40 ms of latency would actually be grotesquely bad unless corrected for by software. The threshold of perception for A/V sync issues is somewhere around 12–15 milliseconds. By 30 ms, you can consciously recognize that they are out of sync. CoreAudio provides audio device latency information that bubbles all the way through to the app, and most apps do actually take it into account, so for the most part, unless a device lies about its latency, audio and video tend to usually be in sync in my experience.
The main problem with Bluetooth audio, from my perspective, is losing entire words every time I pause playback and restart it, forcing me to skip back several seconds to find out what I missed. And the cause of these problems is not latency, but rather power management. At last check, iOS only provides latency info to CoreAudio, but doesn't provide the preroll time required for powering up the highly power-managed Bluetooth stack. So when you resume playback, there's often nobody listening for the first quarter of a second while the iOS device desperately tries to reconnect to the Bluetooth device.
The end result is that a significant chunk of audio gets lost entirely whenever you pause and resume playback unless the Bluetooth audio stack remains up from the last time. This wouldn't be a big deal if you were coming back after pausing for several minutes, but it is very annoying if I pause Netflix for fifteen seconds to check a calendar entry, switch back, start playback, and then am forced to rewind ten seconds because I missed an entire word. Sometimes I don't even have to leave the app, IIRC.
IMO, iOS is way too aggressive at managing Bluetooth power, which is, of course, because the battery is way too small, which in turn is because the devices are too thin. And of course, the lack of AptX is probably because of the power budget involved, too.
So to make a long story short, everything that is wrong with iOS audio, from the missing headphone jack to the bad Bluetooth performance, is caused by Apple's obsession with waifish thinness. Come on, guys. It's unhealthy. Really it is.
Then LG Prada got released, won awards and they probably decided to copy it
I know that's what the LG folks would like to think, but the reality is that nobody—even Apple—could create a working prototype of an entire cell phone OS and hardware in the twelve weeks between when LG announced and when Apple announced (even without the Thanksgiving and Christmas shutdowns cutting into that schedule).
Besides, Apple created the nothing-but-screen PDA form factor when they released the Newton, way back when LG was still called GoldStar and mostly made cheap TVs and VCRs....
What public option would that be? Seniors don't have a choice (you aren't allowed to buy separate insurance other than Medicare, and supplemental policies only reduce the deductible; they won't cover anything that Medicare doesn't), so they don't really have a public option because it isn't optional. And the indigent (Medicaid) also don't really have a choice; they get covered whether they want it or not. Both of those groups are some of the highest-cost groups you can insure, so the fact that it functions at all is, frankly, amazing. And nobody outside those high-cost groups has any public option in the U.S., AFAIK.
Fair enough; that's certainly part of the reason that costs increased, too, though I would argue that they should simply have required them to hold rates constant for a longer period than they did, at which point the initial surge in claims wouldn't have mattered as much.
Another (small) part is a general lack of competition in the marketplace—Trump was correct in saying that per-state markets for insurance lead to inadequate competition—though obviously removing that barrier won't come anywhere close to actually fixing the high cost of care.
And the elephant in the room, as always, is the need for tort reform.
On a the image I saw previously, it showed a standard USB-C cable plugging into a port and going into the bottom of the unit. Apparently, that was just an early prototype. Good to know.
Except that what they forgot was that if we wanted a [expletive deleted] iPad with a keyboard, we would have bought one. We buy a MacBook( | Air| Pro) because it gets the job done, and as soon as they remove parts that we depend on, or compromise it in such a way that it no longer gets the job done, we'll wait to buy an upgrade until they fix it, or if necessary, switch platforms entirely.
Things got so bad this time that OWC is in the planning stages for a product called DEC that adds back most of the stuff that Apple has removed over the past four years. If it were time for me to upgrade my MBP, were it not for the horribly dangerous USB-C connector sticking out of the side of the laptop, I'd buy one of those in a heartbeat. Heck yes, give me a thicker MBP with real storage, a full set of ports, more battery, etc. (That said, it absolutely needs HDMI, or else it still isn't quite ready.)
