Find people who care about what they’re working on and they’ll go well beyond the extra mile. As an extra motivator, make it clear the company won’t be around if they don’t succeed. I’m sure these employees have shares, but tha only really matters if the company succeeds (extra motivation!). Unfortunately, there have been a ton of green/green-adjacent automotive “startups” that have struggled to gain a foothold. See also:

• Fisker
• Faraday future
• Detroit Electric
• Elio Motors

(I’m sure many others)

TIL, thanks!

Are you in Europe? In the US, our 120 volt mains limit the size of what can go in our normal outlets. I’ve never seen an electronic grill, unless you mean something that we would call a griddle.

Except BBQs are often against fire code so they’re not allowed 😭

Turning leftovers into fried rice generally results in one of my favorite foods. That’s not to say I don’t like more upscale options too, but man.

Qualcomm’s stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life

Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.

The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you’ve been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.

I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons

• I lose about 5% charge/day with my laptop asleep. It does wake up very quickly, but 5%/day feels like a lot. At this point, I don’t think Microsoft has a strong incentive to really optimize the kernal for efficiency
• Historic massive variability in hardware across devices also makes it hard to optimize efficiency, although the current crop of snapdragon x laptops seem to have less variability
• One of the strengths of windows is that it can run applications written 20+ years ago fairly reliably. There’s a ton of software that’s still floating around that hasn’t been actively supported in years. I don’t see all of these software companies desiring to port their code over, especially without guarantees that the market will adopt ARM (the Apple approach) or until they see the ARM adoption rate go up (the current Windows approach)

All that said, I’ve had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.

I own a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x Gen 9, which is powered by a Snapdragon X. It certainly checks the “good enough” box. I use it primarily for photo culling/editing (I’m a holdout dedicated camera user). It is more than fit for purpose there, stays cool, is slim, and although I know the fan has come on a few times I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t on my lap. When I bought mine, it was also one of the better deals - you could upgrade to 32 GB of memory and a SSD for under $125 in total. The SSD also isn’t soldered, but the memory is. The 3k OLED display is amazing, but if you want the ultimate battery sipper it’s probably not the best choice. I still get tons of runtime per charge, but am somewhat sad that I lose about 5% charge per day thanks to the laptop not really being off while asleep.

The biggest downside is linxu support is very hit and miss depending on the laptop in question, which means you’re tied to windows 11. I don’t have the time to tinker with it, so I haven’t looked much further into it than this.

It’s not just the surface devices anymore. In June this year, a fresh wave of ARM powered laptops from a verity of different OEs launched. There are offerings from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, etc.

I still view it differently than being locked out of using actual OEM features of the car

Totally agree!

I do find this unsurprising though based on the metric fuckton of spam you get from SiriusXM after buying any new or used car from a legit dealer.

I’ve always wondered how much this costs relative to the number of takers they pull in.

I would love to teach kids. I take any opportunity I can to mentor people at work, but in a school setting would be super cool. The pay cut relative to what I make now just isn’t worth it. Maybe in another decade when we have enough set aside…

Teslas unlimited Internet package is also super cheap at $100/year the last time I checked. Competitors are multiple times more expensive.

SiriusXM does revenue share with auto companies.) Old article, but I’m too lazy to dig through a financial report or find something newer.

I just said the same about a PS5. We used a PS3 for a while too, but it eventually gave up the ghost. I haven’t done this in a long time, but the PS3 could also connect to locally hosted media servers. As an American Top Gear fan, this is how I watched that show.

We use a PS5 for exactly the purpose you describe, sans casting. I am not sure how many of the streaming platforms have an app for it, but the ones we like are all here. For casting we use a Chromecast on another HDMI port. We very rarely cast though.

Both are windows 11. It wouldn’t surprise me if the older laptop doesn’t support the new sleep state. I would personally trade slower wakeup for less battery use while sleeping. I don’t use the laptop every day and it’s kind of a bummer when I turn it on and find out it lost 20% of its charge between uses.

Even when it’s “shutdown” the Lenovo 7x slim doesn’t appear to actually be off.

lol. Amusingly, my wife’s Dell Latitude 7400 with an i3 has much better stand by battery life than my 7x slim. The slim does wake up a ton faster - by the time the lid is open it’s already doing facial unlock and it it sees me it unlocks immediately and is “fully awake”, but I suspect this is achieved at the expense of more battery consumption while sleeping.

The 7x slim loses around 5% / day when asleep :(

Recall was the headline feature for Copilot+ PCs.

When a wave of ARM powered Windows laptops, and now a few desktops launched, they were all Copilot+ for whatever reason. They all marketed the NPU, but struggled to really say what the NPU unlocked that you couldn’t do with a CPU or GPU. Other marketing gimmicks were a better background blur and an AI drawing assistant in I think paint. I think you could also do “AI stuff” in photos, but don’t think that was local.

Honestly, I think everyone missed the punchline on ARM. The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks. But clearly a PM thought so and now they’re trying to save face. Really taking advantage of ARM and pushing for battery life, by optimizing the kernal and changing what happens in standby, would probably be a bigger engineering lift.

/Thoughts from a rando who bought an ARM powered Windows laptop and generally likes it but has never touched the NPU enabled stuff

They did see it coming, this was the goal.

https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50

50 hp for $1k

I can’t find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.

Up front disclaimer: this is all conjure on my part.

I own an “AI” laptop (only because I was interested in a snapdragon x). Most of the AI enabled features don’t really require a NPU, such as a decent background camera blur, some paint and photo stuff, live captions, etc. Microsoft was looking for a headline feature that didn’t already have a CPU/GPU/cloud implementation. Enter: recal.

IMO this is very much about finding a novel feature, that doesn’t have an alternate implementation. The near term motive is to justify their “AI” PCs to customers in hops that customers adopt them. I suspect the long term goal is opening up a revenue stream for AI - get customers used to “AI enabled” features and then tack a subscription cost onto them, but I truly hope this won’t be the case - especially when the hardware you own has a NPU.