What’s even the point of setting a password if anyone can manipulate the system without entering it in?

The entire iPhone OS is on an encrypted volume and that is the right design choice. Not having the password means no access.

There is no general purpose encrypted volume operating system that allows unauthenticated users to perform OS manipulation. If you encrypt your FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows volume, the result is the same: no password, no access.

Your choice is to enter the correct password or wipe the disk.

The fact that Apple doesn’t allow you to set up a system without full disk encryption is not a user freedom issue, it’s a very sensible design choice especially for a device sold primarily to non-technical consumers who don’t understand the security implications of leaving the volume unencrypted.

The issue here isn’t that iOS security is designed wrong, the issue is that Apple broke basic password entry with an update.

Shame on Apple for having such lazy software development practices when it comes to implementing updates like this.

I think they are way more like a normal car company than they publicly admit. I make the argument that they are entirely like a normal car company, just a vertically integrated one like Hyundai/Kia.

They’d really like to have more upside than a normal car company due to their software and AI and robotics, but until the day they start selling those things to other companies it’s all unrealized.

Why wouldn't they want to compete with luxury automakers? It's the more profitable market segment. Every mass market car company selling a similarly high unit volume as Tesla has a luxury marquee because it's simple to reuse/modify the same platform, chuck in some more leather, massaging seats, and sound isolation materials, and toss on a fancier badge and marketing campaign.

The Cybertruck is indeed a strange halo car, but it really should have been a truck with more mainstream appeal. Elon psychosis is indeed highly responsible for that truck's failure, along with an inability to deliver the ballpark promises regarding price and range.

As of 2025 before the discontinuation of the Lightning F-150, the Cybertruck actually did not outsell the Lightning despite Ford essentially selling down remaining inventory, while the Silverado EV/Sierra EV (the best EV truck on the market for actual truck usability, IMO) is picking up the most momentum. GM is already outselling the Cybertruck:

https://ev.com/news/chevy-silverado-ev-sales-nearly-double-a...

Cybertruck is also going to in the future have the “Chrysler PT Cruiser” problem where it’s just about impossible to iterate on the styling for a second generation. Arguably they’ve already run through the Chrysler PT Cruiser lifecycle where it was incredibly cool on release but became something of a joke by the end of its run. Unfortunately with an overstyled car like that it’s difficult to predict whether it’ll be a timeless classic or…a PT Cruiser.

I will just go ahead and rewrite the post because it seems like my message isn’t landing. Maybe seeing what it could have looked like would be helpful:

Cirrus has been acquired by OpenAI with the goal of integrating our technology into their products. We will continue to serve existing customers until the expiration of their contracts, at which point Cirrus will cease operations as a separate entity. We are open sourcing our current products and hope they prove to be useful. Thank you to our customers and employees.

Could have been a private email to customers.

BMW is the 2nd most profitable car company in the world and sells many mid/low volume vehicles like the 7 series.

This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?

If this is a forgettable press release isn't it lower effort than coming up with this type of nonsense?

I’m sure there’s a way to say the same thing without coming across as a bullshitter.

We started a company to make a big difference in the world and build an engineer’s dream company, and that’s why we have now decided to do the exact opposite and become employee numbers 32,463 through 32,510 at one of the largest tech companies in the world because money is nice.

Look, I’d have done the same thing, I’m not criticizing the choice. I just think we don’t need this kind of weird unnatural rhetoric.

Please just stop with the tech industry puffery. You’re not Steve Jobs, you’re just the DevOps team at OpenAI now. You’re dumping your worthless code on GitHub, and you’re kicking your customers to the curb.

There’s no PR spin left to do anymore. You’re not a company anymore and you’re not a founder anymore.

Some people are treated a whole lot better than others in prison.

Can you think of any other successful cars that are being discontinued for a similar reason and aren’t being replaced with a new model? Doesn’t pass the smell test.

You said people buy because of trends…well, the trend is away from Tesla and toward other brands. I don’t see any “I bought this before Mary Barra went crazy” bumper stickers on Silverados.

As of the first 9 months of 2025 before tax incentive expired, GM sells about 1/3 of Tesla’s EV sales volume. They grew EV sales by 200% between 2022 and 2024. The #1 EV brand in Europe is Volkswagen. #1 in China is BYD. Reports indicate that the Shanghai Tesla factory is far below capacity and that Tesla has its largest unsold inventory ever.

You don’t have to agree with me on the current situation but we’ll be seeing how it all goes in a few short years

I think problem with coming to your house for routine maintenance is that a shop is a proper environment for service. They have things like car lifts and equipment that are not mobile. In that sense I’d rather my car just be a car that can be serviced by the dozens of mechanics and dealerships that are located within 5-10 miles of my house.

I would also point out that this mobile service setup is not convenient if you don’t own your own private garage with ample space to work in. If you park on the street, in a lot/public garage, or have a really tight condo garage you’re SOL then. Many condo and apartment rules don’t even allow you to do car maintenance in the place where you park.

