I mean, that makes sense given what the "haters" are saying, and indeed what you yourself admit. If this is just a device for passive consumption of entertainment, then ultimately it's a consumer-facing use case, and there are MANY MANY MANY more consumers than there are creators, whether that creation is a photo or a line of code. So of course more devices are sold, because you need a laptop (due to mostly software, rather than hardware reasons) to do most forms of creativity, from writing code to editing photos.
It could be a great device for certain types of creation also.
I use mine for editing photos. But, I still have to start and end the process with Lightroom classic on my Mac because of stupid decisions by Adobe to rent-seek with cloud storage, offering no local-stroage workflow option with the iPad app (and deliberately leaving out some features only available in LR Classic).
Likewise, I would love to do all of my photoshop work on the iPad. It's a great immersive experience with the Apple Pencil vs. sitting down with a mouse and keyboard on a computer, but yet again, Adobe cripples the iPad app compared to the desktop app.
And those particular use cases aren't Apple's fault. I'm less and less frustrated with iPad OS as a whole, particularly with windowing in 26 (though it could use some polish). It's got external display support, a file manager, access to external storage, audio input select now, etc. But Adobe (and others) are still making crippled mobile applications for it instead of just doing work to port over the full desktop experience on a device that is now just as capable.
Sure you can't code on it (very well), but I feel like Apple should start putting some pressure on Adobe and the other creative-suite of software companies to beef up the iPad experience, maybe offer some incentive or something.
Even on the laptop, Lightroom Classic is missing capabilities and has poor UX for common workflows. I've used Lightroom for 15 years, and at this point I primarily use DXO Photo Lab for editing, I only use Lightroom as a digital library management tool. I can't even fathom using the current Adobe products on iOS to try to do my workflow. That's mostly due to software, but also because I can't connect a high performance CF Xpress reader to a tablet, given the port performance limitations. I have a TB4/USB4 reader and high speed cards for my camera.
I'll be honest I haven't tried DXO Photo Lab yet. I've tried CaptureOne but could never get used to it, although I do prefer it's far more advanced color tools. Lightroom is really basic in comparison.
But I'm going to end up with a subscription anyway because of Photoshop so I've just always stuck with LR. That, and I used a LUT I built using Davinci Resolve, blended with the Camera Standard profile that I use as a slider in Lightroom (Classic) and I haven't found a way to do something similar in any other program yet (you can create these creative profiles in photoshop too but Davinci's color grading tools are so far superior). It's a key part of my look.
Also FWIW M1 and newer iPad Pros have thunderbolt 4
I have never figured out what the point of a tablet is, except for entertainment. I keep wanting to buy an iPad every time a new one comes out, yet I've never bought one, and keep failing to see any point to it. I have a reMarkable device, which is a sort of tablet, but I use it exclusively for taking notes by hand in meetings, which is basically what it is designed for. I have a Kindle, which is kind of like a tablet, and I use it exclusively for reading which is what it is designed for. An iPad feels like it should replace both, but when I actually analyze it, it cannot replace either one.
What really are tablets for other than being a passive entertainment consumption device?
Apart from watching videos, I use mine for making music (podcast scoring) and for drawing (formal illustrations, doodling, and sketching out designs). There are also a few games that I feel play best on an iPad, such as Balatro.
I travel a lot for work and don’t want to bring a second MacBook Pro. iPad works well in the plane for watching movies, MacBook not so much, at least not in Economy class. Can’t use my work computer for personal stuff anyway unfortunately. Also can’t download Netflix content offline on desktop.
Another use case is in the kitchen. Recipes, YouTube, FaceTime, etc. I use my iPad Pro in the kitchen every day when I’m at home. Easy to clean up. Using a MacBook while cooking will make it gross very fast.
On Android, with Samsung Dex, Xiomi HyperOS, Huawei HarmonyOS Next 6, Surface like Windows devices, tablets a good laptop replacement as travel devices.
Because we all know that under the covers it's just Bluetooth and USB, and they don't have a good reason. Especially in Xbox world, where while the hardware on an Xbox Series X is more powerful than an Xbox One, the software is largely the same.
Honestly, unsurprising. Jeep and Stellantis/Dodge in general has horrible quality control and extremely poor electrical designs. They have a huge enthusiast community that will be happily apologize away the copious amounts of flaws. Frankly, nobody should ever buy their vehicles, it's just robbing yourself.
