In Australia, it wouldn't even need to be a used PC. The Steam Machine is $1600 AUD here, you can get a brand new gaming PC for that. Not a particularly amazing machine of course, but you can walk into a shop and buy it right now.
Free OS updates is the norm now though. If you'd bought a Windows PC 7 years ago, or used Linux, or just about any other desktop OS, you'd have had free updates.
I thought the same. If it had a Kia badge on it, it wouldn't shock me, and I think Kia make some quite nice cars now.
I don't like the interior. I think this style can work for some things, it reminds me of a NuPhy keyboard, blocky plastic that looks nice in some circumstances.
For me this is not a Ferrari-standard of car, Ferraris are strikingly beautiful, and this just isn't.
I used RISC OS as my main platform in the nineties and still play with it now. With small screens, I agree with you on how saving works on RISC OS, but it really comes into its own on larger screens (say QHD or above) where you can easily have your application and filer on screen at the same time.
It has its annoyances, but I still like that style of saving.
We had this at a job I had many years ago. We had a Sun Niagara system with some Sun Rays attached, and I had a Sun Ray laptop at home, on the other side of the world. Office in London, home in Melbourne. It wasn't even that slow.
If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.
Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.
FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.
Agree, and this is my point. Apple absolutely has a very clear message on how developers should make software, but as you say, developers often do not care.
I am a desktop app "believer" I like desktop apps, I like native desktop apps, but I also have to make software that makes economic sense, and following Apple's guidelines just doesn't make any sense for me, and a lot of other companies too.
When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop.
That's fine, except no platform answers this.
Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days.
Even if Microsoft decreed the one-and-one Windows development path, most developers are not taking that path.
It used to be the case that Mac developers used Apple tools, Windows developers used Microsoft tools, but those days are gone. Developers want to use Electron, or Qt, or some other system to support multiple platforms in one codebase.
Microsoft has less to do with this than the article makes out. I'm a desktop developer. I don't care what Microsoft recommends, or what Apple recommends, because neither work in the real world where supporting only their platform just isn't realistic.
Safari is a monopoly on iOS and iPadOS, that's a problem if you want to make a bleeding-edge PWA app, in that it's probably not going to work very well on iPad and iPhone and there is no web alternative on those platforms.
Firefox is entirely optional, not a monopoly anywhere.
The problem for me isn't making bad web browsers, it's enforcing those bad browsers as the only option on a computer platform.
Perhaps not single thread, but Rock was a dead end a while before Oracle pulled the plug, and Sun/Oracle's core market of course was always servers not workstations. We used Niagara machines at my work around the T2 era, a long time ago, but they were very competitive if you could saturate the cores and had the RAM to back it up.