What happens if your parking space is on an incline? Or when you’ve got weather like snow and rain, where being inside a proper shop versus out in a parking spot would not be ideal?

All of these variables are why a dedicated shop makes sense. Tesla would absolutely go that route and end if they sold as many vehicles as Toyota.

As far as dealer salespeople, you only interact with them, what, once every 10 years to buy a car? Or less if you’re financially frugal.

And it absolutely was a magic fix. I stand by it.

It seems most likely that this is some kind of bug where that command or its underlying actions should be called every time the user unchecks something in the settings panel.

This is what we get when the iPhone’s permission system is grafted on top of a desktop OS that was never designed for it. I think they could have done something that is more Unix-like and yet friendly to the GUI end user.

Although I'm wrong about it being closely enough related to the Model Y's platform to really say "it's a Model Y," many of those stainless steel panels are absolutely secured with fasteners and glue.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You are not actually in the market for the class of vehicle the Model S or X competed with in the first place.

I'm not actually saying they are bad cars. What I am saying is that they now lack a buyer persona, which is why they're being discontinued.

When the S and X first came out, $90,000 was the price of entry for any electric car of that caliber. Anyone who wanted an electric car with that kind of range and charging network had just those two options.

But the reality is, the vast majority of people who want Teslas will choose the 3 or Y because, duh, obviously! You have to squint real hard at the door handles to even visibly tell the difference between the X and Y.

What I'm really getting at here is that the majority of buyers in the luxury segment, the kind of people blowing $90,000 plus on a vehicle, those are the people for which the S and X are not competitive. They don't give a shit about how good the software is on the iPad that was slapped on the Tesla dashboard. They probably just want CarPlay and Android Auto anyway. They are looking for hand stitched everything, paint to sample and semi-custom interior colors, and either overstated or understated luxury: they want to look like they belong at the country club (Range Rover, Volvo) or they want to look like they belong at the club (BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, etc).

For the Model S, it existed in a struggling segment of full-size sedans where you either have to be sporty as in driving enthusiast sporty or luxurious as in massaging seats. The Model S was a Toyota Crown with the leather package that went fast in a straight line.

The Model X is even more lost on demographics. It's an SUV with a bad 3rd row and wonky doors. More critically, it fails to hit any of the demographics you might want to hit: families don't want it because it doesn't have the minivan-like utility of vehicles like the Lucid Gravity, Kia EV9, or any of the gas competitors like the Telluride - or minivans themselves! For people who want a luxury SUV, it doesn't satisfy either type of club folk. You'll get a more refined build and luxurious experience in something like a Volvo EX-90. You'll stand out more in a BMW iX. And finally, the most successful segment of luxury SUV right now is the performance offroader: The Model X can't scratch the itch that the Rivian R1S, Sequoia TRD Pro, Ford Bronco Raptor, Lexus GX, Mercedes G Wagon, and a laundry list of other options I can't even think of right now because there are so many.

As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA. This is not something Tesla invented. Roadside assistance is included with my car insurance. People who buy Porsches definitely get themselves a similarly good experience. These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.

The X is not competitive with proper 3-row SUVs as the 3rd row is not usable enough, and it was cannibalized by the Y which is not an upmarket luxury SUV as luxurious as EV SUVs that are in the Model X's price range.

Similar story goes for the Model S: they're discontinuing their upper luxury full-size sedan and no longer compete in that market at all.

Since Tesla doesn't split the numbers out it's hard to say but I would say anecdotally, seeing a Model S on the road is most common with older model years as most of those buyers clearly switched over to the Model 3 or Y instead.

The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with, which is why they're being discontinued.

Someone spending that much in 2016 on an S or X was getting a vehicle that was bleeding edge technology you couldn't get anywhere else.

Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.

Sources:

https://insideevs.com/news/746147/kia-ev-sales-record-2024-u...

https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024...

(I guess for Linux I could run the headless daemon, I think only the standard desktop experience is available)

It’s way more work but this subject got me thinking about the idea of self-hosting the all in one nextcloud suite.

They seem to have done research but have strung together unrelated subjects due to their lack of expertise in the subjects.

As a result it reads more like a summary or recap of vaguely related stories.

For example, Tesla’s pivot to robots has nothing to do with their advanced nature of their wiring harnesses, but it’s spoken in the same breath as if to imply that a Tesla Cybertruck (which is a Model Y with paneling literally glued on top) is more similar to a humanoid robot than a Mustang Mach-E.

In reality, what has happened is that the Model S and X have been discontinued and they’re the only products the Fremont, CA plant produces. Tesla has literally nothing else they can make in that plant. They either make Optimus robots or shut the plant down.

Optimus robot production is a face saving move. Tesla barely needs a fraction of that factory to build robots…it’s a much lower-volume and physically smaller product.

I should note that none of that has anything to do with Tesla being great at robotics and seeing it as a better business than automobiles. It has everything to do with competitors catching up and Tesla having insufficient development capability to iterate on those vehicles.

Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?

Who in the buyer demographic for the Model X won’t take a Kia EV9, Lucid Gravity, or Volvo EX-90?

Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.

The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint.

My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.