There are use cases for public transport. There are usecases for trucks and SUVs. EVs currently seem to be limited to a "city car" role, which is a category that's hard to understand.
I'm sorry, but that's not a library. It is useful, but calling these centers "libraries" just accelerates the death of actual libraries, and distracts from copyright reform.
Why lie? It _is_ a tourist location, with > 2mln tourists annually (for their 1 mln permanent population). It also has quite a diverse economy, with Avtotor being a major car assembler (though not quite what it was pre-war), a fishing industry, amber mining, a TV manufacturer, &c. With a significant military presence, of course, but "giant military base in the middle of nowhere" is just ridiculous.
LAMY 2000 and Platinum Preppy/Pilot V-pen are not the same kind of product. To be honest, the disposables are not excellent at all.
However, the difference in writing feel, line quality, &c between a lamy 2k and the new Chinese producers like Majohn or PenBBS is not so big. They do require a bit more maintenance, and the looks and feels are subpar. Whether that's worth the $230 price difference is questionable.
I own the lamy, and love it dearly. I bought it 10 years ago, when I felt easier with spending money. I wouldn't have bought one now.
"operationally" implies that capex (which I would assume includes datacenters, gpus, and r&d) is not in. So the big news is that they can now pay for electricity and sysadmin.
There's a clear intent for EU entities to switch to "sovereign" tech. That means that there's a lot of money on the table. Hence the "EuroOffice" rebadge, and this unpleasantness.
Shortcuts still don't work on non-Latin keyboard layouts on Linux. For people who use languages with non-Latin writing systems, this is a show-stopper.
(there is, of course, a rich tradition of text editors with the same issue, including Vim and Emacs. They 1) have an excuse; 2) provide both workarounds and their own input method systems. Having this in a new program is nuts.)
> The hardware is almost universally agreed to be great
There is some agreement in terms of the M chips. There is no universl agreement re keyboard layout, screen technology and surfacing, trackpoints, touchscreens, 2-in-1 form factors, port selection, or aluminium unibodies.
Anyway: consumer OSes are historically cheap, and cannot be easily converted into subscriptions. So the market is low-margin, and shrinking (due to both phones and clouds). I suspect it is already unprofitable for Microsoft. So they need to exit; while exiting, ideally, sell people something else.
Which is what we observe.
The article advises them to “have a boring year” to “stop the slide” to stay dominant in a market they should have left years ago.