I own a 2002 Grand Cherokee which sometimes will have a 10A+ power drain for no apparent reason. Of course it doesn’t do it when I’ve got my voltmeter on it, except once (when the 10A fuse in my Fluke blew). I resigned myself to unplugging the battery or leaving it plugged in to a high current battery charger at home, and leave it running if I drive it somewhere.
I rented a Jeep Liberty or Compass circa 2018 whose headlights were permanently in DRL mode: couldn’t turn them off or on. Fortunately I didn’t need to drive at night.
In 2017, rented a 300 with 500 miles on it; the infotainment was completely broken, which hosted the controls for the seat heaters and temperature setting. It was well below zero in Minneapolis but we had to drive around with our windows down because the fancy climate system defaulted to max heat blast + max heated seats based on ambient temperature.
Long ago I had a 1996 Neon where the wiring harness started to fail, and the speedometer would stop working. Later on the oil light would come on despite oil pressure being fine. Eventually the entire car just quit running at all at random - nothing but a dim oil light. I sold the car for scrap for $65 since I got tired of being randomly stranded.
So what I’m saying is that it sounds like Chrysler has managed to actually keep doing the same thing for 29 years: electrically unreliable vehicles.
In my personal experience with cars that had strange electrical problems, they tend to be on a bad ground somewhere in the loop. I once took a Chevy S-10 to a place my dad recommended. A guy walked out to ask what the issue was, he nodded, took a step back to look at the truck and asked the year of the truck. He then nodded and said "Yep", and then without looking reached under the dash on the driver's side and tightened a screw by hand. All electrical problems went away. He walked away after politely telling me to have a nice day. I was baffled, and he said it would cost him more in time to write the repair up than he could honestly charge me.
The point is that stable ground connections are notoriously hard on something that by design shakes, rattles, and rolls with all of the vibrating and bouncing on our "modern" streets. It's also a very easy thing to misdiagnose unless you're a mechanic that specializes in automotive electrical systems. It also takes time for new year models to display their warts enough that non-dealer mechanics gain experience repairing them.
Yes ... However. Most car manufacturers manage to deal with this without it becoming too common, with standard engineering controls ( proper fasteners, torque specifications, QC etc).
The neon issue was the engine harness fraying to the PCM and eventually burning out either that pin on the PCM or cable grounded itself.
Back in the day I was buying these, around 2005' or so, for $300-400 non stop and repairing that, the dash that cracked and misc cosmetics.
They were great cars, the R/T model in manual was fantastic in gas, reliability and safety (sadly crashed it.) but boy was 16-20yr old me happy with these neons. Can't believe they sold shy of $9,999 when new (for base of course)
Just reading your post took me back 2 decades, wow.
The dodge Neons had a an issue for over a decade where the bottom trim 4cyl engine would leak oil constantly. They often needed a top up of oil with each tank of gas.
In late 2000s, the problem was finally fixed by Dodge switching to a multi-layer steel head gasket. They had previously used a cheaper option. No more oil leaks.
Gotta love penny pinching.
Absolute dogshit cars. Mine ran better when you first started it up in the dead of winter at -10f because then the tolerances were actually good! Once it warmed back up it ran like shit again.
They handled outright abuse very well though. My sister drove it up state to deliver it to me for 400 miles with zero oil and she does not drive slow. It once threw the alternator belt while I was driving and I couldn't understand why the electrics were acting so weird, at least until I turned off the windshield wipers and headlights and CD player and things worked better. The OEM belt we bought to replace it basically did not fit and we had to move the alternator to the absolute extent of its travel to make it work. But work it did. It also never ran on more than 3 cylinders except in the freezing cold.
Probably one of the best "For your young child" cars ever produced. That was before everyone had to armor up little Timmy in a Pershing Tank though, so now we all suffer from worse roads, more expensive cars, and lack of tiny car market. It was weirdly good in the snow, which is funny because the tires were $34 at walmart, but it weighed almost nothing so it didn't need traction.
I own a Jeep Wrangler, and you're right the electronics are terrible. The rest of the vehicle is really solid though. The only problems I've had with it in three years are electronic in nature. And I've really pushed it to the limits: Colorado Passes, Utah Dessert, Montana backroads. I drove it to the Arctic Ocean and back on the Dempster.
Still there is no excuse for how terrible the electronics are in Jeep / Dodge (I'm assuming all Chrysler) vehicles. And it's been that way for decades.
