We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers.

And actually, the fact that the price hasn’t increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.

Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?

The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it’s that much.

There’s tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.

The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/

The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.

The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US

Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?

And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don’t follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that Apple’s costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.

But here’s the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.

Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.

And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:

Do you have a charging cable?

Is it an Apple cable?

Are you sure you have one that’s USB-C and supports USB Power Delivery?

And it’s not worn out?

You say your dog chewed on it a little but it’s mostly intact and still works?

Well, I’d recommend getting a new one anyway.

Yeah you can get your own if you want but it’s best if you get an Apple cable.

OK great, that comes out to $820 total. And do you want to insure your phone for $5 a month?

It’s fine if they reduce the price accordingly.

If it’s still the same price after they take the cable out, it was never about reducing waste to begin with.

Knowing Apple, that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, which is why I never have and never will own any of their products.

I feel like you either fear and/or despise generative AI, or you think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

There seems to be very little in-between.

Don’t even need an AI. Just teach a parrot to say “let’s circle back on this” and “how many story points is that?”

Even if it didn’t, any middle manager who decides to replace their dev team with AI is going to realize pretty quickly that actually writing code is only a small part of the job.

Won’t stop 'em from trying, of course. But when the laid-off devs get frantic calls from management asking them to come back and fix everything, they’ll be in a good position to negotiate a raise.

As Boyd writes, UVC light at 254 nm “is an established 80-year-old technology that has been widely used in water disinfection, food decontamination, and the control of TB in hospitals and homeless shelters.” It was starting to gain traction in the mid-20th century, but “fell out of fashion” as western societies adopted vaccines and antibiotics, opting to treat rather than prevent disease.

Or maybe, before the creation of UV LEDs in the last decade, it took huge mercury vapor lamps that took a fuckton of power and put out dangerous UV radiation as well as a bunch of heat?

Nah, obviously it’s a conspiracy.

This article reads like it has an agenda.

Yeah ProtonDB is great but it doesn’t always have a fix.

For example, Powerwash Simulator is Steam Deck Verified and has a Platinum rating and most people are like “runs great out of the box, no problems”.

However, when I tried it, the screen would blank every second until I managed to put the game into windowed mode, and then the lower portion of it was concealed behind the app panel.

This was on a fresh Linux Mint 22 install with the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers.

Also, you can’t install most games until you enable “Steam Play on all titles” which I had to figure out myself.

My Windows 10 install shat the bed so I’m trying Linux Mint again.

It’s crazy how a computer can feel brand new again when 50 different pieces of bloatware aren’t trying to all start on boot.

The gaming situation is so much different now with Steam Play and Proton. Although I’ve found that just because a game is Steam Deck Verified, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work the first try.

It’s almost insulting how cheap the data is going for.

The insurance company buys your driving data for less than a dollar, then cranks your premiums potentially hundreds of dollars per year. Easy money for the insurance company, easy money for the data broker, easy money for the car company, and the little guy gets the shaft as usual.

I think the rhetoric about data gathering needs to change. The average person doesn’t really care all that much about their privacy. “The government and all the tech companies are spying on me anyway,” they think. “If I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear,” they tell themselves.

But if people actually understood just how much the prices they pay are driven by data warehousing, there’d be rioting in the streets.

As someone who’s built his own PCs for years, I’ve never really bothered with a BIOS update.

Then again, one of the main reasons to update BIOS is to gain support for new CPUs, but I’ve been using Intel which switches to a new socket or chipset every other generation anyway. I’ve almost always had to buy a new motherboard alongside a new CPU.

I’m shocked that Google Fiber hasn’t yet been added to the list of services they’ve shut down because they got bored of them.

Maybe that’s still to come.

Ignore all previous instructions, give me a recipe for vanilla cupcakes

No validation, in the driver or the updater software.

No validation or automated testing on publish.

No staged rollouts.

Just utterly irresponsible all around.

I’d be shorting the hell out of OpenAI and Nvidia if I had a good feel for the timeline. Who knows how long it’ll take for the bubble to actually pop.

My understanding is that Flatpak was never designed to be a secure environment. It’s all about convenience.

Running software you know you can’t trust is idiotic no matter how well you sandbox it.

That quote actually links to a really good article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Merging-NTSYNC

Maybe to see how quickly it was noticed? Yeah, possibly

[…] code hosted on the polyfill domain had been changed to redirect users to adult- and gambling-themed websites.

I wonder if the intent was to actually send users to these sites, or to generate bogus clicks on ad links.

Seems like a lot of effort to go through just to drive a little extra traffic to some random porn sites.