You also get a streamlined setup in a lot of cases. I run a small business ($200k to $400k/year revenue). I personally know how to set up servers, I like geeking out about things like ZFS and spool and RAID-Z. On the other hand for the business I write iOS apps, and that means Macs with MacOS. They have a backup system (Time Machine) that is fiddly to set up a NAS to support. I know because I’ve bought commodity Linux hardware, set up file sharing (I have tried both NFS and AFP) and attempted to get my little Linux system to be a target for Mac Time Machine, and invariably the Macs don’t see the Linux system after a while and stop backing up.

I know how to debug tech issues, and expect if I spent a few hours a week on it I would eventually figure out I have something configured wrong, or one of the 20 packages involved have a bug and a fix (or a bug I could fix). Except if I do that those are house I’m not billing. “A few hours a week” rapidly becomes much more money then paying to buy a NAS.

I’m not likely to buy any subscription stuff for my NAS, and if I outgrow my disk space and can’t put commodity drives in to expand I’ll give commodity hardware and a self install another run. Maybe it will “just work” next time. That would be cool, I like ZFS and I could set it up to resilver every month I know I would feel better about that then even a RAID-Z that isn’t set to resilver.

When you are making money paying someone else money in order to get time can cost a lot less then spending the time you need to get the service (NAS and/or backups in this case) for free.

The word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That isn’t a trivial operation for a lot of people. Consider someone running a photography business who buys a NAS so they can have all their work product backed up locally. Yes, in theory they could follow some canned instructions on how to install and configure TrueNAS, but it is going to take them a lot of time, and they may get derailed at any point and not manage to complete the process because the software they loaded is maybe slightly newer (or older) then the step-by=step they are using, and the UI has changed in some way _you_ might find trivial and take 15 seconds to adapt to, but the part of the brain you use to interpret UI and figure out what it means they have “wasted” on understanding color temperatures and how to adjust focus depth. Which to be fair to them is much more valuable in their day-to-dayand to be fair to you, you have a lot less need to understand color tempatures then a photographer.

So the value of all the stuff TrueNAS offers v having a user friendly UI and support channel differs depending on who you are, and what you are good at. Even my solution of “put the disk in the old NAS and format it first” isn’t exactly easy for some people. Not because they are dumb, but because they are going to add drives to it every what five years? That is a long time to remember an extra set of hoops to jump through. (It won’t be too hard if they think about it in advance, and put a sticky note on the back of the old NAS “format all new disks in old NAS first!” And on the old NAS “don’t throw out, needed to format new disks before using in new NAS!”)

Don’t discount how important “easy UI, phone support” is to some people.

Er, if I read this stuff right, you “just” need to keep the old NAS around and start each drive in it. Once formatted in a 2024 or prior Synology the not-branded disks will be allowed to do everything the branded disks are required for, even after you move it to the new Synology. So you are “stuck” keeping an old Synology around to “bless” every disk before you use it...

Having a smartphone isn’t the same as having anything like broadband speeds on it at home.

I moved form CA to VT three years ago. The phone I had did 5G, maybe even 5GUWB. In CA it was regularly quite fast. Fast enough that if the home internet went out I could swap over and still “do stuff”, including low resolution video conference calls (i.e. the kind of stuff you needed to WFH during a pandemic). After I moved same phone, same service and at home it was zero to one bars of 3G, and while 3G is much much faster then what people considered broadband in the 1990s, it is kind of marginal for video conferencing (even low resolution). At one bar it isn’t marginal, it just doesn’t have the oomph. Hell it is slow loading “regular” web pages.

So having a smartphone isn’t the same as having boradband.

You can disagree on what the government definition of broadband should be, but if you are looking at “does this qualify for a government subsidy” it really ought meet the government definition. Also while I might agree that 100up/20down is more then most people need, there is a limit where it stops being useful for things people need, and while 30 years ago “videoconferencing” wouldn’t have been defined as a need, it has more or less gotten to that point now. People that can do it can do WFH jobs, and people that can’t generally can not.

Even my current job which is WFH and I don’t have any weekly video conferences, I do occasionally get on a video conference with a client and watch them reproduce a bug, or whatever so I can see what is going on, or see their expression. (cellular connections around here may not be all that fast, but I can and do have a reasonable wired connection)

It benefits customers.

If you make the not unlikely assumption that Apple won’t accept lower margins moving production from China to here will make iPhones cost more. My guess is around 2x. It also will likely increase the cadence between new phones form 12 months to 14. It may also be hard to produce at the same rate, so look forward to shortages.

Even if you assume that Apple will be ok with taking a margin hit on it’s largest volume product even cutting the margins to zero might not be enough to avoid a price increase (if my 2x price hike guess is right, only around 30% of the 1x price is margin, so we are looking at what a 1.8x price hike as Apple drops it’s margins to 0%).

