Just a few years ago there were choices in that price bracket: the Mitsubishi Mirage and Nissan Versa. Now there is nothing.

Doesn't feel very general-purpose when it only supports Nvidia GPUs

A SPA is the lesser evil? What?

macOS/OS X is pretty solid, yes. Mac OS "Classic" (Version <= 9), though, was not nearly as stable. Classic is where most of the big names in media software started, though.

I mean it was good enough for the Beach Boys to record the first full-length album recorded and assembled entirely in-DAW.

Macintosh NuBus computers (the early PPC stuff running System 7.5 onwards) took over completely from TimeLine WaveFrame as Pro Tools established istself in film audio and foley work. Think Toy Story onwards, or anything in Skywalker Sound from the mid 90s.

Pixar was mostly UNIX workstations, and since owned by Steve Jobs, a couple of NeXTSTEP alongside SGI.

And make it actually work well. I'll take the old 9x era control panel over the new text-only, harder-to-navigate settings app.

As someone who likes small-screen laptops: no. The screen size is not the problem (unless it is also low-resolution), it's the battery size, and what the battery can power for a "reasonable" amount of time.

13-14" is the sweet spot between power storage, size, and energy efficiency in my opinion.

Ewww... I remember having to work with that trash.

Even soundbars are better than TV speakers. Proper speakers would still be better, but TV speakers are nearly useless.

I'm sure you're right, but it's very funny to be someone with a pretty good ear in some regards (I played in band in school and sang for many years, so I'm quite sensitive to intonation/instrument balance in music) that apparently has zero ability to mind poor speaker quality - I find the speakers on board my piece of shit 10+-year-old Samsung tv I bought from facebook marketplace perfectly adequate for general use.

It just goes to show how much taste is learned. Not even to say it's subjective (which of course it is at least in part), just that it's a skill that needs to be developed, and, at least in part, a curse. I remember thinking 480p was quite crisp quality, now I find 720p DVDs charmingly rustic.

All DVDs are 480p max.

I was a floutist as well. I think part of it is that you just get used to the level of whatever sound device you use.

A lot of that uncertainty has to do with USPS, who keeps getting slower, and their delivery date estimates are at this point often 2-3 days more optimistic than reality.

At least in my experience, UPS, Fedex, etc., tend to deliver when the estimate says.

For me, FedEx is almost always a day or two over the initial estimate, and the package looks like it's been routed through a war zone.

UPS is generally pretty good.

Ugh, that swap of default direction for scrolling drives me nuts!