/giphy valid

@heartbleed
/giphy half a cat video

@heartbleed ehh it’s enough for most Mac side apps. It’s the same mac I have from a few years ago… but it doesn’t do parallels well (at all)

@heartbleed Everybody knows that the Internet is made of cats and porn… you choose.
/giphy cats and porn

@heartbleed PURRRRRRfect answer–keyed up for this deal eh?

@heartbleed

@ILikeMeh I was kinda wondering the same thing. I dont see a 2014 11" MacBook Air on refurb.me

@ILikeMeh

@ILikeMeh It literally says 2014 right on the title.

@heartbleed The question was “What year was this produced?” Macbook models are designated by their date of release, not their date of production. Usually models are released fast enough that it won’t be off by more than a quarter or two, but it’s still a fair question.

@ILikeMeh I’m thinking this is a pretty old machine given that it’s serial number is listed in Roman Numerals.

@Stumpy91 It’s apple so you should say iNope

@cengland0 Shhh! You wanna get sued!

@Tin_Foil

@Kross Does an iPad come with a tactile keyboard, an SSD, and the ability to install OSX software?

@cengland0 for what 90% of folks are going to do with this, what good is OSX?

And what is the benefit of the SSD in this vs the storage in the iPad?

An Apple tactile Bluetooth keyboard can be had for cheap.

@RedOak
For 50% of users, a Chromebook will work just fine. For another 30% a cheap PC with external storage is needed. And the last 20% know what they want, whether it be a high-end PC or Apple computer.

An SSD is faster than typical flash storage, but I’m not sure what Apple means by SSD these days.

@DVDBZN I believe Apple also calls the storage in this unit “Flash” memory.

@DVDBZN For a 2014 MBA, it’s PCIe.

@eeterrific back in 2007 or something. Used the MacBook until it got too old. That was refurbished from Apple though, and had the same 1 year warranty as the non-refurb models. Them apparently lowering it to only three months concerns me almost as much as the ridiculous absence of ram and storage.

@eeterrific have a retina MacBook Pro 13" refurb 2012, and then a 2013, and they’ve both been great

@eeterrific have one from 2010 and still works great.

@eeterrific I had a refurb 2007-ish MacBook Pro 15" that lasted years. I eventually passed it on to my mother when I bought a 17" MBP new. I just bought her a refurb newer-model 13" MacBook Air for Mother’s Day to replace the previous one, and it’s rock-solid.

@eeterrific I only buy Apple refurbs with extended AppleCare. I have owned 4 generations of 15" Macbook Pros, and never regretted this. I find it you buy the most recent models off the refurb line, your odds of getting a basically-new 15-day return are quite high. The way Apple builds their boards these days, however, ALWAYS get the extended warranty.

@canuk Same! But this has me tempted…

@InnocuousFarmer I think it has a 3-year AppleCare plan, of which 3 months is left.

@sligett So a refurbished Apple, but not an official Apple refurb. I’d want to steer clear, myself…

Wait, that doesn’t make sense. How would that even happen? Is it a used refurb? That’s not a refurbished laptop, then, it’s a used laptop.

@brendonwbrown Same. They say Apple refurbs are better than off the assembly line from China. The Apple refurbs seem to get new everything.

With the 3 months of AppleCare left on these meh is not getting them from Apple so not newly refurbished.

If one of these does need to go in for a repair I believe that Apple does add another 90 days of warranty.

“Depot Repair Program” is not well known even within Apple. It is good for any Apple laptop without warranty. For a base price (I think it was $350 for MBPs) your laptop is sent into a repair depot and they fix just about anything. It is not good for laptops after a certain age.

@InnocuousFarmer If I sell you a Mac after 33 months that I bought with AppleCare, you get the 3 months of AppleCare that are left.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202712

I guess anyone can refurbish a laptop. That’s independent of the AppleCare (in this case).

@huja sigh…if only meh would get and sell them…

@eeterrific It’s a dead horse worth beating

@somf69 That is some impressive looping.

@beachhead

@mcosby

I have an 8gb one. Aren’t they just a joy?

Runnung chrome OS. I never bother with closing tabs either.

@cwolfpack3 not at all. It’s soldered onto the motherboard.

@cwolfpack3 Quick research indicates no. Apple has gone to having ram soldered on board on a lot of models, for whatever reasons that seem to benefit them but shortchange the consumer.

It is what it is, and I own a Mac as well. But upgradeable RAM has been a pretty basic feature of computers for many years now, and it seems a step backward to not allow it these days.

On the other hand, computers are disposable junk now compared to even a decade ago.

