I can't speak to the experience with Android but Apple offers both in-store battery replacement or Mail-in battery replacement for $70-120 which to me seems very reasonable. Could it be cheaper? Sure, maybe I guess? But $70-120 is a lot less than a new phone. And this way we don't need to compromise the shell of the phone with seams and things that can fail.
The battery costs $7-$12 to produce and ship to your location, so kind of strange to say $70-$120 is cheap.
It's a philosophical thing, sure. But the EU is taking the approach that businesses should make honest money by selling quality products, not through consumer-hostile practices like inflating the cost of spare parts + labour for fixing stuff.
In the past our family has had several Android phones where the battery was easily replaceable. We even had a couple of Motorolas where the screen was a simple and cheap thing to replace. That seems to be increasingly a thing of the past.
With those phones, I have never once experienced a failure mode related to seams / screws holding the phone together. If it's one thing that's extremely well known technology, it's fasteners and gaskets for consumer products.
For someone complaining about anecdata and a lack of citations, you're surprisingly eager to offer your own argument that basically boils down to "trust me, bro".
The grandparent provided an anecdote relating to absence of evidence; the parent provided some anecdotal counter-examples. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so the respondent's anecdote is more compelling if we give them equal credence. Disproof by counter-example is usually a very effective method, especially when arguing about whether something 'ever happened'.
Hah fair- I wouldn't give up paragliding either. To keep the analogies- I wouldn't want a bike without inflatable tires, nor a paraglider without a reserve.
They also designed with cheap shells that felt loose before a year was out, and offered exactly zero water and dust protection so if your device got wet, it was considered out of warranty.
how long are you willing to be without your phone? banking apps, public transit tickets, calls, messages, digital signatures. this is luxury not many can afford these days to be offline for days.
With Apple, at least in Germany, you schedule an appointment online, you walk in at that time, and you can come pick it up an hour later. Many independent shops offer basically the same for Android and Apple phones.
When I did it two months ago it took them an hour. Be generous and say they’re backed up and sometimes it takes two hours. Is that too long to be without your phone?
i was referring more to this part "Mail-in battery replacement". good to know that they can do this so fast. but it would be even faster when battery would be user serviceable. and not everyone is living driving distance away from certified workshops.
> And this way we don't need to compromise the shell of the phone with seams and things that can fail.
My older Samsung Galaxy had an easy clip-off back cover and easily replaceable battery. Nothing related to that ever failed.
Whereas two newer Pixel phones have had issues with the back cover glue coming loose, leading to interior damage.
Given that, the idea that a case that can be opened easily “compromises the shell of the phone” sounds like a weak excuse for some other deficiency or agenda.
You can have water protection and easily replaceable battery.
Still, I'm really curious about how many people take advantage of those standards and need IP67 (30min at 1m depth) as opposed to a quick splash or rain on it, or how many buy the artificial tradeoff of water resistance over easily replaceable battery because this is all that's offered.
Yes. You're paying at least $9,99 per month which means that after the 5 or so years when the battery starts going bad you've already paid for multiple batteries.
In many part of the world a lot of people buy second hand phones exclusively and they are the first customers for battery replacement. $70-120 is quite steep for them.
You can output it as a memory using a simple prompt. You could probably re-use this prompt for any product with only slight modification. Or you could prompt the product to output an import prompt that is more tuned to its requirements.
Google did the hard work for everyone last year...
>"In layperson’s terms, ZKP makes it possible for people to prove that something about them is true without exchanging any other data. So, for example, a person visiting a website can verifiably prove he or she is over 18, without sharing anything else at all."
The "hard work" in question is a death sentence for computing as we know it today. All implementations of zero-knowledge proofs require device integrity assurance to prevent the otherwise anonymous tokens from being passed onto another user, and Google has a vested interest in pushing solutions involving remote attestation as they would double as an effective weapon against ad blocking, YouTube downloaders, pirated games, sideloaded apps that don't pay the Play Store tax and more. Requiring remote attestation on all internet-connected devices would result in the complete overnight death of desktop Linux, contribute significantly to e-waste and pave the road for further initiatives such as mandatory client-side scanning of all files (of the kind Apple attempted to introduce not too long ago, with massive backlash); I am not sure this would be preferable to simply handing over your ID.
It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.
The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.
Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
It's wild that everyone seems to have forgotten that Ticketmaster acquired TradeDesk and actively marketed to scalpers [1] just a couple of years ago. Seems they shut down the platform last year, maybe the "ticket bank" [2] idea worked better... Pretty clear to me that they will use any chance to monetize their monopoly.
it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.
personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest.
how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.
> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once
Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.
The only "fair" ways are to have a lottery for non-transferrable tickets, or have something akin to a dutch auction so that the band/venue captures all of the value - meaning tickets would be astronomically priced.
The artists think it is fair that they are now getting some of that money that used to go to scalpers. Very few are opting out of the dynamic pricing and "Platinum" tickets that are driving prices up.
Or easiest is to require KYC for all the buyers (tie ticket to person instead of allowing bulk purchases) and limit ability to resale at scale. This would easily allow them to blacklist scalpers. It's not like they don't know who you are from the payment information, and tickets are often verified against driver licenses at entry.
I can see reasons, among others that 4.5 was the one established as they were preparing this version. "So long" is merely 2 months ago, and Qwen 3.5 was barely released less than 2 months ago. They were likely already working on finalizing 3.6 before 3.5 official launch, and as 4.6 came out.
In any case, aside Claude fanboyism, having other plays inch closer to similar performance is always useful. Even if they are "6 months behind" as the pace slows down, this guarantees that there's no huge moat and they'll eventually either get to where the SOTA is, or the difference wont be that big.
I'd rather put fewer eggs in 2-3 big player baskets.
3.5-plus was also only available via api. I don’t know what the long term business model for open weights is, I hope there is one, but it seems foolish to assume that companies will be willing to spend millions of dollars of compute on an asset worth zero in perpetuity.
The people who signed my keys trust me to be an honest human actor that chose this as the singular identity they signed for the human body they met in person.
I -could- burn my 16+ years of reputation by letting a bot start signing commits as me, and I could also set my house on fire. I have very strong incentive not to do so as my aggregate trust is very expensive and the humans that signed me would be unlikely to sign a second if I ruined the reputation of my first.
This incentive structure is why web of trust actually works pretty well, and is the best "proof of human" we are likely ever going to have while respecting privacy and anonymity for those that need it.
Would be cool to get an original copy of "Colors for Interiors: Historical and Modern by Faber Birren" and create color matches assuming it's not faded too much. I wonder if he created some kind of pigmentation ratio (or however paint coloring works) that he shared somewhere?
Planet Money had a story about the quantization of color[0]. Prior to this, people would essentially bring in a flower, piece of pottery, etc that they wanted to color match for the particular piece at hand.
Or people who aren't parents are yet again sharing strong opinions that are not based in reality. Plenty of parental controls are deployed, how long they last against a determined child is the real question. Here's a concrete example for you. Spotify has a web browser built in so that you can watch music videos, kids have figured out a way to use that to watch any video on YouTube--a 12 year old told me this. If you search on this subject you'll quickly learn this is well known and is generally being ignored by Spotify. Why not allow parents to disable the in-app web browser / video function?
It's not as easy as you may believe to prevent that type of access.
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