An ai can help a lot of non tech savvy people. Imagine every time they want to do something, they could just ask the ai on how to do it, instead of asking you or having to go through a billion SEO garbage google results.

https://archive.is/FUcCY

mirror

The review is pretty fair and somewhat agrees with you.

Design flaws exist in most laptops. But making videos about how shitty hp laptops are wont get many views and engagement.

I have had tons of windows laptops failing on me. And yes lenovo thinkpads are nice but they are different. Also i am not so sure they still are good, everything seems to have gone to shit. Very few laptops last over 5 years.

Or phones. Though lately, phones seem to have become more reliable. Then again phones have 0 moving parts and passive cooling, so not many mechanical things that can break.

Apple tries REALLY fucking hard to avoid accepting hardware faults and recalls but I was plugged into all the Apple forums/communities and saw how often these things happened and every time without fail Apple would go blue in the face before accepting liability.

Apple is an asshole company, i dont think many will dispute that. They go the extra mile to fuck you.

I swore off Apple products

I have 0 apple products. But if Apple wasnt making the iphone, i would probably have had an iphone and i wouldnt even consider any other phone.

Apple products are NOT well built. They LOOK nice, but they’re shitty engineering.

They look nice and they are better than other “nice looking” alternatives. High end hp, high end dell, even high end asus. Though dell and asus seem to have improved lately, hp i have no idea, i avoid them like plague.

A couple months are irrelevant, obviously both phones were designed and released in a similar timetable. Lg prada wasnt a smart phone and didnt have multitouch.

And while many people have turned against modern iphones, i think modern iphones are the best phones on the market. I wouldnt even recommend an iphone from 10+ years ago but modern iphones have addressed almost all issues that i had.

They had

1. shit screen resolution
2. not oled
3. tiny screens
4. terrible cameras
5. not usb-c
6. shitty cpu
7. shitty gpu
8. very little ram(they still do but most apps are designed with that in mind)
9. no fm radio(now almost no phones have one)
10. no headphone jack(same)
11. inability to easily send media and files from one from to another
12. limited variety of apps

I am probably forgetting tons of other issues that i had with iphones over the years. And apple took all these weaknesses and not only caught up to the competition, but surpassed it and made then a key marketing point.

Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung’s first touchscreen phone.

I actually bought samsung wave in 2010, which was the first phone with an oled screen. And it was great, apart from the limited app support, since it was running Bada, a samsung created android competitor. And since then, i refused to get an non oled screen phone. Once you go black, you cant go back.

I think that samsung makes the best android phones.

Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you’ll realise they are shitty products.

I dont care or know much about macbooks but it is obvious that Rossman has an agenda and keeps making “artificial outrage” videos(because they bring the views). From what little experience i have, it seems to me that expensive windows laptops fall apart more often than macbook pros. And all windows laptops have shit battery life, which is very important for many people.

Designing phone ui for fingers first. While there were many other touch phones, many of which could be used with your finger(especially if you were a hipster, you could modify them to be more finger friendly), their ui was primarily designed for stylus use. This is a huge point that basically defined the OS and app design for the next 15 years.

Making capacitive screen popular. Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff. This was fine with stylus, less fine with finger. Capacitive worked with the lightest touch, which gave a smoother user experience.

Made multitouch mainstream and a core part of touch interface. Again, older touchscreen phones were mostly made to be used with a stylus, so multitouch wouldnt make much sense.

It is important to note that one of the reasons apple succeeded was because nokia was too stubborn and late to adopt and promote touchscreen phones. Thats why while nokia was the phone bid dog of that day, users had turned to sony ericsson(SE) for their flagship, touchscreen phones.

And for 5 years before the iphone, people were using phones like the p800, that had a large touchscreen and even a removable keyboard for that full touchscreen experience. SE had taken nokia’s symbian OS and made it more touch friendly. Nokia continued releasing super capable(great cameras, video, fm radio, etc) but non touchscreen phones or with a small touchscreen for years after that, allowing SE to dominate that market. For example nokia released the 6600, which was a great phone but didnt have a touchscreen and its screen was small in comparison to SE’s touchscreen flagships.

