You are correct about managing battery charge level, power drain, depth of discharge, etc. But it's not easy to get 4 solid years of service out of ANY battery in a portable electronic device. Does it happen? Sure. Reliable? Depends on who you ask. 1000 cycles is about 3 years of everyday use, maybe 4 years of Monday-Friday use. Managed batteries work reasonably well on phones. Then again, phones take a beating; the average user can be expected to lose or break their phone before the battery dies. Most laptops are not subject to that much physical abuse. I'm OK with a phone that lasts 3-4 years, but I expect more out of a well-maintained laptop.
Apple seems to think that battery lifetime is good enough to limit the number of in-warranty replacements, while not so good as to extend the useful life of the product beyond 4 years. They may be right, but I'm not so sure a 4-year disposable laptop is worth what they ask for it.
Although I agree with everything you say, people might eventually accept USB-C and maybe even the touch bar. I can easily do without both, so I won't be buying either one.
For quite some time, manufacturers have been trying to figure out what they need to add in order to get customers to accept the next price increase - or to slow down commoditization and price warfare. There is only so far they can go with size and weight before the entire market consists of small/thin/flimsy devices with fewer ports than they had before. Time will tell if consumers are smart enough to avoid planned obsolescence.
I suspect Apple is going to learn some expensive lessons before they rediscover the value of durability and product lifespan. A computer that nobody buys has an effective thickness of 0mm and a retail price of $0, with a profit margin of 0% and $0 projected revenue.
Even if people are dumb enough to buy laptops with irreplaceable batteries/memory/storage (as marketing research suggests they are), competitors will be quick to point out why that's not such a hot idea. Three years from now, AppleCare will be running out on these machines (assuming everyone is smart enough to buy extended warranty coverage). At that point, customers will be howling about how their investment decision worked out. I can get 3 years out of a mid-grade Windows or Linux machine and spend a lot less. Or I can go with a top-of-the-line machine and get 4-5 years. If Apple wants to sell disposable hardware, they need to price it as such.
I wouldn't be too surprised to see a state (maybe California) require a consumer warning label about computers with no serviceable parts inside. If it breaks out of warranty, repair is impossible. Most customers don't realize they are buying a disposable computer. Let's see what market research says when the warning labels start to appear.
Battery replacement is. After a few years, battery life will be half of whatever it started with. At that point, the MBP and its irreplaceable batteries can never stray very far from the charger. Users might accept that, as many people don't depend on the battery all that much. The ultimate deal breaker is soldered SSD. When that fails (and it will), the computer is junk.
If Apple offered a MacBook Pro with HALF of the current battery life, HALF of the memory, and HALF of the storage capacity, but made the components replaceable, they would sell a lot more of them, even if they were TWICE as thick.
The parent article says this is for street lights. Problem is, nobody needs a solar road to do this. Companies are selling solar-powered street lights that have a PV panel on the same pole as the light. Each unit operates independently, so wiring is limited to the panel and the pole. Maintenance is a lot easier than trying to swap out part of a road (assuming the other engineering problems can be solved).
And for $5.2 million, I doubt the solar road will pay for itself before it needs to be replaced. Investment fail.
Solder the RAM and SSD into a desktop configuration, while removing as many ports as possible. Seriously, they have to either keep wired Ethernet, HDMI, and USB 3.0 for the next generation of desktops (tacitly admitting it was a mistake to remove them from the MBP), or build a Thunderbolt 3 iMac and see if anyone wants to keep playing the dongle game. They can't use size and weight constraints as an excuse for diminished connectivity and planned obsolescence in a desktop machine. And they'll have to do something to support modern video processors. Nobody is going to pay a premium price for a desktop with as many limitations as the latest MBP.
US carriers often claim they have global coverage, which often turns out to be a Byzantine system of insane surcharges, marking up a foreign carrier's service by quite a bit. You REALLY don't want most US carriers for your cell service when traveling to other countries. A dual-SIM phone solves that problem, but only if you can positively disable the unwanted SIM card to avoid the unwanted surprise surcharges. Of course, you could just turn off your beloved iPhone and use a local cheapie phone for travel, but I can see why Apple wants to discourage that.
Correct. The departments are part of the Executive branch. Congress provides funding (via appropriation bills), and legislation that defines the authority of various agencies.
