US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.
> Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model.
How is a subscription model any less volatile to the long-term support of an application from the end-user's perspective? To my mind, a subscription service is equally likely to close up shop if the subscriber count dips low enough, which is something that can happen as easily as a "new version" failing to sell well in a purchase model.
The downside is compounded, however, in a subscription model because when a subscription service fails, every user is impacted, both those who would have upgraded had it been a purchase and those who would have kept plugging away with an outdated version. At least with the purchase model, abandonware continues to function for some time.
Funny you should mention owning music because I also prefer to do exactly that rather than pay for a subscription service. And this preference is for two reasons: (a) I like being able to use the music where-ever and whenever I want, and (b) I like that more money goes to the artist via Bandcamp than say, Spotify.
I am in favor of permanent standard time, but failing that, I am super happy with permanent daylight-saving time.
Far more important to me is ridding ourselves of the twice-annual insanity of changing clocks. I'd be okay with adopting UTC if that meant our clocks never changed again.
I wonder what their models predicted as marginal revenue of the touchbar and butterfly keyboard mechanisms, and how that compared to their marginal cost.
> Most devices (phones, tablets, TVs, laptops) don't have constant bezel width.
Some phones and tablets have varied bezel width because they are touch-screen devices that need to be held by their screens.
In my experience, most TVs and laptops have uniform bezel widths. Especially TVs since they are so commonly treated as furniture, and therefore receive a great deal of design attention. On laptops, an exception is often the bottom bezel, where you often will see some additional surface material.
I agree with GP that laptops should have uniform bezel widths to look their best. It's not a must-have, but a uniform narrow bezel is optimal for laptop aesthetics.
There's a lot of Good-Enoughism and Apple apologism in the responses to your question, even though you never said this was a deal-breaker. You are fairly asking why this particular corner was cut for costs, and it does seem a weird place to save a few bucks when, as you say, the price is ~$4,000.
For what it's worth, the front and rear cameras on Microsoft's Surface products are both high-quality and it's generally a pleasure to do video conferences with Surface users. As some others here have pointed out, it's not necessary to have a high-quality video stream—it's not necessary to have video at all—but it's a better user experience to have a more life-like image of the people you're speaking with. In a group conference in particular, the oddball with the low-resolution 720 web-cam does stick out, looking like a relic from 10 years ago. Especially with a high-fashion status symbol such as an Apple laptop, that's an awkward position to be in.
I think we first need to agree that competition in a general sense—that is including browsers and everything beyond—is a good thing. It's healthy for any market to have viable competitors; principally for the consumers, but also for the vendors (so that they do not stagnate). If we don't agree that competition is healthy, then I don't believe it's possible to agree on the second-order matters.
There are several second-order reasons why a monoculture is damaging for the browser industry. I will give a few examples:
1. A monoculture encourages web developers to test on a single platform with the assumption that all other platforms, and even industry standards, are meaningless. Many of us are web developers, and most of us are guilty of dismissing low-share platforms during testing. But as long as some viable competitors exist, we nominally target the industry standards in the hope that by doing so, the platforms we do not test on will have a modest/tolerable (maybe even good) experience.
2. A monoculture is self-reinforcing. Losing established viable competitors makes it more difficult for new competitors to enter the market. If we allow second-tier browsers to be rendered meaningless, we all but ensure a long and (eventually) painful stagnation, and create an ever-larger hurdle for a new entrant to clear to reach any significance (as more an more of the web is designed to work with a single platform). While it may sound passably agreeable to have a Chrome monoculture in 2019, do we want to still have a Chrome monoculture in 2029? For my part, I hope we see an increasing set of options in most areas of life over time, even in "browsing," whatever that ends up looking like in 10 years.
3. We don't know what future stagnation will look like. We don't know what opportunities we will have lost by making it more difficult to compete or by losing the healthy diversifying force of competition. It's a classic problem of the unseen. Projecting forward, we predict testing will be a bit simplified, but we cannot know what innovations we'll never see (or won't see as quickly) because the hurdles for experimentation were too high. Today, if Firefox introduces a new feature, even though its usage is relatively small the usage is still large enough in absolute terms that the innovation isn't entirely under the radar for most of us. If Firefox's share were 0.8% instead of 8%, far fewer of us would even notice if they added a slick new feature, leaving the feature unheralded and obscure despite its potential wide appeal.
