76SlashDolphin

I wouldn't say so. Let power users have their iPhone equivalent of F-Droid or Aurora Store if they care while most users will just use the default App Store. I personally download apps off the Play Store as a last resort if they don't work on the former two.

On the one hand it is annoying but on the other it actually promotes competition and Epic tries their damn best to get users on their platform with deals and free games. I also feel like in response the Steam sales have stepped it up a notch recently compared to the absolute snoozefest they were 2-3 years ago.

With Xboxes you have dev mode so you are definitely buying the Xbox. The Switch technically doesn't have a web browser so I wouldn't define it as a general-purpose computing device. The PS5 should definitely get a dev mode like the Xbox, otherwise while it can do general computing tasks like email, messaging, document editing by plugging in a mouse and a keyboard and you can't run your own code on it then you don't own it and are simply leasing it.

Well, the Series X already is - it is trivial to enable dev mode and it's implemented in a really clever way in which no regular user would dare to touch it. Really wish the PS5 had the same capability.

Now that you mention it, I wonder what non-separable code would run on, say, a Corebooted Thinkpad running Linux with the Intel ME disabled. Surely that would be running 100% code that was not on it when it left the factory.

The question is which of these is a general purpose computer and which isn't. IMHO if what people tend to do on a platform is the same as what they do on a PC then that platform should also be forced to be a general-purposed computer and allow (in some roundabout way) arbitrary application installation.

For example, a smartphone replaces a PC for a lot of people. I even know some people in their 20s that don't own a "normal" laptop/desktop and they do most of their general purpose computing on their phones. In the meantime, nobody uses a Nintendo Switch or their dishwasher to do a quick edit of an excel sheet or access their bank account even if they are technically capable of doing so.

But you would need to somehow get in touch with said carrier. Granted, you could probably do that over WiFi but if my phone breaks when, say, I'm out camping I'm SoL.

Security features should be there to prevent a user from accidentally letting malicious things happen. Key word: accidentally. One does not accidentally enable apk installation from untrusted sources on Android. If you spend the time going deep into the settings of your phone, and dismiss two massive security warnings then I don't really have any sympathies and those users should have some more common sense. It's like wanting to close down a metro system because some people are incapable of reading the warning signs and jump down to the rails.

With these kinds of security problems you need to decide where the restrictiveness is best for society and I would very much argue that in the case of phone security it's on the side of sideloading.

But it's very infuriating because the iPhone does some things so right that nobody can replicate. The quality of the hardware, an actual small screen option (the iPhone 13 mini is the perfect size), magsafe is neat, etc. If I could put Android on my 13 mini I would but I have to live with iOS's issues because I like the hardware so much.

But there are many languages where words are (nearly always) written the way they are said. As a native Bulgarian I always found the concept of a spelling bee very odd. IMHO it's the best of both worlds but it only really works where accents are less of a thing.

The thing is producing a product for the entire world in one place has massive economies of scale vs producing things locally in every other city or even 1 factory per country. While going back to Victorian-era local production would turn cities back into the garbage dumps they once were, I highly doubt it would end up lowering emissions.

Nah, a GTX 1060 6GB for $100 + any 10-year old i5/i7 is still surprisingly capable for messing about with ML. It's not fast but it gets the job done. Also, getting free compute for messing around in, say, Google Cloud is still pretty easy. If you get to the point where those 2 options become a bottleneck, you're probably informed enough to find work in the field and afford something nicer.

* dominate the global market. Apple is a very minor player outside of the US and Japan.

Not OP but I'm Bulgarian and find it insane how people in France and the UK cross with complete disregard for traffic lights. Afaik it's the same across former socialist countries (at least the ones I've been to). I may cross on a red light sometimes when there are absolutely no vehicles around but red means stop in all situations and when in doubt, for safety, you should assume the person with the heavier vehicle has right of way.

Japan may have a lot of problems but as a generally quiet person, I respect that attitude and wish it was more of a norm here in the UK.

Mine just has a simple time waster: https://manolov.me/

I've had 2 reasonably modern HP laptops and they've both been very solid. Currently typing this on a latest-gen HP Envy 14 (Core i5-11300H, Intel Xe, 16GB RAM, 400nit 1200p touchscreen) running Fedora 35 and am pretty impressed with it considering I got it for £550 refurb. Fedora works nearly perfectly out of the box. Performance is great, battery life is great (8+ hours in VSCode + Chromium browser with tlp), the display is bright, the touchscreen works well with GNOME and the built-in hardware camera shutter is a nice touch and, unlike my previous XPS 15, the sleep actually works fine by default and its temperatures are very good even in the "low noise" profile. No issues with WiFi/connectivity either since it's an Intel chip and those have good Linux support.

The speakers are mediocre though compared to the work Mac I used to have and are mostly in line with other Windows laptops sadly. I thought they'd sound great since there are these vents behind the keyboard that look like speaker grills but they're actually for cooling.

One of the downsides is that it has coil whine when charging off the USB-C port which doesn't bother me much as I almost exclusively use it on battery or with headphones. The fan curve is also really weird where it's silent 80% of the time but it sometimes turns on and off for 15 seconds at a time which is a bit jarring. I think there's some way to tune this though but I wish the fan were a bit quieter or that there were a way to just have it cool passively. I've also not managed to get the fingerprint reader working, mostly for a lack of trying, as it seems like there's a fork of libfprint that specifically adds support for it (Elan 04f3).

I also have an HP Chromebook 14 with an Intel Celeron N4000 and 4GB of RAM which I got as a cheap laptop to bring on trips for remotely accessing my desktop and it's only real pain point is the performance - Android and Linux apps work, sound is on par with the other laptop, display is decent, no fan and no coil whine so it's very nice to use in a quiet environment and fantastic battery. I was actually surprised when I found out it can drive 2 1440p displays off a single USB-C port which is something my flatmate's M1 Macbook Air can't do.

So yeah, I can say that the consumer line HP laptops are pretty good this gen, just be careful with the displays since a lot of their laptops still use sucky 250 nit screens and also be careful with Nvidia GPUs. In my experience those never work well and you're better off getting a desktop/console/streaming service for gaming or renting a cloud GPU for compute.