I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues.
I believe Walmart has a deal[1] with Apple to sell[2] M1 MacBook Airs. This has been the case for a year or so, so I don't think it's old stock. They have been in stock for since that date, and slowly getting cheaper.
They’ve always been available at Best Buy, BH Photo, and other authorized partners in the US.
The Walmart deal is a total mystery. It started, seemingly, as dumping new old stock without selling it on Apple.com, but they’ve even updated the machine I think so clearly it’s an ongoing concern.
Nothing like it I know of for Apple, ever. I’d love to know the story.
I would guess Apple’s goal is increasing the number of people buying recurring Apple services, such as icloud and tv+.
It has been a long time since people have needed cutting edge laptops, so an M1 bought today will still work for 90% of people for the next 5+ years. Even if Apple doesn’t earn a large profit margin on the sale of the laptop, they could earn a decent amount on monthly services revenue, plus increased odds of that person buying a watch/airpods/phone/etc.
For what purposes will the RAM and storage not hold up?
I see most people around me watching media, using a web browser to shop, maps, look at photos/videos (small storage is great for Apple, then more people buy icloud), fill out pdfs, and maybe some email or light excel.
Presumably, those are the people likely to buy a laptop at Walmart.
Storage can at least be expanded externally, if at a cost of speed, reliability, and convenience.
For the RAM, 8GB is not enough, but in fairness, when the system can page out at 200GB/s, paging out doesn't hurt nearly as bad. Its only when things have to thrash the page file that it becomes readily apparent on these (say, an application needs to have more than a few GB of stuff resident in memory all the time).
Here's a server-side community adapter our team has been using for ASP.NET Core. It works pretty well! I helped contribute the Vite helper to bring HMR and ease of integration.
Shortcuts is a pretty solid option for users with Apple Devices. Its available actions range from simply changing settings to running SSH commands, all packed in a user interface that is much more approachable than AppleScript or Automator.
I’ve started digging into Alfred (alfredapp.com) automations recently and have had similar experiences. It’s pretty easy to create simple automations using their workflow interface, and I was pleased to discover they made it really simple to publish the resulting workflow using git. In a few minutes I was able to create a workflow to pull a highlighted value and push the user to a variety of different internal websites depending on a regex match.
I’ve poked at Automator and Shortcuts a bit and found them similarly useful. The only issue is that not every app exposes functions to them yet, so there are a number of workflows I’d like to create that won’t work until the app dev adds functions to support “tell this app to do this thing”. KeyboardMaestro works well for filling that gap, but it’s a little awkward to figure out the “click at this spot on the screen” bits.
Too bad it feels like 30 seconds for a shortcut to run, including rather useless notifications. And if the camera is involved, it's unusable until the shortcut has completed its song and dance.
I do hope they make this faster and less obtrusive.
Edit: also, no idea how to run most of them. I've installed a shortcut. Now what :)
There's a handful of ways to trigger a shortcut to run:
- Manually via a home screen app icon
- A Share Sheet action (good for manipulating links or images, etc.)
- Automation event (time/schedule based, NFC tag scanning, or a HomeKit accessory changed)
Just looked through the Shortcuts app, it's impossible to deduce context and purpose :D
I do hope they improve this. Even as a tech person, I looked at this and went: nope, no idea what it is, it's intended purposes, or any useful use cases.
BTW. I did finally figure out that the shortcuts my Audi app added can only be used by saying their name exactly, and they will trigger via Siri :D Searching for them doesn't work. "Details" menu item (menu itself is hidden behind long tap) is unavailable etc.
The timeline also matches:
https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...
https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...