> They did not because they actually did not want to be regulated by EU
That's not how banking regulation works though. If a bank wants to do business in the EU, and all the big banks do, then they have to have entities regulated by the relevant EU regulators. Prior to Brexit, it was ok for a bank to be regulated by the PRA or FCA to trade in the EU. Post Brexit, they need to have entities with banking licenses that are subject to EU regulators.
And that's what they did: they set up banking entities in Germany, France, Ireland etc. And they moved/hired staff into those countries to support that activity (if they weren't there already).
They didn't wholesale move out of London for 2 reasons: The UK is a big market and there is a large pool of skilled people in London that it wouldn't make sense to ignore.
> Real Brexiteers were bankers
Right. Bankers famously want their ill gotten gains to go to taxation, duty and red tape rather than into their own pockets. They lobby hard for extra regulation, multiple, diverse, enforcement regimes and multiple, diverse taxation regimes. They also want their customers' money to be going to taxation, duty and red tape so that they can't spend it on banking services. Because bankers are famously altruistic like that.
To paraphrase Pauli, the idea that the finance sector, esp in the UK, wanted Brexit is not even wrong.
The british financial industry has been one of the harder hit by brexit: London has effectively lost its status as the biggest financial hub in Europe. So if that was their plan it was a bad one.
Some of them. There are not enough bankers in the UK to produce the turnout for leave that we saw. There were also a lot of people whose main motivation was "f*** the system", and they sort of succeeded, even if they ended up worse off as a result.
It makes me think that the academic left should be a bit more careful with their regular calls to "burn down the evil capitalist system". It turns out a mob with torches might also set fire to the parts you like.
Brexit was a democratic vote. Maybe some banks invested some money to push Brexit. But its pretty clear that overwhelmingly immigration was what the Brexit voting base actually cared about.
Overwhelming most people in banking are conventional liberals. They live in big cities and are internationalists.
Maybe the very elite of the richest banks thought that way, but not bankers broadly.
I'm guessing you're making fun of me, too, for my reaction? :-p
I'll expand, then. The EU demands USB charging for mobile devices, Apple didn't suddenly become good. The EU demands longer software updates for mobile devices, Samsung nor Google didn't become angels all of a sudden. Similar situation here.
Everything needs to be dragged away from them, one painful law at a time.
And then corporations turn it around as their "largesse".
> Everything needs to be dragged away from them, one painful law at a time.
But the anarcho-capitalists told me that market will fix it all on its own if only we let corporations do whatever they want and not burden them with regulations!
It's honestly shocking to me how many anarcho-capitalists there are, especially here on HN. I get the aversion to taxation on a primal level, but surely nobody with any work and life experience can believe in that, right?
This would probably work if corporations were NOT permitted to infinitely assimilate via mergers and acquisitions. Then yes, the marketplace becomes a real competitive marketplace not Behemoth Krakens assimilating or crushing all lifeforms.
> It's honestly shocking to me how many anarcho-capitalists there are, especially here on HN. I get the aversion to taxation on a primal level, but surely nobody with any work and life experience can believe in that, right?
Allow me to be surprised by your surprise - take a look at this site's domain name!
This is a web site that originated from (and which still has deep roots in) the American tech startup scene - so of course many users are of the "move fast and break things" mindset. Regulation is anathema to this culture as it slows down tech progress / profits.
It's almost like all these philosophies of "communism" and "socialism" and "capitalism" and "conservatism" are just tribes that a few people want us all to identify with so we can be whipped up. Life is a negotiation between you and all the people around you and in negotiation you have to give to get. Absolutism, the concept of "my way or the highway" is the real danger here.
Except there were plenty of libertarians in bank crisis. There just weren't any in powerful position in governments. There is a reason actual libertarians don't end up in those positions.
A tiny amount of people who claim to have some libertarian conservative leanings maybe changed their minds, but overwhelmingly those were just politicians who talked libertarianism to get some gun fans to vote for them.
I get that no true scotsman would call for government intervention even under the direst of circumstances, but a whole hell of a lot of people who days earlier were loudly decrying the notion that there was any place at all for government within the perfect operations of the one true market were suddenly very, very concerned that that same government wouldn't do enough to rescue the poor innocent bankers who'd just made a couple trillion in bad bets and whose failure would surely end the world economy, and they persisted in that concern right up until it became clear they and their friends would be fine and there was a possibility that someone might actually present them with a bill for the carnage they'd caused, at which point they saw the light again and went back to their former fervent belief that there was no circumstances ever under which the government had any business getting involved in their business. I'm sure you and all your friends are all pure of heart and intent, but boy have there been an awful lot of craven assholes operating under your banner who sure seem to lose their spine once there's actual stakes for them.