No matter how badly the Congress wants an agency to exist, and no matter how much money they appropriate for a beloved agency to function, nobody can stop the President from gutting the agency and declining to spend the money. The President can't reallocate the money to some other agency or function, but nobody can force him or her to spend the money in the first place. I have never seen it happen, but the President can unilaterally shut down a federal agency if he wants to. Nothing in the Constitution requires the President to spend all of the money Congress appropriates.
I doubt Trump will defund any agency 100% and reduce it to a paper shell. But I'd think twice before calling his bluff.
The act of buying tickets for scalpers will be handled by offshore boiler rooms (using either bots or dirt-cheap humans), and "gifted" to the scalpers. Lotsa luck trying to track down straw purchases from Bangalore.
Maybe they'll just ditch the charging connector altogether and provide a non-rechargeable, non-removable battery. The entire car will be only 5mm high, with humans riding in a dongle-wagon (sold separately), attached by a very stylish trailer hitch.
"BMW Assist" is basically a knock-off of GM's "OnStar". I wouldn't be too surprised if stories like this are happening all the time with less pricey cars. Anytime there is a stolen car with GPS and a communications link, police are going to make a serious attempt to find the car and grab the thief. Locking the scumbag inside the car is just an added bonus.
"The US does not have an official right to privacy."
Yes, it does, also known as the 4th amendment.
"[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The right to privacy in a public forum (or on a public network) is debatable, and the conduct of the US government is as the 4th amendment never existed. But it exists, at least on paper.
Not just RAM. Vista video requirements led to a generation of laptops with Intel GMA 900 video that were obsolete before leaving the factory. Instead of relegating such hardware to the recycle bin, it was marketed as "Vista Capable". https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-e-mails-reveal-intel-pressure-over-vista
If the Russians needed a strategy to influence the US election and control the next President, consider 2 choices. Which one is easier to implement and more reliable?
1. Use negative propaganda to knock down a candidate who is blatantly supported by the mainstream media -- in the hope of electing a billionaire who is (a) notoriously unpredictable and (b) difficult to bribe because he doesn't need the money. It may not be possible to add enough propaganda to overwhelm the lapdog media shills.
2. Write a check to the Clinton Foundation and send email to hrod17@clintonemail.com with instructions. If necessary, threaten to dump the entire email archive after she's elected. What's Hillary gong to do at that point? Call Putin's bluff and hope for the best? The beauty of the blackmail strategy is that the Russians don't actually need the emails. The mere threat would be sufficient.
Washington is filled with people who solicit checks from donors and follow instructions. The Clintons have been doing this on a grand scale for a long time. If you can wire transfer enough money, the Clintons are easily transformed into political muppets. Controlling them is a lot easier than defeating them.
My Passat was fun to drive, but only on the days when the car actually worked. Unfortunately, there were not enough of those days. Over the course of six months, I spent about $3600 at the dealership on a wide variety of problems. Each time, I thought the car would be OK for a while. And it was -- for about a month. After a while, I realized I was spending about $600/month to drive a 5-year old car. It would be cheaper to buy a new car whose payments are less than $600/month and drive that instead. So I did. I owned several VWs up to that point, but never again.
I get all the tech support I need from helpful services that call me whenever my computer has a virus. Somehow they know! Sure, it's expensive, but all I have to do is answer the phone and follow simple directions. A bunch of smart people with foreign accents take care of everything!
When a Windows PC vendor makes a bone-headed move, Microsoft is protected by diversity among manufacturers. They won't all ditch USB 3.0 and HDMI at the same time. As long as you can tolerate Windows, somebody will always offer a PC worth buying.
With OS X, the consumer's choice in products is only as good as Apple's hardware. In the past, Apple made some really excellent decisions with the MacBook Pro. In recent years? Not so much. If this is the best Apple can do, maybe they should exit the laptop hardware business. Open up the drivers and sell OS X to the rest of the Intel-based laptop world. At least then, somebody will offer a 2016 GPU and 32G of memory in a machine that doesn't require a basket of dongles to connect a phone, mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
I wouldn't be voting for him, but he's not a pathological liar, didn't sell out to the establishment (except maybe Obamacare), and his heart is in the right place. We could do a lot worse than Bernie.
Washington is so corrupt and disconnected from reality, I'm voting for maximum disruption.
