While I'm not here to argue for or against your argument as I just don't have enough evidence to go one way or the other, I just want to note that while it is true Chinese citizens mostly just want to go about their day, China's government does have a history of using average individuals to further their agenda (for one instance, see: wumao). In America, such programs would become huge scandals, but in China this is business as usual. As a Chinese person, I find that Chinese leadership tends to drum up nationalistic sentiment and patriotism by way of often ridiculous or bully-like messaging on Twitter to their audience. However, Western leaders tend to attack each other or bring up problems about their own countries on the same platform. As we all know, a Chinese leader would never bad mouth themselves or China (or they would, as we say in China, head off with the police to have some tea). Chinese culture enjoys focus and execution, so when they see western leaders as the way they tend to be, it may seem like western leaders appear unorganized or even weak (which Chinese leaders are quick to criticize). This has a broad effect of having disseminated a strong feeling of nationalism amongst the Chinese population, which some have come to argue for as "brain washing" but I feel like its more like pride. So I feel like the burden of the US's wariness may be a prejudice, but it may originate from how the Chinese government conducts itself. Just some thoughts I thought were worth considering.

These WiFi sharing features are always so glitchy. I've never ever gotten the Microsoft one to work. The Apple one mostly works, except sometimes someone will have a device that just doesn't work no matter what we try. And even then there's such a long delay before the target device appears if it isn't your device. The Android one has similar issues. Instead, these days I just use syncthing across Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and iOS. Just drop it into the folder, and its synced everywhere you want. The only issue is that you have to have shared folders between the source and target devices. It's easy to setup, but getting someone to install syncthing on their device is definitely an ask. And sometimes syncthing corrupts its own db and the devs seem to be too unconcerned to give a feature to reconstruct, fix, or wipe the cache in the frontend.

From the New York Times:

Yep, you hit it on the nail; it comes down to doing actual work instead of idling. Anecdotally, crunch a bunch of code on my work Intel laptop and I get 1-3 hours of runtime and it runs slow. Crunch a bunch of code on my Macbook Air M1 and I get 8 hours of runtime which is still an entire day off the juice, not to mention it runs pretty fast. Crunch a bunch of code on my AMD based gaming laptop in Linux, and well, it puts up a pretty good fight actually, like 5 hours of runtime with imperceptible slowdown. All of these laptops will idle or watch videos "all day" long.

The Samsung laptops are targeted at making sure Samsung stays somewhat relevant in the PC space. Their gaming laptops have been laughable, their productivity laptops too fragile for any work place, and their non-standard BIOS and component configuration unfriendly at best to open source OSes. On the spectrum of PCs, they are at the very bottom end, but they need them so they can appear to have a super cool ecosystem like Apple does. Unless they are a Samsung super fanboy, PC users with a fat budget will take their money elsewhere. Not even a normal Samsung fan will touch it. In 5 months, this laptop will be on discount for up to 50% off as is par for course for every Samsung "high end" laptop and phone.

Pretty sure the Apple M1/A14 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 888/780G, just to name a few, have been released for some time on 5nm?

Interesting that after the release of Apple's self-repair program, 30 or so articles came out that frame this the exact same way: "repairing your own device isn't worth it and you should leave it to the professionals." They completely ignore the fact that Apple offers some parts and you don't have to rent or buy their equipment if you don't want to. In actuality this is a huge step forward since previously these parts were not made available at all and you would have to salvage them from broken devices. It still has a long way to go because many parts are still not available and there aren't any schematics among other issues, but its a good first step. The fact that all these articles frame it the same way (and even use the exact same points i.e. "OMG heavy Pelican!!!!") makes me think that someone is pulling some strings to make self-repair seem like a dead end.

Mis-read it as authorities seizing the Win-Raid forums!

Maybe Qualcomm wouldn't have to rush to meet the demand if Qualcomm-based Android devices could receive more than 2-3 major OS updates. Qualcomm keeps a tight control on video, camera, and other drivers so that users have to buy a new chip every couple years in order to run the latest Android OS. The solution could be to open source the drivers or at least provide 8-10 years of drivers for Android. There's no reason a Qualcomm 835 phone shouldn't be able to run Android 12 and beyond.

Important to note that the bad code stemmed from a hacked version of Xcode on Macs.

Also, I'd imagine a good amount of those writes are from FileVault and iCloud doing their first time encryption/syncing when I setup the device.

I think this is it. I have a 16GB ram model and my wear is nowhere close (about 1TB) in the same 2 month timespan. I don't use my device lightly either as I always have a mix of VS Code, Lightroom/Photoshop, AdGuard, Blender, etc. open.

I just built an Intel NUC BOXNUC6CAYH for roughly $330 with the same processor, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB SSD, but most importantly, a full HDMI 2.0 port with 4K @ 60HZ support without needing a dongle (video decoding at 4K is still a bit lacking though). When the new Mintbox comes out this summer, it will be facing some stiff competition as Intel will have released its Gemini Lake platform based NUCs which benchmarks are showing to be much snappier than the current Apollo Lake ones. If you want to support the Linux Mint devs, pick up the new Mintbox, but otherwise you can buy a NUC now or a much faster NUC this summer.