$699 (maybe 799 for a more premium model) seems to be a good compromise given what it would take to build a sufficiently similar PC while being close enough to the PS5/Switch. Xbox is practically dead.
I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.
> I still think about the way the CEO of Nokia back in 2010 describing what it would be like for them to abandon their in-house OS for Android: "Peeing yourself to stay warm"
This has intrigued me because eventually that’s what they ended up doing - although with two major caveats.
Firstly, the mobile space did not have room for 3 players - MS tried very hard and their Nokia phones were pretty good. But it was just one platform too many. They just couldn’t find a niche for itself as Android was being used everywhere due to their open source branch. Proves the point made by you though, there wasn’t space for a second Android if MS were to embrace open source. Nokia tried hard with Meego - I loved the UI but the market was moving at light speed back then.
Secondly, HMD started by branching off from the Nokia of yore and their Android devices are also very good.
I’ll always miss my old Nokias, they were the duopoly with the BlackBerry in the pre-smartphone era.
The phones themselves were very good. I have a functional Windows phone in a drawer, that I sometimes charge (and it still works!), but after playing with the tile UI for few minutes... eww
Absolutely LOVED the tiles UI and so did everyone I know that gave Windows phone a shot. By far the best mobile experience I've had outside of a few apps I wanted missing. I really miss the OS. I think in general though the other commenters were correct that there was already too much market share coming from iOS and Android.
I absolutely loved the tiles interface and held onto my Windows phone for as long as I could. I eventually had to switch to Android when apps I depended stopped working on Windows phone.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought in America there’s no obligation to attend school ever, because you can just be homeschooled and then take the GED? I think it’s dumb but I don’t know for sure.
It's complicated. There's a broad requirement that you receive a K-12 education. There's also a huge amount of pushback against most things that would infringe personal freedoms, so "I'm handling that myself, go away" is permitted but the exact details vary between states.
At least where I grew up if you drop out and don't file all the necessary homeschooling paperwork the police will visit you.
It's a sort of a grey area, and varies a lot by state and which way the political winds are blowing.
Miss too many days of government school because your family are poor and you had to help your parents put bread on the table? The truancy officer may show up to arrest you.
Announce you are homeschooling your kids to avoid liberal indoctrination? Sending your kids to work in a factory? A-ok in a number of states.
See - I actually think this is a pretty interesting idea. Stool/Urine are fairly solid indicators of personal health in a lot of ways.
But I think this is a product that probably shouldn't be allowed to exist as a standard SaaS/IoT product.
If this was a box I could hook up on my toilet that showed useful info on a screen locally - with zero network access... I'd consider buying.
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People are really glib about the loss of control relying on someone else's computer brings.
between service enshittification, company death (out of business), privacy concerns, and ownership contention (do I own a device if a company keeps keys to the locks inside it and won't give them to me? I'd argue a solid and resounding "NO")... I don't want anything to do with most modern networked devices in the form of IoT.
Sure. Load the data locally onto an SD card that I can use to share the data with my doctor. Sending the data off to some remote third party via a questionable internet connection is a no-go for me.
> Landlords get in a lot of trouble, for renting illegal apartments.
Do you have a source for this because I’m not convinced. Maybe a small portion do but the majority face no penalties. When I was in college the number of questionably legal homes for rent was insane, but I didn’t have time to go after them. A friend of mine did and won, but it required a lot of time. Most of the time the landlord does what they want and the renters don’t have the resources to go after them.
You make it sound like it’s the renters who take advantage of the landlords but most of the time it’s the landlords who do whatever they want. The ones who stopped paying rent probably were doing so legally because a lot of them were forced to not work.
Anything legal involves time and effort, but you certainly cannot do a "rapid eviction" on an illegal or unscheduled apartment.
Landlords naturally (e.g., by the nature) have the upper hand because they have the desired thing - the rental.
Tenants often have the legal upper hand, but the whole job of the landlord (even good ones!) is to work out which tenants know how to play the game and not rent to them.
In this case it sounds like "do whatever they want" for the landlords means entering into a mutually agreed upon contract to rent their house when they aren't allowed to by the nonsensical nitpicky rules. But "do whatever they want" for the tenants means squatting. So, yeah, it sounds like the tenants are the ones taking advantage. Tenants can get away with murder.
