They don't really cater for the most obvious demographic. Yeah, I would not want to carry an extra tech device, but I am already wearing glasses anyway, I'd actually love it if they could do one more useful thing apart from correcting my vision. But they have a quite limited prescription range, if you are hyperopic like me, you are most likely over their +4 limit (especially if you have any astigmatism at all). If you are strong myopic or mid-myopic with some astigmatism you are SOL as well. And it's not really a technical limitation, I pay extra for the high refraction index lenses anyway and they come out thin enough to easily fit frames that are in the Ray Ban Meta style. Not sure if it's a stereotype either, but most of my geek friends who are the most "gadget friendly" people tend to wear strong prescriptions too...

I expect at least some ads: "You wouldn't train your AI with a CAR".

Parent post seems AI generated to me, I suspect the poster does not exist.

You are confusing accounting with logistics. When you have a stack of items of the same kind in the warehouse, you have no idea which cost what, they all have the same SKU as far as your ordering/shipping systems are concerned.

I don't think it works that way. Obviously you have to pay tariffs on the time of import, not the time of sale, however I doubt there are stock systems designed to hold data on which part of the stock has had what tariff (or even what cost in general, stock is mingled). So when you start to have to pay tariffs to restock, it makes sense that at THAT point you have to start passing on the cost to the consumer. When the tariffs stop and you can again start restocking cheaper, you can lower the prices immediatelly. If you don't that's when there will be the real outrage: "the tariffs are gone, why are you still charging us".

I had a very weird situation with going for a low price, in that people did not appreciate it? I got an equatorial mount and the existing polar alignment apps were not good, so I built my own. I released it as I figured people should have it and continued working on it. When I saw it became popular, I thought why not make some pocket money and added a "Pro" version with more features and set it at 1.99. It sold quite a few units per month considering it's a niche app. Not to be modest but it was by far the best of its type and it even had an ugly copycat popup on Android. After a few years of this, I noticed that every other, inferior, similar app was 2.99 or 3.99 (including the copycat) and the were still getting sales (judging from rankings and reviews) even though most were quite bad. I increased the price to 2.99 and overnight my sales almost doubled... Not talking about the income, the number of units sold went up more than 50%...
Go figure...
It was not a matter of app store promo as far as I can tell (you can track when you are featured on app stores through analytics sites, and that did not really change at the price change).

Wow, I did not realize Amazon had still not surpassed Walmart. And from what I am reading, this also includes AWS, which is even more surprising to me!

Well, don't know what to tell you, but pretty much all games use in-app purchases and January 24th came and went without major incidents, it was pretty standard. It might not have been 4 lines of code of course. I can't see the history of the app so don't know when it was last updated, but you are limited to how old an SDK you can link to when uploading an update. For my hobby app I am using Objective-C on purpose, so the only changes ever needed to existing code are some rare depreciations of framework methods (which are usually little more than a bulk search/replace with the new method) - the language itself does not change. But swift is in evolution, so you do have to keep up with language changes. This is completely speculation, but if they had for example not updated to a recent Swift version, the might have suddenly started getting these user errors about in-app purchases, looked into what they can do, discovered theres another 200 errors and warnings they got when they tried the current SDK and they reported to their managers that it will take some effort. Or they might be doing something very "unique" with their in-app purchases that I can't imagine :) In any case, it's a "them" problem, it's not an Apple problem, you are free to fix your app and publish an update, you need very shit developers or no developers to not be able to do that...

You have to update your apps to keep up with the OS, this is true for both iOS and Android. In this case, the change was this. I work at a company that has mobile apps, and develop my own too, Apple had warned us about this change taking effect on Jan 24th. The change is about validating in-app purchases (to prevent users making fake purchases). You can deal with validating in-app purchases in these ways:
- Don't validate. That's what I do with my hobby apps where I don't care about fake purchases.
- Send the receipt to Apple for validation (via a proxy server). That was traditionally the recommended way, that's what the mobile developers where I work do.
- Use the appropriate APIs to validate on the device (these were available since iOS 15, so not very old IIRC).
- Do the validation yourself on the device using a trusted certificate.
The change was that if you were doing the last thing, which was never the recommended way, but saved money if you really wanted validation but not paying for backend servers to handle sending to Apple for validation, you need now to upgrade to a more secure certificate (SHA-256).
From the fact that they did not pull the App BEFORE this started affecting them I can tell that they either had no iOS team in place to support the app, or they had left a junior or two that had no idea what this all meant. And now they don't want to spend the money to update their app (I assume it's not making enough anymore?).
Yes, Apple is annoyingly breaking things all the time, but in this case they are trying to make on device validation secure, which should be a welcome thing if you rely on it. It just needs an update - either support the SHA-256 cert, or use the newer APIs, it's really not hard!

In the large cloud providers where the volume is, it's not yet GR vs Turin, it's at best Emerald Rapids vs Genoa. I benchmark the various VM types every year to keep us on the best performance/price (and publish them too to help others, e.g. here are the 2003 and the 2004 results) and AMD has been quite ahead on the curve for a while now as you say. That is until the last round when some Emerald Rapids solutions could best Genoa in various benchmarks and for the first time ever they do not carry a price premium (especially on GCP Intel was consistently priced higher). Emerald Rapids didn't prove as good in production loads though, so stayed on mostly AMD and we have to wait for Granite Rapids to give Intel another go. It will depend on what kind of implementation the cloud providers will go for (they get custom cpus/clock rates) and how much they will charge for them vs upcoming Turin.
But the market in general seems to be very inertial, so big companies were always buying Intel and it took many years of AMD having the best solution for the tide to turn, not sure how fast this can be reversed if Intel gets a competitive generation or two.

Microsoft might have them in vegetables next to the eggplants. And you'll be lucky if they are not all broken too.

I was telling a friend who uses Windows that when I open Windows 11 I have a hard time finding things like settings etc, they seem to be in various places with the organisation making no sense. He told me "but there is a search function"... As a Windows 11 user he has normalized the fact that you have to use search to find common settings and need to do that every time since you still can't figure out where they actually are. That's not how any reasonable UX works.

I switched completely to Mac for a few years now. It was hardware that did it in the end, I had a nice Ryzen Thinkpad which I liked and thought was plenty fast until we went Apple Silicon at work and it was the kind of jump in performance I had last seen when going from HD to SSD. Yes, Apple dumbs down and locks down their OS so I do see some features go (sometimes with easy workaround, sometimes not), but it is a much more coherent experience overall, plus the unix experience works better than WSL, so I really don't miss WIndows.

Exactly, that's why whenever there is a competitor that actually matches, they buy them off and neuter the algorithm.

Perhaps if all the right people go to Mars?

It's a bit like moving to the cloud... We had a sysadmin managing our colocated rack servers, anything you asked him was done within the day. A new CTO brought his guys to move us to to the cloud (the old sysadmin quit as they were put above him). Yes, there are advantages with the cloud setup, but we somehow suddenly need 3 cloud engineers minimum to keep up! Well, we have 2 actually, but they definitely can't keep up...