In this case, it is. Subsidizing a for-profit company just drives the cost up for everyone, because suddenly the people who could barely afford it can easily afford it, so they can afford to pay more by a sizable percentage of the subsidy amount.
The only viable way to drive insurance costs down is through the public option that the Democrats wanted in the first place and that the Republicans forced them to bury. You'll notice that outside the third world, everybody else has socialized medicine, everybody else has cheaper medical care, and most if it is as good as (if not better than) ours. For critical services that everybody has to have to survive, nothing beats good, old-fashioned socialism. It is when socialism starts to spread into non-critical areas that countries turn into hellholes. Yet somehow, in their zeal for painting socialism as evil, the U.S. right wing has managed to create a system that is worse by preventing socialism in various areas where it is the only viable option, such as healthcare and critical infrastructure.
The thing is, Kingston is a flash part manufacturer. They don't need to develop super-high-end products, because they don't need an excuse to increase chip density beyond current levels (or at least they shouldn't). Yes, there's a benefit to having the high end for the people who really need it, but the high end for SD cards and CF cards and USB flash sticks usually means spending a couple of hundred dollars per unit, not a couple of thousand dollars. That's like the 1% of the 1% market, if that.
For a product that appeals to only a tiny niche of a niche (people who need a *lot* of portable storage and need it to fit in a pocket and are willing to spend as much as a laptop to buy it), given that Mac users have (statistically) a lot more disposable income on average than PC users, it borders on absurd to completely exclude that lucrative market when relatively small design changes could avoid that exclusion.
And bureaucrats everywhere are torn between the desire to chastise you for screwing up their numbers or praise you for being technically correct—the best kind of correct....
The target audience for this is people who have an insane amount of disposable income, bought a computer with an 1 TB SSD, and still need more, and are willing to pay through the nose for a small improvement in portability and/or speed. That tends to match much more closely with Mac users. PC users are more likely to have cut corners on cost to begin with (resulting in too little capacity), and thus are far more likely to spend a hundred bucks for a 2 TB external hard drive and carry it in a laptop bag rather than spend an extra couple of grand on a pocket-sized flash stick.
At first glance, I thought the same about USB ports, and I do agree that in the very short term (say the next year), they can be handy. But when I thought about it a little more, I concluded that ditching legacy USB isn't that much of a stretch. After all:
USB devices that you don't carry in your pocket don't matter because it isn't hard to use an adapter or a different cable with them.
USB devices that you do carry in your pocket don't matter because they are typically inexpensive and easy to replace with new versions, most of which have USB-C.
The exceptions are such a small percentage of the market that they really don't matter to anybody. So there's no strong reason for any manufacturer to keep legacy USB ports around at this point other than for the short-term convenience of customers so that they don't have to buy a couple of $10 cables.
I fully expect legacy USB to be phased out in all new models of computer released in 2017 and later, within some small epsilon. I could be wrong, but if I am, then it is either because the product line is on life support (minimal incremental changes) or because they started designing that model in 2015 or earlier.
500k miles really shouldn't be considered insane mileage. I know plenty of people who have gotten well over 300k on internal-combustion-based vehicles. Mind you, none of them would pass California emissions, but then again, EVs don't have that problem. They don't have transmissions (one of the weak points of ICE designs and one of the most commonly repaired components) or oxygen sensors or Nox sensors or fuel injectors or any of the other crap that makes ICE designs fail early and often. Unless the undercarriage rusts out, I can't imagine any reason that an EV wouldn't last 500k miles, though you'd probably have to replace the battery at least once.:-)
Seriously? In my house, not counting old, powered-down hardware, I have six wireless-capable computers, three iPhones, an iPad Mini, an iPod Touch, two Nook tablets, two Bluetooth trackpads, two Bluetooth keyboards, an unused Airport Base Station acting as a wired print spooler (but spewing Wi-Fi beacon packets nonetheless), plus an extra (unused) Wi-Fi hotspot on my old DSL router and maybe one on my cable router as well, plus a five-station cordless phone setup spewing noise on one of those bands (16 Wi-Fi devices, 4 Bluetooth devices, and six "other" devices including the cordless phone base), and I'm still not having trouble getting decent service out of a single 802.11ac Airport Extreme.
