Find me one laptop with a trackpad that works as well as a MacBook and we can talk.
I use a MacBook trackpad to make diagrams, for 3D modeling using Blender and FreeCAD, to draw schematics and route PCBs with KiCAD, and whatever else you’d otherwise do with a mouse, and it just doesn’t get in the way.
Over the years, I’ve been forced to use work supplied top-end Thinkpads, HP, and Dell laptops and none come even close to even the trackpad of my long retired, lowly 2009 MacBook Air 11”.
I don’t really care whether I use macOS, Linux or Windows: they all run the same applications. I also don’t care about the price of a laptop: what does it matter that a tool that I use day in day out for years costs $1000 more?
I care that it’s usable.
MacBooks are usable for things I use them for. The other laptops are not.
My manager got the message after I copied my personal growth and goals 3 years in a row from the previous self-review.
In my late forties, I know what I can do and I’m very good at it. I know what I can’t do well, and I avoid it and tell them to make sure things don’t go bad. (Mostly anything related to managing other people.)
I will learn new technical things on an as-needed basis if there’s a project that requires it, or if it tickles my personal interests. They know that, it won’t change.
I don’t need personal career growth plans. I have no interest in being anything more than a principal engineer. I don’t need goals. Give me a complex technical task and it will get done.
It’s been 8 years now since I rejected to fill in a self-review, and things couldn’t have been better.
Every year, I get a nice bonus, a boat load of RSUs, and an above average salary increase. They seem to be happy with my work.
I hope you as a manager would respect a goal of “I want things to stay the way they are, and that’s the end of it.”
I use caps lock the moment I need to type 2 consecutive upper case characters.
Reading through the comments here, it’s amusing to see how many people make assumptions about how things should be just because that’s how they work.
Someone above claimed that not being able to blind type function keys shows severe keyboard incompetence, something all trained computer typists should be able to do.
Well what about us poor souls who are trained mechanical typewriter typists? We didn’t have function keys?
Having to remove the rear wheel is definitely better from a slippage point of view, but now you still have the friction of removing your wheel and putting it back and getting your hands dirty in the process.
Maybe I'm just lazy after all...
But it still illustrates how something like Peleton can be appealing for many.
Twice, I had something like a Wahoo Kickr. Twice, after repeated use, the mounting mechanism to fasten my road bike to the trainer started to fail or became very cumbersome to use.
When it did work, the tires on the road bike slipped when putting on high power.
In the end, even if it wasn't a huge inconvenience, the hassle of using the system was sufficient friction to stop me from using it, just like the overhead of going to a gym.
There is a large market for tailor-made solutions that are perfect for just one application. (See also: iPad, bike GPS computers, 10 different categories of mountain bikes, ...)
> How many people are willing to spend thousands on an exercise bike?
Tons of them.
I've had a bunch of setups where you could plug in your road bike into a stationary setup, with virtual screen and everything, but the hassle of setting it up was always just a little too much friction.
It'd be the logical N+1 addition to my stable of more expensive road, cross and mountain bikes.
You have no idea how much people are willing to spend on their cycling hobby.
If I want a one hour work-out, going to the gym adds 2 times 10 minutes to go back and from. The bikes may already be taken. Music is blaring out of loudspeakers. There's no training included.
This is not about being lazy, it's about being rich enough to trade time and convenience for money.
> Comparing 12.5% revenues to a pay cut is not misleading at all.
It's misleading in the sense that a 12.5% pay cut is not something I can recover in other ways.
Meanwhile, there is a possibility that this 12.5% cut on individual account might be recovered automatically in other ways if it results in increased enterprise account.
My personal private repos have always been on BitBucket. Not because I like BitBucket more, but simply because of the additional cost.
Having unlimited private account on GitHub will encourage me to move my stuff there, and ultimately reduces the friction and increases the chance that at some time in the future I might be a paying enterprise customers.
As somebody else noted: it doesn't have to be the company that does it, but a lower level employee who cuts a deal. So paying the company more wouldn't solve the issue completely.
All of these things are extremely cost sensitive. Your suggestion that people don't consider using economics is simply wrong. If you can manufacture a million pieces for a few cent less per piece, and the only negative is having to paying a bunch of inspectors who are fixed cost, it's an easy choice.
I understand the indignation etc etc. And the suggestion to not use these kind of companies anymore.
And that sounds really reasonable, until you realize that pretty much all contract manufacturers in the Far East will source cheaper or off-spec components than those on the BOM if they can get away with it.
One of my friends supplied small widgets for a well known consumer electronics maker. He routinely gets widgets returned to him as defect for inspection, which then inevitably turn out to be clones of his widgets.
The only way to make sure that your product rolls of the product line as expected, is to have people on-site with continuous inspection (and pray that they're not the cousin of somebody who's on the other side.)
If you want the benefit of dirt cheap manufacturing, you need to have a system in place to deal with these practices.