I wouldn't describe myself as a libertarian and I don't have any friends that are. I don't have much insight into silicon valley culture as I am from Europe.
All I can say is that in most online forums that I saw, the overwhelming majority libertarians are against such bank rescue operations.
Not an anarcho-capitalist but I'd guess one of the biggest "regulations" they'd be against would be the laws that allow corporations to exist at all. Pure capitalism exists without government and corps are a legal (ie. gov) created entity.
Depends. If your life experience is one of wealth and privilege but you are constantly told you deserve your wealth and privilege because you are smarter and more hard working than everyone else. And if your work experience amounts to exploiting the connections you made as a direct result of the wealth and privilege you were born with, but everyone says you are smarter and more hard-working than everyone else. If that has been your experience, then I can easily see how a person would genuinely believe the anarcho-capitalist philosophy could work in real life, if not for the stupid, lazy plebs
>It's honestly shocking to me how many anarcho-capitalists there are, especially here on HN.
Because HN is full of 'temporarily embarrassed billionaires'[1]. A lot of people here are either vested in big tech or see themselves creating the next big-tech in the future hoping to become the next Steve Jobs.
They saw how the likes of Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft got super rich through exploiting various legal and market loopholes, so they see these upcoming regulations as a threat to their own enrichment. Kind of like technological NIMBYism.
It's difficult to have unbiased discussions on big-tech regulations when many here have built their wealth or careers on big-tech being deregulated and exploiting every trick in the book, and now suddenly get to watch as the ladder is pulled from under them shuddering at the though that SW engineering will be paid like other professions (like in Europe) instead of being a professional get-rich quick ticket it was/still is for now.
As somebody that flirted with anarcho-capitalism, I surprised to hear this. Actual anrcho-capitalists are an incredible small minority. You act like as if there is this big anarcho-capitalist block out there.
I read a lot of these discussion and I almost never come across any anarcho-capitalists. Are maybe mixing this up with people who like markets in general? In terms of this debate about charging points and software updates it hardly makes a difference.
Also, its totally disingenuous to only talk about one side of this from an actual market perspective. These big companies make massive use of the legal system to protect themselves, protection that they wouldn't have.
ARM couldn't protect its ISA, any company could make chips. You could reverse engineer the specific Apple chip and build it exactly the same. You could make the device and sell it with Apple software on it. Apple couldn't project its proprietary charger with patent and copyright law for example.
Apple depends on a global system of agree on laws and enforced copy right and patent protection along with many other such aspects legal systems and the modern world. Apple would require and extremely complex arrangement of trade secrets to get even close to what they have now.
Look at how much the Soviets simply took over and copied, or China during its rise. Its a fundamentally different game if you are not required to follow the law of the place where the cooperation is from.
You would but 100% of the burden on the devices protecting themselves, something that is only recently becoming routine and still isn't a thing for chargers for example.
You can't just look at the current world, imagine it as fundamentally the same and then change one thing. The whole way modern cooperation's are design simply wouldn't be possible in the same way.
Such system are therefore fundamentally theoretical, so arguing about such system is quite difficult. Legal and economic systems can't just be pulled from nothing, there needs to be some historical and institutional development that backs it up. Different visions of how such a system would work and would be structured have been considered.
A more interesting question is in the current system we actually have. The government should get involved in these things. You can just make that argument for that specifically instead of saying 'checkmate anarcho-capitalists and patting yourself on the back'. Just like its idiotic for people to say 'checkmate communist' anytime any publicly owned train company makes some insanely idiotic decision.
> I get the aversion to taxation on a primal level, but surely nobody with any work and life experience can believe in that, right?
The US government in the last 25 years got involved in many wars killing millions of people. Its also using a lot of its power to prevent housing construction that leads a massive housing shortage. And uses its power to systematically deprive the people of Iran from basic goods.
I think its unfair to paint anybody who thinks about these ideas as 'simply doesn't like taxes' as if that is the only reason why anybody would consider forms of anarchism.
But I grant you that most people are less interested in a fundamental argument and its intellectual underpinnings, if you try to have broad libertarian movement just screaming 'no guns laws, legal weed and no taxes' seems more effective. And why such movements end up not being intellectually 'pure'. Communist history know a thing or to about easy slogans and trying to build a 'pure' political base.
> As of 2020, foreigners represent 88.1% of the population.