Are there really normal people (read "not software engineers") who are using more than twenty or thirty wireless devices in their homes? How? Why?
I run four, but if I'm using all four, I still have to dig into the wall.:-)
As for upgrading the cables... yes, in theory, I could upgrade my 15-year-old Cat 5e wiring with something more modern, but I don't see myself upgrading my managed switch to 10-gigabit any time soon, as the existing gigabit network is still more than an order of magnitude faster than my upstream provider's download speeds and two orders of magnitude faster than my upstream provider's upload speeds, which would mean that the only speed advantages would be within my in-home network.
The only part of my in-home network where I could usefully take advantage of any extra speed beyond gigabit is the link from my backup server to the switch, but that hardware supports channel bonding, so I have two ports bonded together (and could go up to four by moving some equipment around, but in practice, two ports are fast enough to basically saturate the drives, making any further bandwidth increases largely moot).
Well, I agree with you, at least up to a point, but IMO having such a long commute is more an argument for asking your employer to set up charging stations at work than for dismissing the entire concept of an EV. Either way, plugging in twice a day is still a whole lot easier than spending ten or fifteen minutes to get off the freeway, go to a gas station, and fill up.
I think you're missing my point here because of my hyperbolic comment about Mac users (on average) having more disposable income than Windows users. I guess I should tone down the snark a little.
Obviously, USB-C isn't just a Mac thing. Even on Windows machines, USB ports are being phased out, albeit not as quickly. The difference is that for Mac users, those ports are here, and they're the only ports that exist on the new machines. But even Windows users (at least the ones who are serious enough to consider buying a 2 TB flash stick) know that the writing is on the wall for standard USB ports.
To put this in perspective, at Fry's tonight, I chose a cell phone charger with a USB port over a similar product with a built-in Lightning cord because I have no faith in Apple sticking with Lightning over USB-C, and they haven't even started moving in that direction yet. And that's for something that I picked up on the spur of the moment that costs on the order of pocket change.
When I buy a flash drive, I expect it to last for several years. My current flash drive dates back at least four or five years, if not more. Any flash drive that I would buy today would almost certainly need to be compatible with my next computer, not just my current one, and I can pretty much guarantee that the next one won't have any legacy USB ports. I won't want to have to carry around a clumsy adapter in my pocket all day every day just because some engineering product manager decided to cut 35 cents off the BOM price. As such, I wouldn't seriously consider spending even ten bucks on a standard-USB-only flash drive at this point, much less thousands. It would be incredibly shortsighted to buy this product as designed.
Kingston created a multi-thousand-dollar flash drive that doesn't support USB-C at a time when the rest of the industry's new products (even at the $30 level) all have both USB and USB-C built-in. That doesn't make any sense at all. This product would have made some sense a year ago, because some folks might not have heard about USB-C back then, but now... the design looks very dated when compared with the rest of the flash drive industry.
IMO, Kingston should have spent two or three months to update the chipset and modify it with a dual connector design before releasing the product, but apparently they thought it was more important to be first than to be good. As someone who buys a lot of their flash cards (SD, CF), I find that troubling, to say the least. It makes me wonder what other corners they're cutting.
Depends on what you view as the investment and the return. From my perspective (as someone who is considering buying one as soon as I'm certain that they've gotten most of the kinks out of the Model X), energy costs are only part of the equation.
But just to confirm your assertion, assuming an installed cost of $3.50 per watt, 8 full-sun-equivalent hours per day, and a 40-year solar panel life (typical for current-generation panels), that comes to about 2.9 cents per kWh. A Tesla goes about 3 miles per kWh, which means this comes out to only about 0.96 cents per mile. At $2 per gallon, a similar vehicle gets about 22-28 MPG. Let's go with 30 as a best-case estimate. That's almost 7 cents per mile. So if you build your own solar farm, the Tesla will cost you a quarter as much per mile as gasoline even at current prices. Let's say that this costs you a $50,000 premium in the cost of the vehicle. The 5.7 cents per mile you save won't cause you to break even until you cross the 875k mile mark. If you recompute with Bay Area gasoline prices averaging more like $3 per gallon, it's more like 550,000 miles, which is maybe plausible for an EV.