I owned a Jeep 4XE, and I was glad the day we sold it, and I'm doubly glad today. The electronics and software were crap, and the powertrain was simply insufficient. At one point, they issued a notice that amounted to 'it might catch on fire, keep it away from your house.'
Yeah, I have family members with 2 JKs and a JL, unfortunately all plagued with issues, almost entirely related to the electronics. A Jeep Wrangler is a vehicle that sounds great on paper, but actually owning one is an exercise in frustration unless you just enjoy fucking with wiring harnesses. I am sure many others will come out of the woodwork to say that Jeeps are great, unfortunately they are not.
It’s too bad because the wagoneer is the best designed car in the segment, inside and out for the most part.
I have a somewhat bad back and want something that I can occasionally work from, so a big space, comfy middle seats, a wide center console. Car makers for some reason refuse to make essentially a Tahoe but shorter wheelbase / 2 row which would be ideal. Instead you have to go with the full size to get full-width.
But out of those, only American brands seem to understand the utility of blocky interiors. Armada and all the Japanese and Korean large SUVs always use swooping rounded edges which really reduce utility.
But the American brands are all less reliable and struggle with consistent quality.
It probably can't be effectively filtered at utility scale. There are only a small number of effective filtration methods and they basically coalesce to either distillation or reverse osmosis, neither of which is effective at utility scale. The other side of that is that both methods concentrate contaminates when removing them, and distillation puts some contaminates into the air, which means neither is a panacea even at residential scale.
The largest reverse osmosis plant in the world produces 165MGD of water, which is less than is required for any of the top 10 largest US cities, while primarily being used purely for desalination (SWRO). At the levels of filtration and membrane size required for removal of PFAS, it would nearly be impossible to cost effectively filter 200MGD+ of water for a major city.
Reading the original report in the dupe from 14 days ago, it seems pretty clear that the conclusion is that counterfeit/low-cost lithium batteries are a safety hazard, and we should probably have stricter import regulations for batteries to shutdown the counterfeit/gray-market operations, as they are a serious fire hazard.
Every time I've looked at Synology, I've been shocked at how anemic the hardware is for the cost. I've always self-built my own NAS. I've sometimes felt regret when I have run into an issue that required more babysitting than I wanted to do, but when considering alternatives, I've always realized doing it myself was the right choice. I wasn't aware they'd even done this, but the fact they did is just more reason to always build your own NAS.
The only way to escape PFAS is to go to a different planet. 3M and Dow have poisoned the entire world. It's shocking how much effort and money I have had to invest to try to mitigate this problem as much as possible in my own home, not because the alternatives are expensive, but because of how pervasive PFAS use is and how it contaminates everything. Every single decision-maker involved should have been jailed.
There's the PFAS blood cleaning startup but is unvalidated and also we'll all just get more replacement exposure from routine activities of living soooo imo almost feels futile regardless: https://www.wired.com/story/this-startup-promises-to-clean-y...
> What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
I've gotten rid of anything in my kitchen that I can that contains PFAS or is produced with PFAS or PFOAs. I use cast iron or stainless steel cookware, glass and silicone only for things that cannot be made of stainless steel. I've more or less eliminated plastics as much as possible from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I can't necessarily do that with food packaging, but even there when I have an option I will change brands or stores to buy things without plastic packaging, or paper packaging coated in PFAS/Teflon. Similarly to avoid PFAS and other chemicals in the production of plastics, as well as microplastics, I almost exclusively buy clothing made entirely from natural fibers.
Beyond that, I have a whole home water filtration system, and after that whole home filtration system I additionally run an undersink 5-stage RO system, both of which are NSF/ANSI certified (53 for the filter system and 58 for the RO system) to remove PFAS and PFOAs. I also go out of my way to find and buy products that don't contain added PFAS, because unfortunately PFAS are in many basic everyday household products like dishwasher detergent, rinse aid, laundry detergent, fabric softener,
and the like. If you dig into this you will be disturbed at how many things have PFAS intentionally added to them, and then you will be even more disturbed to find out how many things contain PFAS incidentally, mostly due to contaminated water supplies.
Even with all of this effort, and more I'm not detailing in this comment, I am exposed to PFAS in the food supply and water supply daily, and in a myriad of other ways. It's impossible to avoid, even with a major budget and being extremely conscious of this issue. There is no way to get away from it. The entire world is contaminated. I don't even know how much my mitigations have any helpful effect towards my health, because it's so difficult to mitigate.
