The advantage only exists today. Personally, I have a short range EV that gets used for all our city driving and sometimes we go on longer runs when speed isn't important but I also have a petrol car for my regular long trips. If I didn't have to do those trips weekly, I would just hire a petrol car as needed. The added complexity of having a petrol engine undoes much of the simplicity of an EV which is why I didn't go for something like a Volt. A PHEV is a short term solution IMHO and in a few years they'll be obsolete, especially the ones that have very low range like the plugin Prius.

"I wish Tesla had stuck with the original plan of including a small gas powered generator."

No, for a car that can do 200+ miles on a single charge why would you even want a generator in tow? Far better to provide the charging network which is what Tesla has done. Now, I have a short range EV which can do 100 miles on a good day and I've thought about the generator thing and there are even companies that do make small two cylinder generators which can put out around 30kW which is enough to move the car along. Other companies like BMW have put range extender motors in too but they're all dealing with cars that have about 1/3rd the range of a Tesla. Personally, once I've sat for three hours in a car, I want to stop and get out and take a break. During that time, my car could be charging and at the rates a Tesla can charge it will be ready for another 200 miles by the time I've had a burger and and bio break. 100 miles is fine for around town and you can hop along fast chargers but at higher speeds the range is realistically only 80 miles or less so drive an hour and charge for 20 mins makes long runs unattractive on a regular basis, but for a 200+ mile car, that's fine and the Model 3 will support the latest supercharger so a full charge should happen in 10 mins or less.

Gas range extenders are a short term solution at best and Tesla was right to skip right past them and go large on batteries. Other car companies have to take that route because they don't have access to batteries as cheaply or on such a large scale but even for them it will come but they're all about 5 years behind Tesla.

The switch to all EVs in cities could happen much more quickly because they'll likely legislate ICEVs off city streets due to pollution. Short range city EVs are already cheap to buy and run. Personally I have a LEAF and I also have a Mini which I use for long trips but that will get replaced shortly with another EV that can handle the same sort of distance. Many families have two cars so switching the one used in cities for an EV could and should happen sooner rather than later. The total car population won't switch over to EV anything like as quickly but in the near term it is pollution concerns not to mention traffic volumes that will see the ICEV disappear for any large presence in cities pretty quickly.

Tesla has very little debt so while it isn't as big as GM or Ford, they're both carrying massive debt. Simple as that. Oh, and Tesla is making cars that people want to buy. They're expensive now, but you get that back in the long run and you get a car that is much nicer to drive and live with than anything the other car manufacturers produce with a smelly old engine. More to the point, the car manufacturers don't actually have the ability to make EVs in any great numbers because they don't have the batteries. Tesla knows this and has invested in building the batteries to power their cars. That's how Tesla will be able to sell hundreds of thousands of Model 3s a year and GM can't even make more than a few thousand Bolts. They could sell a lot more Bolts than they will because without batteries they're going nowhere.

This was actually a concern when I bought my EV because heating the cabin would be a significant drain on the car's battery and badly affect the distance it can travel. Well there's a few things you can do. My car can be set on a timer to preheat while it is still plugged into the mains but I've never needed to do that because the car uses a heat pump and that's amazingly efficient. It is literally blowing hot air before I have even backed out of the garage. Also, there's direct heat coming from the heated seats and steering wheel. Warmest car I've ever owned and it doesn't dent the range of the car much at all. Same goes for cooling, because the heat pump works both ways. I usually lose a couple of Km by turning on the climate control so about 1% of the total range of the car. My petrol car can produce heat from the engine which is fine although there's always a bit of a funny smell associated with that having driven the EV a lot and it takes a few mins before it is actually putting out heat so the car steams up unless I drive with the windows open or run the AC. No such problems with the EV. Also, the AC in the petrol car dents the range by around 5% which is significantly more than for the EV. Petrol cars still have the advantage of distance on a tank full and they're cheap to buy but other than that, they're slow, smelly and quite a bit more uncomfortable even in their high end form and if I want to refuel it I have to go to a petrol station. An EV is quieter and smoother than even the best germany can offer and I plug it in at home so it is always ready to go. The range thing is coming with the latest cars offering 500km (~300 miles) per charge and recharge times getting down to 15 mins or less. The cost issue is that you pay up front for the EV but get that premium back over the years in fuel and servicing savings. I worked out my last petrol car cost me $54,000 over 8 years even though it only cost me $17,000 to buy it because I was paying $5000 for fuel and servicing. My EV cost me $40,000 but the annual running costs are around $200 due to the lack of servicing (rotate tyres, check wipers and fluids) and the cost of electricity ($1 to cover 100 km versus $20 for the same distance on petrol in my old car) meaning that after 8 years the EV will have cost far less and is a much more pleasant car to drive. Once the Tesla Model 3 is available here I'll ditch the petrol car entirely and won't go back. Finally, 100% of our electricity is renewable. I have roof mounted solar and a carbon zero certified energy supplier.

