However, something to keep in mind here is that the upgrades we have performed are built in to the retina MBP (SSD/Ram anyway).

The drive will be upgradable by third parties before too long, just like the Air. Ram is an issue... no real answer there except to max it out to start.

I.e. THIS POST TO BE DOWNVOTED?

Vs SHOULD THIS POST BE DOWNVOTED?

I think your post was longer than the article. That makes you a dick and an imbecile.

The manual garbage collection wasn't the problem. An unexpected data structure created by garbage collection wasn't handled in a fault tolerant manner.

With Apple you are stuck with very few yet pricey base configurations to start from.

  They come in a lot cheaper than those new MBPs, too

Configured approximately the same as the cheaper Retina MBP, the verix cost $200 more than the retina macbook pros.

I say approximately because the mbp has 1600MHz ram vs 1333 in the verix, but I had to choose a 300GB SSD in the verix vs 256 in the mbp. As well, the verix option was for a 2.2GHz vs 2.3GHz of the MBP.

That was the cheaper MBP. Configuring the verix to match the costlier Retina MBP puts the Verix at $500 more.

The only thing the newer macbooks would beat mine on would be games, and I just don't play very many. When I do its usually casual like Plants vs Zombies or whatever.

It's lasted longer and fared better than any other laptop I've owned (14" vostro, 13" inch vaio, 17" HP). It has simply been the best laptop I've every owned.

I have done upgrades, the best of which being an SSD. Without that, I'm sure I'd be feeling the pain of old hardware. I pulled the optical drive out and moved my mechanical drive to that bay for extra storage.

The casing has a few very minor nicks, and I did take it in to the apple store to get new rubber "feet" a few months back (under warranty).

I love my macbook pro. Someday I'll upgrade again, if the logic board gives out or something. Probably to a new macbook pro. Perhaps not though, the other manufacturers are catching up with their ultrabooks.

This laptop has been the first computer I've owned where I haven't felt like I was "fighting" with it to get work done.

The "retina" display is the first thing they've done that has me actually wanting to buy new hardware.

I've never used a Thinkpad, though, so I can't say whether it would have fared better or not.

  massage beef Concords recliners

I imagine the drug atenolol would become popular among politicians.

Being relatively early in the hackintosh scene, a few things didn't work. Mainly the graphics weren't accelerated so all the nice animations in OSX looked crappy. But it afforded me the opportunity to use it as my main OS for a while before commiting to anything expensive.

I rather liked the OS and had started iPhone developing. As my vostro laptop got long in the tooth, I chose to upgrade to a MacBook Pro.

Still using that laptop today, in spite of two or three newer generations of apple laptops coming out. It's been very nice, for 32 months, no hardware issues. Last week, I've had a weird glitch where it switches to optical output when I remove headphones, and this has been annoying. I'll take it into the genius bar this weekend maybe.

Probably the nicest thing about it is that it hasn't felt it's age. In my daily usage, I doubt the experience would be any better on newer hardware than mine is now. Gaming would probably be another matter, but I generally just do casual gaming.

However, the infamous Walled Garden has been encroaching on the OSX space. That is something to give serious consideration to. It gives me pause. I've been thinking about giving linux a go again. Ubuntu has been giving me grief in vmware, but I'm going to see about dual booting.

The digital world is ephemeral.

I think the need for such a well defined and accepted user organizable data store isn't going away regardless of the underlying storage medium.

I like that my file system can be reasoned about in very concrete ways. I'm okay with using a tag based system like gmail, but I find it very flat and more difficult to organize vs traditional hierarchy of folders.

And btw, GET OFF MY LAWN!

The news agencies are confusing capability with complexity. Stuxnet was very targeted with insider information on esoteric industrial systems. It was designed to fly under the radar, cause damage to physical systems in such a way that it would appear to be from "wear and tear."

As I recall, stuxnet used some compiler shenanigans to obfuscate stackframes and make it difficult to decompile (after having first decrypted the executable code).

Flame is written in Lua! A scripting language! So to say that somehow Flame is going to be hard to analyze is absurd.

It's a 20MB package of the Lua VM, the scripts, and modules like sqlite. It's about as vanilla of an application as you can get!

They claim this 20MB package size is going to make it super duper hard to analyze, and yet they have the source code to look at, and while it's a decent size at 3k lines, it's SOURCE CODE. Not obfuscated machine language.

The coverage on this is just stupid.

Some good information on Flame is at http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193522/The_Flame_Questi... . It still has the absurd commentary, but at least it gives details on what is actually there.

To call it a military chip is inaccurate.