It's bad quality hardware hiding behind an cleaner engine and some software features.

It is EXACTLY the product of a hardware company which keeps treating hardware-production like it's software, as described above.

No one said that it shouldn't.

What I wrote is, that the approach of minimizing any SURFACE of risk in software creates the (subjectively good and solid) software of previous car-generations (in Volkswagen terms: MIB2 ~ a bit downhill already in MIB3): A solid, predictable and closed product fulfilling its core use-case.

But it DOESN'T create a user experience with those "fun" niche features, competitive remote-access Smartphone features, exposed API's, sudden new features during lifecycle, funny "ludicrous modes" etc.

And today's customers are demanding those features, it's now a hygiene factor for a premium experience on Smartphones as well as on cars.

A Tesla is not considered a "Premium" car because of its premium hardware or manufacturing quality. They disrupted the car-industry by being the first to apply a software-dev mindset to it, and the consumer perceives this as premium.

a.) a global company in the car-industry being cautious of exposing ANY risk-surface in a product because every issue making it to the field doesn't just bear the risk of very expensive recalls/fines but may also put people's ACTUAL lives in danger, to

b.) the country Germany and its whole society

> If anyone with money finds a technicality to sue you on, they will.

In the car-industry you don't need anyone with money to sue you. If you ship a car which is found to endanger participants of traffic, your company may not recover from the aftermath for years...

That's exactly my observation as well. Classic hardware-producing companies have an immense respect on the step of entering mass-production, as whatever issue that slipped through will be multiplied and physically spread across the world.

So they come from the mindset that the dominant mindset is to minimize the SURFACE-area of potential risk. This makes it really hard for them to compete in software-space, because in software the dominant mindset is to just estimate risk.

Neither is wrong, but applied vice-versa is.

- If you treat software like hardware, you end up cutting out everything that could make your product fit more than your decided main use-case.

- If you treat hardware like software, you're placing a bet on behalf of your customer that the product "will be fine", and a (very expensive) bet that this product won't create an aftermath which may destroy your entire company.

Companies which can't manage the distinction here end up putting hardware in the hands of customers they should have built differently and then spend all their resources on software updates just to somehow keep the core function working.

If it would be more "considerate" from hardware (or even software) perspective it could be compelling, but from the infos on that page it sounds more like a "memberberry" product

(like e.g. a phone from Kodak, Sega, Atari,... built on the business decision of [product-cost] + [branding] = [potential price-premium of xxx USD])

It's the life of a (game) developer...

Kinda RF-nerd clickbait... :)

--> Or (mind you, no fact-basis for this whatsoever): HTC themselves could have facilitated a deal between that "Trump company" and the ODM in order to get out of their ODM-contract for the U24. HTC could have waived possible exclusivity-agreements in order to settle outstanding agreed supply-volume (in the scheme of "we bring someone else to take the volume" and won't hinder any deal).

In my experience dealing with this kind of smartphone ODM-deals, it's not unusual to negotiate a "transfer" of the outstanding committed volume to a new project (the ODM wants to continue business with the customer, the customer won't do that if he has to pay a penalty). So it's not that far-fetched to negotiate a partial transfer to someone else entirely...

Also, HTC having a corporate office in Washington, while that "Trump phone" company never built a phone before, I wouldn't be surprised if my baseless assumption turns out to have some merit...

Typical ODM-supply contracts define some exclusivity for the lifecycle of the product, depending on the agreement it may be (combinations of)

1.) Full exclusivity (ODM provides exclusivity for the design, spec AND the PCB)

2.) Spec. exclusivity (ODM provides exclusivity for the specification-combo of SoC, display, battery, camera),

3.) Design exclusivity (ODM provides a custom exterior design of the device

Usually such exclusivity agreements are made for a span of 2-3 years from agreed launch-date (with parts having the printed customer-name, i.e. "HTC" covered separately).

The HTC U24 Pro was apparently publicly launched on June 12th 2026, which will be exactly 2 years TOMORROW (!)

--> HTC likely had a 2-year spec/design exclusivity which either expires on June 12th 2026

--> (or was already agreed to be waived based on HTC possibly not reaching the total production-volume agreed with the ODM)

I wouldn't be surprised if the "final assembly" in US is just to apply the battery (which is not from china), associated ribbon-cables and NFC-Antenna on top of it, and the custom back-cover. With some creative phrasing you can count that as "10 components".

Also, the final assembly in US surely also helped on import tax duties, as only "components" were imported from different sources instead of a final commercial product...

-) Estimations are that the HTC U24 Pro sold just ~10.000 units globally since 2024, at ~459 USD*

-) The "Trump T1" variant is rumored to have sold ~30.000 units in 2026(!), at 499 USD

--> So they managed to sell a 2-year old device at a HIGHER price than HTC did, and sold ~3 times the volume in ~6 months of what HTC achieved WITHIN TWO-YEARS just by branding it with the "Trump" Name...

