The Macbook Air, the best computer for most people, starts at $1099. I paid something like $2,700 for my computer, which I brought to college in 2002. That's about $5,000 in today's money.

I can go to the movie and there is a decent chance people will talk through the movie or will be on their phones, etc. Or I could watch at home and be guaranteed a great experience.

Movie theaters have to upgrade the experience. They need to police patrons like they used to. They need to sell better food and drinks. And they need to get the pricing model under control.

But the experience is way better than when we were kids. Watching Jurassic Park on a 19-inch CRT with mono audio was nothing like going to the theater. The delta between home and cinema was massive. Now I have a 77-inch OLED with 4K HDR and an Atmos sound setup. I'd take my home setup over a generic cinema screen. Only the premium large format is a noticeable upgrade. It's hard to justify shelling out a ton of money for the movie and snacks for similar audio/visual quality to home, and the risk that the person next to me is checking their phone the entire time (happened a year ago, and it's super distracting in a dark theater).

I buy popcorn kernels in bulk at my local grocery store, and we go through a lot of popcorn. It might cost $10 a year in kernels to regularly eat popcorn at home when you pop it yourself.

Ultimately, why would a large company hire a consultancy company that is bad at tech and has a lot of bad processes to do their tech for them? Because the company itself is even worse and doesn't know what good looks like. If you are hiring McKinsey or Deloitte to do your tech, it's because you are completely lost and don't have the slightest clue how to become unlost. And you have no concept of what good looks like.

If you think the actual tech talent and systems are bad, when you work with these consulting firms, they are going to do the most heavy SAFe process you have ever seen. For me, the worst part is not the tech talent, but rather the most by-the-book, heavy-handed agile process possible. Everything moves way slower because of this "agile" rot, and there is almost no concept of doing proper ideation and prototyping work.

These legacy F500 companies try to do everything cheaply with consultants and offshoring, and yet it always ends up costing way more than it would if they just had proper in-house tech talent.

Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.

This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.

A much more real issue is actually age limits. If someone starts in the Senate at 40 and serves for 24 years, term limits hardly seem to be the big issue. They are retiring at a normal time, and they should still be functioning at a high level.

Conversely, someone who gets elected at 70 and then gets term-limited at 82 is still over a normal, reasonable retirement age. The typical 82 is not in the physical or mental condition to be taking on such an important, high-stakes role.

Both of my parents are in their mid-70s and are in very good mental health for their age. They are very lucid, and my Dad still works part-time as a lawyer. They are also clearly not at the same intellectual powers they were a decade or two ago. Some of it can even just come down to energy levels. I have to imagine being a good legislator requires high energy levels.

Many public companies have age limits for board members, and they even have traditional retirement ages for CEOs. In the corporate world where results matter, there is a recognition that a high-stress, high-workload, high-cognitiative ability job is not something that someone should be doing well past their prime.

Al Gore had to leave the Apple board because he turned 75. In the U.S. Senate, there are 16 people 75 and older.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47172462

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

And because they were relying on computer vision and Indian vision, they had to get rid of all their fresh meals because they were too hard to calculate prices for. So, it ended up being a half-assed 7-Eleven concept. The whole concept was made by someone who hates humanity.

I personally prefer stores with actual cashiers. What I don't like are lines, but that is very solvable. The organic grocer near me is super fast to check out.

Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.

If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick up a dedicated PC for gaming, it's going to be a Steam Machine and/or Steam Deck. Microsoft is basically lighting Xbox and Windows on fire to chase AI clanker slop.