Of course they're not in the habit of giving money away, but manufacturers need a steady supply of new buyers in order to maintain demand. The advertised 0% rate also pulls in a lot of buyers who don't actually qualify but will buy anyway, or who ostensibly qualify but forego the rate for other considerations (longer terms, no down payment, etc).
Sure, you can avoid financing at all, but the opportunity cost of dropping tens of thousands of dollars is considerable. Even setting aside possible returns on your capital, a zero nominal rate is a negative real rate (even while inflation remains mild).
The statute in question - 18 U.S. Code  793 (f) - makes no mention of intent:
(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officerâ" Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
The word "standard" is important here. As in a default factory installed feature. That is a far cry from the availability of a third party hands-free kit.
And yes, of course it was a Touring, why buy anything else?:)
Because they now have a Touring Elite. At least that was the wife's reasoning.
Adapters certainly help, but it's hard to beat the convenience of integrated connectors. The need for adapters is one of the things that turns me off Apple hardware. They solve the connectivity problem until one goes missing, or you're in an office / car / whatever that doesn't have the one you need. Hardly a deal breaker, but still an annoyance.
I'm also not entirely happy with Bluetooth in general. I don't own any Apple products, but my experience under WebOS, Android, FireOS and Windows are often somewhat fiddly. Still not a deal-breaker, but I still default to wired headphones because it's simply more convenient to deal with the inevitable pairing and connecting issues (e.g. "Hey, why aren't my headphones pairing to my phone? Because my wife borrowed them and they're currently connected to hers.")
I'd actually like to see a hybrid nearfield / bluetooth solution, like the "Touch-to-Share" feature of the ill-fated WebOS platform. Integrate a magnetic charging coil like they had in the Touchstone as a built-in phone dock, and let that initiate automatic pairing and connecting. As explicit as plugging in a cable, but less fiddly. Only problem is the friction of getting something like that adopted across the industry.
No, it really hasn't. Look at my other reply. Your single data point of one $40k vehicle from 2008 having limited (HFP only) bluetooth support does not equate to "standard on most cars for 10 years". It wasn't even standard on the single vehicle you cited until 2014.
It's hard to say what percentage of iPhone users drive an older car, but it's worth noting that according to the latest published data from Pew, 36% of iPhone users make less than $50k a year (less than the median income) and another 25% make $50-75k.
That isn't even taking into account foreign markets where income levels are significantly lower (see: China) or automobile prices are significantly higher (see: Denmark).
Nor is it taking into account audio quality. The majority of bluetooth streaming is going to use the lossless SBC codec, which is optimized for low bandwidth and power requirements. Apple may adopt a higher quality codec, like AptX, but that is still lossless, or even support a proprietary codec with their own peripherals, but that's meaningless for third party receivers. Audiophiles are unlikely to want to give up their high end headphones to buy some mass market wireless set from Apple.
If Apple actually eliminates the standard 3.5mm jack, they will almost certainly offer an adapter. Perhaps they'll jump on Intel's push to go USB-C for audio. A combination car charger / audio-out adapter would make sense, and it would hardly be the first time Apple users were willing to overpay for adapters.
All vehicles cost money to drive. The advantage here is that it doesn't cost money to *own*. And with only 70,000 miles, the maintenance costs are not significant. Certainly less than financing even an entry level used vehicle.
In terms of safety, my vehicle already has more features than required for new vehicles - front and side airbags, tire pressure monitors, traction control, anti-lock brakes, daytime running lights, etc, etc. There are more features available today, to be sure, but I don't consider adaptive cruise control or lane departure warning to be deal breakers. I wouldn't mind the blind spot monitoring that my wife's car has, but I'm also not willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get it.
Bluetooth was only added to the high end Cadillac CTS-V in 2009 and then the CTS in 2012, but even then it didn't support audio profiles until CUE was introduced in 2013.
My wife is on her second Honda Odyssey. The last one was a 2006, so no factory-installed bluetooth option, even on the Touring. Your wife was lucky, since the 2008 was the first model year to introduce bluetooth, but then only on the Touring model. But again, that only supports hands-free calling. They didn't support the A2DP profile until 2010 (and also only on the top end models; either the Touring or the EX-L with the optional navigation system).