+
> UAE law does not allow trade unions to exist. The right to collective bargaining and the right to strike are not recognised, and the Ministry of Labour has the power to force workers to go back to work. Migrant workers who participate in a strike can have their work permits cancelled and be deported. Consequently, there are very few anti-discrimination laws in relation to labour issues, with Emiratis – and other GCC Arabs – getting preference in public sector jobs despite lesser credentials than competitors and lower motivation. In fact, just over eighty per cent of Emirati workers hold government posts, with many of the rest taking part in state-owned enterprises such as Emirates airlines and Dubai Properties. Western states, including the United Kingdom, were also warned by the Emirati Trade Minister, Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi to keep politics separate from trade and the economy, as it dilutes the agreements' main objectives. In 2023, Al Zeyoudi indicated that these countries should "tone down" the human and workers' rights provisions in the trade deals, in order to gain greater market access and business opportunities.
So, yeah...
When your workforce is disposable and cash squirts out of the ground, yeah, yay capitalism!!! if you're the right category of person, I guess.
Not at all, I was agreeing with you. It's spot on. I myself have posted the occasional reaction as well, but for example, the "whatabout" folks leave one to wonder if it's some kind of karma tactic or are they really asking here instead of googling the answer with way more depth.
Yep, I saw LTT talking about how Microsoft "improved" to an 8/10 and automatically knew this was another case of LTT USwashing EU regulations.
Don't even get me started how they started using one individual incident about privacy to instantly say "well you know Apple with their garbage excuses might be right since this one individual incident showed the EU is evil!"
It's really ridiculous, imagine being Apple and knowing that all it takes is to pay off one politician to propose a really dumb and intrusive law to discourage an entire movement pro user control and choice.
The real irony is people from the EU frequenting a forum enabled by American Capitalism and likely using an operating system made by American capitalists.
Why not use one of the many EU mastodon instances, with Maemo and exclusively open source and EU tech?
America has a set of very specific circumstances out of which capitalism is only one big factor and most of the others can't really be reproduced elsewhere.
Huge access to two oceans (basically can't ever be blockaded - not reproducible by say, Germany), massive amount of raw resources (probably only outdone by Russia - not reproducible by, for example, Japan), huge population (#3 in the world - not reproducible by, for example, Switzerland).
The US has a large well educated middle class, which is probably it's greatest independent achievement, but let's not forget that other countries just couldn't do what the US did, due to factors outside their control.
Germany could become hyper capitalistic tomorrow and it still couldn't frack its way to oil and gas independence. Or produce food for 300 million people if it integrated that many immigrants.
I wouldn't just pat myself on the back as an American. Not everything is a factor of what Americans themselves did.
On top of that, to put it in neutral terms, not everything given by the US is a net plus. The US invented the transistor but it also invented spam and selling private data.
Imperial Germany had a lots more people and lots more resources. Had they not totally and fundamentally fucked up (driven by their own zero-sum thinking) they could have absolutely been a global power not unlike the US.
> huge population (#3 in the world - not reproducible by, for example, Switzerland)
We are getting immigration, just give us time, we will catch up anytime now.
> Germany could become hyper capitalistic tomorrow and it still couldn't frack its way to oil and gas independence. Or produce food for 300 million people if it integrated that many immigrants.
Actually they could. Because there is plenty of Thorium. And if you have good nuclear and chemical engineering in Thorium there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't be 100% energy independent. Its not even that difficult I would argue, all the necessary technology has existed for 40+ years. It just requires long term sustained investment.
France made itself independent of carbon based energy in its electricity sector within less then 20 years. And if they had just continued to push on that, 20 more years could have replaced all other uses of carbon power. They just didn't.
Replace heat production with electric heaters and heat pumps.
Electric cars wouldn't have been ready, but using high-temperature nuclear reactors to create chemical fuel is totally possible and pretty efficient when operating on large scale. Regulation to require cars to be able to operate with 80% methanol isn't that hard and most engines can handle that.
Like not as cheap as Saudi oil. But with lots of follow on benefits from local investment. Being the most advanced country terms of nuclear engineering and green fuel production. Like well position for other chemical and nuclear advances.
Fracking isn't the only way to energy independence.
> Or produce food for 300 million people if it integrated that many immigrants.
Food is something you can import, and Germany can import if from many different areas. Its hard to blockade Germany. It basically needs two other Great powers to be against them, and that only happens if they are trying to be expansionist.
> Imperial Germany had a lots more people and lots more resources. Had they not totally and fundamentally fucked up (driven by their own zero-sum thinking) they could have absolutely been a global power not unlike the US.
You mean the colonies? That wasn't really sustainable, notice how everyone decolonized regardless of their status after WW2, except for Russia, whose colonies were adjacent to the heartland and much more sparsely populated.
The German heartland was much smaller than the continental US is: 540k sqm versus 8 million sqkm for the continental US.
