"1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage"

That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.

A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.

"...backed by formidable fraud protections"

Laughable, at least in the USA. It took decades for us to finally get cards with chips in them, and when we finally did... the issuers "forgot" to implement the other half of the equation: PINs.

"Chip-&-PIN" was standard through the rest of the industrialized world for ages, while card companies abetted theft in the USA by neglecting to implement PINs.

You obviously don't know any small-business owners and didn't read the article.

Credit-card issuers in the USA are a textbook example of a consumer- and retailer-harming monopoly.

Small business owners generally make themselves dependent on third party selling platforms, which they pay a 15-25% commission to, depending on sector.

That's where they get new clients, and most of the rest of their sales go to loyal repat customers who know them already.

Try to tell them how they could capture a large part of those new customers themselves by investing in their own presence - very little money in comparison - and they start complaining if they have to pay any monthly fee and complaining about card fees to receive payment.

You have to spend money to make money, and any money you spend to get out of the claws of third party platforms is usually money very well spent. But small business owners don't want to hear it.

I think credit card fees are often positioned against what businesses believe is the cost of cash, i.e. zero.

However, with cash one needs to have / has / has to pay for:

* a more complex register * a person who takes more time to do the transaction * someone who counts the register at the end of the day to ensure it matches * someone who drives to the bank to deposit the money (at random times) * additional insurance * a bank account which probably charges for these cash services

If you don't count time, then cash is better.

And also, in Europe, if you as a business prefer cash, we all know it means that you make X, but you only report X/2.

In Europe, interchange fees are capped at 0.3%, so generally handling cards is going to work out _cheaper_ than handling cash for most retail businesses. In the US, interchange can be ten times that, so it's a slightly different situation...

But unless you don't accept cash at all, you have to do that anyway.

I've been to several cashless cafes that just had a Square tap thingy.

That said, I expect the cost of taking cash does scale to some degree with how much of it you take. Obviously you still need a cash register, but if only 10-20% of your business is cash, maybe it only needs to be reconciled and emptied out every second or third day? And it's a faster and lower stakes process if there's less in it? Insurance is cheaper as well if the total loss is 1/10 what it would be if every dime was passing through there.

But before that it was commonplace to see discounts for cash, especially at gas stations. Then credit-card issuers started prohibiting it in service agreements, but that was outlawed during the Obama administration.

It was part of the Obama administration's banking reforms, if I remember correctly. It outlawed credit-card issuers' prohibition on giving cash discounts.

It also included a number of other valuable consumer protections, such as forcing card issuers to provide clear advance notice of interest-rate increases.

The financial-system reforms were some of the Obama administration's most valuable.

Imagine having a president who cares about unsexy policy wonk issues that make a huge difference to everyone. Feels like a distant memory these days.

And a last gasp for the USA's dignity.

If your Mac goes bad it can be worthwile. My friend gave me his pre-Retina 27" iMac, part of the circa-2008 generation of Macs whose GPUs all failed.

I removed all the computing hardware but kept the Apple power supply, instead of using the cheapo one that came with the LCD driver board I bought. I was able to find the PWM specs for the panel, and installed a cheap PWM module with its own frequency & duty-cycle display to drive it and control brightness.

The result is my daily desktop monitor. Spent way too much time on it, but it works great!

Not true. Mac OS does not nag you about subscription services. What are you talking about?

Windows is offensive, insufferable trash. From its CONTINUAL hounding about "your Microsoft account" to its bug-riddled, regressive, and shambolic UI. Things Windows users took for granted 40 years ago are simply gone.

Example: Select three PNGs in Explorer and right-click on them, and look for "Open with..."

Every time my Windows gaming PC updates it nags me about setting up backups to OneDrive.

I cannot install Windows without a Microsoft account unless I apply work-arounds.

It constantly offers Office 365, even adding dummy icons to the start menu.

There are adverts on the login screen.

To be fair I installed Bazzite there, but for a laptop I cannot find an equivalent device at the same price point even ignoring the need for linux drivers.

Mine does not nag me about OneDrive or backups. OneDrive is not even installed. If I search my start menu for OneDrive, nothing even comes up.

Sure, you can't install Windows without a Microsoft account, but realistically a Mac is far less useful if you don't do the same thing. If you don't sign in with an Apple ID you've got zero iPhone integration, for example. I would imagine that 95% of Mac users are signed in to their Apple ID.

Signing in to an account to use commercial software doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I'd rather sign in to my account than deal with entering a product license key and needing to keep track of it.

I have not been offered Office 365 since after the first install.

There are not adverts on my login screen, it's completely blank. Change your settings.

These sales tactics are not unique to Windows, Mac subscriptions are upsold in the system settings and via notifications. They do go away and stay away but they are there when you buy the system.

Even after saying no to OneDrive and doing all I can to remove it, it tends to randomly come back months later and will automatically start uploading my desktop and documents folder to the cloud.

Edit: I even specifically bought the Pro version hoping to be able to shut some of this off.

It's not worth the hassle, but for the Windows machines in my house I set up Windows Server and have all the machines provisioned to an Active Directory domain where I turn off all the crap via Group Policy. You can get by with just editing Group Policy for a standalone Windows Pro copy, but for more than one machine I really didn't want to fiddle with having to update each machine's policy whenever Microsoft does something stupid.

This literally does not happen. Are you on Windows 10? It doesn't happen in 11. It is fully uninstalled. If I search the Start Menu for OneDrive it doesn't even show up.

It very much does happen. I’m one 11. It seems like every time it updates I get the “let’s finish setting up your computer” screen that asks me to setup one drive.

- When you buy a new device you get a few notes in System Settings encouraging you to try the free trials as well as buy AppleCare. You can dismiss these permanently with a couple clicks on each.

- When you open the respective apps they ask if you want to try the free trial.

- Apple once abused the Wallet app to send notifications about a theatrical release.

Other than that I'm not sure what the fuss is about.

Ugh, more "AI" hype. How useful are the cited hardware features for NON-"AI" processing?

Yes, instead of answering... just downvote.

There are lots of other regressive, mind-bogglingly inept changes scattered across the included applications.

One of my favorites is in Apple Music, where the transport controls and song-title display has been moved from the top of the window down into the content-browser or song-list area... where it's "transparent" and overlaid on other text or album art.

In Mail, the "get new mail" button has been REMOVED from the toolbar. WTF? WHY? So when you're awaiting the ever-more-widespread 2FA from something you just logged into, you get to dig through a menu to hurry up retrieval or re-add the button to the toolbar (which casual users are not going to know how to do).

The utter stupidity of these flailing, desperate changes should concern every computer user. Microsoft is lost, and Windows a clinic on dereliction, design incompetence, and hostility toward users. That leaves Mac OS as the only tolerable consumer computing platform... and it has taken a profound turn for the worse with Tahoe.

And all for nothing. Apple's blunders here don't make sense from any perspective.

In Mail, right click on the toolbar and choose customise. Put the "get mail" action where you want it.

Thanks. I noted in my comment the option to re-add it to the toolbar, but everyday users can't be expected to know this is possible or how to do it.

Nor should they have to, given that mail retrieval is something that everyone can logically be expected to do if they're told they were just sent a message.

People who want to click a button to skip waiting for the next mail poll time (and who even know what that means!) probably can be expected to know that just about every toolbar can be customised.

I don't think that follows at all. If my mom goes to log into her bank account and is told to look for a code in an E-mail, she's going to go the E-mail program and try to fetch new mail.

Remember... HN does not even come close to representing the general public.