Bluetooth - especially bluetooth streaming - is a fairly new feature, even for higher end automobiles. Given the longevity of the modern automobile we're probably a decade or more off from it being a truly ubiquitous feature.
Erm, no. Even luxury vehicles didn't offer Bluetooth standard ten years ago. Cadillac, for example, didn't offer it as a standard feature until 2012.
My car is a 2003, but I'm likely to spend at least $650 when I upgrade my phone next year. Why? Because I don't have a car payment eating up my disposable income.
Even if the crop wasn't consumed directly, it arguably displaces food crops from aerable land, and could be used to feed livestock. The same objection holds with switchgrass, which can also be used for grazing.
The link between ethanol subsidies and world hunger has quite a lot of data behind it. The New York Times editorialized specifically on the effect on Guatemalan food prices due to the shift of US corn production from food to fuel. Or there is this artcile from Forbes. Or the Wall Street Journal.
OS X is free to run on hardware sold by the same company publishing OS X. Not quite the same thing.
Linux is free, but only because the cost of development and maintenance is spread among a large number of organizations (many of whom sell non-free versions). Not quite the same thing.
For better or worse Microsoft represents a different model. You don't get free upgrades like you do with Apple, but you are not tethered to a single vendor for your hardware. You don't get a completely free platform like Linux, but you get the benefits of an arguably more coherent desktop platform and better funded development of emerging features.
I ran Linux exclusively for twenty years before buying a Surface. I considered installing Linux on it, at least for dual boot, but the prospect of trying work through the myriad of issues with UEFI, HiDPI, multi-touch support on the trackpad, keyboard add/remove detection, power management, bluetooth support, digitizer support and so forth, I decided it just wasn't worth it. I now have a Linux VM under Hyper-V, and will probably not even use that much once the Linux subsystem for Windows goes GA.
Is it an ideal platform? No. But the investment they've made in a unified platform definitely shows. It actually does work well as both a tablet and a laptop, and the transition is pretty seamless. Apple may get there eventually, but they don't even have the hardware for OS X and the experience on iOS still lags significantly behind Windows (no pointer support, only tiled window management, limited app availability, etc). Linux probably won't get there without Wayland or possibly Mir, neither of which have made it into a mainline release yet, and both of which have been mostly chasing feature parity with X11 instead of developing new features.
This sounds similar to my experience. I ditched Windows 95 after three months in favor of Slackware, and never looked back until recently.
Then late last year, I gave into temptation and bought a Surface Pro 4 (and my wife bought a Surface Book). I considered putting Linux on, at least dual boot, but after looking at the state of HiDPI support and thinking about the parade of problems I've been having with my work laptop, I decided against it.
It's embarrassing that individual applications still need to be configured for high resolution displays. It's embarrassing that my laptop regularly forgets my display configuration when docking. It's embarrassing my machine continues to send audio to "line-out" even after I unplug my headphones.
I sincerely hope that as systemd matures and wayland is adopted that the state of Linux on the desktop improves. More importantly, I hope the desktop environments learn to deal gracefully with new form factors, like 2-in-1's.
In the meantime, I'm actually enjoying Windows 10. As you said, the software and hardware are harmonious, and there is little unnecessary friction in the interface. There are definitely some rough edges, and not nearly enough UWP apps, but that is gradually changing. And the addition of the Linux subsystem should make the command-line situation a lot better than cygwin current does (though I mostly spend my time SSHed into remote Linux machines).
Even where insurance is required (not everywhere, and certainly not for people who do own vehicles or drive them on public roads) that's liability insurance, due to the risk you pose to other people and other people's property. It is not a precondition for citizenship or even car ownership.
Exactly. Everything is as promised in the lifecycle that Microsoft published years ago, so I have no idea what LichtSpektren was talking about when he said that Vista got f@#!ed before the promised EOL.
It was never getting a newer version of IE, but the current version will be supported through its extended support period.
There is little fundamental difference between tags and user-defined flags, which have been in IMAP since at least 1988 (see: RFC 1064).
The problem is that Google presents what are essentially searches (for a specific tag) as folders at a protocol level. This breaks not just an assumption, but a requirement that messages reside in a single folder, as IMAP UIDs are only valid within the context of a folder.