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You are correct about managing battery charge level, power drain, depth of discharge, etc. But it's not easy to get 4 solid years of service out of ANY battery in a portable electronic device. Does it happen? Sure. Reliable? Depends on who you ask. 1000 cycles is about 3 years of everyday use, maybe 4 years of Monday-Friday use. Managed batteries work reasonably well on phones. Then again, phones take a beating; the average user can be expected to lose or break their phone before the battery dies. Most laptops are not subject to that much physical abuse. I'm OK with a phone that lasts 3-4 years, but I expect more out of a well-maintained laptop.
Apple seems to think that battery lifetime is good enough to limit the number of in-warranty replacements, while not so good as to extend the useful life of the product beyond 4 years. They may be right, but I'm not so sure a 4-year disposable laptop is worth what they ask for it.
Although I agree with everything you say, people might eventually accept USB-C and maybe even the touch bar. I can easily do without both, so I won't be buying either one.
For quite some time, manufacturers have been trying to figure out what they need to add in order to get customers to accept the next price increase - or to slow down commoditization and price warfare. There is only so far they can go with size and weight before the entire market consists of small/thin/flimsy devices with fewer ports than they had before. Time will tell if consumers are smart enough to avoid planned obsolescence.
I suspect Apple is going to learn some expensive lessons before they rediscover the value of durability and product lifespan. A computer that nobody buys has an effective thickness of 0mm and a retail price of $0, with a profit margin of 0% and $0 projected revenue.
Even if people are dumb enough to buy laptops with irreplaceable batteries/memory/storage (as marketing research suggests they are), competitors will be quick to point out why that's not such a hot idea. Three years from now, AppleCare will be running out on these machines (assuming everyone is smart enough to buy extended warranty coverage). At that point, customers will be howling about how their investment decision worked out. I can get 3 years out of a mid-grade Windows or Linux machine and spend a lot less. Or I can go with a top-of-the-line machine and get 4-5 years. If Apple wants to sell disposable hardware, they need to price it as such.
I wouldn't be too surprised to see a state (maybe California) require a consumer warning label about computers with no serviceable parts inside. If it breaks out of warranty, repair is impossible. Most customers don't realize they are buying a disposable computer. Let's see what market research says when the warning labels start to appear.
Battery replacement is. After a few years, battery life will be half of whatever it started with. At that point, the MBP and its irreplaceable batteries can never stray very far from the charger. Users might accept that, as many people don't depend on the battery all that much. The ultimate deal breaker is soldered SSD. When that fails (and it will), the computer is junk.
If Apple offered a MacBook Pro with HALF of the current battery life, HALF of the memory, and HALF of the storage capacity, but made the components replaceable, they would sell a lot more of them, even if they were TWICE as thick.
The parent article says this is for street lights. Problem is, nobody needs a solar road to do this. Companies are selling solar-powered street lights that have a PV panel on the same pole as the light. Each unit operates independently, so wiring is limited to the panel and the pole. Maintenance is a lot easier than trying to swap out part of a road (assuming the other engineering problems can be solved).
And for $5.2 million, I doubt the solar road will pay for itself before it needs to be replaced. Investment fail.
Solder the RAM and SSD into a desktop configuration, while removing as many ports as possible. Seriously, they have to either keep wired Ethernet, HDMI, and USB 3.0 for the next generation of desktops (tacitly admitting it was a mistake to remove them from the MBP), or build a Thunderbolt 3 iMac and see if anyone wants to keep playing the dongle game. They can't use size and weight constraints as an excuse for diminished connectivity and planned obsolescence in a desktop machine. And they'll have to do something to support modern video processors. Nobody is going to pay a premium price for a desktop with as many limitations as the latest MBP.
US carriers often claim they have global coverage, which often turns out to be a Byzantine system of insane surcharges, marking up a foreign carrier's service by quite a bit. You REALLY don't want most US carriers for your cell service when traveling to other countries. A dual-SIM phone solves that problem, but only if you can positively disable the unwanted SIM card to avoid the unwanted surprise surcharges. Of course, you could just turn off your beloved iPhone and use a local cheapie phone for travel, but I can see why Apple wants to discourage that.
Correct. The departments are part of the Executive branch. Congress provides funding (via appropriation bills), and legislation that defines the authority of various agencies.
No matter how badly the Congress wants an agency to exist, and no matter how much money they appropriate for a beloved agency to function, nobody can stop the President from gutting the agency and declining to spend the money. The President can't reallocate the money to some other agency or function, but nobody can force him or her to spend the money in the first place. I have never seen it happen, but the President can unilaterally shut down a federal agency if he wants to. Nothing in the Constitution requires the President to spend all of the money Congress appropriates.
