Had the privilege of meeting Jeff "Yak" Minter in Singapore, and also attended his presentation. Another legendary game developer, in the same league as David Theurer

The Zip drives that followed were abysmal. We sold a lot of them initially (I was working in a computer store in the early nineties), but sales cratered once the "click of death" became infamous. SyQuest drives suffered from similar reliability issues.

The founder of SyQuest, Syed Iftikhar, later left and set up another company called Castlewood, which introduced yet another removable drive called the Orb. The Orb was genuinely faster and more reliable than anything Iomega or SyQuest had offered.

But with the advent of cheap flash drives and faster broadband internet, transfer and storage of data shifted decisively away from spinning removable media, and the entire category quietly died, taking Castlewood, Iomega, Imation, and SyQuest with it.

this plus a whole bunch of other skills (credit card payments notification and itemization/spend tracking, utilities (power/water) anomalies monitoring, daily solar power generation tracking and solar battery health checks, homelab maintenance (apt upgrades, storage cleanups, etc), media management, UPS battery health tracking, NAS disk heath tracking, etc).

I believe OpenClaw is start of a new genre of "always on" personal assistant/agent (tied to a "skills" store) that handles all the drudgery of daily living. you get back something genuinely precious which is the headspace to focus on the work only you can do. with OpenClaw, we are currently at the "Visicalc" stage and I'm excited where this will eventually lead.

Talaas' best case exit scenario is to get bought out by Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Nvidia, and even automotive chip guys like NXP (automotive/robotics offline use will likely be major area of application for this). if the Taalas HC1 Technology Demonstrator is actually working and producing the results they are publicly claiming, I'm assuming there is a steady stream of visitors from silicon valley and elsewhere at their toronto offices.

Its services business runs at roughly 75% gross margin, while hardware sits around 36 to 37%. That tells you where the real money is.

in many ways, all the Apple devices exist to feed the services engine. The hardware pulls people into the ecosystem, and the services generate the profits.

the Neo is probably a bit of a loss leader. Once you factor in manufacturing tooling capex, distribution, shipping, marketing, and all the other costs, Apple is likely not making much on the device itself. But every new Neo buyer who enters the Apple ecosystem will probably spend at least $50 or more on Apple services (icloud, music, movies, apps, etc) over time. (i have several friends who are buying neo as their personal content consumption device, abandoning their current ipads)

my estimate (which is why i'm still holding aapl): Services hits roughly $275-300B by FY2035, representing about 35-40% of Apple's total revenue (up from 26% today), with gross margins staying in the 74-76% range. At that point, Services alone would generate more gross profit than the entire company does today. that is where the real payoff comes from.

A startup cannot easily secure large wafer volumes because foundry allocation is typically driven by long term revenue commitments. the supply side cannot scale quickly. Building new foundry capacity takes many years. TSMC’s Arizona fab has been under development since 2021 and is still not producing at scale. Samsung’s Texas fab and Intel’s Ohio project face similar long timelines. Expanding semiconductor production requires massive construction, EUV equipment from ASML, yield tuning, and specialized workforce training.

Even if demand for hardwired AI chips surged, the manufacturing ecosystem would take close to a decade to respond.

Coming to terms with two uncomfortable truths: I'm a hoarder, and an unapologetically incorrigible Apple fanboi.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90329525/amazon-peccy

Also, the Neo is the ultimate iPhone accessory, for this crowd. Who cares if the ram size is 8GB and Tahoe is a certifiable dog, that the vast majority neckbeards here are fretting about here. The Neo is not aimed at you. For Safari, Apple Mail, Photos and iApps, and ocassional Claude/ChatGPT usage, this is plenty good

Once my Olares One is here, will also be using local LLMs on open models.

https://one.olares.com/