Why does every GNU web page look like 1996? This actually matters. Even stripping the page down and removing any styling would make it look more trustworthy less like an abandoned project.
Perhaps a GNU style could be something we could help fund?
If Go refuses to add complexity to gain performance and cannot engineer its way around the GC, it effectively resigns from the pursuit of the high-performance tier.
I'm completely okay with that. In fact I much prefer it.
Writing high performance code is expensive in any language. Expensive in terms of development time, maintenance cost, and risk. It doesn't really matter what language we are talking about. The language usually isn't the limiting factor. Performance is usually lost in the design stage - when people pick the wrong strategies for solving a particular problem.
Not all code needs to be as fast as it can be. The priority for any developer should always be:
1. Correct
2. Understandable
3. Performant
If you haven't achieved 1, then 2 and 3 doesn't matter. At all. If you haven't achieved 2, then the lifetime cost and risk introduced by your code may not have an acceptable cost. When I was inexperienced I only focused on 3. The code needed to be fast. I didn't care if it was impossible for others to maintain. That works if you want no help. Ever. But that isn't how you create lasting value.
Good programmers achieve all three and respect the priority. The programmers you don't really want on your team only focus on 3. Their code will be OK in the short term, but in the long term it tends to be a liability. I have seen several commercial products have to rewrite huge chunks of code that was impenetrable to anyone but the original author. And I have seen original authors break under the weight of their own code because they can no longer reason about what it does.
Go tries to not be complex. That is its strength. Introducing complexity that isn't needed by the vast majority of developers is a very bad idea.
If I need performance Go can't deliver there are other languages I could turn to. So far I haven't needed to.
(From the other comment I surmise that there are plenty of tricks one can use in Go to solve scenarios where you need to resort to trickery to get higher performance for various cases. So it seems that what you are asking for isn't even needed)
I think a core thing that's missing is that code that performs well is (IME) also the simplest version of the thing. By that, I mean you'll be;
- Avoiding virtual/dynamic dispatch
- Moving what you can up to compile time
- Setting limits on sizing (e.g. if you know that you only need to handle N requests, you can allocate the right size at start up rather than dynamically sizing)
Realistically for a GC language these points are irrelevant w.r.t. performance, but by following them you'll still end up with a simpler application than one that has no constraints and hides everything behind a runtime-resolved interface.
I generally don't worry too much about static vs dynamic dispatch. Not that I use a lot of interfaces all over the place, but there are certain places where I do (for instance persistence layer abstraction - where it doesn't actually matter since any overhead caused by that is many orders of magnitude smaller than the cost of what the call does anyway)
Also, if someone can understand the code, they can optimize it if needed. So in a way, trying to express oneself clearly and simply can be a way to help optimization later.
I don't understand why Youtube would do this. Both applying these kinds of "enhancements" to video and to do so without consent or even informing people. How is this a smart move?
We need more people experimenting with creating a better platform for content creators. Not least so people like Beato, but not as well known, don't constantly get harassed by fraudulent and incorrect copyright infringement claims.
yeah it's foolish, the platform should just remain the platform, any attempt at improving engagement should be done by the creators or else this whole system would slowly collapse from frustration and move to a different website
Well, that doesn't sound too bad. But this is a high enough barrier for Mathematica to not see wide spread use.
I don't remember what the pricing has been throughout the years. But I do remember that for some of the time I couldn't really afford Mathematica. And the license I wanted was also a bit too expensive to justify for a piece of software that only I would be using within an organization.
Because it is also about enough other people around you not being able to justify the expense. And about companies not wanting to pay a lot of money for licenses so they can lock their computations into an ecosystem that is very small.
Mathematica is, in the computing world, pretty irrelevant. And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.
It would have been nice if the language and the runtime had been open source. But Wolfram didn't want to go in that direction. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. But it does mean that as a language, Mathematica will never be important. Nor will knowing how to program in it be a marketable skill.
(To Stephen Wolfram it really doesn't matter. He obviously makes a good living. I'm not sure I'd bother with the noise and stress coming from open sourcing something)
> And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.
To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
You're right -- the theoretical particle physicists at my faculty were using Mathematica very heavily when I was still in academia and maintained a dedicated compute cluster for it.
They really did not appreciate the debugging experience, but maybe that's improved in 15 years. :)
I've been at a few universities and labs as a postdoc, and a Mathematica license always came either as part of the University or the department. It might not be relevant in some disciplines, but generally I assume it must be used a lot to warrant such broad licensing (it is a tool I use daily as a theoretical physicist).
