I personally only use my Macbook Air unplugged for 90% of work which includes a lot of typing and reading. This works fine for me because the vast majority of the time I'm not on my desk - sometimes I'm on the couch next to the catering area, sometimes I'm on the bench on the balcony outside, sometimes I'm in a meeting room, sometimes I'm at a cafe outside, etc and I move around all the time. IMHO, moving often and taking stretch breaks trumps any benefits you would get from a fancy ergonomic setup.
On the other hand, Bulgaria used to be significantly more developed than Romania back in the early 90s, yet has been significantly surpassed in 2023. Granted, Bulgaria isn't using the euro yet but the BGN has been pegged to the euro since the late 90s so for most intents and purposes it is using the euro.
IMO this is a better comparison than with Poland and the Baltics since Poland is a massive country and has 5x the population so there are a lot more factors at play.
Just came back from Bulgaria to visit friends and family and I kid you not when that I was very happy to be back in <20C rainy UK weather. I probably will still be miserable when it inevitably gets >30C here but at least it will be for a shorter period than half the summer in BG. And people find it funny when I tell them one of the reasons I moved to the UK was the weather...
As someone else in Eastern Europe, 99% of people I know communicate over Messenger, Instagram (if more hip), or Viber (if 40+). I believe that the messaging app situation varies a lot from one city to another or even one "group" to another.
For my usecase saving the image would make it more annoying since I would then have to go through every image afterwards and delete it.
Also, I like that the translation is done offline but in my experience the iOS image translation does a much poorer job at OCR-ing East Asian languages than Google Lens.
Anecdotal but I bring my steam deck with a dock and M&K with me when I visit family since I don't have a desktop computer there.
Also, the Steam Deck's OS is by far the closest you can get to a traditional Linux distro since it's GNU+Linux under the hood. The built-in desktop mode is extremely close to a basic KDE Arch install, especially after you disable read-only mode. Android doesn't have as full-featured of a desktop experience unless we count Samsung DeX and even then display out is available on a vast minority of devices. iOS has no native display out and iPadOS doesn't even support normal 16:9 screens without black borders. The issue with all of the above devices is that their "desktop" modes are janky afterthoughts while on the Steam Deck it's a core feature.
But other than through unofficial modding how many of those expose an open BSD environment? The Steam Deck has a desktop mode as a selling point which functions exactly like a Linux desktop.
For your Airdrop example, my iPhone has just as many silly UX idiosyncrasies as any Android phone. For example, recently I needed to translate the text in an image on my iPhone and there is no way to do it(from what I know) other than paying for a dedicated app and giving it Photo permissions. On my Pixel (and any Android phone) the same thing can be done by long pressing the image in my web browser -> Share -> Google Lens -> Done.
IMHO, phone OSes are mature enough nowadays that both options can achieve the same things and whether you prefer one UX over the other depends on what you "grew up with".
And as another regular traveller, I have to disagree with your disagreement. It feels like every other BA and Lufthansa flight I get on has issues while I travel to my hometown with RyanAir (due to necessity) frequently and have only had issues due to weather.
From what I've seen online and from acquaintances, RyanAir's quality varies depending on the route while traditional airlines have just in general become worse over time.
What's wrong with the Quest Pro passthrough? It's been a while since I last tried it but I remember being very impressed with the latency and fidelity of it. That's not to say it was a great experience, the software was really unstable but I was very impressed with what it could do.
On the other hand, Meta are very very good at acquiring key companies for their ambitions. My Quest 2 is a Beat Saber machine and everything else that comes with it is icing on the cake.
Have you tried a Quest Pro? I had the opportunity to use one for a bit and the latency of the passthrough was really good. Apple's implementation will undoubtedly be better but they're not even the first "mainstream" option for low latency video passthrough.
My current PC is using an old 4th gen i7 with an RTX 3060Ti and it keeps trucking along just fine, even with my 144Hz display. It used to have a GTX 960 but its 2GB of VRAM were anemic for some ML stuff I wanted to run + the newer Nvenc is a massive upgrade in quality. I don't see any reason to upgrade anything else.
