> ripped a music CD directly with itunes (yes, that was an actual feature. hard to imagine these days).

These days? Last week (though WMP). My retired father's old computer died, his new one, no CD slot. Emails me from Australia asking how to rip his CDs for his media player. He's not an audiophile but he's not a technophile (and his blues music collection is sufficiently large that at least one of the blues radio stations in his city will on occasion ask him to borrow something because they don't have it in their library.

Told him to get a USB CD player and a card reader (his media player is on micro/SD).

Anything you dropped into your computer's MP3 directory would sync to your iPod. It didn't matter where you got the music from.

The restriction was that an iPod would only sync tracks from one computer at a time, which was a demand of the music rights holders.

You can still rip CDs with Apple Music. In fact, that's the only use I have for that app (I recently lost a hard drive with music and I'm in the process of backing up all my CDs again).

Are you being sarcastic? This has definitely changed with Apple Silicon. Looking at hardware value, the M-series are way more competitive than the Intel macs ever were, and if you want to run an LLM locally, they are undefeated.

However, it is quite ironic that while the value of their hardware has sharply increased, their software has become the slop that everyone is complaining about.

Uh where’s the cheaper MacBook neo that is 100000x more powerful?

ADB ports only finally went away when USB came out. But I do have to give Apple credit, because those fruity-colored iMacs with the hockey puck mouse, that had only USB ports... those are really what got USB to become fully adopted. PCs had USB ports for a while before those came out, but nobody made any peripherals, probably because Windows had really crappy support for it... Once those fruity iMacs were released, then came the flood of USB stuff.

Exactly. After the Apple II, it was a post-Woz world. There’s a reason Apple owns so many patents on proprietary types of screws...