RANT INCOMING WARNING!

I just saw a headline this morning that the nearly new MacBook Neo is now available in the Apple Refurb Store for - get this - the SAME price it was released at BEFORE the recent $100 (17%) price INCREASES. What a deal - it's like the good old days of retail groceries where the store either raised the price or decreased product (remember 5lb bags of sugar suddenly becaome 4lb bags) then "put it on sale" for the same old price?

And it is far from Apple though - M$ raised their prices an astronomical amount in June, but third party retailers a month to 6 weeks later have "sales" just above the previous prices.

I understand that data centers are devouring high end ram and vendors are switching production to that profitable market (data centers are announced weekly in Texas), but this has all the…

Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 still skips the S Pen, and that's getting harder to ignore | Android Central

I can't tell you how many speculative articles last Spring were sure that the SPen was coming back. No chance. Nobody seems to miss it. For me, it's keeping me on my Fold 6. I use it all the time. Haven't had a chance to look at the Motorola in person. Too damn busy.

On another front, I had a demonstration of Claude the other day that really impressed me. Not that it was correct in its attempts at analysis but in the ability to dig details out of a stack of documents that were relevent. It set me back on my heels a bit and might have muted my criticism of AI generally by quite a bit. If I was a young lawyer, I'd be paying attention to this.

I've been rather busy recently, so I haven't had the time to get on here.

Firstly, who of us are still around? It's good to see a number of us still around, although Kuma seems to be AWOL; we're missing the innuendoes!

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ZenBook Duo

The ASUS ZenBook Duo (2025) has been serving me well. The battery life isn't great and I'd even say bad when using two displays (no surprise). The keyboard occasionally has a spaz out, but can be quickly fixed. The docks I have to use are temperamental with it and really don't like the dual displays.

The MPP is atrocious. I can barely use it even with stroke smoothing. I draw on other devices and transfer it over it's so unusable. Not to mention the included stylus just straight up died.

I realize it's been nearly 3 decades when "pocket PCs" were on my radar with Palm and iPaqs. I had this notion that perhaps I could do all my computing on a portable device that could fit in my pocket.

I guess the modern smartphone has advanced quite a bit, but it still doesn't handle all my computing needs.

Now, upon reflection, I've strayed far from the idea of having a singular computing device.

Currently I regularly use:

-Windows gaming laptop, specifically with a discrete GPU to handle video and 3D rendering work

-Macbook Air specifically just to deploy stuff via XCode