The Maple syntax may superficially seem easier but actually leads to more problems in practice. The point of the [ ] is that argument of a function is logically distinct from algebraically grouping terms in an equation. Also, Mathematica is a camel case language since underscore is for pattern recognition, hence the capitalization of function names. Personally, I’ve found every little Mathematica design feature to be incredibly well thought out, logical, and consistently implemented over the whole of the language.
It's not about good nor bad, but about the different trade-offs that these two CASs made. What is more important for you is something that you can only answer for yourself.
I actually loved this idea so much that every language I make, I try to do the same. The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while [ does not. And you have no idea when you have tunnel syndrome, how much it hurts each time you write a (. While it’s ugly, the hand thanks you for it.
I definitely get the impression that Wolfram builds his tools primarily for himself, and is happy to let other people play with them because that way he gets money to pay for them.
That is not the impression, that is exactly why, And actually that is their strength. Back in the days the whole Apple was there to make software for Jobs and look how awesome that turned out. Wolfram is trying to complete tue work of Leibniz and create a universal calculus. A unifying language for symbolic computation, which is amazing.
Yes, they should, but there are a couple of things to consider here. In most countries we are talking about very low numbers of cars that are exempted. You can see this as a safety valve of sorts: provide some leeway to ensure you don't give the automotive lobby reason to push back too hard against regulation. Because the automotive lobby is insanely powerful and you need them on your side in order to ratchet up regulations. (And I'm not just talking about those that represent the industry).
What you really care about is that we are able to tighten regulations for 99.9% of cars. That's what is going to make a difference. Not running after the 0.1%. It just isn't worth the effort.
And we do this for new cars. We constantly ratchet up the safety requirements. Ensuring we slowly make the overall fleet safer. Not only do the Euro NCAP rules get stricter over time (hence "ratchet"), but the "NCAP star rating" is being tilted towards what are now termed as "Vulnerable Road Users". (Note that the percentage weights haven't changed that much but the rules that decide the number of stars have).
(The reason we now have the concept of Vulnerable Road Users rather than just pedestrians is so we can broaden the scope to include cyclists)
Note that the 99.9% / 0.1% figures are _guesses_ and that they are most likely way too conservative. I was not able to find exact official figures on exactly how many excempted cars are have valid registration. But I could find some numbers on the specific class that large US pickup trucks belong to. And when you compare these to total automobile sales, these numbers are trivial. That's 0.076% of EU car sales that year, and 0.057% of European car sales.
It would be thoroughly pointless to focus on them.
I think it’s bold to assume that car manufacturers are happy importing X,000 cars a year. Their ultimate objective is to sell as many cars as humanly possible. A “release valve” for the automotive lobby is just a way for them to infiltrate a region so they can entrench themselves into citizens psyche by using manipulative marketing tactics, building a coalition from within. I am from the US and I don’t think Europe should allow the import of any large non commercial vehicles
Look at the numbers. What would you expect if Individual Vehicle Approvals represented an actual bridgehead for manufacturers? You’d expect noticeable growth over the past decades. But it is still a rounding error.
If this were a strategy to make Europe soften regulation, it hasn’t worked. Rather, the opposite is true. The ratcheting of regulation is actually so stringent manufacturers have to worry about cars sitting unsold for too long. Right now there are a lot of unsold cars in Europe that come 2026 will be unsellable. Because they won’t meet requirements. And these are cars that meet 2025 regulations. Not pickups from the US that have to be approved individually.
Yeah, I don't think the "release valve" is the correct metaphor. This is more like a crack around a door frame that you can get a lever into in order to eventually pry it open.
> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"
That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.
This is the theory, yes. And then reality comes bursting through the door and you are confronted with the awfulness that is the C/++ toolchain. Starting with multi-OS, multi-architecture builds, and then plunging into the cesspit that is managing third party dependencies.
Let’s be real. C/++ has nothing even approaching a sane way to do builds. It is just degrees from slightly annoying to full on dumpster fire.
I'm pretty confident the answer on both counts would be "no".
(This teminds me of a show I once saw where various design students were given the task to design things. Philippe Starck was the judge. One of the students made a iPhone cover and Starck almost blew a gasket. I don't remember exactly what he said when he saw it. But he pointed out that the iPhone itself was a beautiful design so defacing it with an ugly piece of plastic was just a horrific waste of resources.
He also said something about objects having to deserve to exist -- though that was probably in a talk he gave at some point. Where he pointed out that his famous Alessi sitrus press was a good example of a pointless object that shouldn't exist. At least it looked good, but it was a pretty poor sitrus press).
