Metal and glass are overrated. Glass cracks, metal bends and stays bent... Plastic, especially high quality plastics combined with a magnesium chassis in a ThinkPad, is way more durable.
Yup. I got an otherwise really nice laptop with a metal shell... it's not very pleasant to touch. Thinkpads have cases that feel better to touch and make me worry less about dropping the thing.
I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.
The standard screen size market is so big that every year there are enough people looking for an upgrade. Apart from enthusiasts or the fashion-minded, most people upgrade every 2-3 years.
It was cannibalized by iphone 12 mini and also se and older iphones still being sold by carriers. All that going on and it still sold millions of units. If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers. In fact if it was apple 10 or 15 years ago they'd also probably be happy with those numbers.
You also have to understand the psychological profile of us "utilitarian" iphone users. We only get one when our hands are forced either hardware failure or forced software obsolescence. The iphone mini came to market and was discontinued all in the time I was still using my SE.
"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers"
That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.
So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.
My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.
My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.
While being more expensive even further decreases your niche size, it still isn't obvious to me that this should be enough to prevent the niche from existing. I am one of those customers you talk about who has a lot of obscure preferences (I can't call them requirements because literally not a single existing phone matches all of them and yet I still buy phones). A phone that met most of them would be something I'd be willing to pay a pretty good premium for.
The 13 mini sold poorly because all of those same influencers just would not stop complaining that it had less battery life than a Max. I mean, of course the battery life wasn’t as good, because it was a smaller battery! But the people who want a mini aren’t influencers who need a phone that can go 18 hours without a break.
It was absolutely this manufactured “range anxiety” that killed it.
Exactly, every older person I've seen has the Plus model (RIP) with screen text turned up to 150%. A small screen for someone with poor eyesight sounds like torture.
Before this week I was sure Anthropic were actually just as soulless as OpenAi, just because they don't support open standards like AGENTS.md and /.agents/skills. They can so easily win the support of the open source crowd if they just support open standards like these.
Big projects should have a lot of nested AGENTS.md files, it's inconvenient and they simply need to add support for the universal standard as everyone else has done rather than being a weird holdout like IE6.
I felt that way too, until I noticed how different their schemes are for discovering these files, e.g. Claude will pick up context files in parent folders, and Codex doesn’t.
Maybe it’s better that they maintain different names to prevent people from assuming that they work the same
Now that would make it easier for Codex users to switch indeed! This seems like the best timing for it they're ever gonna get, and worth the ultra tiny loss of marketing value their "CLAUDE.md" naming provides.
For the Anthropic employees here reading along, pitch it to whoever has kept blocking this, because you need to get the most out of this opportunity here.
Why would they? They were first with CLAUDE.md. Others could have adopted to that if they wanted. Don’t see a reason for Claude to change their approach.
Being a good citizen of the commons means not hard-coding things specific about your product as a standard. ChatGPT or Gemini using a file called "CLAUDE" doesn't make sense. The first mover doesn't just automatically win.
The tech will catch up in a year or two. Gemini 3.1 pro can now turn a basic raster logo into fairly clean SVG. Six months ago the SOTA models where no where near completing this task.
>Gemini 3.1 pro can now turn a basic raster logo into fairly clean SVG.
There have been very high quality raster to vector apps for a long time. You have no evidence that Gemini isn't simply hooked up to one of these apps via MCP, so it may not be "Gemini" that is doing the conversion itself.
Yeah, it will soon generate clean CAD designs, build a PCB and schematics, select the best electronics components and optimize it for you, and even simulate RF and waves propagations.
It helps if I move side to side like a party parrot. I'd love to see a histogram of where I stand.
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