The lawyers are the ones talking, and they have to come up with a fair valuation.
If SpaceX pays too much for it, other SpaceX shareholders have a case against SpaceX leadership. If xAI accepts an offer that is too low, other xAI shareholders have a case against xAI leadership. Given that the leadership is basically the same people, they are very well incentivized to come up with a valuation that is as fair as possible.
And this is not just theoretical, Musk has already been sued successfully once on a similar case, when his companies gave out too much free support to the boring company.
Otoh, he is clearly impulsive and doesn’t think the rules apply to him. I am guessing, if one approach benefits him personally the most, there will be enormous pressure to achieve that outcome.
It's a very superficial "truth", in the "I don't really understand the problem" kind of way. This is visible when you compare to something like ME. Vista introduced a lot of things under the hood that have radically changed Windows and were essential for follow-up versions but perhaps too ambitious in one go. That came with a cost, teething issues, and user accommodation issues. ME introduced squat in the grand scheme of things. It was a coat of paint on a crappy dead-end framework, with nothing real to redeem it. If these are the same thing to you then your opinion is just a very wide brush.
Vista's real issue was that while foundational for what came after, people don't just need a strong foundation or a good engine, most barely understand any of the innards of a computer. They need a whole package and they understand "slow" or "needs faster computer" or "your old devices don't work anymore". But that's far from trash. The name Vista just didn't get to carry on like almost every other "trash" launch edition of Windows.
And something I need to point out to everyone who insists on walking on the nostalgia lane, Windows XP was considered trash at launch, from UI, to performance, to stability, to compatibility. And Windows 7 was Vista SP2 or 3. Windows 10 (or maybe Windows 8 SP2 or 3?) was also trash at launch and now people hang on to it for dear life.
It delivered a terrible user experience. The interface was ugly, with a messy mix of old and new UI elements, ugly icons, and constant UAC interruptions. On top of that, the minimum RAM requirements were wrong, so it was often sold on underpowered PCs, which made everything painfully slow.
Everything you said was perfectly applicable (and then some!) to Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 10 at launch or across their lifecycle. Let me shake all those hearsay based revelations you think you had.
Windows XP's GUI was considered a circus and childish [1] and the OS had a huge number of compatibility and security issues before SP3. The messy mix of elements is still being cleaned up 15 years later in Windows 11 and you can still find bits from every other version scattered around [2]. UAC was just the same in Windows 7.
Hardware requirements for XP were astronomical compared to previous versions. Realistic RAM requirements [3] for XP were 6-8 times higher than Win 98/SE (16-24MB) and 4 times those of Windows 2000 (32MB). For CPU, Windows 98 ran on 66MHz 486 while XP crawled on Pentium 233MHz as a bare minimum. Windows 98 used ~200MB of disk space while XP needed 1.5GB.
Windows 7 again more than quadrupled all those requirements to 1/2GB or RAM, 1GHz CPU, and 16-20GB disk space.
But yeah, you keep hanging on to those stories you heard about Vista (and don't get me wrong, it wasn't good, but you have no idea why or how every other edition stacked up).
I’ve been using Windows since version 3.0, so I know what I’m talking about.
Vista peaked at around 25% market share and then declined. The lowest peak of any major Windows release. Compare that with Windows XP at 88%, Windows 7 at 61%, or Windows 10 at 82%. Why do you think that is? Because Vista was great and people just didn’t understand it?
Windows XP was already perfectly usable by SP1, not SP3. The UI was childish looking, but you could easily make it look and behave like Windows 2000 very easily.
Vista, on the other hand, was bad at launch and never really recovered. I very clearly remember going to friends’ and family members’ homes to upgrade them from Vista to Windows 7, and the difference was night and day.
Your arguments don't show it and if you have to tell me you know what you're talking about, you don't. It's tiresome to keep shooting down your cherry picked arguments.
> Vista peaked at around 25% market share and then declined.
Then IE was the absolute best browser of all times with its 95+% peak. And Windows Phone which was considered at the time a very good mobile OS barely reached low single digit usage. If you don't know how to put context around a number you'll keep having this kind of "revelation".
You're also comparing the usage of an OS which was rebranded after 2.5 years, with the peak reached years later by OSes that kept their name for longer. After 2.5-3 years XP had ~40% and Win7 ~45%, better but far from the peak numbers you wave. If MS kept the Vista name Win7 might as well have been Vista SP2/3, and people would have upgraded just like they always did. But between the bad image and antitrust lawsuits based on promises MS made linked to the Vista name, they rebranded.
When XP was launched users had no accessible modern OS alternative, XP only had to compete with its own shortfalls. When Vista was launched it had to compete not only with an established and mature XP with already 75% of the market but soon after also with the expectation of the hyped successor. Windows 7 also had to compete with an even more mature and polished XP which is why it never reached the same peaks as XP or 10. Only Windows 10 had a shot at similar heights because by then XP was outdated and retired... And because MS forced people to upgrade against their will, which I'm sure you also remembered when you were typing the numbers.
> Windows XP was already perfectly usable by SP1, not SP3
And less then usable until then, which is anyway a low bar. You were complaining of the interface, the messy mix of old and new UI elements, minimum requirements, these were never fixed. XP's security was a dumpster fire and was partially fixed much later. Plain XP was not good, most of the target Win9x users had no chance of upgrading without buying beefy new computers, GUI was seen as ugly and inconsistent, compatibility was poor (that old HW that only had W9x drivers?), security was theater. Exactly what you complained about Vista. Usable, but still bad.