@sohmageek bummer. I know my old MBP was upgradable from 8 to 16. Was hoping the same for the Air.

@djslack Even the “pro” models have soldered down ram and storage, these days. It’s awful. I have a really hard time believing that it’s part of some master plan to make computers so thin that they can’t fit ergonomically practical keyboards anymore; as opposed to cynical market segmentation gone mad.

@InnocuousFarmer

That solder-it conduct just drives people to start using their phones and Chromebooks for almost everything.

@InnocuousFarmer plus cost savings so they don’t have to pay the 50 cents extra for those ram slots. I think it has to do with planned obsolescence. A memory chip goes bad, just buy a new machine.

You buy enough memory for your current tasks and then need more later, you buy a new machine.

The SSDs are also soldered in the newer models. This makes data recovery very difficult if your computer stops working for whatever reason.

@f00l I’m torn between saying that is for the better, and being very unhappy about the dystopian nature of Google having that level of involvement in everyone’s personal lives.

It’s not just their invasive access to information, it’s having a profit-seeking, publicly held corporation having the legal right to dictate ever-changing terms to end users. Whatever the future of the Internet and computing is, it must serve Google’s interests. Them or Microsoft. (Same notion with Windows 10.)

Even then, experience-wise, I wish I could recommend it to people with a clean conscience. Chrome OS, I mean. (Android, I don’t have such a high opinion of… for people who are roughly incompetent operators of a computer, in terms of the UI.)

I know privacy has been dead for some time (see credit cards, Spokeo, etc.), but it is a lot more dead now than it used to be. I tend to see computing as a struggle to avoid allowing one or more entities to steal control of some aspect of my life from me.

@cengland0 I did forget about the planned obsolescence angle. I think that’s still taken care of by Intel on the one hand (via things like upgraded USB and Thunderbolt standards), and batteries on the other. Intel has never included support for particularly large amounts of RAM for the heck of it, either, especially in consumer chips.

Soldering down the SSD does seem like an effective obsolescence trigger, to me, but maybe that’s just my bias, being a person who fills up computers. I don’t think that is near the primary reason they do it. Apple doesn’t sell storage – they don’t release a new model and crow about how much bigger it is, and they have been slow to offer more storage in phones. And phone storage, as an example of what I’m talking about, is one of the primary market segmentation levers. Same story, within a given model, with the laptops.

About the SSDs being soldered down, I believe the modern notion is that your computer and your data are barely things that you own, and are instead an interface to someone else’s server. If all of your computing belongs to Apple in the first place, it’s not such a big deal if you can’t limit their access to the data (by removing the drive before it is serviced), or store very many things locally, etc. This also helps lock you in as a customer – things like their “optimize storage” feature that deletes local copies of files. Backups also become less critical, as most of your most valuable data is already “in the cloud”.

In some ways, that’s a better deal for most people, but boy do I hate it.

… I think I had too much coffee yesterday, and then didn’t sleep enough.

@InnocuousFarmer

I was great about privacy and cleaned off everything and used blockers and was all paranoid back when. Except Gmail. Which I used minimally back then.

Then I got an Android phone.

I was like Eve in the Garden of Eden. I wanted what that phone did so bad that I didn’t investigate and didnt care.

After a short while it finally hit me that these phones are designed for data collection.

But I’d already handed it all over to google and everyone else by then.

Apple may not steal user data off osx machines. Don’t know. I assume they steal everything they can about user behavior off iOS machines.

I could run Linux or another non-consumer OS. But the phone …

They got me by my need for convenience and instant gratification and nice UI’s. Google with search and chrome and chrome OS and Gmail and Android and maps and … Apple with IOS. The cell carriers.

Not so much with win, I have not booted that in months and months.

I guess I ate of the fruit of the Tree Of Convenience And Gratification, so to speak.

@f00l Yeah. This is the world now.

I will say, though, that Apple has a different relationship to user data, for the time being. Their (at least marketed) approach to privacy is the only thing that keeps me using their phones and computers (as I’m exasperated with them, hardware-wise). Since they’re making tons of money on hardware, they can afford to say things like “We don’t want to know the details of your personal life”, and, as far as I can tell, mean it.

Contrast that with Google’s money all being advertisement revenue, and their recently reported efforts to tie your web use to your credit card purchases. The hand-wringing that I’m most familiar with is “how will Apple attract top machine learning people without giving them massively invasive data like Google and Facebook do”?

The dynamic WRT data and its location is the same though – Apple has all the power in this relationship, and could, in the future, choose to make accessible to themselves the data that they have said they are assiduously preventing themselves from seeing. So, the situation could change without my behavior changing, and without me having any control over it (or knowing about it, if I wasn’t paying enough attention).