On the other hand, your gasoline-powered vehicle will keel over long before that break-even point, whereas an electric vehicle might actually reach that number of miles, because there are a lot fewer moving parts. So if you have to factor in the cost of a second gasoline-powered car over that same time period, the value equation changes considerably, because that $50k premium is now a $25k premium, and the break-even point is at 275–438k miles, which starts to sound a lot more likely.
And that value proposition still ignores several other important factors:
You can potentially be completely green, powering your vehicle entirely from renewable energy sources.
You never have to delay your commute by ten minutes (potentially catching worse traffic as a result) to get gasoline.
You never have to worry about running out of fuel. Just plug in every night when you get home, and you'll always be ready to go.
EVs generally have carpool lane access, which can save a considerable amount of commute time, depending.
All of these things have some value, whether in terms of saved time, saving the planet, etc. How much those savings are worth to you tends to be directly proportional to the length of your commute.
If you ignore the fact that the cable breaks, and that the cable hole is so small that a standard cable will wear its way through the aluminum in under a year, the XtremKey is what you're looking for. Mine is several years old and still works. Before I got that, I would go through a flash drive every two or three months.
Falling out of an airplane, orbital re-entry? Even the cheapest plastic Chinese knockoffs can handle falling off a desk.
Even the cheapest plastic Chinese knockoffs can handle falling from an airplane, too. They're lightweight and have a decent amount of surface area for the weight. I keyed in some approximate weight and dimension values into a terminal velocity calculator and got an estimate of only 20 meters per second. This means it has only something like 4 joules of energy while falling at terminal velocity. The outside could be made of glass and it would likely survive without damage....
Either way, the target audience for expensive flash drives is mainly Mac users, and current Mac laptops don't have any legacy USB ports—only USB-C. So building such an expensive product and giving it only a legacy USB port is a really, really bad idea, and has been for at least the last year or so.
Then again, I wouldn't expect anything better from a company that still hasn't figured out after the better part of a decade that their slide-to-uncover design offers no real protection for the USB connector inside your pocket (because other random stuff is constantly shoving it open).
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40 ms of latency would actually be grotesquely bad unless corrected for by software. The threshold of perception for A/V sync issues is somewhere around 12–15 milliseconds. By 30 ms, you can consciously recognize that they are out of sync. CoreAudio provides audio device latency information that bubbles all the way through to the app, and most apps do actually take it into account, so for the most part, unless a device lies about its latency, audio and video tend to usually be in sync in my experience.
The main problem with Bluetooth audio, from my perspective, is losing entire words every time I pause playback and restart it, forcing me to skip back several seconds to find out what I missed. And the cause of these problems is not latency, but rather power management. At last check, iOS only provides latency info to CoreAudio, but doesn't provide the preroll time required for powering up the highly power-managed Bluetooth stack. So when you resume playback, there's often nobody listening for the first quarter of a second while the iOS device desperately tries to reconnect to the Bluetooth device.
The end result is that a significant chunk of audio gets lost entirely whenever you pause and resume playback unless the Bluetooth audio stack remains up from the last time. This wouldn't be a big deal if you were coming back after pausing for several minutes, but it is very annoying if I pause Netflix for fifteen seconds to check a calendar entry, switch back, start playback, and then am forced to rewind ten seconds because I missed an entire word. Sometimes I don't even have to leave the app, IIRC.
IMO, iOS is way too aggressive at managing Bluetooth power, which is, of course, because the battery is way too small, which in turn is because the devices are too thin. And of course, the lack of AptX is probably because of the power budget involved, too.
So to make a long story short, everything that is wrong with iOS audio, from the missing headphone jack to the bad Bluetooth performance, is caused by Apple's obsession with waifish thinness. Come on, guys. It's unhealthy. Really it is.
The study corrected for differences in income.
That said, sleep disruption caused by traffic noise is, IMO, far more likely to be the cause of the increase in dementia than air pollution.
