My father passed away in early 2020 from heart disease. He had a heart attack in the early 2000s and the assumption is that he had lingering complications that went unnoticed. If you're a heart patient, you're a heart patient for life. Even if you think you're in the clear, it can still come back.
Everyone deals with grief differently, and there is no right or wrong way grieve. Don't feel like you have to grieve in a certain way, no two people are the same and no two people have the exact same relationship with each other.
I'm generally the quiet type in this type of situation, I need time to myself, to process my grief and the endless stream of thoughts that pop up. Sometimes the grief just hits me again, out of nowhere. Others need to express their grief more openly and share it with others. Again, there is no right or wrong way, it depends on how you need to express your grief, to process your loss.
And don't feel guilty for starting to not feel grief all the time, that's perfectly normal and OK. It does fade over time, even if it never goes away completely.
In regards to my dad, I know he got an additional almost two decades worth of life. He started cooking more, started playing the drums again, had energy for hobbies and DIY/home improvement again, it was like a new lease on life. That keeps me thinking a bit more positively, for those times where I really miss him.
Take care, and remember your family, they're all dealing with this in different ways, some harder than others.
The only routers vulnerable to that exploit were routers that were deliberately configured to be open to the internet, no router with the shipped default config was vulnerable. The vulnerability was patched out in a bugfix release months before the exploit happened, so additionally it was un-updated routers at risk.
That's something entirely different from what happened with Ubiquiti.
I'm guessing that they're just not interested in making infrastructure products anymore, only the client devices. Airport is discontinued, all backend/server devices are discontinued.
They do sell mesh wifi products from Eero, Linksys and Netgear on their shop, but I don't think there's going to be any Apple-branded network gear anytime soon.
The best intro really is to buy some of their hardware and play around with it. Their routers and APs are all based on the same basic RouterBOARD hardware and run the same RouterOS. The specs for each device is pretty well laid out on their site, but you do have to read through a few product pages to find exactly what you're looking for.
I would start with a hAP ac², a wireless router that is approximately the equivalent of their hEX Ethernet router plus a dual-band AP (cAP/wAP ac). It's a great standalone device and less than $70, or you could get the individual devices for a bit more flexibility.
Avoid the models labeled "lite", those are low-cost versions with lower routing speeds and 2.4GHz WLAN only.
For management you can obviously configure each device separately, or you can use CAPsMAN where one device acts as the controller and handles all configuration. It's not as slick as Ubiquiti, but it works.
I generally try to stay away from the worst offenders, most sites I use are relatively lightweight, like HN and various forums. Even Youtube isn't too bad, as long as you force it to not use the broken Polymer rendering on Firefox.
Mine is an X220s, so slightly newer than yours, but still a modest i3, upgraded to 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and dual-band WLAN. With a new 9-cell battery, I get ~6 hours of battery life, and it's fine for general browsing with a decent number of open tabs, even a few games (Darkest Dungeon and some emulated SNES games).
As long as it keeps ticking and I can get whichever spare parts I need on eBay or something, I'm not going to replace it anytime soon.
The only reason I have a more powerful desktop PC (still ~2011 vintage) and don't just use the X220s in a dock, is that it it struggles with a 1440p external monitor (full HD is fine, though) and I sometimes like to play more graphically intense games.
"It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features."
Don't buy high-end consumer units, buy industrial units instead. They won't have any fancy features like automatic program selection or whatever, but they will wash your clothes and cook your food for decades, and can stand up to uneven loads and abuse, and they can be repaired if they ever break.
I refuse to let any additional "smart" things into my life. I want buttons and manual controls, no internet connections.
I don't even want any program buttons on my microwave oven, I want exactly two knobs, one for power and one for time.
Advertising exists to increase consumption, because capitalism requires constant growth. On order for it to sustain itself, we need to buy more and more, consume more and more.
When a company can produce a product that is somehow too high quality to be a viable business model, you know we're living in a weird society. Capitalism requires that stuff breaks and is replaced regularly.
And advertising helps manipulate us to desire new things constantly.
I used Reddit for a long time and stayed in niche interest subreddits[1], far away from the defaults featured on the front page. While there was certainly some interesting discussions happening, anything even slightly controversial or contrary to the groupthink got downvoted quickly, or even deleted by mods in some cases. In some cases, even the mods got into flamewars and harassment.
Add to this the absolutely horrible user interface that makes navigating long comment threads borderline impossible, it's just a damn mess. The whole setup and layout encourages pithy one-liners instead of longer more thoughtful posts. Not that those don't exist, but they're exceedingly rare.
I deleted my account and I haven't looked back. I'll still look through a Reddit thread if it comes up as a search result, but I don't go there deliberately, and I refuse to create a new user.
[1] Mostly related to my hobbies, such as vintage audio gear, pro audio, cars/motorcycles, metal music, booze and cooking.
Possibly. Or maybe whatever they have is so boring they can't be bothered to ask me for more. I share very little personal stuff on Facebook. Actually none at all, now that I think about it. Most of my profile is empty.
What I did was pare down Facebook to the bare essentials. The only people I have on it are actual would-invite-into-my-home friends, the only pages I follow are for concert venues and bands I like, and I block and turn off every single stupid "joke" page, app and game I see.
Now I basically only get posts directly written by my friends, event notifications for concerts, and updates from my favorite bands.
I don't use Facebook for news, I don't engage in political discussions or stupid arguments. I guess I use Facebook for what its original intended purpose, to keep in touch with friends.
I have no idea what I did, but I don't get any of that nonsense.
I have all notifications turned off in the app, I've disabled all email except if someone explicitly mentions me by name in a discussion (I should probably switch off that one, too) and I've made an effort to hide all kinds of stupid apps and games and pages that are nothing but time wasters. I also only like and follow pages that I have a genuine interest in (such as concert venues and bands I love).
Sure, there's a token notice from time to time ("why not repost a picture from 7 years ago?" and so on), but I find them easy to ignore.
Once you beat Facebook into submission, it becomes a reasonably useful tool.
Everyone deals with grief differently, and there is no right or wrong way grieve. Don't feel like you have to grieve in a certain way, no two people are the same and no two people have the exact same relationship with each other.
I'm generally the quiet type in this type of situation, I need time to myself, to process my grief and the endless stream of thoughts that pop up. Sometimes the grief just hits me again, out of nowhere. Others need to express their grief more openly and share it with others. Again, there is no right or wrong way, it depends on how you need to express your grief, to process your loss.
And don't feel guilty for starting to not feel grief all the time, that's perfectly normal and OK. It does fade over time, even if it never goes away completely.
In regards to my dad, I know he got an additional almost two decades worth of life. He started cooking more, started playing the drums again, had energy for hobbies and DIY/home improvement again, it was like a new lease on life. That keeps me thinking a bit more positively, for those times where I really miss him.
Take care, and remember your family, they're all dealing with this in different ways, some harder than others.