If I knew how to use an Android phone without involving Google, I’d probably switch to running Linux on a Thinkpad + an Android phone. Save a ton of money and have greater peace of mind (and a decent keyboard, maybe). I’d only miss… well, I’d miss a lot of software, actually. iOS and macOS do have some really nice indie software on them. I’d miss those programs a lot.

@InnocuousFarmer

Some of the custom Roms might allow for far more privacy. But on Android, you are going to interact a lot with Google. No way around that I know of.

BTW, I am the sort (as are many of us here) who eats of the fruit, when the payoff involves information or knowledge.

No regrets there.

@f00l As though you have a choice, amirite?

@InnocuousFarmer

/giphy "eat the apple"

@InnocuousFarmer Microsoft.

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/17/15984222/microsoft-windows-phone-mobile-operating-system-android-iphone-ios

(I’ll change when a lower cost phone has at least as good of a camera/image quality as my current 640 XL.)

@narfcake

… lower cost…

But why constrain yourself with such narrow limitations?

@InnocuousFarmer A new phone … or 100+ new catshirts with shipping …

That’s an easy decision …

@cwolfpack3 From https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/ (which I highly recommend):

@CraigDanger same

@sohmageek That would be amazing

@sohmageek I think you’re on to something. To have an existing Apple Care warranty, still active and counting, suggests that meh/Mediocre knows where they were obtained.

Like right there at HQ.

I really would NOT be surprised if these are their old laptops … in which case, @snapster, what did you buy to replace them with so we can buy them in 32 months?

@sohmageek They DO have an easy payment plan. It’s one payment of $498. It’s super easy! You don’t even have to divide anything with maths.

@miko1
https://shirt.woot.com/offers/fractions-are-hard?ref=meh_com

@miko1 how about 5 easy payments of $99…

@SoftAsFur which has a lot less that it can do.

@sohmageek Once you plug in this Crapple it will start to harass you to update to the latest and greatest OSX, oh wait, it’s OS X now. They should just call it OSuX! Anyway, once you update the old Crapple you will no longer have iPhoto because they REMOVED IT! You’ll have to stick with Photos, which is an exact clone of Google Photos.

@SoftAsFur sounds like someone is salty…

@awk Exactly! Half the price and 2x the screen size. Once you go full Chromebook, you never go back.

@stinks
/image shipping kills it animated gif

@RedOak
I’ll admit, autocorrect on Android is the biggest disappointment I have had since switching. You would think that Google, of all companies, would be able to get this right. On the bright side, autocorrect is the only disappointment with Android.

@RedOak I agree. Buy this and take it right to Apple for a checkup. “My computer is doing something weird”.

@DVDBZN Not to go down that road, but I use both iOS and Android daily. Google really sucks at user interfaces. Probably its most used user interface (even more used than Android), Gmail, is exhibit A.

@RedOak Counterpoint: iTunes.

@simssj true that. But just about the only counterpoint. Google is littered with thrown together on a whimap (left that stellar Google autocorrect example there, s/b “whim”) examples.

@RedOak

Yeah got both. use the iPhone for normal “smartphone stuff” because it’s a much better experience.

I use the Samsung Note for computery stuff and file mgmt stuff and weird stuff.
Since I don’t want to jailbreak and the iPhone is so locked down.

@chrisspahn Appears to be the same exept the 90 day warranty is apparently by “Techrabbit” rather than the vastly more useful Applecare here.

On the plus side, free shipping over there… even without VMP.

@RedOak Useful Applecare? The best they will do for you if your computer is defective is to offer another refurbished unit without your data.

Seems the same. Meh is slipping unless three months of apple care is worth a hundred bucks. OR, maybe Newegg is where Meh is sourcing this deal and taking a hundred dollar profit!

@chrisspahn Came here to say this ^

@chrisspahn Not the same. It’s the “A” version which is the 2013 model. Meh is selling the “B” version which is the updated 2014 model. Most of the specs are the same between years but the chip is the 1.4Ghz, not the 1.3Ghz one. Of course, it’s $100 cheaper.

@Jetlag Apple excluding features common to other products is nothing new. Headphone jack, anyone?

@Jetlag That Toshiba Chromebook is sweet, especially the 1080p screen. Skullcandy sound is nice, too. Wish I’d bought 2.

@sligett Competition. It makes everything better.

@sligett I know that’s valid use of the word “devolving”, but I wish people would use the word regressing instead.

/giphy regressing pedantically

@HELLOALICE

eBay.

