> I also don't really care if the content is chronological
Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
I am resisting the urge to detail my insane story with my most recent Dell XPS purchase. Long story short, I will never again buy a Dell laptop. I went months without my machine during a critical time. I kept getting it back in worse shape than it was before I sent it for repair. After months of pure insanity, I just accepted that I'll never have a properly function touchpad again. At least they finally got a working motherboard put in it. I'm feeling waves of rage and anger just thinking back to what they put me through. Never again. I won't even accept a Dell as a work laptop again. Never.
Its such a contrast to the Dell I used to know. Back in 2012 I had the hard drive in my Dell laptop sale and had the Dell small business service contract and they sent out a guy to replace it that afternoon, right there in front of me in the office. I was without my machine for 4 hours. That is what Dell used to be like.
When I bought my XPS 15 in 2023, I got the "extended care" package (name may differ). Last year I had an issue with the graphics card no longer being detected, and they sent someone over to replace the mobo two days later. Support was very good.
No power issues and such either, but I don't run Windows on it. Only problem I notice is audible whine coming from the speakers when charging and doing GPU work, like scrolling.
I guess they don't find enough profit in this? TBH I'm OK to pay say 4,000 CAD + for a top tier, 64GB mobile workstation (don't care about video card, Arc is good enough), and +500 CAD for a 10-year care. And I don't even need someone to come over to my home. As long as I can mail or drop to some place I'm fine.
The problem today is -- even with a similar price point (like top tier Dell mobile workstation does cost 3,000+ CAD), I'm not sure how long it lasts. It could be 5 years, it could be 5 months, I have no confidence in it.
That's indeed a bit on the premium side. Back then GBPCAD is about 1.6, so 2,400 CAD and 160 for 2-year support. That's like roughly my monthly net income back in 2018 (just got into IT).
About six months ago I had a Dell Optiplex motherboard fail and they attempted to schedule a tech to come out the following day. I was not available for that and scheduled it a few days later but they did make as full of an effort as can be reasonably expected to make it happen within one business day.
The default warranty on at least the Optiplex line is one year of next business day service and upgrading to three years is cheap. I've never had a situation where same day service was worth the extra cost but it is an option.
I had the same experience in 2021 when the mobo died on a laptop that I bought slightly less than a year before. I was bothered by the failure but understand sometimes things just break. The service quality was good.
I'm not dealing with the scale other people are in here. We should take the ancedotes of personal laptops with a grain of salt. Anyone pushing the scale that Dell does will have incidents where service runs totally off the rails. I don't know how they stack up at scale but I'm reading this thread with interest. When I'm due for a laptop upgrade Dell will still be in the running but right now Framework might be the one to get my business.
That's really sad. Where are you located if I may ask? Some other commenters mentioned that Dell care is not great outside of the US (I'm in Canada so concerned).
Sort of? My thoughts are that there's something of an AI arms race and the US doesn't want to lose that race to another country... so if the AI bubble pops too fiercely, there may likely be some form of intervention. And any time the government intervenes, all bets are off the table. Who knows what they will do and what the impact will be.
I can see them intervening to preserve AI R&D of some sort, but many of the current companies are running consumer oriented products. Why care if some AI art generation website goes bust?
The little robot was heavily inspired by Wall-E. He'll play around when he's bored. If you play music, he'll dance. And, at least for a while, they had Alexa baked in so you could "ask" Vector to do all the things Alexa does like playing music or turning off the lights.
Vector wasn't without flaws. The Alexa integration was a tad janky. And while Vector was pretty good at detecting his environment, his sensors would occasionally fail and he'd roll off the end of the desk and hit the floor. For me, this damaged the screen which made impossible to read the codes from the device necessary to sync it with services.
But there was enough there that worked to really get the vision across. After playing with Vector for a while, I believe the first in-home robot to see major success will be more of pet and less of a helper. Vector's playful personality was a key thing that made him unique. I believe that there are not technological challenges left to solve to build an amazing consumer product - it's just a matter of putting all the right pieces together to build something crazy appealing.
Since you mentioned hackathons - A few years ago I was working on a game for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and I ended up going to EthDenver. While there, I discovered a rich and vibrant hackathon scene with a lot of monetary prizes. The hackathons were often for various blockchain platforms and, thus, those prizes were generally awarded in whatever cryptocurrency was native to that platform. From their point of view, it was a smart move. They create a network, retain a huge block of pre-minted currency, establish a market price, and then give out that currency as hackathon awards. As a competitor, you can cash you winnings in right away, so it works well enough. A friend and I cleared almost $30k one year in various contests. Unfortunately, winning a hackathon was often more about creating something that would make for good marketing buzz rather than creating something truly novel or even useful. And, frankly, the actual quality of your execution rarely mattered. We lost one contest where we had a fully working prototype deployed and live but lost to teams with ideas that sounded fun but were technically unfeasible. Still, if you're willing to play the game, it seems there's money to be made. My friend and I have since moved on and have not continued to participate - but it sure made for fun memories.
I'm not a fan. Large ultra-wide curved screens are fantastic. With large flat screens that are meant to be viewed across the room, you get a distorted image when you sit up close. Your eyes have to focus further away as you look at things closer to the edge of your screen and the viewing angle for that part of the screen is different from the center of the screen. It also requires more effort for your eyes to look up and down rather than left and right. We're hard wired for that horizontal plane. This makes ultrawide screens a really comfortable option.
I almost bought an 8k 55" screen for use as a monitor, but I tested a 55" 4k screen for a week and the flatness is what turned me off to it. I've been using three 32" 4k screens in portrait, arranged in a "curved" config on my desk (2 monitors on each side are mounted at an angle), which I really like. But switching to a large single flat screen was not fun.
For me the holy grail of monitors is a 55" 8k curved screen. Not "ultrawide", I want the full width and height and I want it curved, with full 8k resolution. Maybe someday, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high.
I'm not the guy you asked but I have a similar opinion on flat screens. Personally I'd want spherical. ~15" tall and ~25" wide is about my limit for flat screens, anything beyond that I find that the corners/edges are too distant/distorted. My home setup is multiple independent 27" screens, which I like. My work setup is a single flat ultrawide (34" probably?), and I find myself physically leaning my head/body from side to side when I have two windows open next to each other. I have eye level a few inches from the top of the screen, and the lowest couple inches also seem distant/distorted.
I've been using Statamic for a few months now. I've often worked with Laravel, so I tend to really like Statamic. The static content by default feature means you can skip a database altogether if you'd like. Theming and content management is a little bit more of a learning curve, but so much more powerful than something like Wordpress.
I do have one complaint. It can be remarkably difficult to learn how to use Statamic properly. The documentation is a bit lacking. I often struggle to find a solution to a blocker only to find out there's a simple solution that wasn't documented very well. I think this is one of those things that will likely improve as the community continues to grow and mature.
Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the content. And that's one thing I've longed to see solved in RSS feed readers as well as podcasts. However, I have not been able to imagine a UX that solves my problems, so there's that.
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