One of the core problems with starbucks is the over roasting of all their beans, this is done to "ensure" consistency between stores. Mix that with enough marketing and a general populous that cares more about being hip and don't know any better, consistency becomes a major factor for them. If one store produced a better quality/tasting drink then you could have fragmentation of the brand name. It's the unification of the brand name that sets them apart from the mom & pop coffee shops, so consistency becomes one of the key factors to ensure that setting apart. Now to do that at a cheap cost the easiest way is to over roast the beans so that it doesn't matter where they are getting them from or the original quality..

While i don't agree with it, and i don't care for their coffee, i can fully understand their strategic decision to do it, and it was and is proving to be a very wise decision.

You do realize the traditional trike design is an extremely unstable platform?

I had an S80 T6, i will say that is one of the best road trip cars i've ever driven. and overall performance wise it wasn't bad. but it was one of the worst built POS's i've ever seen.

that was a Volvo, everything uses the same damn bus

Agreed, by using the same core board/cpu they are bringing the lower end devices up to the same software lifecycle as the high ends.. and just as you said it allow them to avoid fragmentation which is a serious issue to manage.

Agreed, if anything this sounds to me more like streamlining the supply chain and manufacturing by removing component variance. Using the same part a million times is significantly cheaper than using one part for 800k and another for 200k even if the single part used a million times is more expensive.

I'd expect the same result across the board as they roll it out.

Remember that intel had and still has an arm licence, and when they did make their own arm processors the xscale had one of the best power to performance ratios available, while also having very effective frequency scaling and power management..

Even if it was an Apple designed SoC the quality of Intel's foundries are unmatched really, so for the same chip they would have received a higher quality product.

It's my opinion that, yes it would have been better.

It's simple just screw up the global BGP tables and no one will be able to access it. no where did is see where the order required zero impact to anything else.

With margins as small as they are now, you would be surprised how small a $1 million a year shop can be, and still be borderline profitable.

For a helicopter, maybe not so much take off, but landing sure is particularly high stress, and replace wings with rotors as they are serving the same basic function (providing lift).

well a quick google search for "laptop power consumption by component" first link is a PDF

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.87.5604&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Which is a fairly nicely done research paper, sure in idle the screen is the most, but under load the CPU dominates, and that is very true even in a lot of newer laptops..

Which is great really, because only a few years ago it was top of the list for power consumption. once it gets to the bottom, then we can start picking up the next heavy hitter to power consumption. It makes sense to work on what is hurting the most, and the CPU was hurting the most, now we can shift focus on to the next big one. Although that doesn't mean the CPU group should slow down, else they will soon be back at the top of that list.

Well this is Lockheed Martin after all.

All plants are dangerous, some more than others. But people rarely think about the "what if"s in a plant environment enough to really be safe.

The cell towers/cells already do this. but even then, sometimes there isn't enough capacity to handle all the emergency calls that can originate from a small concentrated area.