Look at rentals in college towns… education is already expensive so the tenants just want cheap housing. This attracts many landlords of the slumlord variety but because there’s a contract involved they’re given a pass. But even then they don’t necessarily abide by the contract and students don’t have the time and money to deal with small claims court so they just pay up (or accept the loss). Landlords absolutely take advantage of this situation.
As for squatters, yeah they’re taking advantage of lax enforcement but they’re few and far between despite what you’d read on the internet.
> Tenants can get away with murder.
Sounds like hyperbole
I guess my rant is just that renters get shit on because of a few squatters but landlords barely ever get criticized because there’s a contract involved. Some of the stuff I’ve read on the contracts isn’t even legal but a lot of tenants aren’t savvy to cross check laws or they’re owned by huge conglomerates who use stuff like RealPage.
I will admit to some bias here. I have been renting now for 22 years and have never had anything beyond a minor problem with a landlord that couldn't be resolved by a phone call. This seems to be the case for 90% of people I know. Then there's that person that is always having problems with landlords / neighbors and I tend to think the problem isn't actually the landlord / neighbors.
Yeah I can understand. In college I certainly lived with some folks who trashed the place. After I graduated and rented in nicer parts I haven’t had as much of an issue. Except most of them want to keep as much of the security deposit as possible and start coming up with bullshit costs with no itemization. I admit I’m biased against landlords - I hate how much of the costs can be passed down to the renter, like they aren’t making enough already. The best ones IME are the ones who have one or two properties, and the ones who have close to a dozen are a nightmare. Never been happier after buying my own place.
This is completely irrelevant to anything. It's none of the business of the tenant how much the landlord is profiting, and it's the obligation of the landlord to return the deposit fairly even if he is losing money on the property. Your experience is the opposite of mine in terms of small vs large landlords. Where I'm from the corporate landlords don't even charge deposits when you have good credit and income.
> This is completely irrelevant to anything. It's none of the business of the tenant how much the landlord is profiting
It certainly feels relevant when they start making excuses about why they have to charge you for things they cannot charge you for, claiming how expensive things are now. Operating costs have gone up for everyone, that doesn’t mean you get make things up to pass down the cost. But I do understand your point.
> Where I'm from the corporate landlords don't even charge deposits when you have good credit and income.
True, that has been my experience as well and I wasn’t explicit about that. The last couple of places we rented were from corporate ones and have had 0 issues compared to the mom and pop ones.
Around here, most of the landlords are people just like you. They own a house, and want to get a bigger one, so they either rent the old house (those are often legal rentals), or they divide the house they live in (or their old house), and rent the apartments (those are the ones that are usually illegal).
They aren't land barons or slumlords, and they get pretty screwed, when tenants abuse them. They can lose everything. One family I knew, had to let the house go into foreclosure, because the tenant refused to move, and refused to pay rent. I don't know what happened, after that, but I know that it's nearly impossible to sell a house that's occupied, and the tenants will often abuse the house before they are evicted (which can take months).
Surely it’s more efficient to just ignore this release and continue using the browser than it is to switch providers? Unless there’s another reason, in which case I’m all ears. I’ve been quite happy with Fastmail as a provider.
Buying Google workspace is not an option for me because the whole point of switching for me is to de-Google myself. Appreciate your input though, I totally understand.
I get it, fastmail is the easiest non-google option, likely the one with the biggest featureset+SLA too. It just makes me sad all electron garbage that people push around.
and stop being nice to me, we are competing with reddit here
I just think HOAs tend to favor the vocal minority. If you’re really active and just be very nosy, you can have more influence. I would be livid if someone told me (outside of city/state regulation) what I can do and can’t do after I make a purchase worth hundreds if thousands of dollars.
I know many who lived in HOAs - one of them got fined for having plants by their condo door, another for putting something on their patio, etc. Who makes up these dumb rules?
And it costs $500/mo easy. This is why most people hate HOAs.
You say regulate, I say discriminate. The few people who are in HOA boards have power to decide what the rules should be, and if they don’t like it then sucks to be you. That’s not regulation, that’s discrimination.
I don’t think it needs to compete on price directly, if it can deliver the polish of a console. It can also play up the angle of being a full blown computer.
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