The first iphone had a terrible camera and couldnt even film videos. Something that other “smart” phones could do for many years. The first iphone didnt have third party apps. Competitive smart phones had had apps for over a decade. The first iphone wasnt 3g, couldnt share stuff over bluetooth, etc. It was a pretty but pretty stupid phone in comparison to the competition.

But over time, apple kept improving, catching up and often surpassing competition in every aspect. I remember when iphones had shitty resolution and when apple caught up, they advertised it as retina display. Nowadays, iphones are the best or almost the best in everything. Now if only apple gave 120hz refresh on base iphones and a faster charging rate. And werent closed garden assholes.

Only in the US and only extremely cheap versions of models. Other countries have mandatory immobilizer.

Wouldn’t China have seen the writing on the wall years ago?

Noone wants to spend tens of billions of dollars if they dont have to. Eventually, in the last 5-10 years, it became an absolute necessity for China, so they had no choice but to do it. In comparison, the West is still manufacturing most of its stuff in China because it is cheaper and it would be pretty expensive(and time consuming) to move all that manufacturing to EU/US. And most of that manufacturing is infinitely simpler than cutting edge microchips.

Hell, nvidia(an american company) is literally trying to “bypass” sanctions and sell their 4090 gpus in China. Once those sanctions were announced, their stock fell. And then nvidia made a “crippled” 4090, that in theory wasnt as capable in terms of AI calculations. But the US is still saying “are you fucking kidding me? no means no”.

In return, China is buying all 4090 graphic cards they can get in their hands, even older generation cards. If you are wondering why a 2000€ card is even more expensive now than it was a year ago. Of course thats how sanctions work in a capitalistic society, you can only increase the cost of doing business, not actually prevent someone from getting stuff.

It’s the same thing with Russia. You can ban Russia from buying stuff but then a random armenian or turkish or cypriot company can buy that stuff and secretly ship them to Russia.

Capitalism has created significant strategic weaknesses for all sides. Thats why the West is losing its mind with batteries and rare earth minerals. It isnt that we cant make batteries or mine rare earth minerals(they arent that rare), it’s that we have relied on China and now we need to start doing the work for ourselves(with increased monetary and potential environmental cost). It will take money and time but eventually we will get there.

is it too hard to believe that China, and maybe others have done the same and have been able to keep it a secret as well

This kind of technology is about the capability to mass produce cutting edge chips, in order to use it for AI, phones, missiles, etc. There is little reason to be able to do that and keep it a secret. This is a very iterative heavy technology, you start from something and you keep improving it, it isnt like nukes(you either have it or dont).

In fact, China is already making graphic cards for AI(and technically gaming). And they are absolutely terrible in terms of performance and power efficiency. But at least they are “homemade”(with tons of IP stolen from nvidia, etc). That is very impressive.

This kind of super high tech manufacturing is something that only a couple companies in the world can do, it is literally the most technologically complex thing humans have created. And they can only do it by using machines and technology from all over the, “western”, world. For example the taiwanese TSCM might use extremely specialized machines from the Netherlands or lenses from Switzerland, etc.

If China wants to replicate that, they would need to create everything from scratch, since they wont have access to the knowledge, technology, machines and manufacturing techniques the other(taiwanese, american and korean) companies have access to.

This is a matter of time and money. Obviously at some point China would succeed as long as there is political will and funding. But there is a difference between China succeeding within the next 3 years or within the next 15 years.

If these claims are true(and it is a big IF), China is way ahead than expected.

No other country in the world can do it alone. The US isnt producing high end chips. But thats because it didnt need to, since their allies are doing it. But because the situation in Taiwan is becoming hotter, both the US and the EU are inviting companies(tsmc and Intel) to create factories in their lands.

TSMC is kinda reluctant in creating a cutting edge fab outside of Taiwan, since having all cutting edge fabs there, provides Taiwan with a security advantage(increasing the chance the EU and US will come to Taiwan’s assistance in case China invades). However it seems they are willing to make “last gen”(still very high end in comparison to what China has) fabs outside of Taiwan.