I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.
I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.
But as they say, writing is hard. :)
My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.
I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.
There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.
I had a similar thought, ideas are cheap. Loads of people are like "I have this GREAT idea for an app, I just need a developer to build it!"... as if the idea on its own has value.
Unfortunately and / or fortunately thanks to AI tech, anyone with an idea can now throw it at an AI and see it materialise.
Worth pointing out that their laptops cost you $1,000, and they probably cost a fair bit to make. A quick google says generally they make 10-20% margin on most products, and after accounting for other expenses involved, walk away with 50-75$ per unit. That's consumer, mind you, it's probably much more complicated for enterprise.
To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.
HEVC is far from being the most popular codec on the planet in the context of video conferencing. Most implementations are using WebRTC and as it is unevenly supported and AV1 support is becoming more prominent and stable, most implementations are going from H264/VP8 -> VP9 -> AV1 and skip HEVC entirely.
Each new codec to support is adding a lot of complexity to the stack (negotiation issues, SFU implementation, quality tuning, dealing with non conformant implementations...), so it's never quite as easy as toggling a switch to enable them.
You are right that a customer won't balk at a $1 price increase, but -- customers balking at $1 isn't the reason why value engineering has won in the marketplace.
If they ship, say 20m laptops a year that's $800k. I can't imagine what cars their executives are dinging if their repair is orders of magnitude more than that. How many orders is it?
And if you've made $50 on each, that's literally a BILLION dollars in profit, and if their financials are true, that would be 1/22nd of their FY2024 profits. So you would be responsible for the bottom line going down by 0.0036%.
I don't know why you're saying this. Doesn't seem related. The point is that if the price goes up now then it can go up again, and where does it end? This process is how prices are kept in check, and is why laptops don't cost $1m each.
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