There are also proponents of Chinese phones who are trying to convince everyone that ZTE/Xiomi/Honor/younameit phones are in no way inferior to iPhone/Pixel while cost 50-80% less. I honestly tried give them a chance - not even close.
I had a Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and picked it over the contemporary Pixel 4. At the time, I was extremely unimpressed with the offerings from Google or Samsung (I've always been on Android so didn't consider the iPhone) and started looking to Chinese OEMs. They had a wide variety of features and build quality. Some were cheap but some, like the one I chose, felt quite premium, had all the latest features (in some cases better than the Pixel), etc. It eventually got replaced by a Pixel 8 Pro but I would try it again.
I don't think I'm saying every Chinese OEM makes phones on par with iPhone or Pixel, but as with any market with multiple options, some are good, some are not so good. There also seems to be this weird anti-China sentiment that appears whenever these phones come up and I think it'd be a more interesting discussion if we focused on the hardware/software instead of country of origin (not saying that that's the case here, it's just been my experience in the past).
No one reasonable is comparing budget model that cost 80% less is equivalent to a flagship model. The typical comparison is flagship to flagship where a PRC flagship cost 80% and generally has objectively superior hardware if you can live with the software, and tbf many people can't. Or a PRC midentry/flagship cost as much as an Apple/Pixel midentry/budget where the hardware difference is even more noticable. If you're not locked into the ecosystem, iPhone/Pixels are outright inferior, especially in regions where PRC brands have support.
Agreed. I used to own a ZTE Blade. It was an incredibly cheap smartphone and you could CyanogenMod it. Great phone in the performance per $ category. It was honestly the top tier phone in that category in 2010 or whatever. And I suspect these Chinese makes are likewise the top tier in that category. But that's not the category of the iPhone Pro.
I've been using one of those Chinese devices - a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - for the last 8 years. The combination of good-enough hardware and AOSP-derived Android distributions do make some of these devices capable of lasting for a long time. This does not make them "better" than their more expensive counterparts but it does mean they're a much better value proposition. This is not limited to "Chinese" phones, it is also true for some devices by brands like Motorola. It also does not hold true for all devices produced by those 'Chinese" brands since it stands or falls with the device being supported by AOSP-derived distributions. Many of these devices become obsolete long before their time due to lackluster or missing software support by the vendor.
Frankly, the model with the single America continent doesn’t make any sense, because south and north Americas are so different in both geographical and cultural/historical sense.
My rubric for Greenland is to watch what Europe does. If European NATO allies station troops and naval assets in/around Greenland (or demand SOFA changes at Ramstein, stuff like that), I'll believe they're taking it seriously. Right now the sense I get --- totally uneducated take, but it's a message board not the Sit Room --- is that Europe sees this as a media fight and little else.
well, yeah. That's what the phrase "marginal cost" means: if it costs $x to do something N times, and $x + $y to do something N+1 times, $y is the marginal cost.
I have maybe unpopular opinion, but Apple always been terrible in UX.
Just to give a few examples which annoys me the most:
- Finder. It just something else. After 10 years of using OSX I still can’t figure out how to use it efficiently for selecting the path - this experience is different every time, depending on the context where Finder was called from. I just don’t get.
- Lack of the true tiling window manager experience. Yes, there is Yabai, but it still suck due to the fact that you can’t have truly independent spaces each with individual layout and stack of windows.
- Infamous Magic Mouse’s charting port at the bottom.
I just wish I could have normal Linux natively on MB Pro.
Regarding the window manager and Finder; I had a better experience with the Windows equivalents way back on Windows 2k or even Windows 98 more than quarter century ago. Truly baffling.
Yes, even the Windows 98 Explorer with IE integration (let's load a JPG of clouds to the left of the file detail pane) was better than modern equivalents. In Windows 10 (or was it 7?) they introduced a stupid column view in detail view that became focused with tab, so you couldn't just tab between the 3 places of directory list, file pane, address bar.
They also added stupid "quick launch" areas with places nobody went, like "3D Objects", and reduced the menu area to a "grope and find a button" ribbon.
The older Explorers were usable like File Manager on Windows 3.11 was: address bars that were usable from the keyboard and mouse (no subdivision buttons for parts of the path), acceptable launch speed, and no extra "features" that were unnecessary (like it ignoring "use same view for all folders" when your directory happens to have MP3s in it - it'll switch to showing rating / bitrate etc.)
I believe all developers should use older versions of the software to see how usable they were in comparison to the modern "improvement".
I’d happily pay for a tool that lets me opt out of being slowly nickel-and-dimed by entities optimized for short-term yield. This feels like infrastructure: a small amount of collective effort that gives individuals leverage again. Visibility is the lever. And it could be done, it's just more organizing and involvement in local politics. The information already exists, it’s just effectively invisible, and a small translation layer could collapse it into a one-second answer, letting people avoid operators with a predictable extractive playbook, with the only real challenge being the constant, boring maintenance in an environment designed for churn and opacity. Eventually this should revolve around organizing and politics to make a difference.
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