I like this quiz format much more than just reading a doc because I get to guess what it might do before finding out, which reinforces how well I remember it. As a Python amateur I had no idea fstrings were so powerful!
It's interesting to see someone bring up ThinkPads!
I have been saying for a few years now that I want the "classic ThinkPad of phones" with readily available parts, sensible design choices (drainage holes on ThinkPads were a boon! Same with quickly swappable battery handles!) and some kind of afterlife that goes beyond whatever the manufacturer or OS developer decides it is going to be.
To my knowledge of keitei, there aren't any Richard Sapper-ish ThinkPad-styled ones, but you do occasionally see red flourishes like the ThinkPad nurple/TrackPoint, but they're usually on things like a SIM card tray, but not generally contrasted by black, but similar impact to Sapper's distinctive style.
I love me some utilitarian industrial design—I think that's what I'm searching for in modern phones. Sadly, I think that mentality is leaving us as the likes of Sapper pop their clogs and take the mindset with them. It's definitely somewhat oldskool values buried amidst all this.
Sent from my modded classic ThinkPad next to Richard Sapper's '70s Artemide Tizio lamp with an aftermarket LED upgrade to make it energy efficient. :- )
Out of curiosity, why's it your last Apple product?
Watching lots of Louis Rossmann has put me almost ideologically against Apple (even though they design great hardware and smooth UX within their ecosystem), but I'm not good at forming coherent points to present to Apple loving friends.
For me so far, I think it's about control over what I buy - but the rebuttal is always "you're buying a product from them, if you don't like it then tough".
The opinion I got from Louis's content is that in a sense he is right, but also almost every brand is even worse. Apple does pretty much nothing to help 3rd party repair and sometimes actively impeeds it, but most other tech products do that while also not even having 1st party repair options.
I remember when Samsung had removable batteries, I went in to a Samsung store to buy a replacement for my S5 battery and they told me they didn't sell them, only new phones. Meanwhile I can take my iPhone in to any Apple store and they will replace the battery for me.
So yeah Apple does need to be forced to massively improve their practices but so does pretty much the entire tech industry aside from a few small projects that focus on being repairable.
I just don't see the value add anymore and the company appears to have lost its product vision and the design sensibilities are slipping. Apple is controlled by a geriatric board and a logistics expert and it shows.
I feel I am more frequently encountering software bugs, vaporware,(dESiGnEd fOr ApPle InTelLiGeNce), and ridiculous "innovation" (genmoji). I feel the hardware advances are not very relevant to me, I don't need VR or augmented reality. I want a computer to get out of my way and solve problems for me so I can spend time in plain old reality. The hardware upgrades I DO care about are ridiculously overpriced (Ram upgrades are abusively expensive).
While I prefer my computer to be a tool to get a job done and don't want the computer itself to be a hobby. I also do not want to be forced to use AI. I also dislike the rent seeking and toolbooth behavior of iMessage and the App store. Now that linux has more paved paths, things increasingly "just work" and hardware has basically caught up I don't see a good reason to support Apple's non-vision with my money.
What Linux computer can you buy with the battery life, quietness, lack of heat and speed of a modern ARM based Mac?
Battery life, probably none. For the rest it's pretty ok now - I recently got a ThinkPad T14. Performance-wise it's in M1/M2 territory and yes the fans can spin up, but they are not very loud.
I have used MacBooks since 2007, but I have started using the ThinkPad more and more. Why?
I put in 64GiB RAM and a 2TB SSD and it cost me almost nothing. The laptop plus these expansions was 1400 or 1500 Euro, a MacBook with 64GiB RAM and 2TB SSD would cost me 5000 Euro. When the battery has had its time, I can replace it by removing a few screws. I added a PCI cellular modem. The expandability and maintanability is just great.
Even though the GPU in my MacBook Pro (M3 Pro) blows away the ThinkPad's GPU on paper, the ThinkPad with Wayland actually renders everything super-smoothly on my 120Hz 4K screen, while on the MacBook the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is barely noticeable. On the ThinkPad I can run NixOS, which is generally much nicer than macOS.
The primary thing that my MacBook has over my ThinkPad are battery life and a bunch of really good Mac applications like the Affinity Suite. But since more and more applications are switching to Electron, it has become less of a problem. Heck, I even have 1Password with fingerprint unlock, etc. like if it was a MacBook.
