we already saw this in Windows 8 or something.

Labelling this as ageist sounds like blatant woke-ism to me.
It's hardly ageist to understand that the years of experience necessary to do such a job well is critical.

Likewise on the "Sure." I don't share your view that 20% couldn't be achieved. The designs of all portable electronics today are based on the capabilities of an unlimited supply of cheap, disposable Asian hands. It is feasible to create designs suited to far greater automation.

The UN is in clear need of full US defunding. Make that building to rental lofts.

This is coming from RISC-V SOC developers, and there are a number of those. They need something to boot and run that has a complete set of packages+infrastructure. It's great that Debian is the go-to distro for much of this, as opposed to a fragmented mess of proprietary dead ends.

There is a lot of new RISC-V silicon appearing or about to arrive. Tenstorrent Ascalon is one I'm looking forward to: by this time next year, Jim Keller intends to have a RV64 chip that is competitive with server grade ARM devices.

Perhaps a reading comprehension mishap has occurred here, but there is no rational way to read this such that it should contribute to your decision. Failing to support Linux is not an option Intel has 2025, and dropping Clear Linux OS does not indicate that they're doing this.

Except for printers, IBM still does everything on your list. POWER is one of the few surviving vendor proprietary CPUs in the world today. POWER11 was introduced a week ago, and they're still made in an IBM fab. They make enterprise grade flash storage systems and scalable cluster file systems. They are among the leaders in quantum computing research. They've developed their own inference accelerator hardware to augment their conventional CPUs.

Again. This isn't apparent to people in the commodity hardware and software world, but IBM still sells a complete stack of IBM gear to those that can write the necessary checks. IBM's largest source of revenue isn't either consulting or hardware. It's software licensing. The have a portfolio of enterprise software you've never heard spoken of, and it's a $27e9/year business.

IBM serves a world you don't know or care about. And they'll be cashing those checks long after we're both dead.

IBM is fine. IBM serves institutional customers. Wealthy customers (cities, states, major corps, federal agents, etc.) pay IBM for services. And no, I'm not taking about mainframes. They have zero profile in the start-up, VC circus, so bloggers don't prattle on about IBM, so you and your ilk are ignorant of what that do and why people pay them. Rest assured, however, IBM a going concern with a very secure future.

How much of these "desktops" are actually SteamDecks?

Texas Instruments went into a nosedive in the 1980s. They bet on and failed at home computers, and Japanese competitors came after TI's bread and butter semiconductor products. TI had to restructure, do mass layoffs, close plants, etc.

Only true in USA.
Everywhere else in the world, restaurants pay their workers a living wage and customers are NOT expected to tip.
When they do, it's actually merit-based and not nearly as much as the "expected" 20%+ (now more like 25%) in the USA.

..or do you also find this creepy as fuck and would actively avoid any places that you knew were doing this?

>> AI research is good,

I for one welcome our new Skynet overlords.

"I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done"

OK:I just install Linux on it instead then get everything done quicker/easier/better.