I'm a configuration admin in the Seattle area, solidly in the Appleverse but a regular Windows user and Linux dabbler as well. I've written a few unpublished novels and am thinking about writing a few more, but I spend too much time flirting with different text editors.
A Remarkable tablet was the first thing I thought of, but it was still so unclear I had to click through to actually understand (more or less) what was going on.
I ended up with two disk drives, and a RAM expansion, so I was able to run GEOS. But it took a good while to build up to that (I was a married, childless adult when I used the C=64, if that's any comfort).
At least some Tor.com ebooks are available DRM-free through Amazon. Honor Of The Queen, 2nd in the Honor Harrington Series, specifically says it's sold without DRM on Amazon.
My own novel, The Immortal Remains, is DRM-free on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and other platforms (maybe Apple as well, I'm not sure). Other authors, such as Cory Doctorow, sell their books DRM-free as well.
British TV in that era was enormously, shall we say, frugal. As soon as they discovered videotape, which was both cheaper than film and reusable, they went all in on it. BBC especially (and ITV as well, it appears) often wiped their tapes and recorded over them to save money, since they saw no reason to think anyone would be interested in their shows in the future. For this reason, some early episodes of Doctor Who are lost forever, at least until some foreign TV station finds copies in their vaults, which has happened over the years.
I complained about this style of writing on Medium a few months ago. The author of the article replied that it's a preferred style if you anticipate your writing to be read on a small smartphone screen. This kind of makes sense. Whether that article (or this one) was AI-generated or not, I don't know.
I consider myself an "intelligent general reader" and read this last month, producing my own much briefer review [0]. Such a good book! I read a lot of popular history, but not usually written by actual practicing historians (who usually probably don't write "popular history"). Good stuff, and highly recommended.
Adobe Digital Editions runs on my MacBook Air M3 with macOS Tahoe. What problem do you see?
(FWIW, ADE will probably die when Rosetta support goes away with MacOS 28, but one of the de-DRM plugins will read acsm files directly and bring in the books.)
You can also play with Calibre's default transfer template so all book files go into a single folder of your choice on the device. Then you can set your KOReader home or favorites folder and see everything in one place.
The MacBook Air is a better machine, but the Neo is far better than an iPad because MacOS isn't constrained like iPadOS is. The Neo can't really be compared to an iPad for that reason alone.
As a recent retiree from a Fortune 500 company...no, there's no such thing as an upgrade. We were virtually exclusively laptops on the desktop. It was full replacement every time.
The last time I refreshed my Mac setup I didn't reinstall my standalone Microsoft Office, which I'd kept for the (very) occasional Word compatibility need.
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.