I bought one of these once. The specs on paper look good, but the CPUs are weak. They’re like those U series Intel CPUs where you could get say an i7-7700U, with 4 physical cores and 8 total threads, but at 15W TDP you were never really going to benefit from the 4 cores and 8 threads.
I do love those particular boxes for certain workloads. I have a few Lenovo ThinkCenter small form factor boxes in my office. They’ve replaced all my Rapsberry Pis. Unlike the Pi, I was able to purchase these!
If your 1440p monitor looks “fine” or “good”, it’s because the scale is 1x - for many people, including myself, UI elements are too small at 1x 1440p. I had to buy a 4K monitor so I could have larger UI elements AND crisp UI elements.
In my experience, you can’t do any sort of scaling with sub-4K displays. This is “since M1”. Intel Macs, even on the latest macOS, can do scaling eg 1.5x at say 1440p, which last time I bothered with an Intel Mac required a workaround via Terminal to re-enable.
But that workaround is “patched” on Apple Silicon and won’t work.
So yes if you have an Apple Silicon Mac plugged into a 1440p display, it will look bad with any sort of “scaling”- because scaling is disabled on macOS for sub-4K displays. What you’re actually doing when you’re “scaling” on say a 1440p display is running that display at 1920x1080 resolution- hence it looks like ass. Back before Apple Silicon, running that 1440p display at “1920x1080” was actually just scaling the UI elements up to appear as though you had a 1920x1080 display- since it was still utilizing the full …x1440 pixels of the display, “1920x1080” looked nicer than it would now.
So brass tacks it’s just about how macOS/OS X would obfuscate the true display resolution in the System Preferences -> Displays menu. Now with Apple Silicon Macs, “1920x1080” means “2x scaling” for 4K monitors and literally “we’ll run this higher-res monitor at literally 1920x1080” for any display under 4K resolution.
I find NASes to be a waste of money except for the “no one ever got fired for….” aspect in an enterprise environment. $600 for a NAS with a Celeron and 8GB of RAM is absurd.
Value of your time and effort maintaining it is not zero.
I used to play with stuff like this. It was fun when I was single and had lots of free time. I don't play with it anymore. If I pay someone $500 over nominal value to provide me with 8-9 years of support for security updates, etc., and I just install their packages... that's worth it to me. My first Syno was a DS412+ and my second was a DS1621+. Nine years between introduction of the two. The 412+ is still running just fine at a friend's house. I gave it to him with ~12 TB total drive space, said just help me next time I need something done with car audio (he's a DJ and knows cars) and we're square.
He's happy, I'm happy. I go set up his network, he installs my head unit. We both win by doing what we're good at and letting someone else use their expertise instead of learning a lot of stuff we will almost never use again.
I’d give my left nut for a Google Home Mini powered by ChatGPT, but the article is suggesting this device will have a touch screen interface so it’s probably more like the Rabbit R1.
Knowing Ive, it’ll be thinner than anybody asked for, have mediocre battery life, and have a charging port on the bottom so you can’t use it while it’s charging because it’s flipped over.
What are the assumptions for the “132 miles” figure? At the very least wind is going to affect that- if you’re in a headwind you could probably make it closer to 150 miles (albeit not a huge gain).
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