What's surprised me in the processor market is AMD making inroads in the laptop space that Intel owned for decades, even when AMD were dominating on the desktop and had very strong server offerings (the Athlon 64/Opteron days, for those who's memories stretch back that far). 15% of laptops are now AMD.

Upgrading budget laptops is how you save.

I have a cheap Asus gaming laptop for travel. It cost me £550 and most of that was for the RTX3050. I was able to pop the back off, add in another 8 GB of RAM, doubling the original and replace the 512 GB SSD with a faster 1TB for less than £100, the next model up that had the same amount of RAM was over £200 more expensive (but it did have a 3060 to be fair).

A lot of budget laptops are deliberately underspec'd to force people afraid to upgrade to buying a far more expensive laptop.

All of this is a moot point anyway, Apple have been hostile to upgrades and repairs for decades, they already spend extra to solder in the hard drives and ram modules. Also anyone who didn't predict that they'd be killing off the Mac line for phone based ones? Anyone still denying that? Mac OS being killed off is next.

That's still 3 million people of the ext. 300 million laptops that get sold each year.

And I'm willing to bet a lot of people are like me who buy a lower spec'd model where I can upgrade the RAM and SSD on the cheap saving a hundred quid off the more expensive one.

However that's besides the point, Apple have been openly hostile to people who want to upgrade (and consumers in general) for years. Plenty of other manufacturers to choose from though.

It's inevitable that something like this will appear regularly, and one day it will be silently exploited.

At that point, everyone will scramble back to on-prem, but until then we have to tolerate this cloud nonsense, apparently.

As a side effect, they're going to become a huge vector for malware.

A fridge will last for a decade or more, they'll stop doing software updates after 7 years maximum, maybe even as low as 2. In fact some may never receive a software update.

They'll just put in defences they will put in place to prevent it.

"Your fridge will shut down in 20 hours unless we're able to reach the Enrichment server" which is also the advertising server.

What needs to happen is laws need to be passed making this shit illegal. There's a reason they're starting in the US, even before their government was more corrupt that all the other tin pot dictatorships put together, there were enough people who were irrationally afraid of competent governance that they'd willingly prevent laws against this kind of thing.

I can see no reason a fridge should ever need to be connected to the internet.

All that does is requires a beeper.

The idiots who leave it open are the kind that want these beepers removed because they find them annoying (erm... it's kind of the point, to get your attention). They're the same kind of people who openly invite being bombarded with ads because they think "they're not affected by them" which is evidenced by the amount of branded crap they don't need strewn around their dwelling.

I want my fridge to reliably keep things cold. Efficiently would be nice, doing so without releasing harmful chemicals would just be a bonus the way things are going.

Consumers don't get a choice.

They don't give a shit either. Try finding a non "smart" TV in the UK because you just want a TV that doesn't have a long boot time or requires network connectivity as you simply want to use it as a display unit for other devices.

People need to petition to make laws to make this kind of shit well and truly illegal. That is unlikely to happen in the US however as making this illegal is "government overreach" and being bombarded with advertisements is "freeze peach". Not likely to fly in the UK though. At least not yet, who knows what will happen after the 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement thanks to Fuhrer Farage.

And of course the MAGA faithful don't want to see this, so they attempt to suppress it.

I have to wonder, when does it finally dawn on some people that they're on the wrong side of history? I guess for some the realisation never comes, I'm willing to bet some died in the wool German and Italian fascists went to their graves still believing they made the right choice supporting Hitler and Mussolini long after their downfalls.

One does wonder what they are thinking - why would anybody want or tolerate this?

Most ads we are stuck with because we want the media or service that the ads support. Oh, you want to watch two teams of 53 millionaires play football? OK, but 30% of your time will be watching ads.

On a fridge what is the payoff?

Gen Z... not Gen X. I'm Gen X.

Got my first credit card in 1988. I was in credit debt until 2002 when it all collapsed, after years of using one card to pay off another, and being caught in payday loans. I experienced the stress of having the phone ring several times a day and knowing it was debt collectors on the other end. Had to declare "not bankruptcy", or what in Canada was a consumer proposal. My credit score bottomed out well under 676. 2004, all bills paid. I was at square 0 again. Started to rebuild my credit.

Fast forward to today, my credit score is... 888. I have had one mortgage paid in full, and a current one with a balance. I have loads of credit, but I have not carried a balance or paid interest on any of it in, well, at least a decade. I don't recall when. I financed 5 vehicles in that time, but paid cash for my most recent. I have not missed a single payment of any kind since starting over.

When I was in trouble, I was a smart guy doing smart things for a living. I still had to learn the very hard way. So while I pick on younger people for a lot of things (some of them earned, some likely not), this isn't one of them.

Erm... Citation needed on that ban sparky.

Gas stoves are still commonplace here in the UK and in many other nations... We just have standards on installation and maintenance so that houses don't catch fire and guess what, houses aren't burning down left, right and centre over here.

We also have this thing called "reliable power"... That means you don't need to keep a portable stove or lamp for a time where there is a prolonged power outage because we don't have regular prolonged power outages. Now before you rush off and find that time where parts of Spain were without power for several days last year (or was it the year before) the fact you can so easily find articles for it, is proof that it is a very rare event, not a regular occurance (also in the UK, the gas network is independent of the power network, so in the event of an outage my gas stove will still work).

That being said, I prefer electric for cooking as it gives you much more fine grained and accurate temperature control. It's a shame it's more expensive than gas, but thems the breaks. Electricity is really one of the worst ways to provide heating or cooling.

I'm all for shorter seasons with better quality.

Go back and watch Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5 or Stargate SG1. How many filler eps were there? Holodeck episodes, clip episodes, dream episodes, so on and so forth. Having to fill 20 or more episodes in 1 year of shooting means that they end up having to use a lot of filler (there's not a lot of meat in these gym mats). Old British shows were generally the opposite, less filler and more story however there would be fewer episodes. I recently did a re-watch of the complete Red Dwarf, 6-8 episodes per season and almost none of them fillers, most of them complete gold.

Showrunners have a choice, they get X budget for a season, they can either have better quality but fewer episodes or more airtime and less quality. I'm glad they're opting for the former.

Also the 24 eps per season was an American broadcast TV thing. Most other countries didn't follow it. The rationale behind it was that you'd have a slot filled for 6 months, two shows filled one slot for an entire year leaving the Christmas period free for specials and repeating really crappy Christmas movies. That way they didn't have to bother with repeats or trying to find something to fill a slot.

One thing I've learned about the far right, whatever they claim is being done to them, whatever they claim victimhood over isn't happening to them, it's what they really want to do to others. They want to be cancelling, they want to silence others and deny them freedom of expression. They're not having their rights taken away, their problem is that they're not allowed to take way the rights of those they don't like.

The sad part is, they've been taken too seriously for far too long.