@HELLOALICE

@f00l that is a bad comment and you should feel bad

@HELLOALICE

Ok. I apologize for my bad comment.

And I feel bad.

And seriously, Happy Birthday!!!

(If I wanted an apple watch I’d personally go straight to eBay or Swappa. But there’s nothing wrong with mentioning it’s your birthday, and seeing what might happen. Right?)

I hope someone hands you a glorious Apple Watch today!

/giphy birthday happy

@f00l I think you misunderstood my comment a bit; I don’t want anyone to give me an Apple Watch, I want meh to sell a cheap refurbished one that I can buy. Of course I could go to eBay, but I trust meh.

@HELLOALICE

Thanks for info.

Swappa can be pretty reliable, since Meh doesn’t seem to be obliging you today.

And Happy Birthday!!!

@KNmeh7 You realize there are Grade A and Grade B refurbs, right?

Its pretty clear Meh was being facetious about “not new” and “Grade B”.

Grade A typically indicates virtually new condition whilst Grade B typically means there are noticeable scratches and “use”.

@RedOak Actually, I did not, because I don’t buy into the appleuniverse. Is there a Grade C? Refurbished means refurbished. We get that.

If meh had a sense of humor that they routinely do on say, sub 50 dollar items, they would’ve pointed that out. But I guess when you are shilling a nearly 4 year old, outdated, apple product for half of a grand, you don’t want to tell it like it is.

@RedOak

You tried. Oh well.

@KNmeh7
Apple has sub- $50 items?!

@KNmeh7 it might be your sense of humor that needs a little polishing. Actually, those grade ratings have little to do, specifically, with Apple.

They are pretty much universal guidelines for all refurbushed electronics. For reputable sellers, the ratings are quite useful and give you the rationale for returning a really trashed device. Apparently you haven’t shopped refurbed smartphones. That’s fine, now you know.

Pro tip: If a seller acknowledges “Grade C”, run away quickly.

@DVDBZN https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Lightning-Digital-Adapter-MD826AM/dp/B009WHV3BM

only $44.99

for a single cable

I use one of these with my iPad Pro to stream movies on TV when I travel. Works great! I got mine on eBay for about $25 (genuine Apple, new in open box).

@yahsah15 The MD711LL/B that Meh is selling is slightly faster with modestly better performance benchmarks. You don’t mention anything about a warranty with the eBay system, so that may be a difference as well.

@stupidrobot Mine made it to my local hub, but has been sitting there since Thursday night. Status has been “Scheduled delivery information is not available at this time. Please check back later.” since Saturday.

@stupidrobot Mine is sitting somewhere also. I sure wish MEH cared more about shipping.

I contacted UPS & Meh. UPS said to file a claim since they can’t find it. waiting to hear back from meh.

@bigevilgrape I thought Meh shipped by FedEx and smartpost (USPS).

@Barney Sometimes things are drop shipped straight from a third party, and I guess they could use whatever shipper they wanted. Not sure if that applies here.

@djslack Yep, that’s true, but I was just wanting him to double check that he was contacting the correct shipping company. (bigevilgrape has to be a guy, right?)

@Barney Makes sense (on both counts).

If it were bigevilblueberry we might have to question it…

@djslack I’m speechless.

@Barney Definitely a UPS shipping number. Probably because of what @Barney said.

Plus side is UPS got back to me within 5 minutes of using their email form.

@stupidrobot Same here, what’s the deal?

@jeffodw we are working on a solution for the few, like you, whose MacBooks decided to take the scenic route.
We need to see if UPS can locate and get them moving. We’ll check back in with you Monday.

@Thumperchick Did you have any success with UPS?

@og218 Not yet. We’re working on reshipping and will update tracking as soon as we have it for you.

@gzmoe Disappointing, but OTOH, that should mean you’ll be in a better position since it’ll be replaced.

(Replacing the board is pretty much the only option anyway, since everything’s soldered down.)

@narfcake good point just been a bit of a hassle

@gzmoe Thank bob you had apple care and not another warente company. It is a little freaky to need to fix something right out of the box.

@og218 Happy for you, but reading this makes me sad I didn’t order one.

@bibin10 Where did you order it? meh.com sold this 19 days ago.

meh.com and the order number is vibrant-nostalgic-amusement

@bibin10 A long holiday weekend is probably not the best time to get all worked up expecting results. From what I’ve read though, the recipients of the reships are very happy.

then why my order, which made at August 14th 2017 3:30pm ET does not arrive yet? i paid for shipping too and you guys use such irresponsible people for shipping?

@bibin10 We did, check your emails! Responded 8/29 to ya with it.