Population wise, similar situation: 70 million people Imperial Germany versus 100 million for the US. And due to their much smaller size, Imperial Germany for sure couldn't have scaled to 350 million people, which is where the US is in 2024.
For the rest of the comment, you're focusing just on energy. Oil and gas are used for everything. Materials, medicine, etc.
Also, relying on food imports for potentially hundreds of millions of people is stupid. That's how you end up with people starving at the first major catastrophe.
> You mean the colonies? That wasn't really sustainable, notice how everyone decolonized regardless of their status after WW2, except for Russia, whose colonies were adjacent to the heartland and much more sparsely populated.
Germany didn't have colonies worth mentioning.
Germany had a population going on 68 million while the US had a population of 92 million. That is pretty close. Much, much, much closer then the US is to current China.
Germany didn't have as much growth opportunity as the US but they would be one of the most densely populated most urban countries in the world.
> The German heartland was much smaller than the continental US is: 540k sqm versus 8 million sqkm for the continental US.
Lets be real here, this doesn't matter. The waste amount of economic power does not come from the empty land in the middle.
Yes producing a lot of corn is nice, but its not actually that important.
Germany had a much more important thing, developed trade power near by. I rather have Nordics close then Iowa.
And being denser actually helps in many way, better for trains and transportation. Its much easier to turn the country into a tightly integrated economic unit, specially before mass air travel.
> Imperial Germany for sure couldn't have scaled to 350 million people, which is where the US is in 2024.
Population isn't the end all be all of global power projection. It matters of course. But Germany with say 150-200 million people and non of the world wars would be a very powerful.
Additionally it was already pretty clear around 1914 that Germany would start to lead some sort of European block. Austria-Hungary was basically a German satellite already, this would have just become tighter. Together they have more population then the US.
Sweden and Denmark were strongly in the German economic orbit to. Forming some sort of economic central European block would have been inevitable.
> For the rest of the comment, you're focusing just on energy. Oil and gas are used for everything. Materials, medicine, etc.
As I pointed out, energy can be converted to chemical energy and with high temperature nuclear the process could be quite efficient and cheap as well. Nuclear becomes quite efficient when you mass produce reactors, as the fuel cost is basically zero. You have higher investment cost for a reactor and chemical plant then for a derrick and a refinery to be sure. But that is an investment worth making.
Germany today has a powerful chemical industry even without having their own supply. Doing this would give you very powerful chemical processing industry. And it would make you the globally best power in nuclear innovations (things like medical isotopes, nuclear batteries, nuclear satellites and so on).
Not to mention going the nuclear and electric route would be a major benefit for the health of the population. Going away from oil and coal quite would be a major economic benefit.
The initial investment is bigger, but the long term payoff is way better. And Germany certainty would have had the ability to do that level of investment (again, even Post-WW2 France managed about 1/3 of it and they stopped for political reasons).
> Also, relying on food imports for potentially hundreds of millions of people is stupid. That's how you end up with people starving at the first major catastrophe.
Imperial Germany had a lot of further potential in terms of food production if they really wanted to push it. But in my opinion its not actually that big a deal. The claim that people will starve the first major catastrophe simply doesn't line up with reality.
Unless you are in a war, with multiple super powers at the same time (really only Russia and Britain/US), there is essentially 0 scenarios where a rich developed country can run out of food. Specially one like Germany that has excellent access to Atlanic and Eurasian trade networks.
Germany in the absence of being an really dumb political actor would have been a major global power. Maybe not quite on the US level but certainty the US could never have influenced Europe in the same way they did after WW2. And Germany would have been strong enough to continually counter balance Russia. Imperial Russia had a much, much worse long term growth perspective.
LOL, if you minimize every natural obstacle to growth[1] and consider that the vast majority of everything is purely a result of population, and at the same time discounting the huge population ceiling difference between the US and Germany, then yeah, nothing matters anymore.
You cannot be a long term world power without abundant natural resources of almost every type. Having lots of smart and rich people obviously puts you in a good position, but we're arguing about being #1-2 in the world, not #20.
Also for the hypothetical German-led union, the EU, after 70 years of efforts, is still a weak confederation. It's weaker than even the original US based on the Articles of Confederation.
> LOL, if you minimize every natural obstacle to growth[1]
Claiming that natural resources are fundamental limiter to growth just isn't accurate. Market access and innovation is far more important.
Thorium is unlimited in both countries so energy isn't a resource problem.
The reality is, housing policy is far more important for success then aluminum deposits.
> You cannot be a long term world power without abundant natural resources of almost every type.
That is just false. The growth of most of the western world is not based on its own mining. Japan also wasn't very mining heavy. China growth hasn't come from its own energy resources.
