Immediately had the same experience: input a Theroux, Bill Bryson and Bruce Chatwin into the engine, as I've been longing for some new travel books to read, but naturally it just gave me... five or six other books by Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson.

Definitely needs more input parameters to be useful.

You got my upvote because I have a similar experience - still using my 2014 MacBook Pro.

However, I also agree with the other take I’m seeing in these comments: the current prices do seem disproportionately high (at least in the EU).

I feel I have to go back about 25 years to see the same level of expense for high-end electronics. I genuinely thought we were past that era of rarefied ‘professional’ hardware.

And as others have also pointed out, adding RAM or disk capacity is ridiculously expensive.

I don't think you got the memo where everyone seems to think getting blind drunk and then getting on an electric scooter is totally ok "in Sweden".

I've had a few near-misses myself with crazy drunk riders on pedestrian streets in central Stockholm; I once interviewed a job-candidate with a cut-up face who laughingly told us he'd crashed a scooter with two(!) friends on the back after a drink night; a friend of mine smashed their hip after a night drinking and then jumping on a scooter.

The rules may be there. The actual reality is different.

This sort of article is just window-dressing for what it’s really like to live in this mostly restricted and limited land, out in the boondocks.

Swedes living abroad probably actually believe this nostalgic fiction of their homeland.

An ex-colleague who is now 31 (or 32) who was running the Stockholm marathon in 2018 and 2019, got Covid very early in 2020, and suffered a massive pulmonary embolism which took him months to fully recover from.

This was before the vaccines were available, of course.

This ignores that lockdown was a 'side-effect' of covid that affected the health-service, whereas covid itself had the exact same effect on healthcare, with or without lockdown. This can be seen in Sweden, for instance. Not only were death-rates during the height of the pandemic much higher in Sweden than its Nordic neighbors, the healthcare system was crippled by the workload and stress.

People were not getting health-checks here — just the same as in countries with lockdowns - so the effects of late screening on cancers are just as great.

The system is still overloaded, so there are constant stories in the news where people who need treatment urgently, are needing to wait a year or 18 months or more for treatment that might save their lives.

In addition, the stress that was caused by having totally overloaded emergency wards for 3 years has meant that nurses and doctors are leaving in unprecedented numbers, leaving the service woefully under-staffed.

A recent survey of all the country’s hospitals by an oversight authority found every single one of them under the minimum standard that they should maintain, with long waiting lists, people dying unattended in corridors and on floors, and staff-levels that are way too low.

Sure you could have a coffee in town during the pandemic in Sweden. But getting decent healthcare wasn’t (and still isn’t) an option.

> open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing

Have an M1 laptop with Photoshop and Lightroom and need to edit 16-bit film-scans from a 6x12 that are more than a GIGABYTE each and have had zero issues.

Many people chiming-in about the absolutely rock-solid stability of the last few updates, and I'm adding my vote to that.

I have had zero system-crashes or freezes for maybe 2 or even 3 years now. I tend to wait to hear what other people's experiences are, but that waiting-time is getting shorter these days. And the update process is also getting smoother: almost never any need to fix update issues with apps.

If I go back 10 or 15 years, I remember regular kernel panics, tricky restarts into 'safe mode', spinning beachballs, clearing the PRAM (don't even remember what that was about anymore - but it was needed all the time), and so on. It was an ongoing task to keep the OS running.

So this idea that MacOS is "getting worse" is just complete amnesia, in my view. I have never worked with anything so stable and powerful in my entire developer experience over the last 25+ years.

If we're talking about the price of these machines (and especially the measly disks and RAM on the cheapest options) - that's another matter...

Ironically Sweden’s best weather forecast comes from Norway [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965812

So I'm also reading more books - both digitally and on paper. I find the 'non-fiction could be a blog-post' attitude just baffling for the sort of books I've been reading lately - including a biography of Napolean, another book about his Russian campaign, and a really fascinating biography of Casanova that was linked from HN (the type of post that brings me back here, in spite of the tribal nonsense).

There's so much more a sense of 'mental nourishment' and intentionality from reading a book, than if I'm mindlessly clicking through a sequence of links.

btw the RSS reader really gives a sense of the 'abandonment' of blogs: hundreds of blogs on my list haven't published anything for years.

I really recommend you transfer your hatred and sense of injustice to companies that are right at this moment poisoning environments - even in the US - and actively covering-up chemical leaks, or the pollution of people’s drink-water, or allowing workers to use carcinogens that executives deny are dangerous.

Some pathetic technical contravention of a trivial rule by Apple here is not worth your energy and passionate hatred.

Amazing number of people baying for prison time for this pretty trivial mis-step.

As I said in another comment, just finished reading a book where one of the chapters was about the Diamond Alkali works near Newark, where executives knowingly covered-up the intentional leaking of dioxin (the most lethal chemical known to man - the smallest dose will cause cancer) for decades.

But people on HN want to put Apple employees in prison for some trivial, minor EU law contravention.

So in an obscure settings toggle, in one version of iOS that was immediately fixed, some developer probably unknowingly set a toggle default to a setting that contravened an EU law… and you think Tim Cook should go to prison??

I just finished reading a book where one of the chapters was about factories in north New York where the executives covered-up systematic leaking of dioxin into the local environment for decades.

But sure - Tim Cook should go to prison to appease your Apple hatred.

So this was a toggle in an obscure preferences setting toggled incorrectly and therefore a minor infringement of EU law - but you want the court to fine Apple their entire profit? plus some random extra amount?

Wow. Aside from this being completely stupid to anyone who doesn’t share your irrational level of Apple hatred, how would you deal with a really serious offense?

Dunno where you got the idea that I somehow ‘shifted the goalpost’ from “it’s easy…”?

The poster I was answering said that Apple made it “impossible” to cancel subscriptions by using “dark patterns” and this somehow got transformed into some vanishingly tiny, special HN-case of a person running Linux who doesn’t have another Apple device and ‘cannot’ install iTunes with a teenager who’s phone they can never access to check subscriptions…

Oh well - the anti-Apple fanatics here will downvote absolutely anything, I guess - including anyone responding to utter garbage like this.

Ah here was me thinking this was an uncontroversial and enjoyable discussion on HN.

Anyways. Once again, just to underline what I wrote before - my comment wasn’t supposed to suggest that there was a golden age of Elysian harmony in the pastoral landscape of Europe, somehow superior to the ‘terrible’ existence we have now, with our hospitals, antibiotics, electronic gadgets, space travel etc.

Over the last few years there’ve been quite a few studies linked on HN that have begun to give a nuanced image of life in the ‘Dark Ages’ - albeit one that was ravaged by conflict and disease.

I thought these interiors gave another dimension to this new perspective. That’s all my post was about.

Wow I’m speechless.

Not having access to your kids’ device, and not having access to a linked Apple device, and not having access to a Windows device, and not being willing to download iTunes is considered a dark pattern??

Sometimes I really wonder about the little anti-Apple bubble some people live in…