If everybody was sacked for making a bad prediction, nobody would ever have a job.

You have pretty low standards if you think apple has a good gpu.

If you're a citizen or permanent resident, you can't be denied entry. Full stop. You can be detained for a short time, they can make you miss your flights, they can maybe impound your possessions, etc. But you can't be denied entry.

Yes.

This is like being charged with destroying evidence because you were witnessed flushing something down the toilet prior to being detained. It might've been drugs, it might've been a fresh turd. If law enforcement can't follow the pipes and find the evidence, that's their problem. Does it mean some criminals might get away with crimes? Yeah, but that beats the alternative of charging people with destroying evidence unjustly, because they were just going to the bathroom at the wrong time.

I'll still be interested to see how the overall market responds to the Slate. It's far too spartan for my tastes, and I have no complaints with my Bolt. Honestly, the nicest thing about CarPlay is that I don't even have to take my phone out of my pocket.

Buick sedans used to be solid, were go-to reliable transportation for teenagers, with low-mileage examples from estate sales being quite affordable. This was many, many years ago.

When you put all secondary controls and even instrument gauges on a screen, it is no longer non-essential.

The iPhone's hotspot is a finicky thing that often requires toggling off and back on again to get it to do its thing. Maybe Android doesn't have that issue, but I wouldn't want my choice of phone platform to be decided by a desire to avoid paying for connectivity. Plus, if you need a phone present to provide a WiFi connection, you may as well just have the phone handle everything else as well.

As for the whole providing a seamless experience between different vehicles thing, what if one vehicle doesn't support your preferred mapping software, or you don't stream music and prefer to play your music collection from local storage? As things stand, I can hop into either of my vehicles and CarPlay works identically on both of them. Yes, that means I'm locked into that ecosystem if I decide to buy a new vehicle in the future, but that's the auto manufacturers' sale to lose if they don't see the value in offering CarPlay.

Finally, when it comes to the hardware in the car becoming unsupported, just ask all those Tesla owners with the older hardware platform that can't run the latest FSD, how they feel about that. I'd prefer not to have to buy an entire new car because some app I've been relying on will no longer update. I actually own a smart TV where the smart functionality has become completely obsolete, but at least with a television you can just connect a new streaming device to one of the HDMI ports and call it a day. Most modern cars integrate so much other crap into the infotainment that you're stuck with it for the life of the vehicle. At best, you can get one of those generic CarPlay screens from Amazon that hang off the dash and really give any car that "poverty spec" look (might as well also add a set of plastic spinning hubcaps at that point).

Plus, the car cannot be driven until this screen is fixed. So this is not something you can live with on an "old" car.

books are tangible.

It's amazon. They probably burn the books to generate excess CO2, and us the heat from that process to run large noisemaking fans to annoy anyone within three miles of the facility. There's probably a kitten killing machine involved as well for no clear reason.

Every single article about Amazon is pretty much Dr. Evil level nonsense.
Why do you people keep buying stuff from them?

From the ones I've seen , aren't they just barely usable and generally don't contribute much at all to your electricity needs? I looked at some a few years ago, they may have become better. But at the time it felt like "pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that saves you $5 a month.":

They've been increasing fuel efficiency and engine reliability a lot since they were first introduced in the early 80s, in addition to reducing emissions, because it turns out that computers are much better at timing than a serpentine belt. So yeah, I'd say it's a good idea. If you don't like them, I'm sure you can buy an old Pinto with a carburetor that doesn't rely on computers, and those are about as fuel efficient as you get from that era.

Otherwise, just how much smaller do you want them to be, exactly, and why? They're already pretty far out of view and out of sight given they're typically in the engine compartment.

I'm not sure I like the idea of Google, never mind Apple (or even worse, Samsung) skimming off the top of every single purchase I make. And in this case, even if they don't, even the cash purchases inevitably take a hit, effectively subsidizing these companies where they're not even involved.

We're literally adding yet another payment middle man in a place where we already have several. Anybody who has ever had a credit card merchant account will understand what I'm talking about.