Investment in a platform makes all the difference. x86 was selling like hot cakes and Intel pushed hard (as well as being pushed by competitors like AMD, Cyrix etc) to keep getting faster. But physics finally kicked in and they couldn't keep making their chips faster but the costs over the huge volumes made their chips fast enough and cheap enough to compete against RISC chips which were much lower volume and more expensive as a result. Companies can only improve their products on the back of investment which comes from sales. ARM found a niche in low power portable products and so focussed on this because it was earning them money and they didn't need to compete with x86. Other chips died as a result of purchases. Alpha went to Compaq which had bought DEC and then it went to HP who bought Compaq, and they killed it because of the deal they had with Intel to develop Itanium. The Alpha devs went to AMD and producer the Opteron which killed Itanium in the market. The market determines where investment goes as well as the history. The x86 (once it got 64 bit support via AMD64 extensions, a direct result of the Alpha) it became suitable for big servers as it could now address more than 4GB of RAM. ARM continued in its niche but as smart phones came along, the need for more RAM and better performance started pushing the architecture towards the same sort of improvements that the x86 had gone through so it got 64 bit support, and multiple cores too and now the performance of ARM is such that a desktop or server could run on ARM, and ARM hasn't remotely hit the buffers that x86 is hitting.

I'm guessing you've not been around long enough to know this because you sound really inexperienced. I suggest you accept that you're wrong and give it up. ARM will keep getting faster and history got us to where we are. Do some reading, it is fascinating.

It clearly can't or phones would be full of Intel x86 chips. The x86 underwent a large amount of development during the 90's where it doubled in speed pretty much every year until it peaked in the mid 2000's at which point they switched to multiple cores to keep ramping speed up. ARM took a different approach but the architecture has a lot more room to grow. Back in the 90's all the fastest chips were RISC like the ARM (eg Alpha AXP, SPARC, PA RISC) and x86 wasn't used at all on servers apart from small office servers but as it got faster and LINUX got better it displaced the RISC platforms. ARM will keep getting faster and x86 won't be the only game in town anymore. The last 15 years Intel has had it all its own way although they did get a bloody nose from AMD who produced a heck of a chip in Opteron also introducing us to 64 bit x86 while Intel tried to force the market onto Itanium and failed. Intel isn't the be all and end all of chip designers and it is good that they and Microsoft no longer control the market.

ARM are low performance today because they haven't had the investment x86 got. Back in the 80's when Acorn first released their Archimedes running on ARM it was 10x quicker than an equivalent Intel x86 machine. There's nothing specific to ARM that makes it low performance, just that they have been focussed on the low energy market but with a significant push the ARM architecture can easily make massive performance gains. These things look pretty neat: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

ARM doesn't make chips, it licenses designs to FABs who actually make them. Even Intel is making ARM chips again. Intel hasn't been able to get down to the very low power levels that an ARM CPU can run at without serious compromises on performance. ARM chips still have a lot of performance to give which is why we see them increasing rapidly each year like we did with the x86 back in the 90's and early 2000's. There's only so much that can be got out of a design and Intel has been flatlining for years since they debuted the i3/i5/i7 line and in that period ARM chips have got multiple times faster per core, and added more cores, not to mention tricks like having low and high power cores on the same die. All of this makes them attractive for servers, especially now that 64 bit ARM is out there. I've got a RP3 which is 64 bit and it zips along nicely with Linux and there's a whole bunch of useful things it can do in a machine which runs of a small USB power supply.

Here in NZ we've had TiVo for the last 9 years but we just had an announcement that the company managing the service will cease operations in October. No replacement EPG so both my TiVo boxes will become useless bricks at that time. There are some people looking at getting the S3 box working with locally produced EPG like they did with the S1 boxes personally imported, but it is unlikely that it will work out so I'm here with a couple of DVRs and in 6 months they will stop working. Since I've got Netflix everywhere and I rarely watch FTA TV any more anyway as even with TiVo the adverts are a pain, and all the DVRs I've looked at that aren't TiVo are horrible, I guess I'll not have a DVR from October and I'll watch far less TV as a result.