I doubt Trump will defund any agency 100% and reduce it to a paper shell. But I'd think twice before calling his bluff.
How many self-driving cars went into tunnels and stopped when they lost GPS and Internet connectivity?
Runs Linux pretty much "out-of-the-box". All sorts of deployment options for kids with software or electronics aptitude.
The act of buying tickets for scalpers will be handled by offshore boiler rooms (using either bots or dirt-cheap humans), and "gifted" to the scalpers. Lotsa luck trying to track down straw purchases from Bangalore.
Field replaceable batteries!
Maybe they'll just ditch the charging connector altogether and provide a non-rechargeable, non-removable battery. The entire car will be only 5mm high, with humans riding in a dongle-wagon (sold separately), attached by a very stylish trailer hitch.
Non-replaceable tires, headlights, etc. Rest assured, Apple will find some way to kill the value proposition. That's all they do these days.
"BMW Assist" is basically a knock-off of GM's "OnStar". I wouldn't be too surprised if stories like this are happening all the time with less pricey cars. Anytime there is a stolen car with GPS and a communications link, police are going to make a serious attempt to find the car and grab the thief. Locking the scumbag inside the car is just an added bonus.
If we were building The Matrix. Otherwise, it's a monumentally bad idea.
"The US does not have an official right to privacy."
Yes, it does, also known as the 4th amendment.
"[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The right to privacy in a public forum (or on a public network) is debatable, and the conduct of the US government is as the 4th amendment never existed. But it exists, at least on paper.
Not just RAM. Vista video requirements led to a generation of laptops with Intel GMA 900 video that were obsolete before leaving the factory. Instead of relegating such hardware to the recycle bin, it was marketed as "Vista Capable". https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-e-mails-reveal-intel-pressure-over-vista
Speakers joining RAM, SSD, and batteries on Apple's growing list of components that can never be swapped out?
If the Russians needed a strategy to influence the US election and control the next President, consider 2 choices. Which one is easier to implement and more reliable?
1. Use negative propaganda to knock down a candidate who is blatantly supported by the mainstream media -- in the hope of electing a billionaire who is (a) notoriously unpredictable and (b) difficult to bribe because he doesn't need the money. It may not be possible to add enough propaganda to overwhelm the lapdog media shills.
2. Write a check to the Clinton Foundation and send email to hrod17@clintonemail.com with instructions. If necessary, threaten to dump the entire email archive after she's elected. What's Hillary gong to do at that point? Call Putin's bluff and hope for the best? The beauty of the blackmail strategy is that the Russians don't actually need the emails. The mere threat would be sufficient.
Washington is filled with people who solicit checks from donors and follow instructions. The Clintons have been doing this on a grand scale for a long time. If you can wire transfer enough money, the Clintons are easily transformed into political muppets. Controlling them is a lot easier than defeating them.
My Passat was fun to drive, but only on the days when the car actually worked. Unfortunately, there were not enough of those days. Over the course of six months, I spent about $3600 at the dealership on a wide variety of problems. Each time, I thought the car would be OK for a while. And it was -- for about a month. After a while, I realized I was spending about $600/month to drive a 5-year old car. It would be cheaper to buy a new car whose payments are less than $600/month and drive that instead. So I did. I owned several VWs up to that point, but never again.
I get all the tech support I need from helpful services that call me whenever my computer has a virus. Somehow they know! Sure, it's expensive, but all I have to do is answer the phone and follow simple directions. A bunch of smart people with foreign accents take care of everything!
When a Windows PC vendor makes a bone-headed move, Microsoft is protected by diversity among manufacturers. They won't all ditch USB 3.0 and HDMI at the same time. As long as you can tolerate Windows, somebody will always offer a PC worth buying.
With OS X, the consumer's choice in products is only as good as Apple's hardware. In the past, Apple made some really excellent decisions with the MacBook Pro. In recent years? Not so much. If this is the best Apple can do, maybe they should exit the laptop hardware business. Open up the drivers and sell OS X to the rest of the Intel-based laptop world. At least then, somebody will offer a 2016 GPU and 32G of memory in a machine that doesn't require a basket of dongles to connect a phone, mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
I wouldn't be voting for him, but he's not a pathological liar, didn't sell out to the establishment (except maybe Obamacare), and his heart is in the right place. We could do a lot worse than Bernie.
Washington is so corrupt and disconnected from reality, I'm voting for maximum disruption.
Cheap natural gas, made possible by tracking.