The iPad has a touchscreen, supports Apple Pencil, etc. but the observation that the iPad has been Apple's "budget" computing platform for a while is spot on. It is interesting that they have reformulated it into a Mac laptop (and also that A-series iPhone chips offer M1-class performance.)

Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.

> Now the color options, that's a tragedy.

Maybe they need to bring back psychedelic iMacs.

https://www.slashgear.com/1706745/rare-apple-imac-designs-fl...

> undesirable traits that derive from the training data

The research areas of model alignment and safety are attempting to address this fundamental problem - and have yet to solve it convincingly.

Problems like emergent misalignment can make things even worse.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09937-5

You omitted the important "commercial" part.

The reason they care whether your commercial software is licensed is that their business model is charging for software licenses for that software.

Once there were indications that people were very much interested in, and working on, running rips of commercial games on PS3 Linux, and/or leveraging OtherOS to jailbreak a stock PS3, it was basically game over for OtherOS/PS3 Linux, in spite of the fact that it had been advertised on the box (of the original "fat" PS3) as a feature of the system.

Piracy (in the running unlicensed commercial games/copyright infringement sense) had long been the killer app for jailbreaking, including mod chips (and other schemes for playing CD-R "backups") for the PS1 and PS2, as well as PSP jailbreaks and custom firmware; homebrew notwithstanding, the most popular use was playing commercial games without paying for them.

Sony also nerfed the original 5-console installation (aka "game sharing") for PSN games after players organized public game sharing web sites to split the cost of games 5 ways.

"No one could have predicted this!" as they (don't) say.

This is largely contradicted by the (pre RISC-V) MIPS editions of Patterson & Hennessy, Harris & Harris, etc., which teach you how to design a MIPS datapath (at the gate level.)

Regarding silicon implementations, consider that 1) you can synthesize it from HDL/RTL designs using modern CAD tools, and 2) MIPS was originally designed to be simple enough for grad students to implement with the primitive CAD tools of the 1980s (basically semi-manual layout).