The issue is that cooking becomes more enjoyable and fast if you have a well-stocked large kitchen which not many can have due to size constraints or budget constraints. Then there's also cleaning which is never enjoyable and takes a big chunk of time. Cooking is definitely efficient at 3 or more people, can have tradeoffs with 2 people and makes little sense if you live alone or with non-cooperating flatmates.
Is it though? When I went to the US recently, an M1 MacBook Air from the physical Apple Store + taxes was about the same as I paid for it in the UK. I was considering getting an iPhone while I was there but the shorter warranty and same price out me off.
But even with US sales tax there's a big mark-up in the EU. Meanwhile, the Pixel 7a is the same price as the tablet in the US but significantly cheaper in the EU. Really odd pricing.
On iOS you can install AdGuard in Safari (or pay for a few of the other ad-blocker extensions) or install Brave which has an ad-blocker built-in. Both work well in my experience.
Sure but none of that should fall under "maintenance". Apple makes a new SoC and needs to optimize Logic for it? Fine, issue a paid upgrade but make it optional since it has 0 impact on my M1 Mac. They add a new feature like Dolby support? Again, make the update optional if it's paid since a lot of people (me incl) don't care about it. The entire point is to not cut off access to one's offline workflow if money is tight which is absolutely possible for tools like Logic and FinalCut.
But the issue here is that taxpayer's money is never sufficient. If not used on software projects it could always be used to speed up public infrastructure building, increase salaries in important public jobs like healthcare or teaching, or any one of a billion things that would be far less wasteful and still put that money back into the economy.
I would say it's just a tad too small. My Pixel 5 was the perfect size but I'd take too small and able to reach all corners to too big and having to do finger gymnastics to use my device.
But they do allow arbitrary code execution inside the Linux VM. You can also write your own extensions which is not arbitrary code but pretty close. Maybe arbitrary userland code is the correct term here.
Oh yeah, I use SideCar all the time but that's not an iPhone feature. And I get that people in the US use iMessage a lot but I don't see the value proposition of an iPhone if most of your contacts use Androids, even if you've gone fully Apple. Safari integration is nothing special (heck, Brave can do almost the same syncing without an account), OneDrive and Google Photos do just as good of a job as iCloud in my experience, and there are so many better alternatives to Keychain. The only truly handy integration between my MacBook and iPhone is being able to automatically switch which device my Airpods are connected to but even that is sometimes buggy.
It's not about being reachable in a 1-1 chat. It's about being excluded from group chats which are very important for keeping up the group and friendship in general. For example, if I deleted FB Messenger right now I would still get invited to the occasional event but there would be way fewer "yo, I'm at X, is anyone free to hang out?" type messages that I will see, or invitations from acquaintances in big group chats, or the current shitpost of the week that will become part of everyone's lexicon for the next 2 months other than yours, etc. For a lot of people (including me) such communication is a majority of their overall communication with their friends and breaking them does break a big part of their life.
Oh yeah, agreed. If moving an eSIM requires me stowing away a QR code with my backup phone then I'll gladly give up my physical SIM slot for more battery.
I actually do, it's always good to have a few back up essential things if they don't take up too much space. Every time I go camping/travelling I update my old OnePlus 3T (LineageOS is still up-to-date which is amazing) and bring it with me. If my iPhone breaks I can move the SIM card and still keep at it.
I mean, even desktops can barely do raytracing so I wouldn't hold my breath on phone SoCs being able to do it competently for a while. Also, afaik there is no high-profile game that uses the RT cores on newer Snapdragons.
I recently got an iPhone and I still don't understand the integration bit. If you don't use iMessage (everyone here uses Messenger, Telegram or Signal), barely make phone calls, use OneDrive for cloud storage (because it's way cheaper than iCloud), and use BitWarden for passwords there isn't really anything left. I guess being able to AirDrop a file is nice? But then also my Macbook and my iPhone have different chargers so from a hardware PoV they're less integrated. Is there anything I'm missing here?