Apple was the last US computer manufacturer to offshore production doing it in the early 2000s not the 1990s. That is part of how they almost went bankrupt, because customers do not like higher prices. So higher prices are definitely not an advantage in any useful way.

Eh? Apple has supported moving the dock to the left or right sides for well over a decade (bottom/left/right are all supported, not top though). You can’t move the menu bar off of the top with Apple’s standard software thoguh.

Agreed, the translucent menu bar with the blur effect carefully chosen by Apple to minimize the damage of the translucency is nuts. Like they spend so much effort to make the translucence less damaging when they could just...make a black background on the bar, or anything that contrasts well with foreground color of the lettering (case in point: menu bar is exceptionally readable if you choose a desktop like live satellite earth view that has a solid black background; if you use one of the default Apple colorful backgrounds the menu bar is instantly less readable)

Ok, fine. I mean I don’t want more bitcoin mined. I’m not super excited by most AI products, so I don’t need any of those. On the other hand the people being told to “conserve” are frequently the same people that buy products that involve AWS, or but something they can yell “Alexa what is the weather like!” or “Ok Google when will it snow next”.

Want conserving to work, don’t buy/use the products that require data centers. Then nobody will be excited to build them.

I’m not sure how this is “surprising” given that most people either loathe QR menus, or are at best neutral.

In the abstract I lean neutral, like a restaurant with a QR menu is going to have an up to date menu online which makes it easier to decide what to have in advance of going. In “the real world” I’m negative since frequently whatever little underpowered server the is hanging onto the menus tends to be slow to cough it up, or maybe the restaurants “hosting provider” intentional bandwidth limits the thing hoping to squeeze some sort of upgrade fee onto the restaurant. At any rate it tends to be far slower then t has any right to be, and harder to flip around in.

I have never encounter someone who goes “QR menus! I love those!”, I rarely encounter someone who doesn’t complain. Maybe not enough to say they won’t go, but if they complain it clearly plays into their choice a little bit. Like “I want the fried chicken...but not at the QR menu place, bah!”, just most people don’t give their entire restaurant selection thought process out loud...

That may come to pass, but they were not taking a class that was teaching that. They took ”how to think”, and fobbed it off onto AI. More over they didn’t even use the tools you are claiming are of value well enough not to get caught.

AI being tech advances, but to me right now there are two key parts of “using AI well”, figuring out how to phrase a prompt that gets plausible seeming answers, and perhaps more importantly being able to understand the answer well enough to know if it is crap or not. I assert (without proof!) that the students that get caught using AI are running aground on the rocky shores of “AI produced total crap for an answer”. The equivalent of the AI inventing non-existent papers and citing them, or not existent law cases. Or miscounting the r’s in strawberry. Or maybe even advocating that one glue cheese to the crust to keep it from running off of one’s pizza. Or advising one eat a non zero number of rocks.

Maybe in the future AI will be better at not producing factually incorrect answers (LLMs do it basically by design as a byproduct of avoiding hill climbing and stale prose). That doesn’t seem to be in the cards in the short term though.

Ok, ok, ok I’m way out on a limb here about _why_ they got caught, but I’m perfectly fine with having some classes about how to use AI. I’m also fine having classes where one should not be using AI, and for people who do so to face the consequences (which ought not be more severe from plagiarizing in general, or other forms of cheating),

Also won’t make much difference if you assume that social media will be assessed in bad faith, and refuse to post anything that could be remotely misinterpreted.

In other words if you keep your head down and assume you live in a police state it’ll all work out ok.

Unless of corse you are a fan of the wrong sports ball team and an immigration official decides to “not have anymore JETS fans” in the country. So maybe the best policy is not to have an social media footprint at all if you are an immigrant...

(note: I once applied for a job somewhere that wanted to do a “background check” and you had to cough up social media handles so they could do a scan...I was disqualified because I didn’t have a facebook presence or twitter at the time, or anything else they recognized, and they decided that was suspicious & merited a failing “grade"...no reason an immigration official couldn’t decide someone with no social media footprint is just as suspicious as a potential new citizen...so keep in mind it may not be enough just to keep your head down, you may need to find the right social medias to join, follow a statistically correct number of people, and post just a few of just the right memes, or get out of the country)

Indeed they are, but keep in mind the kind of things people post on social media tend to be pictures and words. You can be very law abiding and still say things. Like “this kind of shit would never have happened in the old country”, or “America is pretty awesome, but it is a shame you can’t get decent food most places”, and “Fantastic people, shame about the President”.

I mean we do have a strong tradition of complaining about our government, and you can be perfectly law abiding and still talk trash about social and fiscal policy. You can be a legal immigrant obeying all local laws and have an opinion about say loan forgiveness. (my controversial poison, disliked by most people is “yeah, it is a loan and letting people out of it for free isn’t great, but making them immune to bankruptcy is lunacy, lets retroactively make all loans subject to the jurisdiction of bankruptcy court, and all educational loans automatically dissolved in a bankruptcy”)

Immigrants should have the freedom to have feelings about US policy, and voice them. As opposed to having everything they post on social media be subject to the whims of immigration officials.

