I've got one of those $50 Chinese rework stations, except mine's from Amazon. It works great. An "SMD rework station" is a hairdryer with less fan and more temperature control.

Meh. I'd like to have datacentre performance without any cooling fans. And less than three pounds. Thanks.

You also had the Nissan LEAF in 2009.

"Well, you had the Tesla Roadster that cost $109,000 and had a battery capacity of 53 kWh. Today, I see a Tesla Model 3 with a 57.5 kWh battery for $40,630. So that seems like a pretty good drop."

Apples to Bananas. I mean... to compare a Tesla Roadster to a Model 3 ? You might as well compare it to the upcoming 2026 Tesla Roadster - Its at least as fair (unfair?) a comparison -- except that's going to be 200,000 to 250,000. So it doesn't really support your point.

Now in 2010 at least, we did have a Nissan LEAF... and in 2025. So over that 15 year span... well... it was ~30k to start then, and its ~30k to start now. So... yeah. Its a better car with a better battery, and after inflation the price effectively dropped some. But that's a far cry from what this article is saying about battery prices.

I'm sure those are also benefits, but it mostly makes things faster because you don't have connectors in the way. Solder joints can be a pain for high speed, low power signals. Actual connectors are much worse, and if those connectors lead to off-board modules that's even worse. And actual connectors that are accessible without disassembling everything (i.e. the traces are likely even longer) worse yet.

First reply here has more detail:
https://electronics.stackexcha...

These days all high performance computing is limited by just one thing: ram bandwidth. And with the tradition to AI on gpu this issue got worse. Apple is the only company that is making integrated gpu/cpu memory that is also high bandwidth. Not like the bad old days where integrated memory just meant cheapo motherboard without dedicated video memory.

Memory is in fact moving into the system chip for even better bandwidth so of course it has to be soldered! That's not even the right terminology.

The real question is do you want additional off chip memory or not? The off chip memory will be slower just as register and global
Memory must be used carefully on gpu to get performance the answer is that yes you could perhaps make use of the off chip slower ram or even slower sodimm ram. But at some point maybe the place to put that is instead on the solid state drive. Integrate the ram as a cache for the ssd. It's already doing that but make it even bigger. Then you can make it persistent as well.

Apple as usual is way ahead in adopting the future before the software exploiting it arrives .

It wouldn't be hard to train a chat LLM on your holy texts of choice. I'd be shocked if someone hadn't already done it. There's no way it would make it past any major corporation's safety checks though, so you'll probably have to week through all the AI porn generator sites to find it.

The military doesn't want a general AI (what I assume you mean by "true" AI) any more than they want privates who think too much. They DO want specialized systems for image and signals analysis and some limited autonomous vehicles. Everything else is soft science fiction at best.

Corporations are much the same. Google doesn't want Maps staging a sit in or Docs going on strike because it doesn't approve of the customer.

Geo is a made up English prefix based on a Greek word that means (E/e)arth, dirt, land or ground. You can insist on making up new Greek or Latin derived prefixes for every body, but after a few people get tired of it and do the snesible thing: make one term generic.

Companies need to return the money they make to their investors sometime. Dividends are how that happens. Unless you like the "tax efficiency" of liquidation.

It's funny. Loads of people are in the "OMG, not paying dividends is the root of all evil in the world!" Less frequently you run into your type, "OMG, dividends are stupid and awful!"

Neither is true.

Stock transactions are free.

Lol, maybe for you.

Qualified dividends which is most ordinary companies like Apple, MS, etc., are federally taxed at
- 15% for up to 553,000 income (married joint)
- 0% for up to 89,000 income (married joint)

I assume this is in the US. I'm not American, many people are not. Many people are also not married. If you read carefully, you might have noticed phrases such as in many places and usually.

Hey hey, come on. They're spending like mad on their military. Only 20% or so short of the recommended NATO minimum!

They don't have to cut off exports to you, you're working hard on doing it to yourselves.

There's lots of manufacturing in the US. Enjoy your $10,000 Pentagon approved hobby drones!

If you're a company that's run out of ideas for new things to do with your income, giving it to investors isn't a bad idea. That's dividends. "Tax efficient" is between you and your government.

Companies have a natural lifetime. While they're growing, paying dividends is a bad idea. When they're mature, it's a good idea.

Anybody can give themselves "dividends" from a non-dividend paying stock, no day trading or exceptional long-term planning required. Every year, or quarter, or whatever you like, just sell x%. In most respects it's the same thing that would happen if the company actually issued a dividend.

The disadvantage is that you'll probably have to pay a fee for the sale. The (big) advantage is that in many places sales are capital gains while dividends are income, and capital gains is usually taxed less.

Google is an advertising company that occasionally develops some technology to support that. They've expanded to the point where they're dominant in pretty much all advertising except old fasioned print, TV and radio, and they're attracting a lot of anti-trust attention. Their growth is probably hitting its ceiling so dividends aren't necessarily a bad idea. Their actual payout is too small to be much more than symbolic though.

Even something that could be more accurately called a tech company is eventually going to saturate their market and stop growing. Growth doesn't mean you stop making, e.g. better processors, growth means you keep making better processors that you can sell more of for more money.