"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."
I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.
Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours, is a toxic place.
Happily, this practice is illegal in California. Sometimes consumer-protection laws work ... and are necessary.
(As a hackaround, try using a VPN to make it appear as if you are connecting from California...)
Is it feasible to run Linux on the Apple hardware? Seems like that could meet your requirements, except possibly "align with my values." I saw https://asahilinux.org/ but don't know how usable it is, or whether the long battery life and hardware support is preserved.
How about 10 GbE switches/routers? I have 10 GbE fiber-to-the-home via Sonic, but so far just have it plugged into a Google Wifi router with gigabit ethernet. Would love to have 10 GbE wired to my desk.
I ran OS/2 Warp and was a fan of it... But to say that it was simply "better" than Windows 95 is a bridge too far. It had its strengths (rock solid multitasking) but also plenty of rough edges.
The "Ivy League" consists of precisely these eight schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.
Honestly I feel like some of these are negative indicators when it comes to engineering cred.
Meanwhile, stellar engineering schools like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT are in a league of their own.
This comment is mostly to complain that using "Ivy League" as a shorthand for prestigious engineering schools is inaccurate.
I think even among professionals in general relativity, MTW has developed a reputation as being too dense and old-fashioned, certainly so for a beginner. If you're first approaching GR, Sean Carroll's notes or books are much more approachable.
"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."
I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.