch to a non-iphone.

But if you value your time, why would you wash your car multiple times per month?

I would probably qualify as being in the car hatred movement but I don’t lump in rural areas. I do believe that cities should be largely car free. Cars belong in rural areas but when coming into a city should park outside and take rapid / convenient public transport into the city. This transition is already happening in many international cities.

That said, even rural areas shouldn’t require cars nearly as much as they do in the US now. Trains can service rural areas as well the same as they do in Europe.

That might be the converted us$ price in China but definitely not the case everywhere they sell the car. Here in Colombia the BYD Yuan Plus EV is 199.900.000 pesos or over $49,000 usd.

I’m an American who used to listen to a lot of country music. I have spent the last four years in South America and before that two years in France. I can’t remember a single time hearing American country music outside the US. I’m sure I have heard a song or two but I can assure you it is very rare.

I think this is actually the system working. The benefits of a tiny proportion of the population (lawn care companies) don’t outweigh everyone else. As a whole, the people decided that clean air and less noise pollution warranted a change. Maybe it will cost more in the near term to achieve those goals. But, it’s a level playing field. The costs will not be borne by the lawn care companies but by society at large. If the price of providing lawn care truly goes up then all lawn care providers will charge more. Society at large was already paying the costs of air / noise pollution.

100% agree, personally I just prefer typing but seems like I am not in the majority. I very often receive audio replies to my typed messages and it’s very frustrating. 70% of the time, I’m not in a position where I can easily listen to the audio vs just reading text. The other 30% of the time I’m simply annoyed as I do not want to be forced to listen to the audio.

I would say I live even further than the suburbs (45 minutes from Medellín, one house every acre / 5000 m2) and we just got a second fiber option maxed out at 300mb so that may be changing.

As an American who moved to Colombia, I can highly recommend it. That said, there’s a lot of downsides not mentioned here. First off, your foreign earned income and your US credit score mean nothing here. You will not be able to get a loan and if you want to buy property, you’ll be paying cash. I had to pay 8 months of rent into a bank deposited escrow just to rent a fairly cheap house for one year. That also involved (literally) about 6 trips each to a physical notary office and banks). Things that would be unheard of in the US are common place, like constant physical signatures and finger prints to authenticate documents and asking for your national id number in order to do anything and everything.

A small empty lot in the nicer parts outside Medellín will be at least $225,000. Not bad and beautiful land but again you’ll have to pay cash for everything. Taxes are very high and you can expect to pay 30% - 80% more for many foreign products (“nicer” cars in particular seem to be ridiculously high priced). Tech product selection is terrible, everything lags way behind or simply isn’t available. Amazon does ship a selection of lighter weight items here but you’ll pay a VAT tax of 20% plus an import tax of 10% on the total including shipping. It usually works out to be a 40% premium. Electric vehicles essentially do not exist unless you want a Twizy. I just had my radiator fan go out on my car and was quoted $900 for the part alone which is available in the States for $200. With shipping and taxes I can order from the US for about $550 but it will take about 2 weeks to get here.

There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in daily life, just trying to do “simple” things like an online purchase.

Still an amazing place, lots of great things but as someone trying to actually make a long term life here it can definitely be frustrating.

Not sure what the HN rules are for self-promotion but my team and I recently launched an ATS/CRM called TalentAdmin. We're currently more geared towards smaller businesses but slowly growing into larger customers. We're not a perfect fit for everyone but we're very strong in structured interviews / scorecards, support, and at a price competitive with Google Hire.

Understood, however from our cash flow perspective, Google is “charging” us this amount in order to play. We have no alternatives, we cannot find another vendor, and at the end of the day have to pay a minimum of $15k to compete with them. It makes no difference who gets the money, obviously that amount of money means nothing to Google.

We are in the process of going through this but have not yet received the confirmation that our scope is approved.

This process was a huge surprise for us. We are a bootstrapped startup that spent a significant amount of time building the Gmail integration last year before this was announced. We are launching shortly and have had to remove the entire integration. We have no idea how much it is going to cost or if we will be approved.

We are launching a product in a mature market with lots of competitors (hence the long initial development time), one of those being Google. According to Wikipedia, Gmail has ‎1.4 billion customers. I don't understand how this got past their lawyers - 1) monopoly in e-mail space, 2) create other products tightly integrated, 3) charge a $15k - $75k fee to any new competitors in your space.