MacBook batteries have not been permanently glued in for quite some time. Replacement requires some disassembly but is perfectly doable for most techies.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Late+2020+B...

You have remove screws and be careful not to damage anything. Easy for you and me but not for the layman.

Sorry but why do we have to accept mediocre as acceptable these days? My old laptop had hot-swapable batteries.

Personally I prefer the current solution to adding weight and size.

I can’t remember my battery draining below 50% since I bought my M5 a while back. 10+ years ago I agree that the needs were different but these days needing swappable batteries seems like a very minor niche IMHO.

You can just use a third party shop.

Pre-Regulation you couldn't even buy a genuine spare part, and they even did part pairing with batteries. Bothering you with stupid Nags when you went with the 3rd party shop

So gender is a strict binary but dragons kinda-sorta exist, got it (＠_＠)

Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.

At least it’s not a reaction video. That those are such a widespread phenomenon both frightens and fascinates me.

Sometimes I think they are a mash-up of three things from older media

1. A laugh track

2. An inset with a sign language interpreter

3. An imaginary friendship with a low budget meta commentator, like Mystery Science Theater 3000

Doom scrolling. For people who get hooked it can be very very addictive.

I switch between Tahoe, fedora and pop_os on a daily basis. Tahoe in its complete design madness is still in a league of its own when it comes to basic UX IMHO. Just the fact that the keymappings for undo/redo are consistent between apps puts it’s way ahead of Linux when considering the whole ecosystem. Linux is a clear winner in tech and tooling thought, which is why I use both.

I’d guess that there’s at least one person at your company who has bragged about it.

My understanding is that it worked by doing read/write on a known bad sector to verify that the physical defect is there. Replicating that on normal discs sounds hard.

The problem with all these protection schemes is somewhere in the code they could usually be bypassed by turning a JNE to an unconditional jump.

So you had to add code to detect modifications which itself could be bypassed.

There's many ways to do it: JMP (absolute or relative), NOP if fall-through is acceptance, or less favorably: invert the JMPcc such that invalid input becomes valid.

If I were a paranoid DOS-compatible publisher of expensive software, I would add layers of checks:

- checksum the entire executable on disk, at different points

- checksum the entire program resident in memory, at different points

- use a serial number and activation verification system based on public key cryptography and hardware attributes, and spread those checks around critical functionality. Store the activation code in the end of the root directory as phantom deleted file entries.

Ultimately though, does the increase in hassles and decrease in goodwill create more sales than it pushes away? I'd argue that intentionally no-DRM/no-cp software (GOG style) encourages brand goodwill and loyalty and there's even a nonzero conversion funnel from warez to paying customers. Cp is, thus, mostly an exercise in the practice of footgunnery by performative restrictions that do not deter technically-inclined persons. But like a sign that says "restroom for customers only", it doesn't add positive value. If they had instead spent more engineering time on the software and making the software priced for normal humans, they would have had more customers and more profits.

>So you had to add code to detect modifications which itself could be bypassed.

Right, which is why DRM schemes aren't typically implemented in a straightforward way. Instead license checks are added to critical program logic so you can't easily skip it, anti-tamper/debug is added to thwart runtime analysis, and on top of all of this the code is obfuscated to thwart analysis even further. You might be eventually be able to figure it out, but it's designed to make it enough of a slog that nobody bothers to work through it all.

I Googles that exact string and I can't say that I see even enough cases to count on one hand. Do you have any concrete examples that you think are representative for the behavior that you are referencing?