That a completely regressive idea. Having access to a broad reliable supply is what actually matters matters.
Modern Germany doesn't need to mine its own stuff to be rich and have reliable inputs. Having reliable access to Sweden is more important then having Iron ore deposits.
The reality is when world power were replaced, it was almost always by countries with larger populations. Germany overtook Britain because Germany had more population. US overtook Germany because of population. China is gone overtake the US because of population.
If Britain wasn't replaced by Germany because Germany had more resources. Arguably Germany had less then the British Empire.
Having a large population economically integrated as close to the peak of technological progress with reliable market access has always been how great power replaced each other. By that metric Imperial Germany would be smaller then the US (depending on its immigration policy) but not by a huge margin.
> Coal: US #4, Germany #8.
That's not a good thing. Coal is literally bad for your society by any objective matter. At least in the last 60 years.
> Gas: US #1, Germany #50.
Focusing on gas over nuclear is making your society worse, its basically the coal of the last 50 years.
I’ll take that as a sign that Right to Repair advocacy and legislation has begun to bear fruit.
It's more likely a sign that whatever OEM they decided to use this time just went in a slightly different direction because it made things easier for them, or they are aiming for the enterprise market that Dell and Lenovo occupy (and where things like "FRU replacement" manuals and labeled screws are still the norm.) MS has lobbied heavily against RtR in the past and I don't think that's changed.
It’s probably also in preparation for EU legislation on the area. Microsoft is a major player in the EU public sector and for good reason. They are one of the best IT-business partners you can have as an enterprise organisation on every aspect which isn’t necessarily technical, and their tech isn’t exactly bad either. What is the “realistic” alternative to most of their 365 platform? I say “realistic” because it’ll need to be used by people who can’t tell you if they are using iOS or Android when they need support.
I’m guessing that part of staying on top of EU enterprise in general is being EU compliant, it’s a lesson AWS quickly learned from Microsoft as their support area went from Google to Microsoft in like half a year as they realized it was the only way to get in on all those billions.
> What is the “realistic” alternative to most of their 365 platform? I say “realistic” because it’ll need to be used by people who can’t tell you if they are using iOS or Android when they need support.
Google's Workspace or whatever they call it this week. It's not really better than Microsoft in any aspect, but covers enough features and is familiar enough (most people probably had a Gmail at some point) to everyone.
Right until you need support. Microsoft's isn't great, but I don't have to create a new account at Bing's ad department and shove a few hundred bucks into it to guilt trip them into unblocking my old O365 tenant because a haywire AI accidentally closed it down, and that's the only department with something occasionally approaching customer support.
Used Workplace at my last company. (Paid of course.) I don't have any visibility into how IT liked their support but it seemed like a pretty good service--especially over time. Even Chat and Meet seemed more than adequate although they basically cut over to Slack if only because a good subset of the company insisted on using Slack whether officially or not.
There is a world of difference between the Microsoft you do business with as an enterprise customer and the Microsoft you do business with as a private citizen or a small organisation. When you’re a big enough customer (and this can be with 5000 employees) you’ll get calls directly from Seattle with updates on major incidents on half-hourly basis. Meaning your CTO can tell your organisation that they know there are issues but that Microsoft a keeping them updated. You’ll also get different prices on things in Azure and the 365 platform, bundle licences, access to have changes made in core Microsoft products (if it’s not unreasonable), get compliance product owners who’ll try to get your local legislation to go through and so on.
With Google there is no difference if you’re spending $100 or a hundred million a year. You still get to talk to the same chatbot. Except for Google education which is ok.
Not that it really matters that much as Google likely wouldn’t be a realistic choice for anything because of how tough the EU legislation is on keeping data within the EU. I think AWS is still the only giant US tech company which is compliant with only having EU citizens work support on the infrastructure of EU customers. Well, Microsoft has probably caught up, but if they have it’s taken them a long time to do so.
Personally I think it’s a little sad Google can’t seem to get it right for EU enterprise because their education suite is actually very affordable and easy to use for EU schools. But despite it being the one area of Google where they seemed to understand how to actually sell it to EU enterprise, it’s still having major issues over privacy concerns as the advertisement part of their company just can’t stay away.
This is about a 20,000 person global organization with large EU operations. For smaller EU organizations, I expect Google just doesn't care very much and that may be an increasing trend with US companies to the degree that EU regulations run counter to how they want to operate elsewhere.
I’m guess Google took it serious enough after all. They recently made an agreement with the 98 municipalities of Denmark which will allow our schools to continue using Chromebooks after the summer.
I’ll have to adopt my comments in the future. It only took them like 5 years, but they got there.
