I’d expect the laptops would work similarly, you can either pay longer and keep it or trade it in earlier.

To be fair, there are millions of Americans who upgrade their phones with their cell carrier every year. Technically this is a 2-year loan that will pay off the device if you do nothing, or give you the option to trade in the device after 1 year of payments in exchange for a new device. This pays off the original loan, assuming the device is in good working order.

The details matter here, but this is also very similar in the end result as a lease. You pay every month for an installment, get to use the latest and greatest hardware, and can trade it in for a new model. This model works very well for phones. Why not apply a similar principle to a laptop, but amortize the upfront cost over 4 or 5 years with the option to trade-in and upgrade after two years?

It’s interesting enough for businesses that it may be a great model. The amount of older e-waste laptops filling closets and IT departments is staggering.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a toll bridge, but only heading into San Francisco.

Get 'em while that last:

“In a major industry shift announced in early 2026, Sony is entering a strategic partnership where TCL will take a 51% stake in its home entertainment division, including Bravia TVs, with a new joint venture expected to be fully operational by April 2027”

It’s the end of an era for the Sony Bravia.

I would be shocked if there wasn’t a single fuse just for that antenna.

Pretty sure at least half of Adobe’s users are on macOS.

I mean, yes, that is bad… but the biennium budget for 2011-2013 was around $60 Billion, which means this project represented about half a percent of the overall budget. The current budget deficit is around $60 Million, but the kicker from 2024 was a record $5.6B in unexpected surplus.

The Oracle debacle is a good representation of why government contracting can be a mess, but I don’t think that project caused such a big long-term financial problem. Putting a toll on the I-5 bridge into/from WA is a massive issue, I agree with you there.

I was asleep in bed one night many years ago and heard a loud bang, startling me awake. I thought for sure somebody was trying to break in a window or something. Went out, checked the house, nothing amiss. Went outside, checked around for any signs of something being off, not a thing. I then sat in my living room for 30 minutes trying to decide if it was a dream or if it would happen again. Still, nothing. I went back to sleep.

The next morning I made coffee and sat down at my MacBook Pro. It was an older model but I immediately noticed something was wrong. The entire laptop was elevated off the table slightly. The battery had apparently expanded in the middle of the night and with enough force ripped the bottom aluminum cover through three of the screw holes. Found the source of the noise, and immediately took it for disposal.

I was very lucky it didn’t catch fire, although it would have quickly solved my midnight mystery.

You seem to be missing the point, the Nintendo Switch is handily the most popular game console in US gaming history. It has officially sold more units than the PS2.

I’m sorry that you don’t appreciate the switch, it’s an amazing general purpose gaming console.

I never said they don’t get hail, I said they don’t get regular hail. In general, hail is uncommon in Denmark, and large hail is even more rare.

Yeah… pretty sure Denmark doesn’t get regular thunderstorms or hail storms.

Taking a vacation road trip from Florida to the Grand Canyon with three kids with only bikes also comes at quite the cost. Bikes are great, but in many practical scenarios they are slow. Not all of us live in Manhattan, or a dense city, or even a well connected and safe to traverse suburb.

Bikes cost time.

There are some smaller Ollama Llama 3.2 models that would fit on 12GB. I’ve run some of the smaller Llama 3.1 models under 10GB on NVIDIA GPUs

Dang, I used to have so many Juno disks. What a flashback.

Using your own WiFi router also bypasses the wireless security settings to access the school network.

Some resources are only available while on the network (printers, access to library, academic papers, other student hardware). Now imagine a random person in a coffee shop next door had u limited access to these resources via an unmanaged access point.

For cutting up RATs on the runway.

I agree, the speculative execution failure feels like the start of the bad times for modern Intel.

This.

You’d be surprised how much of a place’s physical infrastructure depends on a physical line. Automated fire alerts for high rises, security alarms, remote access for gates and doors, backup phone connections. A lot of this still uses old physical lines because it is easy to fix and highly reliable.

Now consider the infrastructure needed for specialized services like EMS, police, secure and classified buildings, federal agencies, embassies, smart traffic signals. Shutting down a network like that has massive implications for anything in society that relies on it, which is well beyond your cell phone plan.