Objects have to earn the right to exist. We make so much stuff. Most of it unnecessary. Stuff that will soon be cluttering your home and then end up in a landfill.
This is not a product that deserves to exist. It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
What makes this particularly objectionable is that it is from a design house that usually makes quality garments. And then they stoop to making this crap, slapping their designer label on it and then exploit ghastly people who don't know any better to waste tons of money on it.
Exactly my reaction. I hate this. I hate that someone thought of it and that it exists. I have no idea if it will sell, but I was like "no way, that cannot be a real launch from Apple"
Im not sure if you have spent any time in Asia but they love to have little throwaway bags for their to go drinks so they stay cold - and they hang in the same way. This looks like the exact same thing but pop an iphone in it.
What I am curious about is whether women in France, Greater China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the U.S (where this product is going to be launched) don't use hand-bags? If not, do they hold the phones in their hands or keep it in their pockets? In India or the middle-east, I've never seen women carry their phones in anything but their hand-bags / clutches.
Yes, you're right. People in Asia do like to use small bags for their phones or lipsticks. But those little bags are usually really cute or nicely designed, not like this one. Collaborate with Issey Miyake? Seriously?
To some degree, but junk is junk even if it says Issey Miyake on it. But at the price they are asking I'd insist on higher quality materials. Not this junk.
It is like those horrible Louis Vuitton plastic bags. Yes they are expensive and probably better made than most plastic bags, but they are mass produced plastic bags. You can get nice, custom, handmade bags for a fraction of what this pointless junk goes for.
(The only reason I know about Issey Miyake is because years ago I happened to buy a couple of handmade linen suits while visiting Japan. And only later discovered that these suits were "a big deal" when some fashion people I shared an office with saw me wear them as "casual office clothes". To me they were comfortable linen suits that were obviously hand dyed. And they weren't even that expensive)
> You can get nice, custom, handmade bags for a fraction of what this pointless junk goes for.
You're making the subjective value judgement that a synthetic material is "junk", without qualifying it as such. A textile that is less expensive to manufacture, or is synthetic, does not automatically qualify as "junk". Look at technical fabrics such as GoreTex as a highly functional example, or any avant-garde techwear from brands like ACRONYM which usually last quite a long time and have some artistic merit within the fashion world.
It's OK to not like synthetic materials. It's also OK to not care about fashion-as-art, but fashion is oft ephemeral by nature and design.
Gore Tex is a good example of a material that, on its own, doesn't actually work as well as the marketing would have you believe. For instance it stops breathing when it gets wet. And then the whole rationale is gone. It means your perspiration condenses on the inside and then you become wet and cold. Most gore-tex jackets will not even work for my bicycle commute since it rains all the time here. Much less riding my bike in the forests or mountains.
Technical garments are not just down to what materials are used, but how the garment is designed to manage moisture and heat, and how you combine it with other garments and reconfigure it as needed.
I spend a lot of time outside in anything from heavy rain to -25C cold. Often in stormy conditions. I often engage in prolonged physical activity, which means I perspirate a lot. Often followed by rests. If you do not dress properly, so you can manage moisture and heat, best case is that your jacket will start to smell like a homeless dog. Worst case, you freeze to death (yes, that happens when tourists don't know how clothes work).
If there is any miracle material it is wool. No synthetic material even comes close. But then again, that's not an outer layer. It's what you wear for the inner and middle layers. And it does that job unreasonably well.
Couldn't agree more about Gore tex. It's mostly marketing genius.
On the surface it does what it says, in practice it won't work as you expect it.
In the end it's kind of useless, especially considering the price.
But the marketing is so well done, that people swear by it, even though for the supposed purpose of the garment, there are far better and cheaper solutions.
It’s much more efficient to wear the densest layers closer to your body, because that’s less volume to keep warm. Most people wear wool, synthetic, or a down coat underneath the goretex.
Try doing the opposite and see it how it works. Puffy outside the goretex. This only works on very cold weather. If it’s raining it’s too warm.
Mark Twight tried to popularize this idea but it never gained popularity despite how efficient it is
Perhaps it works if you are not physically active. But it is quite the opposite of what people do in cold regions.
The inner layers are usually the most important ones. The inner layer needs to do two things: transport moisture away from the skin and maintain a continuous layer of air close to the skin for insulation. It also needs to reduce skin contact points if you perspirate a lot.
Wearing dense layers close to your body would interfere with moisture management and heat distribution.