If that doesn't at least demonstrate how broken the competitive landscape in the smartphone industry is (me gently excluding the gravity of the 'Trump' branding), I don't know anymore...

*) approx., with 2024-style memory/storage spec of 8GB/128GB

It's most likely that Micron was also the second supplier for the HTC U24 RAM/Storage, and was barely/not used due to ultimately low demand of the U24 (estimations are that only ~10k units were sold globally, which is even below a typical minimum contract volume for semiconductor supply).

(Supply-chain management for volume-produced electronics involves secondary suppliers for expensive/time-critical components, to de-risk supply during the lifecycle of the product or decouple different regions)

Assuming that's the case also here, the ODM manufacturer (I assume it's not HTC) just exercised good supply-chain management by tapping into the previously contracted supply of Micron components to produce the T1.

If Micron was already listed as secondary supplier for the U24, they can probably even reuse the certificates and conformance testing results, which saves money for FCC, R&TTE, GCF compliance-testing by only submitting brief sanity-check results...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490225

Points: 23

# Comments: 9

I lived in societies of high and low information trust, and observed first-hand what happens on transition. If trust in public information is high, people contribute and challenge common sources of information, and there is high expectation and punishment to rectify, improving the quality and transparency of commonly agreed information.

In low trust environments, people start to distrust everything, initially seek out explanations but then largely gravitate towards information sources which confirm their assumptions or own bias, because they lack time, energy and skills for any other path. To stabilize themselves, they then build a mental "fortress" around their belief which is periodically fostered not by challenging it but by seeking out others who confirm it.

Advancing in this direction increases the general consensus that there is no common ground (because this requires common trust in some information source), it gets increasingly difficult to educate such fractured groups, because there is no longer a path for many to accept inconvenient truth in light of a more convenient "alternative truth".

This is poisonous in a democracy, because common agreement on facts is what's so crucial for this process.

Hence my learning that it's not a healthy direction for a society (and also the reason why systems attacking democracies don't aim to gain trust, they build distrust)

> but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.

There is a huge difference between a ideologically open society and a low information trust society. Accepting other ideologies requires trust.

A low information trust society breaks down trust not just in institutions but also among citizens, which is the fertile ground for polarization and actively prevents open ideology.

You may have the wrong understanding of the terminology. A high-information-trust society doesn't mean that everyone blindly accepts a leader, it describes a system where trust is maintained. In a functioning democracy this happens because society constantly challenges institutions, as it DEMANDS to be able to trust them.

In low-information-trust systems, the consensus is that no one can be trusted. So no joint effort is taken to hold power accountable, everyone plays to his own fraction which erodes common grounds, solidarity and citizen power.

A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising).

A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".

But despite that, as a Windows user I acknowledge that any kind of interaction with another Mac from within MacOS (Handoff, Sidecar, Universal Control, Bluetooth-pairing to Apple-ID instead of Hardware MAC-ID,...) is leaps ahead of what Microsoft was doing with their OS for the past years.

Just the scenario of an employee getting a Windows laptop as a work-PC, there's barely any halo-effect if he/she also uses Windows at home. No easier handoff, no interaction, hardly any "just-works" connectivity.

Windows is mostly a vessel for the (legacy) applications it can run, and for these Browser-based Microsoft Online-Applications (which work equally-well on other platforms)

They didn't invest in creating "just works" frameworks for their PCs which amplify the ecosystem the more compatible devices you have, instead most of their focus is now on "just-works" stuff in the cloud.

So if Microsoft would make a clean cut on backwards-compatibility, I'm not sure there would be a reason left for most B2C users to even stay with Windows.

The "you can make it work if you invest a bit of time or google it" paradigm is nowadays well-covered by Linux already, and it's getting even harder for brands to compete on price/quality with Apple's scale, for almost any portable device...

But the bigger problem in my opinion: How much of the Windows userbase actually sticks to Windows because of its backwards-compatibility?

--> What would happen if they break this model and the OS is only judged based on its user experience and available applications...?

I'm not sure it would stand any chance to compete in the B2C space. If I think about it, there's not a single new feature in Windows of the last ~20 years I particularly care about.

Without backwards compatibility, there's barely any ecosystem. MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc.

Listen, I'm hosting this Telegram channel for people like us, where we can exchange free information without media bias, share the real facts and plan coordinated activities against these poisoning mainstream scumbags.

I also have a 20% coupon code for Wamp® Wolf-Testosteron for you, Wamp® really helped me stay awake and alert in these dire times.

It's true: Wamp, it really whips the Llama's ass!

But that's not because Asian EVs have a specific identity, but because the Luce's design has NO identity. It has no heritage, like a sports car from a company that didn't exist 15 years ago.

At the moment I don't even see alot in it to BUILD a design-heritage upon, not many accents you could carry onwards to other cars.

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is also an Asian EV. But it has character, it has accents, it has "rough edges". I can see aspects of it carrying onwards to the point that I see a van on the street and instantly know "it's a Ioniq". I don't see much of that in the Luce right now...