But let's frame it differently. I want many of these things, but I want them to work on my own virtual private network—communicating exclusively with my other devices and only communicating off-network according to clear and obvious needs for external data (e.g., weather).
The problem is today's third-party oriented cloud that assumes that all device-to-device communication requires a third-party intermediary. In an alternate timeline, an encrypted virtual private network shared by all devices would allow peer-to-peer on-network inter-device communication without a third-party eavesdropping.
All too facile is the argument that a third-party cloud is required in order to handle the processing demands. This ignores the fact that it's relatively easy to have a personal "compute" node (it would be just a computer like any other after all) that you could run on your own private network (or even lease one from a data center).
So yes, I want smart door locks, smart assistants, and all of these "Electric Dreams" gadgets. But I want them to serve me and not a third-party. In some of these spaces, there are viable options, but I want more companies to explore the opportunity of making money selling privacy-enabling omnipresent personal applications.
As a fan of dark color themes and displays, I've shared a bunch of thoughts related to this on my personal blog. But I'd like to share a few quick thoughts below. I am not an expect on these matters, so these are just my opinions:
1. Glare. When reading on a small device, the amount of glare reflected in the screen space occupied by black pixels may be fairly minimal depending on your reading environment and positioning. Also, although mobile devices use glossy display surfaces, they tend to have several anti-glare layers in the display stack. You said your computer is macOS, so I suspect you're unlucky enough to be reading on a glossy laptop display. With "dark mode" color schemes, your eyes can more easily see the reflected scene (maybe your office lights, an exterior window, or even your own face). And the focal length of that reflected scene is 2x your reading distance to the screen. That reflected scene at an extended focal length is more relaxing for your eyes to focus on. So in order to read, you need to fight your natural tendency to relax and look at the reflected scene.
If you are lucky enough to be reading on a matte desktop display (typically a professional or prosumer monitor, such as a Dell UltraSharp or LG 43MU79-B), the glare will be minimal and it should be much easier to read.
2. Pixel density. I contend that one reason dark themes have become more prevalent in recent history is thanks to wider adoption of high pixel density displays. At a legacy density of approximately 75 dots per inch, the stroke weight of bright text on a dark background appears too faint if the strokes render as just one pixel in width. Higher pixel density allows for the strokes of letters to be wider than a single pixel, allowing for greater clarity. If you ever designed a dark theme in the days of ~75 dpi displays, you might naturally favor bold text as the default because it was considerably easier to read. (Interesting sidebar: many console oriented bitmap fixed-width fonts historically used two pixels for stroke weight, especially in the horizontal dimension, presumably because they were designed to be used bright-on-dark.)
Now, you did again say you were reading on macOS, so your display's pixel density is probably higher than ~75 dpi. But a MacBook Pro is still only ~220 dpi. A Surface Book is ~260 dpi. A Dell XPS laptop with a 4K display will be a little higher still (maybe ~300 dpi). But many phones are using 450+ dpi displays. The stroke weight of a character on a mobile device is several pixels wide, so it's highly defined and clear.
3. Font selection (related to above). Bloomberg has selected a serif font, presumably because they are a media organization and serif fonts are typically used for article bodies. However, combined with pixel density, the serifs will lose a lot of their definition and (in my opinion) reduce readability versus a sans-serif font. As an experiment, pull up the dev tools and change article[data-brand="businessweek"] .body-copy p to use sans-serif and see what you think. It may be marginally easier to read.
4. Don't discount OLED. The contrast that Bloomberg selected is maximal (pure black background and pure white text) and that works well for OLED since the background vanishes entirely. However, since most desktop and laptop monitors are not OLED, you're still getting backlight bleed, so the contrast is imperfect. Especially combined with the glare factor above, my experience is that given LCD backlight bleed, it is better to use a dark gray background instead of stark black. This makes the backlight bleed less distracting, for lack of a better word. The background ends up looking more uniform.
As with above, try adding "background-color: rgb(40,40,40)" or similar to .body-copy and see what you think.
As someone who has used a few SuperMicro boards in custom builds, I would like to know which motherboard models have been affected. It's not clear to me from the article whether that is even known at this time.
I'd also like to know of a recommended work-around. I have always had IPMI "disabled" as much as I can; assigned a non-routable IP address in the BIOS in case it flips to a failsafe mode by piggybacking on the main NICs. But is that sufficient? Is BMC ~= IPMI?
Has anyone found more technical details yet for system administrators who don't work at the thirty companies contacted?
US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.