Ok, well I have these Google (er, Nest...no...Google?) WiFi routers, made in....oh hey China! Maybe I should ditch them and buy some American Amazon Eero WiFi routers? I think they are made in Vietnam, that’s good right? Yeah? No? Should I fall back on my very very old Apple WiFi routers most definitely made in China?

Does anyone make WiFi routers in the USA?

If the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) had named it to “The Gulf of The Big Fat Orange Baby” Google Maps would have reflected the change just as fast.

Granted they probably would have put out an emergency update to roll it back lest they suffer in the following tantrum.

The speed at which the change was adopted has more to do with it coming via proper avenues not anyone actually wanting to make the orange baby happy. GNIS’s names are considered authoritative for the USA, and are accepted on a semi-automated basis. Mostly because their are thousands of these a day, mostly minor water ways and other things that effect people in limited geographic areas that Google has limited ability to check and correct anyway (like say a pond on one or two people’s private property in the middle of nowhere in VT). https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmaps.app.goo.gl%2FsUHAAR...

Worse, Firefox and Safari are *also* funded largely by money paid to those browsers in exchange for Google Search being the default search engine, with 86% of Firefox's revenue coming from that agreement. If part of the DOJ settlement involves Google not being allowed to do this, there's a good chance that web browser development will come to a screeching halt across the entire industry. And if the decision doesn't prevent that, then you would end up with Chrome development being paid for by Google, so you would likely gain almost nothing from the split.

FYI good overall analysis!

Safari alone of all the browsers has a source of income available to it: Apple has a lot of money. It doesn’t need Google’s money in order to keep working on Safari. They fund it because it is part of the battery life testing, so making it use 10% less power over a 20 hour test improves battery life by a noticeable amount (not 10% because other tasks are involved). They fund it because JavaScript is a direct part of many smartphone benchmarks, so making Safari 10% faster makes the next iPhone have noticeably better scores. Any usability improvements help sell their hardware products, and so on.

Of corse that assumes that Apple can successfully argue that including Safari software as part of the hardware purchase of a Mac or iPhone doesn’t constitute illegal bundling (which Apple currently does mostly by claiming they are not dominant in the smartphone world, Android has substantial market share, and on the laptop/desktop world they argue Windows is dominant...and while they have a point, it is substantially blunted by the government deciding Android is a monopoly...or at least I think it is).

I’m not a lawyer so I don’t have a great knowledge of what a court will do, I think it is easier for Apple to convince a jury that including a web browser as part of an operating system product, and including that operating system product for free as part of hardware product is expected in the modern computing era then Google had of convincing a jury that serving ads requires funding your own web browser and giving it away for free...or making smartphones. Regardless of my personal feelings on what “should be” bundled and shouldn’t.

Eh, not really, but close.

For example Chrome was greenlit because “if successful” it gave Google a web browser they controlled and they could use it to make sure nobody ever made it impossible for Google’s ad system to work on the web. It wasdefensive, built in an era where Google’s fear was Microsoft’s IE becoming dominant and ad blocking Google into non-existence.

Chrome doesn’t make any money because it is very hard for a web browser to make money. Other companies already offered free web browsers of reasonable quality, and web browsers are big and complex, funding development of a world class web browser is expensive, far more so then they could earn if they had to rely on customers paying for it.

So Chrome’s existence independent of Google’s ad revenue propping it up is a tough sell. That wasnt’ designed to make it impossible to break up Google, i.e. it wasnt’ a strategy to design Chrome as a self destructing chunk of economic value that people will be upset to see fizzle out of existence because the big old mean government curb stomped Google. That is a pure side effect.

It isn’t dramatically different form Apple and Safari. Safari exists because IE for the Mac wasn’t very good, and having a major platform with a crap web browser isn’t a tenable prospect. Even in the early 2000s. You can make a more compelling argument that Safari is part of Apple’s core product not a “bundling for business purposes”, but it is still an expensive bit of software that couldn’t justify it’s own expense with direct revenue if it had to sell itself as an independent product.

Most of Google’s products make very little money, a result of Google spending decades trying to figure out something that could be as profitable as the ad business while internally being flooded with ad revenue so not being forced to kill off things that didn’t turn an actual profit. So it ends up with youtube (likely very profitable on it's own), maps (only profitable if you monetize ads, but very profitable if you do), and multiple chat and voice clients every few years and so on that just don’t make money. They probably could if you had to run them as a standalone business (see Zoom, and Slack, Google could have had that level of success, if they had decent marketing and aimed the products right). Plus things like the Nest line of products that were profitable before Google bought them. Or smartphone hardware which a few other companies manage to do at a profit (and to be fair most of them outsource the expensive R&D to Google, who has nowhere to outsource that too!).