As far as phones - your alternative is to buy an Android phone with an operating system by an ad company that is also pushing AI just as hard.
Or I don't know, you buy a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and you have better privacy than on an iPhone? And no F1 movie ads too.
I think there are a lot of offerings out there now. Maybe not to the minute with respect to battery life but Apples chip advantage is steadily evaporating. I typically don't need more than 8 hours of battery personally.
Have heard good things about framework computers. As a more efficient chip or battery comes out you just upgrade that component if your use case requires it.
By the way, it's not a lack of heat in the Air. The M4 will hit 105°C and start throttling pretty soon in sustained workloads. At any rate, modern Ryzen laptop CPUs have narrowed the gap with Apple Silicon performance-wise. It's mostly battery life that's still lagging behind. It not only requires a mainboard optimized for power use (which is pretty good nowadays on modern laptops), but also very strong OS integration. I am not sure if non-Apple laptops will get that far, because Linux and Windows simply have to target much more hardware.
At any rate, non-Apple laptops have other benefits, like being able to get 64GiB/128GiB memory and large SSDs without breaking the bank.
In the end it's all a trade-off. If you are a sales representative that needs all-day battery life, MacBook is probably the only option. If you are a developer that needs something portable to hop between desks or on the train, but usually have access to a power socket (yay, Dutch/German trains), a few hours of battery is enough and you might prefer to get an insane amount of memory/storage, a built-in cellular modem, and an ethernet port instead.
Most people don't really need more than 2 hours of battery life anyway[1] as their laptops barely ever leave the house. >8H of battery is nice to have but it is really an important parameter for a specific population while for others it is just convenience. I wouldn't trade an OS/desktop I don't like over my linux setup just because it last longer when I never need more than a couple of hours on battery[3].
[1] which means you need a 4 to 6h range when new if you don't plan to replace the battery too often
[2] students, construction companies, people who are always on the road...
Is that where we are going? Most people don’t need a laptop that has more than 2 hours battery life?
When I was in the office full time in the bad old days, you would be in a conference room and every one would plug their laptops in.
After I started working remotely and still doing business trips, one charge could last a full day either going back and forth between conference rooms, in “war rooms” etc and no one with M series MacBooks even worried about charging.
Heck my MacBook Pro (work laptop) can last a full day on power with my portable USB C powered external monitor where the power and video come from one cord.
I spent almost 10 hours at a coworking space and didn't even worry about charging my M4 MacBook Pro. Apple Silicon is a game changer: incredible performance and long battery life, generally totally silent, no thermal throttling. 10 hours may be extreme, but it's nice to be able to go to a coffee shop and not worry about not having charged your laptop since last week.
I used to run Linux on a laptop (10+ years ago) and you couldn't even close the laptop lid without risking it not going to sleep and overheating in your bag.
It is exactly what I am saying, it is nice, a convenience. But that's it.
I don't worry about closing my thinkpad lid. Well I do because I disable sleep on lid close and prefer using the dedicated button for that. But my thinkpad goes to sleep when I ask it to.
I have an Asus Vivobook S14 laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 258v processor. In Linux, it gets 12-15 hours of real usage (i.e. not manufacturer "playing videos off local storage with wifi off and the screen all the way down" battery life numbers). If I'm doing something like web browsing or streaming videos, the laptop doesn't get hot and the fan doesn't turn on. I've only had the fan turn on when I'm doing something intensive like compiling GCC or video encoding. It feels just as fast as my ARM Macbook Air.
I'd sacrifice some battery life to have a Thinkpad (example: T14 gen 5), with the superior keyboard, Touch point and smaller touchpad (the Mac one is annoyingly too large).
I have stopped caring so I caved in to work policy and got an iPhone, and I really do not see the point. It is just a thing no better or worse than an Android...
That’s cool, but you represent a tiny slice of the market that as devices get more powerful, isn’t addressable in the low volumes needed to make you happy.
When the chips needed to make a phone are priced like toys, maybe you’ll find the product for you.
It sounds too good to be true... article mentioned none of the side effects that other commenters had rightly pointed out. Otherwise I would actually be tempted, but there are no free lunches (especially when messing with your biology).