If you look at how Norwegian soldiers have dressed for winter exercises over the last 100 or so years, the inner layers will usually be a string/mesh undergarment. This holds a continuous layer of still air against the skin while minimizing fabric contact points. The holes allow sweat vapor to escape to the next layer, which then handles the transport of moisture. The second layer is usually a somewhat dense weave, relatively thin wool layer. Synthetics lose their insulating ability when they get wet/moist. Followed by a looser knit, thicker wool sweater. With a wind- and water proof uniform jacket as the outermost layer. This essentially creates two layers of air separated by a moisture transport layer.
The mesh garments were traditionally made of cotton, which is usually not a material you want next to skin, but it works in mesh form. Non-mesh cotton garments are terrible next to your skin because they get wet and then lose their insulating properties and stick to skin drawing off heat. If you sweat and then keep still for a while you will get cold and it feels wet and miserable. Wool doesn't have this problem as it keeps insulating even when wet. (Roughly the same cotton mesh garment, from the same manufacturer, that I wore in the military, was also worn by Tenzing and Hillary during their ascent to Mt. Everest in 1953).
You can get pretty good mesh garments today made from wool that also cover your arms. This is kind of the secret trick to staying warm and dry in polar conditions.
The configuration I wear most days is just light, thin, loose merino wool inner layer, thin, dense wool second layer and then a hard-shell. I started wearing this because I commute to work on my bike all year round, and I needed something that manages moisture, keeps me warm and doesn't smell. When it gets colder I add a cotton shirt or a loose knit sweater.
If it gets really cold (below -25) I usually drop the third layer and wear a down jacket (the kind climbers use on expeditions), but this has no vents so it doesn't work if it is warmer than -25C -- it gets too hot. If it drops below -30C I add a wool sweater. (The down jacket is overkill for where I live, so I use it perhaps 2-3 times per year)
I couldn’t get past your first sentence. The person that promoting dense-first layers is probably the most influential and famous Alpinist ice/rock/mountain climbers to have ever lived. The man is known for doing his research.
And yet, this isn’t what what people in polar regions do. Nor is it how professionals are taught to dress in cold climates.
Reinhold Messner believes in yetis. Linus Pauling thought you could cure a cold with vitamin C and shot coffee up his ass. Clever people believe in dumb shit too sometimes.
Perhaps you should read the manual for how armies that operate polar regions dress? Or perhaps get some first hand experience before you insist?
I don't think you have chosen the correct physical model for insulation. Insulation is about thermal resistance, not minimizing mass.
Your body is continuously producing heat. What matters for staying warm is how fast you lose that heat, not how much “extra fabric” you have to warm up. The thermal mass of clothing is tiny compared to the thermal mass of your body so it isn't numerically relevant. The limiting factor is heat loss to the environment.
In clothing insulation comes from dead air space and preventing convection and conduction. Down jackets are warm because they trap a large amount of air in place and create a very gradual temperature gradient. That is, it spreads the temperature drop out over a thick, fluffy layer, so the inner surface stays close to skin temperature and the outer surface closer to ambient. The result is a much lower heat flux for the same inside–outside temperature difference. (A better mental model of this is that you have two boundary layers separated by a gradient that keeps ΔT low at each boundary layer. We know that heat flux is linearly proportional to ΔT)
Of course, clothing adds another dimension of complexity that is critical for comfort and survival: it has to deal with how your body actively regulates temperature: by perspiration. That is: you have to manage moisture too. And quite possibly a lot of it if you are active.
Wet fabric has higher thermal conductivity. Worse still, if it is dense and gets stuck to your skin you get very efficient direct heat transfer. The thing we want to avoid.
Think about why it is important to have a good thermal paste layer between CPU and heatsink. Now imagine you place the heatsink on a 0.1mm layer of aerogel. Do you think the latter configuration will cool the CPU efficiently?
When metabolic heat production drops that wet, conductive layer becomes a heat sink and you chill rapidly. In cold environments this can happen fast and be lethal.
I have a long-sleeved polypropylene shirt from the 1980s that I still wear for hiking. It's not scratchy, never smells, keeps me warm, dries quick. It was probably made by a Switzerland company, they knew how to make good quality clothing.
GoreTex is highly functional but it doesn't last long & it isn't repairable. These are trade-offs that may be worthwhile for certain innovative, highly-functional use-cases (like water proofing) but are very rarely worthwhile for average use-cases.
With very few exceptions, the majority of synthetic materials commonly used in clothing come with these trade-offs. "Junk" being a slang term for things that get thrown away seems appropriate in this case (short-lived, non-repairable material).