Also left, now at telecom Lumen (merger of Level3 and CenturyLink) https://news.lumen.com/ryan-asdourian : "Ryan also led Business Development and Marketing for the Microsoft Surface business group in the United States"
Perhaps unrelated, but it feels like Microsoft exists in a zone where anything good is by perceived to be by accident, while anything bad is by intention.
Digression: It's amazing what people in the states can do, you buy the item, fiddle with it and then return it outright with no valid reason. This is beautiful.
Huh, I don't have any experience in other countries with this, but I guess I've never thought about how easy our return policies are. What's it like from your (or other's) part of the world?
This is silly.
Soldered CPU, RAM, SSD.
Pretty much the only thing repairable is the battery.
I'd argue that this was a cheap business decision to make.
Keep the price gouging on parts, while satisfying regulators on "right to repair", and even get some free marketing from iFixit.
It only takes one part to break for you to have to buy an entire new device.
Is there a single laptop on the market that's different in that sense? Even Framework only supports swapping entire mainboard. Even then -- we have yet to see for how long they'll be releasing updates for the current form factor.
Not in the hot-swappable way but yeah, they kinda do: e.g. latest AMD CPUs use sockets called FP7 / FP7r2 / FP8. However, I don't think footprints of these sockets are public.
I'm pretty sure that only Apple is desperate enough to solder storage. I've never heard of any other laptop or desktop with soldered storage (although please correct me if I'm wrong; I'd love to know what brands to avoid).
I get the skeptical responses on here, but this is a good step, clearly over time reflecting good management decisions, and it should be encouraged. For me, this put the Surface back on my list of choices to consider for my next laptop (obviously they must have a model meeting other requirements, but they're now a candidate).
In my dreams, I can unscrew the new Surface Pro 11 and rip out the AI core like it were some kind of tumor, then put the rest back together again and it still works just fine.
Being able to repair is up there with recall/copilot being off-by-default as a cool feature though.
Until you find out it's actually useful for creating subtitles for no-audio video watching for videos that don't supply their own subtitles. Improved grammar and style checking without the cloud. Maybe a whiff of telling GIMP what to do instead of clicking through 1,000 menues. Automatically creating calendar entries from emails that lack an *ics attachment.
NPUs are able to do more than Recall and Bing search. Don't fall for Microsoft marketing.
I've found that when I attempt to automate some task via llm, I have to really focus, sit down, and think about exactly how I'm describing every detail. I have think about the wording and how I describe the concepts in such a way, where it takes more mental effort then just doing the thing.
It's even worse since the mindset of describing and writing in such a way is not within the same headspace as the technical portion, so by the end I'm only more tired from having to switch gears too much.
Paint in W11 cannot even do AI augmentation without first phoning home to Microsoft. I'd just use a service for the use cases you mentioned, if I had need for them.
An NPU is like a specialized GPU, it's just raw compute power you could use for anything, and many mobile devices have had an NPU like unit for many years at this point.
Nadella's MSFT is plenty underhanded. You only have to look as far as their last two major OS versions. Last four to five if you want to count everything they did to 7-8.1 to get people on 10. But even just on 10 and 11 there's plenty of anti-user nastiness. And more is getting cooked up every day.[0]
ok, how is that different from iOS, ChromeOS, macOS, or Android?
I'm mostly a linux user, but the idea of having to sync with a stupid cloud account to use a commercial OS is kinda how things work these days. Don't you even have to do that dumb stuff for things like Photoshop now?
If so, singling out MSFT as some egregious malcontent for this sounds more like salacious headlines
No other OS employs dark patterns to trick users into upgrading. Plenty of OSes have online accounts that the user is encouraged to use/create, but no other OS forces it. Plenty of other OSes have privacy settings tuned to opt-out, but no other OS has those settings sporadically resetting to the less private defaults. No other major OS runs ads in their app launcher.
Even in cases where other OSes do commonly misbehave, Microsoft puts them to shame. I think I had one popup about storing things on iCloud when I set up this MacBook. My Pixel phone rarely sends notifications about features I might have missed, but it's possible to shut those off with a single switch. But on my Windows laptop, Teams insists on launching in the foreground on every boot and OneDrive slides into my notification drawer on a daily basis.
Two most used OSes on the planet - iOS and Android - force you to create online accounts and do not allow you to fully use your device without online accounts.
No one complains about it and instead they praise this as a great feature.
Windows does not force you to use the online account to access all the features of your computer, it tries (more and more forcefully) to get you onboard so you get similar backup protection as what you have on your phone but minimally technically savvy users can still create local-only accounts (which is near impossible on the phone OS).
What's missing from iOS and Android if you don't use cloud accounts?
