"Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without needing to be prompted each time," said Omar Shahine"

Actual autopilots require constant oversight, whether you're on a yacht looking or for shipping containers, or in a plane watching for mountains. That's why it's a good name for Tesla's Almost Self Driving misfeature. On that basis it's actually sort of a good name for this, in that so will these AI agents, though they won't be getting it.

If they wanted to give an air of confidence, though, they would have named it more cleverly than this, and without using a name already in common use for a semi related product.

I suggest general operating LLM enterprise management, or GOLEM ;)

Not sure what size battery that uses. But I'd be surprised if it wasn't a "standard" size available at "Batteries +Bulbs". In which case, many manufacturers just figure "why bother". Some will even direct you to a common equivalent part number.

They are also one of the few parts of the electronics hobby that isn't toxic. A very welcome change.

Which present their own Zen riddle: How do you replace the batteries in the electric screwdriver?

Seriously: Who would buy an electric screwdriver for a once a year job like this? OK if you have your own repair shop. But around the house, I can afford to twist the manual type myself.

WTS
YMBNH

That's great for you, but irrelevant to users buying laptops, which is the topic at hand.

I misremembered. It's been some years since I did it.

We found that submersion to 10cm was often worse than submersion beyond 1m. I think it was the lack of compression on gaskets. Our pre-compliance test was a drainpipe blocked off at the bottom, and string.

Samsung used to make waterproof phones where you could replace the battery. I'd give up the ability to fully submerge if it meant the battery could be swapped out.

For me it's a big deal. I had a hell of a time replacing my Pixel XL battery. I'm keeping that thing alive forever, because it has unlimited full quality photo uploads to Google Photos.

[flipping through Sports Illustrated quickly]

I played around with it, and my experience was terrible. The problem I have with these types of token-based ai services is that they have no financial incentive to providing a fast and efficient tool set. They start you off with 20k tokens, which sounds like a lot. Then you ask for it to do a thing, and it does it, for 500 tokens. So far, so good. Then you ask it to do a more complex thing. It tries to do it and charges 4k tokens. Then you state "Hey, that isn't what I asked. I wanted XYZ and you gave me ABC". So it tries to fix it, for another 4k tokens, and it still did ABC.

On the flip side, we really ought to get rid of the entire culex genus because of West Nile and various forms of encephalitis, and we also really ought to get rid of other Aedes albopictus as a secondary vector for several other diseases. There are few species of mosquitoes that aren't problematic to humans. This one is just slightly safer to get rid of because it is a recent invader, rather than something that has been part of the ecosystem longer.

Except when they swell up and become dangerous.

True. Most people don't keep them long enough to require a second swap.

I'm not convinced there's any reason you can't have both. As far as I can tell, the main thing preventing easy battery swaps on smartphones is the label on the back case with the IMEI and stuff.

As long as there isn't any legal compliance reason why that has to be on the back of the phone after the repair, you could make battery change-out as simple as "Remove some number of screws on the side, lift the sealed back off like a giant wristwatch, thus disconnecting the battery that's glued to the back, attach a new back with a new battery and new rubber seals, and put the screws back in."

The only challenging parts are designing a self-aligning connector between the battery and the motherboard (if you make the distance between contacts big enough, this is just trivial spring contacts, so when I call it "challenging", I'm being generous) and convincing the companies to stop making the back case and the sides as a single piece and spend an extra half cent per unit on a silicone seal strip between the two. Oh, and convincing the companies that user-visible screws is a good thing instead of a design horror, because form-over-function has been the biggest plague on the tech industry since the 1990s. The point is that it's more a "We don't want to" problem than a "This is genuinely hard" problem.

And even if there's a compliance reason why the numbers have to be on the back case, you could make part of the back case permanent, or make it possible for people to mail order the part customized for their device, or order iron-on decals, or... there are various ways to solve that problem.

That would be a disaster. There are real power and performance wins from having RAM on-die. And by the time you need more RAM, you'll probably want a newer CPU. Now if you mean flash *storage*, then... maybe.

This is the usual way the EU does this stuff. They don't get too specific, they let courts figure that out and update their rules if necessary.

It is disappointing that waterproof devices are not included, like IP68 phones. Then again I wonder if IP68 rating is enough to claim that, because typically if they say IP68 and you submerge the phone, they don't want to fix it under warranty. IP68 means a water jet, so I suppose it's not actually submersion, but I think a manufacturer might have a hard time arguing it with a court that is likely to side with the consumer's understanding of words like "waterproof".

Some people get them for free, but most people do have to pay if they want them. Or not if their employer offers them.

Same with COVID now, those were free but now only certain people get them for nowt and the rest have to pay.

unbridled capitalism is really the way to get things done.