I know that's what the LG folks would like to think, but the reality is that nobody—even Apple—could create a working prototype of an entire cell phone OS and hardware in the twelve weeks between when LG announced and when Apple announced (even without the Thanksgiving and Christmas shutdowns cutting into that schedule).
Besides, Apple created the nothing-but-screen PDA form factor when they released the Newton, way back when LG was still called GoldStar and mostly made cheap TVs and VCRs....
What public option would that be? Seniors don't have a choice (you aren't allowed to buy separate insurance other than Medicare, and supplemental policies only reduce the deductible; they won't cover anything that Medicare doesn't), so they don't really have a public option because it isn't optional. And the indigent (Medicaid) also don't really have a choice; they get covered whether they want it or not. Both of those groups are some of the highest-cost groups you can insure, so the fact that it functions at all is, frankly, amazing. And nobody outside those high-cost groups has any public option in the U.S., AFAIK.
Fair enough; that's certainly part of the reason that costs increased, too, though I would argue that they should simply have required them to hold rates constant for a longer period than they did, at which point the initial surge in claims wouldn't have mattered as much.
Another (small) part is a general lack of competition in the marketplace—Trump was correct in saying that per-state markets for insurance lead to inadequate competition—though obviously removing that barrier won't come anywhere close to actually fixing the high cost of care.
And the elephant in the room, as always, is the need for tort reform.
On a the image I saw previously, it showed a standard USB-C cable plugging into a port and going into the bottom of the unit. Apparently, that was just an early prototype. Good to know.
As I recall, the Democrats couldn't get it out of committee by themselves.
Unless they removed him after SJ left, Woz still has badge access.
Except that what they forgot was that if we wanted a [expletive deleted] iPad with a keyboard, we would have bought one. We buy a MacBook( | Air| Pro) because it gets the job done, and as soon as they remove parts that we depend on, or compromise it in such a way that it no longer gets the job done, we'll wait to buy an upgrade until they fix it, or if necessary, switch platforms entirely.
Things got so bad this time that OWC is in the planning stages for a product called DEC that adds back most of the stuff that Apple has removed over the past four years. If it were time for me to upgrade my MBP, were it not for the horribly dangerous USB-C connector sticking out of the side of the laptop, I'd buy one of those in a heartbeat. Heck yes, give me a thicker MBP with real storage, a full set of ports, more battery, etc. (That said, it absolutely needs HDMI, or else it still isn't quite ready.)
Freudian slip? I mean, I know the competitor's product might not auto-park correctly, but that's a little harsh. :-D
In this case, it is. Subsidizing a for-profit company just drives the cost up for everyone, because suddenly the people who could barely afford it can easily afford it, so they can afford to pay more by a sizable percentage of the subsidy amount.
The only viable way to drive insurance costs down is through the public option that the Democrats wanted in the first place and that the Republicans forced them to bury. You'll notice that outside the third world, everybody else has socialized medicine, everybody else has cheaper medical care, and most if it is as good as (if not better than) ours. For critical services that everybody has to have to survive, nothing beats good, old-fashioned socialism. It is when socialism starts to spread into non-critical areas that countries turn into hellholes. Yet somehow, in their zeal for painting socialism as evil, the U.S. right wing has managed to create a system that is worse by preventing socialism in various areas where it is the only viable option, such as healthcare and critical infrastructure.
*sigh*
I mean, next thing you'll tell me is that 1234 is a bad combination for my luggage.
The thing is, Kingston is a flash part manufacturer. They don't need to develop super-high-end products, because they don't need an excuse to increase chip density beyond current levels (or at least they shouldn't). Yes, there's a benefit to having the high end for the people who really need it, but the high end for SD cards and CF cards and USB flash sticks usually means spending a couple of hundred dollars per unit, not a couple of thousand dollars. That's like the 1% of the 1% market, if that.
For a product that appeals to only a tiny niche of a niche (people who need a *lot* of portable storage and need it to fit in a pocket and are willing to spend as much as a laptop to buy it), given that Mac users have (statistically) a lot more disposable income on average than PC users, it borders on absurd to completely exclude that lucrative market when relatively small design changes could avoid that exclusion.