> Windows does not force you to use the online account to access all the features of your computer
With current Windows (11 23h2) you have to know the correct incantation to be able to create a local-only account. Is it technically possible to not have a cloud account? I suppose it still is, just the same as you can technically install it on an older CPU with no TPM. Is it something Joe RandomUser will be able to figure out on his own? I doubt it. So in Windows-land, the situation is much closer to "you can't use your pc at all without a cloud account".
Windows is far more lenient there, it's a flag in Rufus and you're good. Meanwhile your iPhone becomes a dumb phone if you don't want to make an iCloud account.
Android of course also just let's you install apks.
> Two most used OSes on the planet - iOS and Android - force you to create online accounts and do not allow you to fully use your device without online accounts.
Last time I checked, AOSP based phones as well as Samsung's and Google's lineup as well as iPhones can be installed without an online account just fine and everything works, the only thing that doesn't work is the Find My stuff, it obviously requires an account on either platforms.
You do need an Internet connection of some sorts during setup though, because iCloud Lock/Samsung Knox was the only way to get theft and robberies under control.
> Windows does not force you to use the online account to access all the features of your computer
Unless you know about the OOBE\BYPASSNRO trick, you literally cannot proceed in setting up Windows 11 at all.
There's an easier Windows online bypass. Just log in with "no@thankyou.com" and any password; it will tell you the account is disabled before dropping you to local account creation.
It's because it's not magic, someone has a microsoft account named no@thankyou.com that has enough sign in attempts to be disabled. I bet you could also do any other email address that people commonly use as a fake.
> No one complains about it and instead they praise this as a great feature.
That's because we have a duopoly in phone operating systems.
> minimally technically savvy users can still create local-only accounts
On Windows 11? Can they still? I tried setting up a windows 11 arm VM recently and I couldn't find a working way to use a local account. Yes there are tutorials, but i think everyone at Microsoft is working overtime to invalidate them all.
I’d disagree with “doesn’t force you” if it’s getting harder and harder. If I have to look up how to run a new install without an online account (just setting up without network doesn’t work any more), then that’s near enough forcing in my book.
Patently untrue. Both iOS and Android allow you to skip setting up an Apple ID or Google account. The only way you are not allowed to fully use your device is the app stores which require accounts. It's still a phone, you can still sideload apps on Android, or install them on iOS through some sort of device management schemery.
However, on Windows, Microsoft is removing every workaround they can find to create a local-only account. It used to be a skip button. Then it used to be unplugging the network cord. For a while it was a magic email address. I believe that trick no longer works, although it did for me the last time I set up a new Windows install. But now, as far as I know, there is no way to create a local account during setup, you have to create an account, then convert it to a local account later.
And that still leaves dark pattern upgrades, OS-level third party ads, privacy nightmares, and unmatched first party ads. MSFT is not the good guy in the ecosystem. Never has been. They're not illegally curbstomping their competition anymore, sure, they've redirected their energy at enshittifying their OS.
MSFT used to be exceptionally evil. Halloween documents, how they screwed IBM with OS/2, their fake pen windows demo to kill Go corp, SCO trials, the skullduggery with Netscape and the antitrust case.
They pillaged and burned the competition in the 80s and 90s, legendary stuff.
Now what? They have a cloud login like everyone else?
They used their ill-gotten market dominance to turn the desktop personal computer into a dystopian spyware machine for which the primary function is to serve ads and drive MS engagement. I struggle to think of any entity in the modern world that has subverted the potential of the information age more profoundly than Microsoft, they are a pox on mankind and a net loss to humanity
Mac and Linux user here. Linux is of course what you make it, but Mac forces no cloud account, contains no freemium apps at install, has no advertisement built in, and respects choices around voice assistants (looking at sneaking copilot into every facet, which is an issue for enterprise.)
Right so they reverted from the exception to the norm.
Tech is either leaders or followers. Everyone is doing touchscreen cars or laptops without ports or phones with a bunch of things I didn't want. It's a problem, sure, but saying HTC, Hyundai, or Microsoft, in this instance, is particularly uniquely evil for following a trend sounds pretty hyperbolic
I was incredibly disgusted to learn that to open a HEIC image on Windows, I would have to download an officially sponsored extension from the Microsoft Store that costs $1. Like.. wow; what's next? Pay to play for other new media formats that come out? At $1, it can't even be netting them a useful amount of revenue, at the cost of appearing more user hostile and eroding more trust.
This is likely a result of HEIC being under patent and requiring licensing. I'd guess Microsoft doesn't want to foot the entire bill for something only of use to a possibly small subset of users.
This is such a tired trope that should have died in the early 2010s.
Those who don't like their direction should just switch to a different OS.
