If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically. They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.

Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases, dongles, cables, straps!

Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be made for those things, almost anyone can make those things for niche sized demand.

Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.

I'm still using my Drop CTRL keyboard from 2018. I haven't bought another keyboard since then because it's a good keyboard.

Going through my order history, everything I've bought from their early days are still in use or usable. Keycaps. Mics. Pocket knives. A leather belt. Titanium reusable straws. A couple of headphones and DAC/amps. Ultralight camping/hiking gear.

There hasn't been any reason I needed more of those things I already had, so unless Drop continuously expanded its customer base or product offerings, there wasn't a strong case for repeat business. Then the quality and uniqueness of their offerings dropped and I had even less reason to buy from them.

I don't know what the solution is for survival for retailers and manufacturers offering long lasting products, but I really hope someone figures it out because I really don't like how the world is racing towards disposable low quality junk. But disposable products leads to repeat business.

Maybe it wasn't as noticeable when Github had less features, but our CI runners and other automation using the API a decade ago always had weekly issues caused by Github being down/degraded.

So as water/weather gets more unpredictable and beef/dairy rises in price, alfalfa becomes even more attractive to grow.

Alfalfa is also a staple for crop rotation, so any farming operation will still grow some alfalfa to maintain rotation for good soil health (or during bad condition seasons since it's hardier to poor conditions and not a permanent crop).

If alfalfa cannot be exported (through policy or economic conditions), the low price attracts more livestock production in-state (which would be even worse for water use).

Those things makes it a hard crop to target for sustainability and export.

But really, California (and really the entire Western US) needs a water rights governance overhaul. Right now the focus is all on urban water use, which is practically negligible compared to the agricultural water rights usage.

But SoCal isn't only LA. LA itself gets a bit less than half of their water from MWP, which manages the water from the SWP and the Colorado. About the same amount it gets from the the eastern Sierras. These are supposed to drop to ~10% of LA's water supply as recapture/recycling projects complete.

Or computed the other way around, LA only has rights to ~20% of the water managed by MWD. Of course water supply, distribution, and rights are all blended and traded around all the time, but generally speaking it's not "LA" using up that water from NorCal, the consumption is significantly more from the cities and farms that came after.

NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.

So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.

The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.

LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.

For phones, I think it's just the Sony and Asus and Chinese brands that support it. Pixels and Samsungs generally don't since they use Tensor/Exynos instead of Qualcomm/Snapdragon SoCs, and definitely not Apple.

Story is even more bleak on the headphones side, Sony prefers their own LDAC codec so they support that instead of AptX Lossless, a pattern shared by many Asian headphones manufactuers. Many western brands only support up to AptX HD and AAC because Apple/Samsung devices have the majority marketshare. Qualcomm's own site only shows 12 headphones that support AptX Lossless.

Now my opinion is LDAC is close enough to lossless that it's probably good enough for Sony and most people (the 1411kbps for uncompressed 16/44.1 CD quality generally compresses to under 900kbps which is below the 990kbps max of LDAC). Bose does have a headphone that supports AptX Lossless. It's just the Airpods that are far behind the competition.

There is a large number of competing and overlapping suppliers because they're all competing for business and none have gained market dominance.

The US and most of the west is largely in a post-capitalistic market, where competition is no longer necessary because monopoly/duopoly status has been reached and segment leaders can simply use their capital to prevent challengers instead of competing on product/service quality, and margins can be widened and quality can decrease because there's no other option.

To me, it seems the solution is to make it possible again for smaller more agile players to compete against bloated and stagnating established companies. The large legacy companies are preventing innovation to protect their domain instead of innovating to keep up.

Ford wanted to also build trucks for the Chinese market, with a different joint venture. However, the rules limited companies to two joint ventures, which was a problem because Mazda also had a joint venture with FAW. Which meant it counted as part of Ford's 2 joint ventures.

So Ford sold Mazda. Changan Ford/Mazda got split in their respective halves. FAW was no longer associated with Ford and left with Mazda. Ford could then pick up a new joint venture for trucks, which they did and I don't believe they're doing well.

Ford just really wanted to double down on trucks, in more than one market.

Mazda handled the small vehicle chassis design for Ford. So without Mazda, Ford no longer had the knowledge for continued development of their sedans and crossovers based on sedan platforms.

Then yes, there's obviously the other end of the extreme where the mp3 player is very obviously a phone without a radio with a price tag to match. And everything in-between.

I'd say there's actually too many choices cause the silicon and battery cost required to simply play music has gotten so cheap that it doesn't make sense to optimize the OS further than Android. I'm sure the economics of scale means the actual hardware wouldn't be cheaper by any noticeable amount either.