Not sure if it meets the performance criteria you would need, but the higher end Microsoft Surface Laptop is on par with Apple MBP build quality wise from my experiences. I got one from work a few years ago and it’s now my preferred non-mac laptop. I think their marketing is hurting them as I assumed it was the hybrid tablet Surface initially but they make a pure laptop too and that’s what I’m recommending
That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.
It's wild how my car won't let me change basic settings while vehicle is in drive (too much menu nav as to be distraction & I've had cars that would only let me edit the navigation destination while in park) yet - this exists as well
You're forgetting the "people who don't care, they just want to be seen looking like they care so they make a bunch of noise" factor.
Once you multiply the safety problem by the this factor it all makes sense.
A small non-problem that every screeching jerk will be exposed to is a bigger actual problem more likely to get addressed than a potential real problem that will mostly go unnoticed.
Also rear doors are kinda optional. They still make 2door 2-row cars. Heck, they made 2-door 2-row SUVs pretty recently. And child safety locks are a thing. So there is an argument to be made there (not that I think it holds up on modern stuff).
Tons of devs (CS grad devs that is) have made their career writing basic CRUD apps, iOS apps, or python stuff that probably doesn't scratch the surface of all the CS course work they did in their degree. It's just like everyone cramming for leetcode interviews but never using that stuff in the job. Being familiar with LLMs today will give you an advantage when they change tomorrow, you can adapt with the technology after college is over. Granted, there likely will be less devs needed but the demand for the highly skilled ones could be moving upwards as the demand for this new AI tech increases
You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances.
I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years.
We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.
I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself.
Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always leeway for students to chart their own path to success, it never really felt like Asia or Europe's systems where they place you in a bucket early on and thats it you are in there for life.
I graduated with an Engineering degree in the early 2010s and let me tell you, I really did do the bare minimum in a bunch of classes. It led me to tinker with junk computers that the school discarded which led me to dedicated school space in a lab to experiment which led to my first job and general success. Looking back not studying harder led to more trouble later on but the path still worked out because I jumped at some opportunities due to that path. If I were in asia, I would have probably not even be admitted or permanently weeded out after my first academic probation warning instead of being a decently successful software developer.
> Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen
Before that people dreamed of becoming a hollywood actor. It was the number one desired career for years. The bar is much lower for trying your luck at being a successful influencer than becoming an actor. The end result will be the same, many will try and flame out and then go do something else.
>Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.
You sound like you are thinking of the 1990s as your context. These days after movies the The Social Network, one of the most desired careers is in software development. This goal requires people to expend much more effort than prior generations pursuing other desired careers and many more kids are doing it! Techies are the boss now.
I definitely like the flexibility our system provides. I changed majors a couple times before I found what I could tolerate (can't say it's a passion). I do not think the kids today are as comparable to the kids of yester*. I think in past, people desired those things in a day dreamy way, but knew it wasn't realistic. They also knew they'd get disciplined for poor grades; perhaps even harshly. We just culturally have really relaxed on being stern parents and I feel we have transitioned to wanting to be friends with our kids. That's a great thing too but it needs a balance IMO, there are advantages to being stern. But we're a nation of lazy parents who have high expectations of teachers, but don't pay them, and won't even help them out at home by being a parent and taking responsibility for our kids. (My rant on this topic is too verbose for HN but I firmly believe it's lazy parenting at the core of how we view education systems performance/lack of)
> Techies are the boss now
I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today. The normalization of tech has opened it up to average joe's that wouldn't have touched it back then due to the social stigma it had. This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech. But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is. Social norms, bullying, cliques have all changed but being a teenager in a group setting isn't yet a democratic affair.
> I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot.
Yep, it's all about status, money and power chasing. Nothing taught me this more than getting an iPhone before everyone else in France (wasn't yet available, imported). Before that I had weird phones and proto-smartphone that costed as much but nobody cared. But the iPhone was cool and desirable and automagically I became more desirable.
Before that nobody gave a shit about my technology interest and it wasn't for the lack of trying to discuss it at large.
>I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today.
Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.
>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.
Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.
If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.
> But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is.
Always hard to know what’s universal, but I think the inclusion of video games on this list represents a genuine shift. When I was growing up only the other studious kids would talk with me about video games. We understood it to be an intellectual hobby because we were analyzing how to achieve things instead of just passively consuming.
I see it all the time. I actually don’t have an issue with it though. I’m usually alone in the room, or with my family and we all know that we poop. Not that we don’t respect privacy but when circumstance arise, we can bunk together in close quarters without it being super weird.
> Even traveling alone it's a clear indication they have no respect for their guests, and it's a significant hygiene issue.
I feel like if you consider lack of a door a significant hygiene issue, you probably just shouldn’t be staying in hotels. These rooms aren’t being sanitized between guests, they are pretty dirty.
All the more reason not to add mold from the shower and excess feces from every toilet flush to the list of things I have to worry about being on the mattress.
There are good reasons to keep bathrooms physically separated from where you sleep and hygiene is one of them, along with not wanting the bed to be a front row seat to the sights, smells, and sounds of whatever is going on in there and not wanting an expensive hotel room I'm paying for to be like a prison cell.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that, just because things aren't perfect isn't a good reason for the hotel to make things worse and doesn't mean I shouldn't avoid worse hotels on the basis that they are worse.
On my work PC, they all but forced me to create an account just to watch videos. I could not find a way around it (I didn’t try super hard). I don’t use my personal accounts on that device so I just created a throwaway.
Yeah the phone number thing across services is out of hand and we need a hide my email type solution for it now.
I checked in at a restaurant recently and they asked for my number to text me when our table was ready. As soon as the number finished they had my name and all sorts of info I never gave them. It’s totally out of control.
I’m still using Amazon as much as I was before, it’s just a more miserable experience now which I can feel and the annoyances are compounding. I’ve not yet done anything that would show in their numbers, like cancel my prime or start trying to shop elsewhere or even boycott them altogether, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy as I was and would say they’re pushing me to a point of defection. All to say, they should be smart enough to not just do uninformed numerical analysis. They need to hone a gut feeling for how pleased people are or build metrics around that. They should see satisfaction is waning. In fact, it may be what’s driving this behavior. If satisfaction is down, people leave, sales slump, then they make more user hostile changes in hopes to cover the sales gap with existing customers, but results in satisfaction going down at every pass. It’s a vicious cycle.
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