And bureaucrats everywhere are torn between the desire to chastise you for screwing up their numbers or praise you for being technically correct—the best kind of correct....
The target audience for this is people who have an insane amount of disposable income, bought a computer with an 1 TB SSD, and still need more, and are willing to pay through the nose for a small improvement in portability and/or speed. That tends to match much more closely with Mac users. PC users are more likely to have cut corners on cost to begin with (resulting in too little capacity), and thus are far more likely to spend a hundred bucks for a 2 TB external hard drive and carry it in a laptop bag rather than spend an extra couple of grand on a pocket-sized flash stick.
At first glance, I thought the same about USB ports, and I do agree that in the very short term (say the next year), they can be handy. But when I thought about it a little more, I concluded that ditching legacy USB isn't that much of a stretch. After all:
The exceptions are such a small percentage of the market that they really don't matter to anybody. So there's no strong reason for any manufacturer to keep legacy USB ports around at this point other than for the short-term convenience of customers so that they don't have to buy a couple of $10 cables.
I fully expect legacy USB to be phased out in all new models of computer released in 2017 and later, within some small epsilon. I could be wrong, but if I am, then it is either because the product line is on life support (minimal incremental changes) or because they started designing that model in 2015 or earlier.
500k miles really shouldn't be considered insane mileage. I know plenty of people who have gotten well over 300k on internal-combustion-based vehicles. Mind you, none of them would pass California emissions, but then again, EVs don't have that problem. They don't have transmissions (one of the weak points of ICE designs and one of the most commonly repaired components) or oxygen sensors or Nox sensors or fuel injectors or any of the other crap that makes ICE designs fail early and often. Unless the undercarriage rusts out, I can't imagine any reason that an EV wouldn't last 500k miles, though you'd probably have to replace the battery at least once. :-)
Seriously? In my house, not counting old, powered-down hardware, I have six wireless-capable computers, three iPhones, an iPad Mini, an iPod Touch, two Nook tablets, two Bluetooth trackpads, two Bluetooth keyboards, an unused Airport Base Station acting as a wired print spooler (but spewing Wi-Fi beacon packets nonetheless), plus an extra (unused) Wi-Fi hotspot on my old DSL router and maybe one on my cable router as well, plus a five-station cordless phone setup spewing noise on one of those bands (16 Wi-Fi devices, 4 Bluetooth devices, and six "other" devices including the cordless phone base), and I'm still not having trouble getting decent service out of a single 802.11ac Airport Extreme.
Are there really normal people (read "not software engineers") who are using more than twenty or thirty wireless devices in their homes? How? Why?
I run four, but if I'm using all four, I still have to dig into the wall. :-)
As for upgrading the cables... yes, in theory, I could upgrade my 15-year-old Cat 5e wiring with something more modern, but I don't see myself upgrading my managed switch to 10-gigabit any time soon, as the existing gigabit network is still more than an order of magnitude faster than my upstream provider's download speeds and two orders of magnitude faster than my upstream provider's upload speeds, which would mean that the only speed advantages would be within my in-home network.
The only part of my in-home network where I could usefully take advantage of any extra speed beyond gigabit is the link from my backup server to the switch, but that hardware supports channel bonding, so I have two ports bonded together (and could go up to four by moving some equipment around, but in practice, two ports are fast enough to basically saturate the drives, making any further bandwidth increases largely moot).
Well, I agree with you, at least up to a point, but IMO having such a long commute is more an argument for asking your employer to set up charging stations at work than for dismissing the entire concept of an EV. Either way, plugging in twice a day is still a whole lot easier than spending ten or fifteen minutes to get off the freeway, go to a gas station, and fill up.
I think you're missing my point here because of my hyperbolic comment about Mac users (on average) having more disposable income than Windows users. I guess I should tone down the snark a little.
Obviously, USB-C isn't just a Mac thing. Even on Windows machines, USB ports are being phased out, albeit not as quickly. The difference is that for Mac users, those ports are here, and they're the only ports that exist on the new machines. But even Windows users (at least the ones who are serious enough to consider buying a 2 TB flash stick) know that the writing is on the wall for standard USB ports.