I've often wondered if this long-term planning and foresight is fundamentally incompatible with a democracy running on sub-decade cycles. I imagine the two could coexist if voters themselves were more aware of their candidates' long term effects, but they need to trust politicians to actually produce results (and not get voted out next cycle).
>but they need to trust politicians to actually produce results (and not get voted out next cycle).
Due to the lack of accountability of politicians and the greed of wealthy elites who own them, most of the democratic west became low trust societies, where people can't trust politicians to have their interest at heart anymore.
That's why you see people voting the most extreme and destructive anti-establishment candidates in almost every major democracy, because voting the least worst option as was the norm, simply resulted into a slow march towards feudalism: unaffordable housing, higher taxes, stagnating wages, decline in quality of public services, increased illegal migration, etc.
So why would people choose to vote for the same thing for multiple decades? That would be the definition of insanity.
> Due to the lack of accountability of politicians and the greed of wealthy elites who own them, most of the democratic west became low trust societies, where people can't trust politicians to have their interest at heart anymore.
That is the core problem of the United States today.
In a low-trust society, it's hard to do anything low-margin but useful. The overhead of hostile action makes it unprofitable. Yet most of the goods and services people really need are low-margin.
China has formal Five Year Plans. Currently, the fourteenth Five Year Plan is finishing up, and the fifteenth, to start in 2026, is being worked on. They're published openly, but few in the West read them. They're general in the sense that they don't specify who does what, but specific in that they specify what should be emphasized and funded.
Historically, the Five Year Plans were aspirational and political through at least the 1980s.
There were some major disasters. Search "Great Leap Forward".
Some time in the 1990s, the planning system seemed to gain focus and started to become effective in guiding industrialization.
The Five Year Plans drive capital allocation. If a company wants to do something that's in the plan, it's easier to get money, loans, land, and such than for business areas not in the plan.
This is different from Soviet central planning, which was more like a very sluggish manufacturing scheduling system that told specific plants what to do.
Updating was annual, which is far too slow for that level of control.
Search "Gosplan".
I've made a couple photo/music montages with both tools. Not an advanced user, but I found Kdenlive was more stable on Ubuntu and the UX is similar between the two.
Interesting arguments in favour of technology transfer/diffusion that I really needed. However, I wonder if letting greater economies of scale form would accelerate progress overall when those economies of scale are applied to research.
Fundamentally, I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one.
Tech companies that I use and (more importantly) I pay for and I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android), Microsoft (via office365), OVH (via servers), Proton (via email). And there are others, but tried to select known ones.
Do I like all that they do? Definitely not. But the services for which I ended up paying are reasonable. I would not like to build my one OS for a mobile, install the 10s applications required in an enterprise or manage my own data center/mail server.
Of course there are some that I find adversarial, but that is more a personal feeling - like Apple which asked X times more in price for minor (in my view) better quality for their devices.
It might help you to consider that pricing in direct proportion to bill of materials means the base model must increase in cost to balance the lost revenue from the higher spec devices. That is, people paying "over the odds" for the larger ssd and so forth subsidise the base model.
There are so many actors out there that collect data (ex: GSM companies, utility companies, CCTV, states, etc.) but nowhere near as much discussions as mobile phones.
Regarding Google, I’m consistently disappointed by the ads they suggests to me. I’d prefer relevant recommendations, but what I get is irrelevant. My favorite example: couple of years ago they kept showing me ads for a household appliance like 6-10 months after I already bought one, even if I had lots of emails regarding the buying process in gmail. I can't think "oh, they are evil masterminds" if they fail at their most basic stuff.
So they can record how many times per day I unlock the phone or open an app or the location if the GPS is on, good luck using that for something useful.
I do have limits to what I think they should collect in bulk (ex: video or audio), but I did not see allegations that they do that so far, and I think sometimes it's healthy anyhow to behave "as if they do it", just in case.
Things like these make me glad to have a Xiaomi phone with their minimal implementation of Google instead of a full on Android phone. I get to avoid this stuff being pushed on me, and I don't use any of the Xiaomi "AI" stuff (which wouldn't support foreign apps anyway).
Granted, my data is definitely being sent to Xiaomi analytics, fixed by NextDNS. Re: governmental influence, I'd prefer Chinese to US (then again, that is my ethnicity bias). Recent events make the two governments look more similar than ever.
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