Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.
If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
That's a valid opinion to hold. I think both machines are Pareto-optimal though. The ThinkPad will likely have a longer useful life because of its heavy build, extra I/O (each port gets less use), and upgradeable parts. The Neo clearly wins on power efficiency, battery life, resolution...
TBH, if I imagined I was the median casual user, I would also take the $20 marginal cost for the Neo. "Worse in almost every way" just depends on how you weight each individual parameter, which for me, is quite atypical.
I don't see why comparing prices between used and new options is unreasonable in this case. If I want a machine to do XYZ (without the stipulation that it be new), then an older model might well be better value. "In $CURRENT_YEAR, how can I get X processing power?"
Of course, old Macs should factor into that too. Also, it's a different story if I do want something brand new.
Here it’s because the old PC they picked is worse in every way than the brand new PC, except for RAM, which the Mac largely mitigates by having ludicrously fast flash hanging off the CPU. Of course an older, worse PC is going to be cheaper than a new Mac. (Except in this case, buying the boat anchor saves you a whopping $20. It’s not even better specs for the same price: it’s worse than the Apple gear that costs the same.)
If we want to compare new vs used, then how much would you have to spend to buy a brand new PC laptop as powerful as last year’s MacBook Pro?
Doesn't necessarily have to be top down. It could be cultural, the quarter-by-quarter market economics incentivises "money today" (just look at all the disasters caused by poor maintenance) but cultural norms of long-term thinking could drive prioritisation of "security tomorrow". Also, a sense of personal duty and honor instead of accumulating money being the sole arbiter of social status.
The economic pain is current. The impact of unmitigated climate change will happen in the future. Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians makes this sort of planning ahead difficult.
It seems like the whole economic system runs on a quarterly time scale - just look at all the times negligent maintenance to improve profits in the short term have caused disasters in the long term.
Not sure what the solution is though, so I won't complain too much.
> Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians
I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.
> the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians
Honestly, if we made even a step towards the changes necessary to limit the current damage most of HN readership, especially the "green" ones that don't seem to understand global energy usage, would be revolting as well.
The pandemic was a great example of what this would look like as a first step. If we even cared a tiny bit about slowing climate change, there would have been at least some amount of people voicing that we should actually continue to follow early pandemic economic restrictions since it did impact global oil usage.
I pointed this out pretty frequently at the time and was nearly always down voted for it. People want "green" to mean "buying the right thing", they don't want "green" to mean "slicing my annual pay to 1/3, never using Amazon or large retail company to purchase thing, no fruit in the winter, and expensive locally woven clothes".
And more to the point, there is literally no way to make that happen. None. It’s as pointless as suggesting we summon magic fairies to cool the earth.
The totalitarian government required to get humanity to return to the lifestyle you’re suggesting here would itself consume vast amounts of energy and resources.
We can’t go back, and almost none of us even want to. We have to figure this out with the tools we have now.
For a someone looking to switch from a M-series MacBook to a Thinkpad, which one would you recommend? Preferably not of a diminished quality, so I can daily-drive Ubuntu without missing Apple.
I have done similar searches before. They do exist, but most dedicated ICs are targeted towards tightly-integrated cells or battery packs. The variety available is much smaller than for Li-ion batteries, and the ICs are more expensive.
It seems like commercial multi-cell battery chargers mostly use custom microcontrollers to achieve this, instead of multiple charging ASICs.
If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
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