That's what your nose is for. (I'm quite skilled at advancing or going back by gently tapping the kindle against my face. It helps that I'm very nearsighted so it's kind of already there)
Yes - but - ironically - he did that _before_ joining them. IIRC he literally started collaborating and helping them while being at a different company.
That seems surprisingly common to me. Visionary engineer has solution to problem, gets hired, solves the broad strokes in the first year, then spends N more years in meetings with exec stakeholders and worrying about schedules/hiring/financials instead of _doing the vision work_.
yeah, and its kind of just misaligned incentives. Visionary engineer wants to solve hard tech problems, corporation wants a product with mass-market appeal. To hit mass-market appeal, corporation cost-cuts until the hard tech problems are outside the solution space...
This would be perfect if it could monitor the force with which the lid is closed (macs have accelerometers after all, either this info or an acceptable proxy could be derived?).
Gently close? no action.
Stronger, faster action? Disable touch ID
Slam shut in full panic? yeah disable all biometrics, lose all state, even wipe the ram and the filevault key if it's an option
Perfect rage quitting machine. There should be an enterprise version: when lid is closed with full force it also sends a professional resignation letter to the current employer.
Totally logical, especially with some sort of thermal mass, as you can throttle down the clock when quiet to cool down after, I used this concept in my first sci-fi novel where the AI was aware of its temperature for these reasons. I run my Pico2 board in my MP3 jukebox at 250Mhz, it has been on for several weeks without missing a beat (pun intended)
I wouldn't judge it so harshly. The Garmin side is indeed a wide gaping hole in the story, and I consider them actually well worth bothering with - but a lot of the considerations are interesting and resonate with me. The condemnation of google, how they betrayed the trust of consumers and partners, their fleeting, unstable attention, the damage it caused to companies and to trust in the product, is spot on.
I would have maybe added a mention of the extremely cheap watches (like an Amazfit I got for 49 EUR before I received an AW Ultra as a gift - but Xiaomi/Redmi, Huawei, even Samsung have stuff in that range) as they fit the described "What a Smartwatch Actually Does" use case perfectly at an amazing bargain price. If I really don't need much beyond telling time, showing notifications and maybe counting my steps, anything above 30EUR is going to be a really hard sell. We can add 20 EUR extra budget for a decent tracking of sports and fitness functionality. And the point is that, despite not admitting it even to themselves, really few people actually truly need something beyond these core functions which have stayed the same for a decade. As others observed in the past, the target user of an Apple Watch is someone who imagines themselves active and needing all the fancy stuff, but in reality doesn't.
I really do like my Ultra, and actually use the payment and scuba diving (as a backup) which go beyond the bare basics and set it aside from most competitors, whether cheap or not, but the reality is that I'd never have bought it myself. And I have no idea how the battery life is found acceptable by anyone - it's a joke. I can't leave 3 days without bringing its dedicated charger. One night out of every 3, my sleep quality isn't tracked as it's charging on the nightstand. Anything with less than 10 days (and I'm being generous) is - or should be - ashaming IMHO. Especially as a charging cycle every max 3 days means the nonremovable battery will turn them into e-waste within 6 years. Disgraceful.
Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
I entirely agree with you, and profoundly dislike them, but it's clearly working for them if their financials don't lie. While most other manufacturers bleed money, Samsung had healthy profits on smartphones last time I checked. It still puzzles me that anyone would buy them at all, but I've long accepted that I'm not a representative sample.
So given that, I don't see why they would bother coming up with a vision after all this time.
I managed to purge myself of Apple as of a couple of years back by getting an s24 ultra.
Main things that stand out over apple:
- Much higher resolution camera w/ pretty incredible zoom. Though overall picture quality is a far closer comparison.
- S-pen, mostly used for its remote capability, shame they dropped that for the s25...
- Samsung Dex. I use my phone as my laptop daily, I've also used it as a dumb terminal for remote gaming while travelling which works exceptionally well
- Access to alternative browsers, ad blocking, alternate stores, side loading apps etc
While Google is no angel Apple actively works against open systems and control of your own devices, I'm glad to be out of that ecosystem.
Samsung seems to be targetting a sweet spot. "Costs less than Apple, superficially looks like an iPhone, product lineup includes smaller form factors, good enough."
It doesn't work for me, but that's because I courageously use my headphone jack.
Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.
I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.
I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.
It also fits in a handful of bytes or kilobytes what would take half a gigabyte to communicate in a video - sometimes making the difference if you have limited bandwidth or a cap on monthly traffic.
It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)
It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)
It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.
It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.
It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.
It's also the only medium where semantic reasoning and indexing at scale makes financial sense. I can run RAG over millions of text rows in Postgres for pennies, but the compute costs to process and embed video content are still prohibitive if you care about margins.