Alternatives to cars is what is needed. I agree with you that public transport is pretty hopeless. I used to work in the CBD and live in the suburbs so the commute by bus was 1.5 hours, but then again it was 1.5 hours by car too and it would cost $14 a day to park so adding in fuel I was looking at $20 a day. $400 buys a lot of bus trips and there's the benefit of being able to zone out. However, spending three hours a day commuting wasn't going to work for me so I bought a motorcycle and cut my travel time down to 35 mins each way because I could filter through the traffic to the front at traffic lights, and also parking in the CBD is free for motorcycles, plus I used around 1/3rd of the fuel that the car would so my weekly commuting bill dropped from $400 a month to $100. I was very surprised how few of us were on bikes because the traffic here is so awful but everyone likes their tin umbrella I guess. Personally, I was happy to gain another couple of hours a day, and I enjoyed riding my bike come rain or shine because I would take the out of the way route and have fun. The only downside was that car drivers tend to be ignorant of the existence of bikes so don't look, or don't see them so you need to keep your wits about you. Now though, I work from home so no longer need to commute through the city and I couldn't be happier.

"I heard from a cop that a big problem with driving down there is tourists."

There's a degree of that to be certain, but also local driving standards are pitiful as well. The tourist crashes get noticed but there's a pretty constant rate of locals losing control on corners, or running into the back of other cars due to insufficient following distances. This has nothing to do with driving on the wrong side of the road, and everything to do with people being too bunched up and speeding. Local drivers frequently blame tourists but they're no angels on the road either and tourists don't actually make up a massive proportion of accidents.

"A recent New Zealand study found that the risks of death from second hand smoke is between the risk of getting melanoma and dying in a car crash.
"

Interesting that you picked the NZ study and not one from somewhere else because here Melanoma and car accidents are both big killers due to us having far stronger sun, very low levels of ozone meaning we have the highest incidence of melanoma in the world: http://www.stuff.co.nz/nationa...

Also, the driving standards here are terrible as are the roads, and there's a lot of old cars still in use with the average age of cars being 14+ years meaning they lack a lot of the modern safety features and given that's an average, there are plenty of cars that are 30+ years old still running around. We have a very high accident rate and many deaths on the roads as a result of poor driving and old vehicles.

Put those together and then consider that smoking sits in between them and then think, how safe is smoking? It is already illegal to smoke in a car with children and there's a push for the country to be completely smoke free by 2025 because that's at least something that can be done to improve health as we can't fix the ozone layer, turn off the sun, or train drivers to not be crap behind the wheel apparently.

As for pollution, NZ is 85% renewable energy so that's nice, but transport makes up a lot of our pollution and the air in cities like Auckland is very poor at some times of the year due to traffic fumes along with a large amount of wood burners. There's very little support to move to EVs (I have one) or to encourage no-polluting heating (I have heatpumps) and there are even efforts to penalise those who generate their own electricity (I have solar) so it is pretty poor in the face of the whole clean green New Zealand image.

The question is what should they do for a refresh? They've been waiting for processors from Intel but it almost looks like the bad old days of the PPC at the moment with Intel dialling right back on improvements, I mean an i7 processor from five years ago is still a pretty good chip all things considered. Hard to sell new computers to people who don't need them and I know from my history of Macs that three years is far too short a time for me to get maximum value out of them. More like 6 in fact. My current laptop is two years old and I consider it virtually brand new and won't be looking to upgrade it for quite some time to come. Apart from bumping the RAM and putting in a new HDD to replace a failed one, all my Macs have been virtually sealed units so I don't mind the current state because with the lack of upgradability comes reliability. I've had problems with machines in the past where I needed to reseat the RAM to get it to behave, but that's not the case any more. Dead HDD? Built in SSD solves that and at 500GB it is plenty big enough when allied to external storage as needed. As for the design? Why mess with a classic just because a few years have gone by? I like that I can buy a new Mac and in a few years it will still look and generally act like a new Mac (a few minor cosmetic features may differ but overall it looks the same) and that may not excite people who constantly want new stuff but I like it. I certainly don't like PCs which change models frequently and become hard to maintain because the specific parts are no longer made for that model, and I don't like Windows which is a ghastly mess and doesn't know if it is a tablet or a desktop where at least the few things macOS has picked up from iOS are subtle and I don't really use them anyway. Maybe people are refreshing their PCs after holding off due to Windows 8 and finally accepting Windows 10, but for mac users who just got Sierra there's still no need to upgrade unless the machine is really old.

I travel a lot and never use roaming. Most of my stuff comes over the network anyway so I just make sure I have plenty of data. Last time I visited the UK I bought a SIM from 3 for £20 from a machine which came with unlimited calls, text and data. What I didn't realise at the time was it would also work almost anywhere in the world. When I went over to Denmark it connected to 3-DK and worked fine there, Sweden, yep, USA it switched to T-mobile and then I ended up in NZ and it connected to 2degrees. The SIM only worked for 4 weeks but boy did it work.