Ask Paul: September 29 (Premium)

Whew! Happy Friday, and welcome to another epic Ask Paul that’s chock-full of excellent reader questions.
Certified refurbished is the way to go
jmeiii75 asks:

Hi Paul. Here's a quick one for you. I'm primarily a Windows user, but also owned a Mac in the past (and liked it). As someone who likes to see how the other half lives, I've been looking into getting another Mac but obviously would like to save a bit of money wherever possible. This has pointed me to the Certified Refurbished area of the Apple store. Perhaps I am misremembering, but I think I heard you mention that you have gone this route yourself. If so, how was that experience for you?

It’s possible I have purchased more Apple hardware from the refurbished part of its store than otherwise. But if that’s not true, it’s close. And I have never once had a bad experience doing so. I highly recommend it, and if you somehow get a device that got past them with a scratch or some software issue or whatever, you can return it very easily. You get the full warranty, etc. There is no downside to doing this.
Sometimes the truth hurts
vernonlvincent asks:

At the Google antitrust trial, Apple testified that there really was no other option for search engines other than Google. That, to me, seemed like a slap in the face toward Microsoft and Bing. This seems to echo the general sentiment I see frequently that Bing is a joke of a search engine. However, I also hear that Google has gotten really bad - especially of late.

So, I try to acknowledge that everyone has their own experiences, and that even some objective truth to me isn’t always the case with others. I often look at what people do, and the decisions they make, and they fall into three categories: Things they do that I would also do, things they do that I would not do but I at least understand why they’re doing it, and then things they do and there, nope, is literally excuse or rationale for doing that and I am just not OK with that.

To me, Bing falls into that latter category. Friends don't let friends use Bing.

And ... I know.

I write that knowing there are people out there who disagree with that. That their experience is that Bing is, in fact, better than Google. That maybe in some part of Europe or whatever, it does a better job doing ... whatever. Look, there are exceptions to everything, but my take on this is simple. Bing is a sad joke of a service that Microsoft should never have kept on life support for all these years (and that’s so true that they tried to offload it on Apple, we just found out). It’s a failed brand, the butt of jokes, just like Zune, and that made starting this year’s AI push with Bing so confounding. And that even if the AI stuff somehow elevates the service or improves its usage (which it hasn’t), that it won’t matter because AI is just table stakes now, and everyone will have it, and in a world in which everything is AI, we’re back to the same old problem t...