If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative about a college student going to work at a computer repair shop.
I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side.
It would be nice if I could download a version of the Arc browser with the cloud bits removed. I use it because of the UI/UX and pretty much ignore everything else. Really if there was a browser that let me keep organized spaces in a left panel plus create split screen views then it would immediately convince me to switch from Arc.
I know about Zen and Floorp. For my day to day browsing Arc has:
# Split screen tabs
Zen and Floorp both have this but the UX for both is really clunky. Surely they'll improve but Arc felt like second nature.
# Little Arcs
As far as I know, neither Zen or Floorp have this feature and if they do then the UX is not as obvious as Arc. The UX around Little Arcs is almost perfect. If I click on a link, it opens as a modal that I can expand to its own tab if I need or dismiss by just clicking away. The same things happens in other apps so I don't lose context just because I wanted to look at a link quick. If I do want to bring that tab into a space then it's 1-2 clicks away. My only gripe with this is that the Little Arcs that are created from clicking links in other apps don't auto dismiss if you change focus but this might just be a setting I don't have configured.
# Inset meetings/videos
AFAIK neither has this feature either. Having videos that are playing just seamlessly pop-up picture-in-picture when navigating away from the video tab is useful enough but the meeting feature is key for me because my company uses Google Meet. I can navigate away from meetings to look-up info/check Slack/etc without losing focus on the meeting itself and getting back to the meeting tab or unmuting myself is 1 click away.
Sure all of these things could probably be accomplished by browser extensions but I think the UI/UX within Arc is pretty tough to compete with.
>A smart travel agent could in theory use this to cancel an old booking and book again if the price is reduced, but I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.
This is called churn and airlines are pretty on top of it. If you do this often then it will completely ruin your relationship with the airline. Maybe individual travel agencies can get away with it if they're trying to book a handful of tickets each week but OTAs can't.
> I think some airlines have changed their practice to avoid this.
AFAIK even direct connections still use the pattern of creating a PNR, confirming the booking, and then issuing a ticket. Even so in the US, airlines have to guarantee a full refund if a domestic flight is cancelled within 24 hours of booking.
Disclaimer: I've worked for the OTA Hopper for 7+ years.
> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline
This is not necessarily true. OTAs are not allowed to list a price that undercuts the airline but there are definitely ways for them to undercut the price that the booker ends up paying e.g. offering credits that they can redeem on future flight bookings. In this scenario the airline still gets paid the full amount for the ticket and the OTA makes up the difference.
Airlines are fully within their right to withhold inventory from OTAs that do this, but that entirely depends on the relationship that the OTA has with the airline. In some cases airlines actually run discount campaigns through OTAs in order to capture a bit more market share or fill inventory that they're not seeing being booked through their first party website.
>I can assure you any "add-ons" offered by a third party are ultimately a scam
This is definitely not true. Any kind of insurance product offered by third parties are essentially just that. Hopper's "cancel for any reason" insurance is essentially paying a premium to make your ticket fully refundable. Typically airline inventory managers price refundable tickets at a fixed premium and there's an opportunity there for OTAs to essentially undercut that premium because it's a naive model.
Not the person you're replying to but I tried all 3 sets of standard tips as well smaller 3rd party tips and none of them sat in my ears well enough while doing any kind of moving around (or gum chewing) so I ended up giving them to a friend and going back to the standard AirPods because I've never had a problem with them staying in my ears. What's weird is that before AirPods came out my standard earbuds were the Panasonic ErgoFit ones and those always stayed in my ears no problem with the smallest set of tips.
> Nice money, not enough to make a major lifestyle improvement.
It most certainly is enough to make a major lifestyle improvement when someone is living paycheck to paycheck. That could be the difference between just barely scraping by to being able to comfortably buy necessities and maybe even grow a savings.
If you're talking about the OpenResearch study that Sam Altman is funding then yes it did [1]. Granted this study was a little bit more money but the results imply that any amount of extra money helps people living paycheck to paycheck in terms of financial flexibility and safety.
I like the concept and I'm sure the product is great, but not putting the actual cost of the product anywhere on the website is insane to me. Just say it's going to be $730 and I can make the decision to put down a deposit or not. Only being shown the $100 deposit without any indication of the actual price is one of the worst dark patterns I can imagine.
I agree. It showed the price when the presale was still available, so this seems like an oversight. Unless they plan to change the price.
Also, I'm still waiting for an actual hands-on review. It's really quite expensive given that my 3 year old phone was under half the price and is considerably more powerful.
I highly doubt this. In my opinion, the much more likely reasoning was that there was a huge drop off in pre-order conversion on whichever page had the price and someone important said "we should try removing the price to see how that affects conversion."
I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii [2] https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/
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