Google's solution is to layer a second, global identifier to each message, so that changes can be propagated to other views of the same message. This requires not only supporting the X-GM-MSGID extension, but making its use mandatory when the server advertises it.
This is not being a good actor, in my opinion. Protocol extensions are intended to provide additional functionality; not a means to work around your broken implementation of the core specification.
I'm a fan. I was using a Moto G and managed to drop it screen first onto marble tile, so I picked up a $50 Lumia to use until I fixed the G. That was months ago, and I haven't bothered fixing my old phone.
To be fair, my needs are modest. All I care about are the stock social media apps, a browser, a music player, a podcast player and a terminal client.
Three million units more than "total sales of the Microsoft Surface tablet range"? If they're talking quarterly sales, it's possible.
On the other hand, Microsoft sold an estimate 2 million Surface tablets in their last fourth quarter. Before the Surface 3, before the Surface Pro 4, before the Surface Book. I'm not going to hazard to guess their sales this quarter, but given the introduction of three new products (and two new form factors), generally positive reviews, and holiday sales on the remaining Surface Pro 3 inventory, I would be surprised if they don't hit 3 million units (which is what 9to5mac is projecting for the iPad Pro).
Erm, wot? Are you buried in a bunker or something? Tablets are ubiquitous.
Heck, I currently have thirteen of them at home (a Surface Pro 4, a Surface Book, two HP Touchpads, a Fire HDX, a Fire HD 6, a Fire HD 6 Kids edition, and six of the new 7" Fire tablets). Granted, the Touchpads have been relegated to toy status (for playing with Open WebOS), and the six new tablets are Christmas gifts (with a couple being given to relatives).
But in a family of six, we still have five tablets in regular use, and will have at least eight after the holidays.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they're not in the habit of giving money away, but manufacturers need a steady supply of new buyers in order to maintain demand. The advertised 0% rate also pulls in a lot of buyers who don't actually qualify but will buy anyway, or who ostensibly qualify but forego the rate for other considerations (longer terms, no down payment, etc).
Sure, you can avoid financing at all, but the opportunity cost of dropping tens of thousands of dollars is considerable. Even setting aside possible returns on your capital, a zero nominal rate is a negative real rate (even while inflation remains mild).
The statute in question - 18 U.S. Code  793 (f) - makes no mention of intent:
(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officerâ"
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
Zero percent financing is far from uncommon for auto loans.
Chrysler isn't domestic anymore. They're owned by Fiat. They have an American subsidiary, of course, but so do Toyota, Nissan, Honda, etc.
The word "standard" is important here. As in a default factory installed feature. That is a far cry from the availability of a third party hands-free kit.
And yes, of course it was a Touring, why buy anything else? :)
Because they now have a Touring Elite. At least that was the wife's reasoning.
Adapters certainly help, but it's hard to beat the convenience of integrated connectors. The need for adapters is one of the things that turns me off Apple hardware. They solve the connectivity problem until one goes missing, or you're in an office / car / whatever that doesn't have the one you need. Hardly a deal breaker, but still an annoyance.
I'm also not entirely happy with Bluetooth in general. I don't own any Apple products, but my experience under WebOS, Android, FireOS and Windows are often somewhat fiddly. Still not a deal-breaker, but I still default to wired headphones because it's simply more convenient to deal with the inevitable pairing and connecting issues (e.g. "Hey, why aren't my headphones pairing to my phone? Because my wife borrowed them and they're currently connected to hers.")
I'd actually like to see a hybrid nearfield / bluetooth solution, like the "Touch-to-Share" feature of the ill-fated WebOS platform. Integrate a magnetic charging coil like they had in the Touchstone as a built-in phone dock, and let that initiate automatic pairing and connecting. As explicit as plugging in a cable, but less fiddly. Only problem is the friction of getting something like that adopted across the industry.
No, it really hasn't. Look at my other reply. Your single data point of one $40k vehicle from 2008 having limited (HFP only) bluetooth support does not equate to "standard on most cars for 10 years". It wasn't even standard on the single vehicle you cited until 2014.
It's hard to say what percentage of iPhone users drive an older car, but it's worth noting that according to the latest published data from Pew, 36% of iPhone users make less than $50k a year (less than the median income) and another 25% make $50-75k.
