There's the need to dust fans and then there's the possibility that OS computing requirements have risen which isn't often a Linux thing on old hardware.. OsX had exactly the same problem and had to make a minimizing release IIRC.
Computing kind of stagnated since 2010 and plenty of hardware since then still works fine today and is usable enough for many tasks. Apple was nice for needing not all that many different drivers but its statnge integrations like drive fans to bios are obnoxious.
I'm not really sure that's remarkable, maybe compared to the netbook level machines. Now that HDs are gone the only cause of failure I see from my coworkers is extended vacations and remote work in tropical climates.
I threw a 15" Dell laptop from the early aughts into a wall (for reasons I am not proud of), hard enough to put a hole in the sheet rock, and the laptop still worked fine.
Cracked the plastic case a bit but that was it. The most amazing part to me was not the HDD surviving but the LCD backlight. This back was when they still used those super fragile thin CCFLs.
I find it bizarre. I think we obviously we want to be able to run pages from 2015 far in the future but certainly for a few more years.
As a browser maker, why would you even put this work in for cordinated processes instead of investing in a way to patch away your native code and do that continuously at a slow pace for every aging feature?
The US' experience is in rescuing older and failing sectors preferably with a quick resale.. This is one of the worst ideas I've heard so far because of the international politics of having berated China over Huawei. Intel is likely to lose exports which they can't make up for with an investment it could do without.
I'm curious as to why startup would be a goal specifically vs the job itself at any company? Lifestyle, company size, career growth, equity, something else?
You have a lot more control in an early stage startup vs a later stage one where lots of design decisions have already been made before you arrived and you're kind of stuck with them. If you like having an influence on the design of the product, tools, even implementation languages the earlier you get in, the more influence you have.
1. AI is past the inflection point. Startups are best positioned to accelerate on this. I don't mean AI products, but just hiring people who are good at cursor and don't have this mental block. They're able to get to a more optimal 1 engineer per PM ratio without the demoralization of firing a whole bunch. These companies are growing a lot faster and earlier than before.
2. Late stage funding is dry, early stage funding is cheap now. It's been three years of "winter is coming".
3. Even without the equity, you're positioned to be in a good place with the right growth.
To me, it's just riding the wave instead of complaining about the wave.
If you don't even trust that someone respects some basic limits you don't want to be engaged in a fight for the profit from some project every year. Getting nothing out of the project is not the worst outcome.
You must dig deeper into US history. Citizenship was revoked or frozen en masse at certain period for different races. Actually the “free” USA only happened after world war 2 and it was probably because the US was becoming the super power.
This current administration wants to end interventionism which means the old US (100% white/all Protestant) might be coming back. If you are not in that category you must start planning accordingly.
It was also revoked for American women who married foreign citizens until the early 20th century - in fact, an awful lot of my parents' friends for some reason still assume that I lost mine and automatically became a German citizen when I married my husband.
Ha. Getting German citizenship has become easier, but it's still far from automatic, and at least the way things have been the past 100 years or so, I (native-born to native-born US citizens in the US, white) would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get rid of my US citizenship.
Yes the Germans are really strict with their nationality. One thing I cannot fathom is how the Germans kept honouring the citizenship given to SS collaborators from other countries after the war.
In Holland we've had some war criminals (Dutch collaborators) that leisurely lived out their lives in Germany because they received citizenship through SS membership as thanks for their war crimes. And Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens. Also they stalled local prosecution until the people in question were too old and frail to stand trial.
I really don't understand how the western world let them get away with doing that. Every SS-derived citizenship should have been instantly revoked in 1945, all wartime laws retracted and citizens with wartime crimes extradited.
The high resolution is a waste of money. The camera is a waste of money. The number of buttons is small. The issues like a hinge are non existant. The ability to pop out the battery is the kind of complicated thing I would expect from someone competent like a laptop maker.. The lack of Ram slots and now other slots is simplifying.
Really Apple made the game field very simple and its no problem making a perfectly good $50 phone. Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems. Basically forcing you to buy a "middle level" phone that has all the pointless features only a teenager has time/eyes for to get the minimum security updates.
Camera is the main selling point for new phones. It may not be for you, but for most customers, camera performance is the key differentiator.
Modern smartphone camera modules are incredibly high bandwidth. They are hooked up to custom chips that handle everything from video encoding to the massive amount of post-processing it takes to make those tiny sensors output high quality images. Up until the last few years, cameras were regularly held back by the media processing ICs available.
