The HEV are already a substantial cost reduction over the diesels. It's not clear that the BEVs offer a sufficient cost savings over the HEVs to justify their extra cost. It's not a small extra cost, the cancelled 2023 deal for 1229 BEV from Nova Bus was at a cost of $2.1 billion, or about $1.7 million per bus.

I'm not sure it's just a cashflow issue, if the BEV don't have a lower TCO in the long run. The transit agency *is* partially funded from higher levels of government. They get funding from the fuel tax, funding from the city, funding from the regional transit authority, funding from the provincial government, and funding from the federal government. But all levels of government (and the transit authority itself) are running deficits, and there are competing priorities.

What's more important, buying BEV busses over HEV busses, or making more of the transit network accessible? Building elevators in 60 year old underground (sometimes quite deeply) metro stations without interrupting service isn't cheap or fast, and its taken them 18 years to install elevators in just 30 out of 68 stations, though they only really kicked into high gear ten years ago. But due to the funding shortfall, that work has been cancelled, except for the stations currently in progress (and the new stations being constructed as part of the blue line extension and new above-ground metro system, though the latter is a different transit authority).

The actual air temperature during that cold snap, we had days that had a high of -20. The point was just that Montreal, the second largest city in the country, experiences cold weather, and gets a lot of snow, and the electric busses are working fine here. The reason we didn't go whole-hog on them (despite there being a plan to do so) is because the transit authority simply couldn't afford the expense in the end, and chose hybrids, which offered only some of the benefits, but represented a cost reduction compared to diesel. It's not the only area where their financial difficulties are causing struggles. It's lead to labour disputes, reduced maintenance, service cuts, and accessibility work (elevators for subway stations) also got suspended indefinitely.

Montreal has 41 fully electric busses. This winter we hit roughly -40 with windchill, and we get around 217cm (85 inches) of snow a year. They're from the same Canadian bus manufacturer (New Flyer) as the Vermont busses, but we charge them inside the garage, so the temperature is not relevant for charging. The reason Vermont can't charge them indoors is due to the limitations of their garage, not their busses.

All that said, Montreal is focusing on replacing all busses with hybrid instead of electric. The bus fleet currently consists of 41 electric, 849 hybrid, and 959 diesel. The transit authority is cash strapped and underfunded and simply can't afford the up-front costs of the fully electrics, but has found that the hybrids are more reliable and dramatically cheaper to maintain than the diesels that they're replacing. Most of the hybrids also have air conditioning, which the diesels don't, which is nice in the summer.

I think you missed the part where they switched from resistive heating to heat pumps, and *then* started scavenging waste heat. You don't lose efficiency in cold temperatures from the battery operating at cold temperatures, you lose efficiency from the energy spent keeping the battery warm. And moving to heat pumps and scavenging waste heat reduced the amount of energy spent keeping the battery warm.

I'm saying that cold weather performance of the battery itself is less relevant because modern EVs don't need to spend nearly as much energy keeping the battery warm as they used to.

CATL's LFP batteries hit 205 Wh/kg in 2024, so "roughly" is doing a lot of lifting there. It's 17% heavier for equivalent capacity. And it's not just a little lower than nickel-rich chemistries, it's a bit more than half as much.

It's also not clear how valuable cold weather performance is, newer EVs use heat pumps instead of resistance heating, and share the cooling loops between the powertrain, battery, and cabin, so that the heat removed from the motors can heat the cabin and battery. They're going to need that system in place (to heat the cabin and cool the powertrain) even if a new battery type can operate at colder temperatures.

Sodium batteries don't differ enough from LFP in cycle lifespan enough to matter (not for this sort of use case, anyway), and the density is lower, so the only way they'll be competitive is if they're sufficiently cheaper.

At least this one is doing something unique for that price. The world is filled with expensive phones that have only incremental improvements over their cheaper brethren. Maybe you get a bit more performance, or slightly better cameras, or a slightly better screen. But a phone that unfolds into a full 10" tablet (a full-sized iPad, not an iPad Mini), that's something that no other phone can do, and one that offers a significant potential utility.

Of course, very few people will be able to justify the price, no matter how unique or useful that unique ability is. But if this functionality was offered in a $1000 phone, I'd consider buying it.

Most 3D printers run off cheap microcontrollers that don't have to do anything more than follow a set of CNC instructions provided to them. They couldn't detect an attempt to print a gun even if they wanted to.

Fair enough, I only tried it on desktop.

You clearly didn't try it, because not only does the site appear to be fully functional without an app, I couldn't even *find* any reference to an app on the site. I had to google it to figure out if they even had an app.

Those are reasons why they didn't design their own CPU with an x86 frontend, not a reason why the frontend has any impact on performance or power efficiency (which it doesn't). Modern CPUs are giant beasts with a paper thin instruction set facade wrapped around them. The instruction set that users see (x86, ARM, etc.) isn't even the native instruction set of the CPUs. It's just what gets sent through the translation layer.

The instruction set is irrelevant, just a tiny fraction of a percent of the footprint, and x86 CPUs decode instructions to RISC-like micro-ops anyway. The reason that Apple was successful with ARM was because they had a really good CPU design, not because of the instruction set that it used.

Considering that Valve is working on an arm SteamOS device, the Steam Frame, Iâ(TM)m not sure I can reconcile your statement.

Samsung makes the RAM, and the smartphones, and the manufacturing costs haven't changed. There's nothing stopping Samsung supplying themselves RAM for their smartphones at the same price they always have. They're raising the prices not because they have to, but because they'll make more money.

Xbox was dying long before the RAM shortage started. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now. The infamous and confusing "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign started over a year ago.