To put this in perspective, at Fry's tonight, I chose a cell phone charger with a USB port over a similar product with a built-in Lightning cord because I have no faith in Apple sticking with Lightning over USB-C, and they haven't even started moving in that direction yet. And that's for something that I picked up on the spur of the moment that costs on the order of pocket change.
When I buy a flash drive, I expect it to last for several years. My current flash drive dates back at least four or five years, if not more. Any flash drive that I would buy today would almost certainly need to be compatible with my next computer, not just my current one, and I can pretty much guarantee that the next one won't have any legacy USB ports. I won't want to have to carry around a clumsy adapter in my pocket all day every day just because some engineering product manager decided to cut 35 cents off the BOM price. As such, I wouldn't seriously consider spending even ten bucks on a standard-USB-only flash drive at this point, much less thousands. It would be incredibly shortsighted to buy this product as designed.
Kingston created a multi-thousand-dollar flash drive that doesn't support USB-C at a time when the rest of the industry's new products (even at the $30 level) all have both USB and USB-C built-in. That doesn't make any sense at all. This product would have made some sense a year ago, because some folks might not have heard about USB-C back then, but now... the design looks very dated when compared with the rest of the flash drive industry.
IMO, Kingston should have spent two or three months to update the chipset and modify it with a dual connector design before releasing the product, but apparently they thought it was more important to be first than to be good. As someone who buys a lot of their flash cards (SD, CF), I find that troubling, to say the least. It makes me wonder what other corners they're cutting.
Depends on what you view as the investment and the return. From my perspective (as someone who is considering buying one as soon as I'm certain that they've gotten most of the kinks out of the Model X), energy costs are only part of the equation.
But just to confirm your assertion, assuming an installed cost of $3.50 per watt, 8 full-sun-equivalent hours per day, and a 40-year solar panel life (typical for current-generation panels), that comes to about 2.9 cents per kWh. A Tesla goes about 3 miles per kWh, which means this comes out to only about 0.96 cents per mile. At $2 per gallon, a similar vehicle gets about 22-28 MPG. Let's go with 30 as a best-case estimate. That's almost 7 cents per mile. So if you build your own solar farm, the Tesla will cost you a quarter as much per mile as gasoline even at current prices. Let's say that this costs you a $50,000 premium in the cost of the vehicle. The 5.7 cents per mile you save won't cause you to break even until you cross the 875k mile mark. If you recompute with Bay Area gasoline prices averaging more like $3 per gallon, it's more like 550,000 miles, which is maybe plausible for an EV.
On the other hand, your gasoline-powered vehicle will keel over long before that break-even point, whereas an electric vehicle might actually reach that number of miles, because there are a lot fewer moving parts. So if you have to factor in the cost of a second gasoline-powered car over that same time period, the value equation changes considerably, because that $50k premium is now a $25k premium, and the break-even point is at 275–438k miles, which starts to sound a lot more likely.
And that value proposition still ignores several other important factors:
All of these things have some value, whether in terms of saved time, saving the planet, etc. How much those savings are worth to you tends to be directly proportional to the length of your commute.
If you ignore the fact that the cable breaks, and that the cable hole is so small that a standard cable will wear its way through the aluminum in under a year, the XtremKey is what you're looking for. Mine is several years old and still works. Before I got that, I would go through a flash drive every two or three months.
Even the cheapest plastic Chinese knockoffs can handle falling from an airplane, too. They're lightweight and have a decent amount of surface area for the weight. I keyed in some approximate weight and dimension values into a terminal velocity calculator and got an estimate of only 20 meters per second. This means it has only something like 4 joules of energy while falling at terminal velocity. The outside could be made of glass and it would likely survive without damage....
Either way, the target audience for expensive flash drives is mainly Mac users, and current Mac laptops don't have any legacy USB ports—only USB-C. So building such an expensive product and giving it only a legacy USB port is a really, really bad idea, and has been for at least the last year or so.
Then again, I wouldn't expect anything better from a company that still hasn't figured out after the better part of a decade that their slide-to-uncover design offers no real protection for the USB connector inside your pocket (because other random stuff is constantly shoving it open).