I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?

Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible

wake up with a random song from your music collection

(Third point under “usage examples”)

Capital spending cuts may include German factory expected to cost $32 billion, source says

As a German this makes me sad and maybe biased, but imo that looks pretty bad to me. On the one hand Intel wants to turn around their foundry business including long term aquiring third party customers, on the other hand apparently even a subsidy of $10 billion isn’t enough to see it through. I get that a completely new location might not be ideal and in Germany there also isn’t a big semi supply chain already in place. But still if you get one third of your fab gifted and decline, what more does it take?

Progress is getting more and more expensive each node, so you’d probably want other customers and higher volume to spread out the development costs (like TSMC does). If they can’t stem the burden of building it, then ofc it can’t be helped. But it seems to me like having fewer fabs ultimately makes it harder to stay in the race longterm.

The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).

But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.

I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.

So like the Stillsuits in Dune?

I think the satellite based cellular networks like ASTS is currently trying to launch will be ubiquitous.

The tech already seems good, so it’ll happen much sooner than 34, but I imagine by that point it will just be one of those things everyone takes for granted.

I can also see small autonomous drones playing a much larger role with various tasks.

That is one aspect of it: if you are 10, then 1 year is 10% of your whole life, more if you consider the first few to not really be conscious. If you are 50 it’s only 2%.

But I think another factor is what stays in our memories vs what gets filtered out. If you are young, you’ll experience lots of “first times”, major changes, and defining moments. As you get older there are more parts of your life that are routine and repetitive. Looking back at a year/a whole life what are the things you can vividly remember?

This is also what imo causes the shift in perception for the covid period. Suddenly a lot of events that usually create memorable experiences didn’t happen. No parties, festivals, meeting new people, or vacations in foreign places. For most of us it will have been a major change initially, but relatively quickly routines setting in.

Yeah, hadn’t heard about it until today either. But Steam also kind of torpedoed their launch by lifting their NDA for Deadlock on the same day. Not sure how similar they are, but that’ll grab most of the attention from gamers right now.

Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.

I actually think it isn’t the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.

Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i’ll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.

There’s also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren’t immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.

Then there’s the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.

You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.

And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.

If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.

Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they’ll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they’ll all follow.

I can’t really see Apple market the usage in kitchens. The reality is way to messy and i’d imagine that you would see dirty or even damaged units in no time. I don’t think that would go well with Apple’s clean design and brand image.

But wouldn’t you want to have screens in multiple rooms? Because $1000 seems too expensive for that use case

You actually have a good point there. In another comment here I was wondering where you’d actually need the automatic movement, since you are usually either close enough to move it yourself or far enough away to not be able to read or interact with the UI.

But situations like in the kitchen or maybe a work shop, where you don’t want to touch the screen are where it would come in useful.

However would those be the places you’d want to put a $1000 Apple product?

The robotic arm part seems a bit gimmicky, not sure how much value that will actually add for the average user. I’d imagine that when you are using voice commands and are far away you don’t really need it to turn towards you. At a distance you can’t interact with the ui anyways and depending on how far away it is might not even be able to read anything on screen. And if you are close a normal adjustable arm would do the job just fine.

However I do think there is a market for a well integrated home command center and Apple with their walled garden approach is in a good position to deliver on this.

But it yet again seems like a dedicated device that is expensive might feature good hardware, but is limited to it’s specific use case. Like the iPads that have the same chips as laptops, but Apple purposely doesn’t give them MacOS to not cannibalize their sales of laptops.

The way control centers should imo be setup is to have the “brain” somewhere hidden like next to the router and then you have cheap screens around the house where you need them. Although Apple might love it, if people buy a $1k+ device for each room. Or instead of a dedicated computer for control one could just put their phone into a hub and have it serve as controller.

Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.

Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That’s like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.

The chart also doesn’t specify what hardware the calculation is based on. If it’s “1 year to crack for your average desktop PC”, then a server farm will do so in minutes.

I think you’ll need to give some more information to receive good advice:

• What’s your budget

• What’s your use case? Just web browsing, light office work or something more demanding like gaming or editing?

• What form factor? Want a larger screen or something lighter and more compact? Touch screen/convertible yes or no?

I’m nowhere near tech-savvy so it has to be easy to use,

Easy to use or easy to repair? As far as use goes pretty much every windows laptop will be feel the same to use, same as with apple. I mean it is the same operating system, just depends on what you are used to, but neither are complicated. It’s only Linux where you have a larger variety of variants, some easier to use, others geared more towards advanced users. Bur you haven’t indicated that you specifically want to run Linux.

I want something that is built to last, as opposed to certain (looking at you, Apple) devices that are desinged to become unusable within a next couple of years.

Generally laptops aimed at businesses are more durable than consumer lines. Don’t go too cheap unless you are buying used business laptops. And if something is heavilu leaning towards thin and light, then usually it is at the expense of some durability.

Apple is actually decently durable and I’ve seen quite a few MacBooks running for over a decade while still being ok. Where they fall short is repairability, when something does break and their lowest specs paired with no real way to upgrade later (especially with the newer models that don’t even have SSDs that can be swapped) is bad for future proofing, if demands change. And they make you pay through your nose for reasonable configurations.

The way we do it here in Germany is that all bottles make you pay a deposit, which you get back, if you return them to a collection point (e.g. at a supermarket).

According to this article it’s working really well, with return rates of 98%.

So at least for most bottles there is a proven solution.

Sometimes it doesn’t work, especially when it is a particularly weird colour palette, but it gets it right most of the time. In that case it does have the options to make some adjustments or just turn it of for that particular site.