Curious if anyone familiar with Azure/OpenAI could make some guesses on the root cause here. The official OpenAI incident updates seem to be very generic.
These specs could catapult LFP above all other battery chemistries. "400km in 10min" for a 700km range battery would mean 60% charge in 10min, which is about 1.5x the speed of today's fastest-charging NMC batteries. Hopefully there's not too much weight or discharge rate penalty. Excited for the future of LFP!
Sad news. I really wanted them to succeed. Their hardware engineering and design were top-notch. I test rode a VanMoof S3 three years ago and it was incomparable to other bikes. The integration of every single component into the frame and design was unparalleled, the smoothness of the automatic gear shifts felt magical.
But for me these features erred on the side of "nice-to-haves" and I ended up purchasing a "traditional" but more expensive e-bike that had the essential features I valued as a commuter (in New York); namely, more range for winter, more speed and torque going uphill, and a removable battery for carrying.
I had really hoped VanMoof could improve on these areas with newer models but it never happened. They continued to iterate on their strengths of beautiful integration using bespoke components, but didn't meaningfully improve any essential features at all. Currently, I have 3 commuter e-bikes in the family of different brands, drivetrain technologies, and price points. None come close to the level of polish and craftsmanship the VanMoof S3 had; if only it was better at being a bike.
Thinking more broadly about VanMoof's downfall, I think the commuter e-bike market might just too small and too competitive. Anecdotally, I still see about 10x more road bikes than commuter e-bikes today on the road, no change over the past 3 years, but the number of subscription e-bikes (citi bike) has skyrocketed.
Fun read. I found "maidian" more intuitively understood as "embedding dots" instead of "embedding seeds", since tracking dots (or tracking pixels) are often used for analytics and "dian"'s literal meaning is "dot".
The last paragraph for Magic Mouse 2 seems a bit forced. This mouse has not garnered the same level of controversy as the other products in this article.
I've personally found it more enjoyable and ergonomic than my Logitech M705 and Microsoft Sculpt. It's not inherently more ergonomic but the additional functionality enabled by multitouch means I don't have to move the mouse as much (on macOS at lease), which vastly improves usability.
The charging port is not in the most functional location, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff IMHO. If we assume Apple doesn't want to change the shape of the mouse, the only alternative location is on the side of the mouse, which makes the mouse asymmetrical and would probably give Jony Ive a fit.
There are still plenty of rational people out there. If we're lucky, we might be getting GMO'd citrus-green-disease fighting trees using a mustard gene in a few years:
Just to share an anecdote from my experience in China. I was in Beijing over the holidays and met up with a handful of friends who live there, surprisingly they all switched to Huawei within the past year, three of them even in the past 2 months. The Huawei phones they use are flagship models and not cheaper than iPhones and they have all been Apple users for years (like myself) and who still use Macs today.
I asked each one of them if patriotism or the recent Huawei/US kerfuffle influenced their decision. They all resoundingly said no. When I asked why they chose Huawei after being in the Apple ecosystem for a decade, all of them said "camera". They said camera quality isn't about DXO scores or 4k60 but being able to take "beautiful" photos out of the box for some definition of beautiful. To them, iPhoneXS is the same if not worse than a 6, because the iPhone camera doesn't take more "beautiful" photos, only more "realistic" ones.
Obviously anecdotes are meaningless and all that, but I want to note that China is a very homogeneous society given its population, so even a brief first-person glimpse into people's everyday lives can be pretty telling. I would not be comfortable making similar conclusions about any other cluster of 1.3B people.
TL,DR: I don't buy that the economic downturn in China and the Huawei/US situation are the sole perpetrators of Apple's problem in China. Apple is missing opportunities due not innovating in certain crucial areas.
> Another part of the program will help students whose family income surpasses the maximum: If their family's income is
between $130,000 and $200,000, they can still get grants covering at least half of their tuition.
Presumably there're more nuanced factors to consider for families with incomes between $130k and $200k beyond what can be expressed by a simple equation.
> Excluding Whole Foods Market and the $124 million favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 29% compared with third quarter 2016.
Still a really impressive 29% without taking WF into account.