Just like XP, Vista became usable with SP1, and subsequently even good with "SP Win7".
You remember Vista against a mature XP, some cherry picked moments in time. And if your earlier comments tell me anything, you don't remember early XP at all. You remember fondly Windows 10 from yesterday, not Windows 10 from 2015 when everyone was shooting at it for the "built in keylogger spying on you", forced updates, advertising in the desktop, ugly interface made for touchscreens, etc. Reached 80% usage anyway, which you'll present as proof that people loved all that in some future conversation when you'll brag that you were using computers since transistors were made of wood.
All Windows OSes improve with time, so that point is moot.
> You're also comparing the usage of an OS which was rebranded after 2.5 years, with the peak reached years later by OSes that kept their name for longer. After 2.5-3 years XP had ~40% and Win7 ~45%, better but far from the peak numbers you wave. If MS kept the Vista name Win7 might as well have been Vista SP2/3, and people would have upgraded just like they always did. But between the bad image and antitrust lawsuits based on promises MS made linked to the Vista name, they rebranded.
With that line of reasoning, it's very hard to have a productive discussion. By that logic, one could just as well say that Windows 10 is simply "Windows Vista SP15".
If Vista had really been as successful and great as you claim, why didn't Microsoft just keep iterating on it? Why didn't they continue releasing service packs instead of effectively replacing it? If it was "great", that would have been the obvious path.
And again, the numbers support my argument, not yours. Vista remains the least adopted and least liked Windows version by market share. By far.
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
At the fall of the USSR, Coca-Cola should have bartered soda with Russia for the nukes. After all, the Cola Wars were heating up even as the Cold War looked to be ending, and Pepsi had a superior navy, bartered from the USSR with soda, and Coke could have used a nuclear deterent.
Russia had originally licensed Coca Cola (or Pepsi) like a decade before the fall of the Soviet union!
Stripping nation from nuclear deterrence is suicide: Ukraine did this in 1993. Both missiles, payloads and strategic bombers :/ They had it all... (Reverse engineering some command codes would be trivial as Ukrainians had top tier engineers in the entire Soviet Union).
Have the CIA turn enough insiders that one of them succeeds in assassinating Putin after a propaganda campaign raising up an opposition party ready to take over in an election/coup (mixture of both really). Have a weak and friendly leader installed that exchanges nukes for population support and possibly brakes up Russia into several smaller states.
When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
Tell me you honestly think what is happening in America right now isn't the outcome of long planning by Russian intelligence (and likely other intelligence services). Their plan was to install a leader they had chosen and influenced.
Also Epstein was probably also a spy, but more likely for Mossad. BIG COINCIDENCE he was so close with dear leader?
Then tell me you think that doing things in Russia isn't possible.
Ukraine gave up more than nukes, it forfeited future membership in russian federation and nato. All the ridiculous bush-era bluster about nato membership for ukraine was in itself a (minor) violation of budapest memo.
Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
>Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
I'm not saying that at the time it wasn't the best course of action. Something other than what happened may have been possible and may have been an improvement, but it certainly would give any future nations considering giving up their nukes a significant pause.
>Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
Again, this is the method that you would use to do it. If it were a good idea it would likely already be done. I'm not saying it's a good consequence-free course of action, that wasn't the question.
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
I've never had any 'not work'. Sorry.
My Huawei Freeclip 2 are fantastic and a very different form factor Apple doesn't offer sadly. Great for urban walks and listening to podcasts while still being able to hear your surroundings.
Maybe I got lucky, but I never had issues with my Bose, Shokz, or even with my Soundcore headphones and bluetooth. I don't use in ear, so I can not comment on that.
Yep but with AirPods, you are listening music or watching a video, on your Mac, your iPhone rings (on your AirPods), you accept the call, and now the video is paused on your Mac and your AirPods are already connected to your iPhone.
Any time any of the registered devices needs to emit sound, the AirPods instantly switch to this device (and both devices will show an unobtrusive notification to reverse the auto switch).
And it works every. single. time.
Apple can't make Airdrop work reliably after decades but somehow, they are able to magically and instantly transfer bluetooth audio from a device to another device.
Though, if you use your airpods with anything non apple, it will juste work like a classical bluetooth device, with manual pairing and no magic switching.
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.
I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).
I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.
It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.
I've had Bose 700s, Sennheisers, Anker Soundcore, and probably other bluetooth earbuds and none of them come close to the simplicity of the Airpods. The Bluetooth handoff and pairing is insanely easy and works within a second or two. I've never once had to go to Bluetooth settings to force it to pair.
This is the opposite of my experience. AirPods refusing to connect, randomly disconnecting, pressing "pause" on my phone only to have "play" instead invoke Apple Music on my Mac, and so forth. There are tons of "smart" features built into these that make the experience worse than I've had on normal, bluetooth headphones.
When it works, they at least connect with little friction. That's nice. The real value is in the very good noise-cancellation and battery life.
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
Not from me and my peers. All nerds/devs/sysadmins.
> Apple has better app selection (for most people).
Again, based on what?
> Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS.
Only when forced.
> Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
What are you even talking about?
Don't get me wrong, iPhones are great devices, but I prefer the Android ecosystem time and time again.
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