I suggest you look at teardowns of a modern high performance phone. The telephoto lens alone are marvels of engineering that involve a large number of high precision parts, all of which have to stand up to years of horrible abuse unlike anything real professional gear would ever see.
Camera features are pretty much the sole reason why people pay extra for higher end phones.
> Google and Qualcomm have made sure that you will pay more via preventing reasonable update systems.
Google has spent years putting systems in place to allow for longer support periods, they had to write a bunch of abstraction layers first, hardware abstraction not being something Linux is exactly famous for.
Also those small low cost phone manufacturers don't offer lifetime support because they cannot afford to keep engineers and engineering resources around for 7+ years. Have you ever worked on a team trying to support multiple builds of old hardware that use completely different driver stacks? I have, it sucks. After a year people just forget how to even setup a dev environment for the previous version, test hardware breaks down or just gets lost, tooling gets out of date and doesn't work anymore (or has conflicts with newer tooling installed on a dev machine).
Apple can do it because apple controls the entire stack from top to bottom, and because they have an army of engineers devoted to just one thing. Your average Kickstarter Boutique Phone Company has maybe a dozen engineers and they have almost no control over the underlying platform.
> The high resolution is a waste of money.
Once resolutions and refresh rates get higher you can start to do things that make readability better for everyone, but even ignoring those techniques, higher refresh rates feel better, and a wider color gamut makes everything look better.
> The number of buttons is small.
Try making a button survive water, sweat, sun screen (which royally messes up a lot of finishes) and pocket lint some time. Also it has to feel good to press even through a protective case, and it needs to be durable over 5+ years. Again, I've been on teams doing these things, it is not easy. The big phone makers have been doing it for decades now, and they are good at it, but "we've solved it" is also why you don't see large changes in button layouts, shapes, materials, etc, now days.
To give an example of just a volume button - You need to setup a robotic test fixture that presses the button thousands upon thousands of times. This needs to run on each of your engineering revisions that comes in. You hopefully run it on a decent sample size of devices (ideally ones you've sent engineers overseas to pull off the lines directly to avoid the factory choosing golden samples!). Spray the device down with a variety of substances, test again, and you'll need lab managers and engineers to program and run all the different robotic harness tests.
Making quality durable goods is hard. Making a $200 smart phone that'll fall apart in a couple years is easy.
(Now even with all of this, I've had 3 Google made/branded phones that failed due to wide spread hardware issues....)
You are trying to twist if to their favor that the market and not Google specifically is known for hardware problems, recalls and making a camera that 95% of people don't have any use for. What they have is control of Android which allowed them to cancel Android One to build a larger market for the pricing they want using pressure.
Look at what a marvel we can force them to buy for no reason! 80% of them have never made a video intentionally. A great marketing segment.
I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.
The phone industry is now an oligarchy and prices (and forced feature combinations) are up.
Google's phones are a minor bit player in the market. They have an estimated 4% of US market share. OnePlus was kicking their butts until OnePlus decided to destroy their entire value prop and also laid off their much beloved software team.
But if you want a mid priced phone, go ahead and buy one. A CMF 2 pro has 6 years of security updates, it costs $279.
> 80% of them have never made a video intentionally.
I find that hard to believe. Nearly everyone I know uses their phone cameras heavily. Maybe the stat is true in some strange sense, but 80% of high end premium phone buyers? People paying an extra $200 just for a telephoto lens are never using the camera? The high end is all about camera performance.
> I had a cemetery of working phones and broken laptops all through past decades. I used laptops for longer than 3 years but I also didn't put them through the pressure a student would and could usually replace parts.
I have everything from a Motorola Q9m to an unreleased Windows Mobile 7 (not phone 7!) to an army of LG, Motorola, and Nexus devices.
Phone hardware is generally shite. Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS, that I could barely use the phone anymore due to running out of RAM. Great job OnePlus, great job.
> Or in the case of my OnePlus, their updates added so much of their own shit to a once pure OS
Same situation on preinstalled laptops and Android. You are complaining about Google in relation to Microsoft.
Android One was a correction to how their system should work and it wouldn't help their goals to sell $100 phones that are secure, all an older adult would typically want, not particularly engaging for marketers, competing with their flagship phones for people who will pay and accept any quality in pointless toys.
Even their own A series has been a problem for them since it covers what any reasonable person would want (in a flagship eliminating way). So let's restrict the charging bellow the lowest industry standards, etc.
Computing kind of stagnated since 2010 and plenty of hardware since then still works fine today and is usable enough for many tasks. Apple was nice for needing not all that many different drivers but its statnge integrations like drive fans to bios are obnoxious.