I'm curious what kind of power distribution you work in. I've lived in suburban, rural, and urban places over the years and I've never experienced five 9's of uptime on the grid.
The time to go public was about 16 months ago. People are waking up to large bills now, Chinese models are nipping at their heels, public sentiment has turned, money is becoming more expensive.
The market no longer cares about fundamentals, corporate structure, controls etc.
I assume the long stem increases the likelihood it will be dislodged from the ear because it increases torque at the point of contact when moving. The first AirPods were much less secure in the ear than current ones. Reducing stem length may lower the risk of them falling out.
The long stem may have been a necessary but suboptimal engineering tradeoff to get the first version out the door. A lot of design tweaks have gone into making AirPods less likely to fall out.
This must be a personal preference based on ear anatomy.
The first-gen Airpods fit my ears perfectly, and were secure. When I lost them and upgraded to the 2nd gen, I was initially upset - aside from the body being fatter (and so less comfortable in my ears) they were very insecure - I couldn't even walk around without them loosening and dislodging.
I was on the point of returning them when I saw the advice online to 'twist' them into a different position. I now use them with the stalks horizontal, and they're secure. Still a touch less comfortable than the v1s, but easily tolerable.
My experience is the exact opposite. The new shape fits less well in my ear, hopefully they've chosen the best shape for most people, but the shorter stem provides no third point of contact like the old ones!
The longer stem used to have a better chance at contacting your face for some staying power. The shorter stems don't.
I really miss the BeatsX headphones where it’s 2 earbuds attached to each other with a flexible cable that drapes over the back of your neck. It was nice to be able to take my headphones out without needing to hold them and they just fall over my shoulders like a necklace. Also means not having to keep track of a third item since there’s no charging case. And the whole thing is soft and flexible so you can put it more easily in your pocket without it bulging like the AirPods in a case do.
I find the “true wireless” form factor finnicky and comically easy to lose and easy to drop. I don’t really see much utility in it either aside from the cool technology flex. If they’d put the modern audio quality and noise cancelling on the BeatsX (and the more neutral AirPods response curve) I’d be first in line.
Apple are king of form over function. Have we already forgotten that hack Jony Ive and his fetish for removing usefulness in favor of a few mm of thinness? Or the stupid fucking Touch Bar keyboard?
I still have a touch bar MacBook and the keyboard is unusable now.
The touch bar was not a bad invention. Apple just neglected it and never gave it the software support it deserved. With some proper development it could have been great.
The touch bar was a terrible invention. Apple had no shortage of money to fix the software side, they just recognized that it wasn't a "Pro" feature.
Consider the most basic usage of the touch bar, displaying function keys. The tactile feedback of a physical function row enables most people to touch-type the function keys from home row. For IDEs, NLE/DAW workflows, UNIX terminal setups and cross-platform software, the touch bar had nothing to offer but downsides. And even in apps that supported it, there was no unified mnemonic standard that enabled you to use the touch bar strip without looking away from the monitor and losing sight of your content. Apps that copied the content into the touch bar were even more hilariously cornered into bad UX, displaying a postage stamp-sized status for whatever you're working on.
The common defense of the touch bar says it needed hardware reworks and greenfield HID architectures to succeed. But I think Apple realized it was a totally flawed concept, and iterated on it internally to the point that they realized it was a sunken cost fallacy.
I’m sure I’m not the only programmer that developed a habit of resting my finger on the F5 key at a certain point in my workflow, and then had to unlearn it just because of the stupid touch-bar (Still using my 2019 Intel MBP with stupid touch-bar).
It’s Apple so the answer is clear: shorter stems look nicer. Functionality be damned. You’re holding it wrong my dude. Nobody wants to look like they have q-tips in their ears.
Also each device has to be identifiably different by at least some small margin, so the people who care about measuring worth/value based on the latest devices and similar trash can reject people based on what they "wear", pushing up device sales.
The point is that the state needs to flip enough that Trump would not be in a position to control what the state (the court actually) views as an official act.
If Trump continues to have enough influence in the SCOTUS after he's done being president, then yes, you could imagine they contort any action into an official act. But that'd be a failure of the next government to first establish a less biased SCOTUS (either by packing it or removing existing justices).
Current moves have been to implode all currencies, but peg the dollar to petrol, so it floats slightly higher on the pile.
The only ways to pay back 120%+ GDP is hyper-inflation or a debt jubilee. Given the South Seas company debt interest is still being paid back, doubt it will be the latter.
You work in grid/industrial?
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