How do you deal with running electricity through the house? This is not meant to be a fully serious question, but I'm replacing old wires in my home currently and it doesn't escape my attention that PFAS added to the insulation makes the new wiring easier to use and possibly safer from a fire perspective. I'm not certain about this but pulling cloth wrapper wires out of the ceiling makes me think where such chemicals have been used. I know I buy precrimped jumper wires with a teflon coating for work. I'm certain some people strip them with a heated tool. And I certainly melted some insulation while soldering them as a teenager.
I've never owned a house old enough to be rewired, my previous house was built in 1992, the current house was built in 2017. That said, as far as I am aware, SIMpull does not contain PFAS, which is the slippery coating on Romex wiring. I don't know what the off-brand companies do, though.
For data cabling, which I did install myself in both houses, I looked up material safety data sheets (MSDS) for any products I purchased before buying them. The wiring I used also does not contain any PFAS in its insulation.
Interesting, I haven't looked at the datasheets but I assumed there were some PFAS used in the coatings. That is good to know. The problem I see is that the material properties of PFAS are so useful and desireable, so they are used in so many different contexts.
I am not the OP, but traveling in a nomadic way is often significantly cheaper than you would expect. When I was doing this, I had roughly $4000/mo in expenses, and more than half of that is because I kept a house in the US while I was on the move, so I had to still pay mortgage, insurance, utilities, property taxes, etc. All-in, it's fairly easy to get by on less than $2k/mo as a single person in /most/ of the world, that's only about $37k/yr before taxes. Myself and most of the other digital nomads I met in my travel mostly worked location-independent remote tech jobs, often as one-person consultancies or as subcontractors to a prime contract agency, most of us made more than $100k/yr.
My observation when I'm talked to people about my experiences is that they imagine travel is a lot more expensive than it actually is. The most expensive thing I ever had to pay for was my plane ticket to get out of the US. Once I was abroad, even flights were significantly cheaper.
Legit question, how do you work stably enough to have a good income to support this? Personally I find living a "regular" life and maintaining a 9-5 job is hard enough in terms of time management and logistics. And that's with the ease of not having to think about where my next accommodation, next meal, next shower will be.
Do you find yourself more time pressured? More stressed? Spending more on conveniences to make life easier?
In my case I simply refuse jobs that don't let me work when I want to. Daily standup? Absolutely no way. Weekly standup? Only as long as I can skip it on the regular.
I'm extremely productive and I'll work weekends, but if on a Tuesday at 11am I feel like going on a trip, I absolutely will and you can't stop me.
Honestly, when I was doing it, I didn't really find any of that difficult. The biggest pressure was from other people who I met while traveling to go out and party or do fun activities while I preferred working. I used time zones to my advantage when I was in Europe and Africa, so I'd have a nice relaxing morning, have a good breakfast, and then work in the mid-day through the evening, go to bed and do it again, and my weekends were still my weekends to do whatever I chose. When I was in South America I just worked normal east coast hours because most of the continent is on EST time zone or similar. It really wasn't as big a deal as you might imagine.
It's not like I was homeless, I would know I wanted to spend a month or thereabouts in a city and I'd get an AirBnB or otherwise arrange accommodations, I'd pay for a coworking space to have a good place to work with stable internet connectivity (this actually was one of the most difficult things in some parts of the world, back then), and I'd eat like the locals either cooking at the AirBnB or going to local restaurants/cafes.
I don't think being nomadic has to mean living like a hobo, those are not necessarily the same things. I never stayed anywhere that didn't have basic indoor plumbing at least, although a few times I'd have to hand wash clothes in a sink and hang them to dry outside the window, which was kind of a bummer but not a world-ender.
Overall, my productivity didn't suffer at all, and I didn't find it stressful from the things you mentioned with even a modicum of planning ahead. In fact, being able to explore different parts of the world and head out when I felt satisfied or got bored, meant that I always had some sort of moment for inspiration that helped to fuel both my curiosity and my work.
I recently got informed that my Game Pass subscription is going to go from $19.99/mo to $29.99/mo, paid annually, which is a $10/mo or $120/yr increase for the exact same service. I wonder how much of this price increase was intended to subsidize free users beyond the ads, or how much is just a naked money-grab because they can't increase the subscriber base so they're juicing existing subscribers for more.
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