For any dense populated area, starlink cost explodes exponentially to support customers there, while fiber/5G is linear.
You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.
Remote areas of USA (and other third world countries when it comes to the communication infrastructure) + companies that operate in remote areas (logistic, resource extraction, etc) + military are main customer base.
I’m pretty sure rest of starlink customers will get similar treatment in the future. Their potential customer base is limited and it’s only ISP that literately burns their backbone network every few years and has to replace to keep it running.
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
I love my macbook neo. I have more powerful macmini at home as my daily driver, but neo is amazing for me basically as a companion to my corporate laptop. I use it:
- to take as my personal device when I travel
- do personal stuff when my corporate laptop is connected to my home setup and constant switching between computers is a hassle (even with a built in kvm in a monitor). i know, 1st world problems
It has a price point that makes it no brainer for me.
EV batteries are expected to offer about 60-70% of capacity at 20 years. I think that's really good compared to general wear and tear of the car.
But let's go back to the original point, about being able to UPGRADE (not repair/replace) battery in the car. 20 years old car is worth like $1k-2k, which is fraction of the cost of the new battery.
While it's cool thing to do for hobbyists, it makes 0 economical sense.
Useful life of most of the cars is on par with their battery longevity, as long as you have proper thermal management and your usage patterns are not outliers.
Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.
That's why you split tasks and do project management 101.
That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again.
When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc.
We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of those problems". But they're often involved in evaluation/scoping down/breakdown of problem/supervising/correcting/etc.
There's tons of analogies and decades of industry experience to apply here.
1. Because people like it.
2. “Social media” is not the right term to describe those apps anymore. There’s nothing social about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social media aren’t that different from forums - places where you can interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy way).
Watches are now roughly in the same spot as phones - form factory is largely complete and each new version is a small iteration over previous generation, with changes that most people don’t care about.
That being said - feature I LOVE added recently-ish that made really happy I’ve upgraded my many years old garmin was a flashlight (proper one, not screen brightness). It seemed like a gimmick but it’s now one of most used features on my watch - walking dog at night, looking for kids toys under the bed, fixing things around the house, looking for things in the bag, etc.
You cannot just put more satellites on top of cities, as they aren’t geostationary (which is why they’re fast), so you need to add insane amount of satellites, that would do nothing most of the time, when they’re not on top of densely populated area.