> have some artistic merit within the fashion world
> It's also OK to not care about fashion-as-art, but fashion is oft ephemeral by nature and design
While I do feel strongly that art for its own sake is oft undervalued & has enormous merit, this is ultimately off-topic in a thread that kicked off on the topic of quality, function & the (undeniable) fact that we produce too many things. These are separate qualifiers to "artistic merit".
Fashion being ephemeral is in fact the point here (it should be less ephemeral, independent of what your views on art are).
GoreTex is a bad example - it's gonna delaminate after a year or so of heavy use and is pretty much impossible to repair after that. Which also undercuts ACRONYM's messaging about their GoreTex products being some kind of like, buy-it-for-life rainjacket.
Issey Miyake's "Pleats Please" line has always been made out of synthetics. It was an intentional choice due to the character of polyester as a fabric, like it's ability to hold the pleats while still being machine washable.
The MA-1 "works" under a relatively narrow set of conditions that I don't see most days. I tried. It is a miserable garment for how and where I live.
I'm not saying synthetic materials are always bad. I own a few jackets in synthetic materials that are good, but I have gone through a lot that are rubbish. For jackets it is more about the technical design than the exact material. I have had lots of expensive jackets that just don't work for my use cases. And a few that do. It is trial and error since I have no idea why some jackets just don't work.
I live in a place where it rains heavily, and in the winter it is often cold, and I spend a lot of time outside being physically active. This means that the challenge is to find jackets that can deal with heavy rain, cold, physical abrasion, and perhaps most important of all: moisture management.
If you spend a lot of time being physically active outside in all kinds of bad weather, you tend to start caring a lot about what materials you wear. Best case for sub-par garments: they start to smell. Worst case: you freeze because your clothes can't manage moisture.
But for what is more or less a glorified sock, at that price I am not buying a piece of plastic. I'd expect more pleasant natural materials.
Synthetic materials vary by many orders of magnitude in quality depending on the purity, molecular weights, antioxidant packages, processing conditions, etc
I haven't tried it so I wouldn't know. But I'll have a look. Thanks for the tip!
As I mentioned, I've gone through a lot of jackets in order to try to find a model that consistently works and it is slightly baffling. I have a long discontinued 20 year old Bergans (https://www.bergans.com/) jacket in a horrific puke green color that works really well, but it is ugly as sin. (It is almost painful to look at :-))
It is one of the few jackets I own that combine good resistance to heavy rain with an ability to vent moisture really well, so it doesn't get clammy. It also traps heat really well so I have worn it in ~ -15C with just two relatively thin merino wool layers. Most of the other jackets I've tried tend to build up condensation when I ride in heavy rain. Which is pretty common weather where I live.
MA-1s are inner lined with a 100% cotton/wool mix. The outer is nylon because synthetic fabrics are generally good for waterproofing (waterproofing is always a trade-off of quality over function) & also just because bombers are generally nylon, but a big part of their construction is using quality non-synthetic fabrics wherever they can to ensure overall quality.
Hadn't heard Issey Miyake mentioned in over a decade. He was an important designer in the 1980s, and died in 2022. Known for running completed garments through a pleating machine.
Looking at that thing, the overall impression is "a phone so big and heavy it needs its own shoulder bag?"
What do you mean? Nylon and polyester can be extremely durable, that’s always been their appeal. A knitted pocket is very likely to be a BIFL item even moreso than typical cotton or wool fabrics unless they’re specifically designed to be hard wearing, like canvas. That and the fact that it’s designed to fit any size and model of phone means it’s likely to be significantly less wasteful than putting your phone in a high end leather case that will age out when you upgrade.
Apple is clearly trying to experiment with more textile elements on its products, like with the Apple Watch band and FineWoven/tech woven cases to move away from using environmentally damaging leather and cheap feeling silicon. Stuff like this, sold in small lots, is how you test out whether people are into it before trying to work it into a product meant to sell to hundreds of millions of people.
I'd object to the notion of a free market. Free and fair markets don't actually exist in the way we like to think. Pretty much every kind of business I've been involved in has different strata of rules for different players.
Try to set up a HFT business. Or try to do anything interesting in telecom. Once you have cleared the capital and regulatory hurdles what kills you is that you need special relationships.
In this case, I doubt this product would become a success without the two brand names behind it, and completely astronomical amounts of financial might. They will sell literal tons of these even if people ultimately find out that they are junk. On its own, this is a bargain bin-liner.