That isn't even taking into account foreign markets where income levels are significantly lower (see: China) or automobile prices are significantly higher (see: Denmark).
Nor is it taking into account audio quality. The majority of bluetooth streaming is going to use the lossless SBC codec, which is optimized for low bandwidth and power requirements. Apple may adopt a higher quality codec, like AptX, but that is still lossless, or even support a proprietary codec with their own peripherals, but that's meaningless for third party receivers. Audiophiles are unlikely to want to give up their high end headphones to buy some mass market wireless set from Apple.
If Apple actually eliminates the standard 3.5mm jack, they will almost certainly offer an adapter. Perhaps they'll jump on Intel's push to go USB-C for audio. A combination car charger / audio-out adapter would make sense, and it would hardly be the first time Apple users were willing to overpay for adapters.
All vehicles cost money to drive. The advantage here is that it doesn't cost money to *own*. And with only 70,000 miles, the maintenance costs are not significant. Certainly less than financing even an entry level used vehicle.
In terms of safety, my vehicle already has more features than required for new vehicles - front and side airbags, tire pressure monitors, traction control, anti-lock brakes, daytime running lights, etc, etc. There are more features available today, to be sure, but I don't consider adaptive cruise control or lane departure warning to be deal breakers. I wouldn't mind the blind spot monitoring that my wife's car has, but I'm also not willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get it.
Bluetooth was only added to the high end Cadillac CTS-V in 2009 and then the CTS in 2012, but even then it didn't support audio profiles until CUE was introduced in 2013.
My wife is on her second Honda Odyssey. The last one was a 2006, so no factory-installed bluetooth option, even on the Touring. Your wife was lucky, since the 2008 was the first model year to introduce bluetooth, but then only on the Touring model. But again, that only supports hands-free calling. They didn't support the A2DP profile until 2010 (and also only on the top end models; either the Touring or the EX-L with the optional navigation system).
Bluetooth - especially bluetooth streaming - is a fairly new feature, even for higher end automobiles. Given the longevity of the modern automobile we're probably a decade or more off from it being a truly ubiquitous feature.
I hear some people still use phones for phone calls.
Erm, no. Even luxury vehicles didn't offer Bluetooth standard ten years ago. Cadillac, for example, didn't offer it as a standard feature until 2012.
My car is a 2003, but I'm likely to spend at least $650 when I upgrade my phone next year. Why? Because I don't have a car payment eating up my disposable income.
Plenty. The average age of a passenger vehicle in the United States is 11.5 years, and Bluetooth only became ubiquitous in the past few years.
Even if the crop wasn't consumed directly, it arguably displaces food crops from aerable land, and could be used to feed livestock. The same objection holds with switchgrass, which can also be used for grazing.
The link between ethanol subsidies and world hunger has quite a lot of data behind it. The New York Times editorialized specifically on the effect on Guatemalan food prices due to the shift of US corn production from food to fuel. Or there is this artcile from Forbes. Or the Wall Street Journal.
OS X is free to run on hardware sold by the same company publishing OS X. Not quite the same thing.
Linux is free, but only because the cost of development and maintenance is spread among a large number of organizations (many of whom sell non-free versions). Not quite the same thing.
For better or worse Microsoft represents a different model. You don't get free upgrades like you do with Apple, but you are not tethered to a single vendor for your hardware. You don't get a completely free platform like Linux, but you get the benefits of an arguably more coherent desktop platform and better funded development of emerging features.
I ran Linux exclusively for twenty years before buying a Surface. I considered installing Linux on it, at least for dual boot, but the prospect of trying work through the myriad of issues with UEFI, HiDPI, multi-touch support on the trackpad, keyboard add/remove detection, power management, bluetooth support, digitizer support and so forth, I decided it just wasn't worth it. I now have a Linux VM under Hyper-V, and will probably not even use that much once the Linux subsystem for Windows goes GA.
Is it an ideal platform? No. But the investment they've made in a unified platform definitely shows. It actually does work well as both a tablet and a laptop, and the transition is pretty seamless. Apple may get there eventually, but they don't even have the hardware for OS X and the experience on iOS still lags significantly behind Windows (no pointer support, only tiled window management, limited app availability, etc). Linux probably won't get there without Wayland or possibly Mir, neither of which have made it into a mainline release yet, and both of which have been mostly chasing feature parity with X11 instead of developing new features.