Cloud integration brings features which customers want. Customers still can't even be trusted to back up their own data. Customers don't want to upgrade their OS because they don't fully value the huge number of advancements that come with major revisions.
I got something like 7-10 licenses for windows 7 via a student program when I was in undergrad. Literally haven't paid for a single windows license in over a decade because the upgrades are free and transferable to new hardware in many cases.
This is not the outcome one would expect if msft was anti-user. Think about it.
> I got something like 7-10 licenses for windows 7 via a student program when I was in undergrad. Literally haven't paid for a single windows license in over a decade because the upgrades are free and transferable to new hardware in many cases.
Not anymore. Now that you will have to pay for the OS, maybe you will think your consumer rights more. It wasn't a charity.
MSFT has never been as bad and evil as they are now. Ads everywhere as just one example and they base their ads on your conversations in their messaging apps.
There's this - and then there's Windows 11 refusing to install itself on devices that could run it just fine. Ok, there are tricks to get around it, but most people will just buy a new PC/laptop if their current one is deemed unsuitable by M$, so perfectly good PCs (irrespective of their repairability score) will end up in the landfill...
My MIL had one of the Surface 0/10 laptops that the battery had started bulging on, and she asked if I could fix it. I told here there was a better than 50% chance that it wouldn't work after repair, but I'd give it a shot. In the end, I was happy with the job I did, but it was a lot of work, easily the hardest laptop battery replacement I've done.
She's got back and other physical problems, so she wanted something very light. A lot of the decisions I understood to make it a tiny laptop. But putting the battery connector on the back of the motherboard rather than the front, or having a connector in the cable, that was just mean.
Regardless of the impetus of this, I'm happy to see a 8/10 repair score. I think we've proven that thin and light and repairable are a false dichotomy. I don't expect every manufacturer to go Framework levels of repairability, but if we can get more laptops to at least this level that will be a huge win for consumers. Even just renormalizing repairing devices will be huge.
How consistent are ifixit repair scores? I find it's hard to predict the score. There's a "reviewer effect" common to many tech reviews where scores tend to be relative to whatever previous device was just reviewed.
they're pretty consistent. unlike most tech reviews, there's things which have to be present to be considered repairable. eg: is everything glued down? are screws accessible? are there a bunch of different screws with obscure heads? is there a publicly available repair manual? etc.
also iirc their scores are determined by committee rather than a single individual
The score is not a qualitative measure on how serviceable a product is compared to it’s peers, rather, the score reflects how simple it is to service items that are able to be serviced. If the ram is not swappable, it’s simply not counted in the score as it’s integrated with the main board.
Not sure this is true — then every device by definition gets a high score, singe the display or batter is simply “not able to be serviced” on devices with poor repairability.
They have also gone back and changed scores in light of more recent information. Like parts-pairing in more recent iphones decreasing its score months after the initial review came out, despite the part seeming easy to swap. I appreciate that.
It’s quite rare to have bad memory, especially when not using an overclocked gaming machine. Most memory troubleshooting guides start with reseating the modules which means it’s not the memory that’s bad but the connector. Getting rid of the connector could mean it’s even more reliable.
There’s no point in making stuff interchangeable if it almost never breaks. We don’t have the L2 cache on a module anymore like with the old pentiums. And nobody seems to have a problem with throwing away good memory chips when just one on a DIMM module fails…
Hopefully they keep it up. I'm one person but I went from a few surface pro iterations to two surface laptop iterations to framework 13 exactly to be able to repair and replace parts. I like to think it's part of a trend.
Sorry, but that doesn't prevent M$ from pushing an update that breaking it.
Got a surface pro last year, shipped with Windows 11 pro. Worked for one week, then an upgrade broke the graphics. Uninstall of the update made thing worse. Factory reset failed too. Eventually had to clean wipe and install Windows 10. Then I had to try all my keyboards/thumb drives etc as it's either this or that did not work with it and there were not enough port to plug in all the things I need at the same time. The only thing worse than that was over 10 years ago when I was playing with different Linux distributions.
Enough is enough. I guess my next device will be shipped with Linux.
How does any of that have anything to do with hardware repairability scores.
For that matter, how could they possibly push an update that breaks said repairability? It's not like a software upgrade can fuse the battery door to the bottom of the laptop.
Yeah, right. Just this morning I learned that Window 10 is EOL next year. Also my pc wasn't fit for Windows 11. Tried to figure out why, but all I got was a redirection to a website that tried to convince me that I should buy a new computer. My pc isn't that old.
Look into Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IoT version which is EOL in 2032. Also there’s LTSC versions of Windows 11 that remove a bunch of the BS that MS includes in consumer builds.