You hate on Louis Vuitton but have you ever tried one? Have you looked at all the designs they have? I think LV is better than Hermes bags with that horrendous closure they have on the Birkin and other bags. LV has cool colorful designs also in their ready to wear. You might object to the branding but the bags work very well and are designed well in terms of how easy it is to get stuff in and out and if you don't throw it around the canvas can last a long time. Hermes might have nice Pogo leather and so on but that doesn't mean that closure is worth the hassle IMO.
Also IDK what to think about the iPhone Pocket. It LOOKS like a hassle to get stuff in and out of it but if they have somehow managed to make it easy, maybe it's well designed. If not then I agree with you the product is probably garbage.
They hate on Louis Vuitton plastic bags, not Louis Vuitton in general, and they are entirely right to do so. It's the same with their perfumes, keychains, wallets and most other small accessories. All products which are far too expensive for what they are but remain reachable by the average person to capitalise on people who want the brand but can't afford the "real" products.
Buying entry level products from luxury brands is hard to justify. At their price point, you can generally get a far better equivalent product from a brand with less appeal. It's especially true with Louis Vuitton where the brand's cachet has been severely diluted by how many people own their bags.
Other random LV fact: Louis Vuitton was a lock maker, and the locks he made were advertised as “unpickable” (more advertising than reality, sadly.) He even had Houdini try to pick one. No, this has nothing to do with TFA, but I like locks.
You're right, of course, but I don't think blame rests solely on the individual consumer here... I guess it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, wherein Apple makes $200 knitted iPhone scrotes because they know people will line up to buy it, and people will line up to buy $200 knitted iPhone scrotes because Apple made them.
And people have brand loyalty to Apple stuff because quality, or design, or something... but for a product like this, which to me is prima facie a ridiculous, impractical, high-priced, fast-fashion item, you know that the marketers are cashing in on that brand loyalty almost exclusively (in the absence of any intrinsic value).
Half-baked thoughts, I'm sure people have written properly about this. But the conclusion I leap to is that marketing people are the great Satan here. Fuck those guys.
Pretty sure the profit margin for these bags is 10x at least. Way better (and simpler) that dealing with expensive computer/phone hardware and it supply chain, even if their pricing is ridiculously expensive.
Marketing guys just know and exploit a very well known human weakness. It's annoying because it's Apple, but everyone has been doing this forever.
Non-standardized phone chargers? USB-C and its patent hell? HDMI and its licensing? There's plenty of examples for creating wasteful items without them being fashion ones.
The materials themselves probably cost no more than a few tens of cents, so all the cost is going to be the in the manufacturing process. The knitting pattern does look somewhat advanced, so I guess it would require a relatively high spec knitting machine. I suspect what would drive up cost is a combination of throughput and somewhat that you need an expensive knitting machine. Since this is a high volume item that will probably bring down the average cost by quite a bit.
I would guess somewhere in the region of $2 to $5 per pocket to mass produce these? Anyone have a more qualified guess?
The tech industry is basically entirely run on Advertising. Google, Facebook, even Apple owe a huge chunk of their revenue to Ads.
Clearly Ads work. You cannot blame the individual who has been brainwashed, addicted to buying things, by the hyper-capitalist advertising mega-monopolies around us. They are victims too.
I don't disagree and that's factually correct. I'm not sure about calling someone who can spend $200 in an iPhone bag a victim, though.
Plus that kind of wasteful consumerism is only seen in certain developed countries in the world, while the brainwashing happens globally. So corporations are evil but a little individual accountability wouldn't harm.
>It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%))
Polyamids like Nylon are some of the highest quality and most durable fabrics in the world, with some of the best material characteristics fabrics can have.
Given the constraints of the product and looking at it from an engineering standpoint, these are the materials you want for a product like this. Flexible, durable and resistant to weather. I do not see what other materials you would use to achieve a better quality product.
That said, it is of course a stupid fashion accessories. The world is full of them.
> It is not made from quality materials ( Nylon (14%), Polyester (85%), Polyurethane (1%)). It is not innovative. It is questionable whether it solves its primary use case particularly well.
It is impossible for Apple to innovate. It's way too much work to compete with BYD/Tesla on real things like Electric Cars.
It's a LOT easier just to extract money from idiots who pay top dollar for 'fashion'. They will market this as the Balenciaga of phone bags, to differentiate it from the $2 phone bags that will appear on Temu next week (or they are already there; Apple is slowly catching up after a few years).
Perhaps a GNU style could be something we could help fund?
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