Before the iPhone no one was marketing smartphones to consumers. It was essentially a new product category.
This sounds similar to my experience. I ditched Windows 95 after three months in favor of Slackware, and never looked back until recently.
Then late last year, I gave into temptation and bought a Surface Pro 4 (and my wife bought a Surface Book). I considered putting Linux on, at least dual boot, but after looking at the state of HiDPI support and thinking about the parade of problems I've been having with my work laptop, I decided against it.
It's embarrassing that individual applications still need to be configured for high resolution displays. It's embarrassing that my laptop regularly forgets my display configuration when docking. It's embarrassing my machine continues to send audio to "line-out" even after I unplug my headphones.
I sincerely hope that as systemd matures and wayland is adopted that the state of Linux on the desktop improves. More importantly, I hope the desktop environments learn to deal gracefully with new form factors, like 2-in-1's.
In the meantime, I'm actually enjoying Windows 10. As you said, the software and hardware are harmonious, and there is little unnecessary friction in the interface. There are definitely some rough edges, and not nearly enough UWP apps, but that is gradually changing. And the addition of the Linux subsystem should make the command-line situation a lot better than cygwin current does (though I mostly spend my time SSHed into remote Linux machines).
My phone was $40, unlocked and unsubsidized.
Even where insurance is required (not everywhere, and certainly not for people who do own vehicles or drive them on public roads) that's liability insurance, due to the risk you pose to other people and other people's property. It is not a precondition for citizenship or even car ownership.
Windows 10 and the Universal Windows App platform, on the other hand, are only just picking up steam.
Oh, it runs on phones, too? Huh.
Exactly. Everything is as promised in the lifecycle that Microsoft published years ago, so I have no idea what LichtSpektren was talking about when he said that Vista got f@#!ed before the promised EOL.
It was never getting a newer version of IE, but the current version will be supported through its extended support period.
Eh? Extended support is ending for Vista on April 11, 2017. The date hasn't changed since at least 2012.
When you miss a metric, redefine the metric.
There is little fundamental difference between tags and user-defined flags, which have been in IMAP since at least 1988 (see: RFC 1064).
The problem is that Google presents what are essentially searches (for a specific tag) as folders at a protocol level. This breaks not just an assumption, but a requirement that messages reside in a single folder, as IMAP UIDs are only valid within the context of a folder.
Google's solution is to layer a second, global identifier to each message, so that changes can be propagated to other views of the same message. This requires not only supporting the X-GM-MSGID extension, but making its use mandatory when the server advertises it.
This is not being a good actor, in my opinion. Protocol extensions are intended to provide additional functionality; not a means to work around your broken implementation of the core specification.
I'm a fan. I was using a Moto G and managed to drop it screen first onto marble tile, so I picked up a $50 Lumia to use until I fixed the G. That was months ago, and I haven't bothered fixing my old phone.
To be fair, my needs are modest. All I care about are the stock social media apps, a browser, a music player, a podcast player and a terminal client.
Three million units more than "total sales of the Microsoft Surface tablet range"? If they're talking quarterly sales, it's possible.
On the other hand, Microsoft sold an estimate 2 million Surface tablets in their last fourth quarter. Before the Surface 3, before the Surface Pro 4, before the Surface Book. I'm not going to hazard to guess their sales this quarter, but given the introduction of three new products (and two new form factors), generally positive reviews, and holiday sales on the remaining Surface Pro 3 inventory, I would be surprised if they don't hit 3 million units (which is what 9to5mac is projecting for the iPad Pro).
Erm, wot? Are you buried in a bunker or something? Tablets are ubiquitous.
Heck, I currently have thirteen of them at home (a Surface Pro 4, a Surface Book, two HP Touchpads, a Fire HDX, a Fire HD 6, a Fire HD 6 Kids edition, and six of the new 7" Fire tablets). Granted, the Touchpads have been relegated to toy status (for playing with Open WebOS), and the six new tablets are Christmas gifts (with a couple being given to relatives).
But in a family of six, we still have five tablets in regular use, and will have at least eight after the holidays.