It's worse than that. It's not just not a prestige badge, it's also a shit car. The Mach-e is probably one of the worst EVs I've driven. It handles poorly, has some WTF level design decisions internally, has a range estimator that seems to have ADHD and not reflect remotely the vehicles actual electrical consumption or battery drain, really shit 12V battery management (no management while the car isn't being driven - something other EV makers addressed years ago), and some incredibly dangerously expensive design decisions (a small strike to the underbody of the car in an unlucky spot will kill the cooling system for the battery and be a 5 digit repair cost).

Or maybe Ford just needs better cars. They have competitors in every category they produce EVs in currently outperforming them, including some which are sold as a premium. They just produce really shit cars. If I were in the market for a Mach-e right now it would be on the bottom of the list of cars I'd buy. Having driven them they are SHIT and if I were stuck in the budget for a Mach-e and it were the only SUV on the market in its price category I'd probably pick a different style of car.

But the reality is the market is full of cars being sold for *more* than the Mach-e which are in fact selling well - and that would be my go-to, save a bit more money and buy a Polestar 4 or something.

Irrelevant. My point is that seeing a few cars on the road does not make something a success. Ford's entire EV business is lagging the industry and losing money. Whether it's because they are selling the wrong type of car doesn't change anything.

That's a bit short sighted. While a 37 year old CPU is no longer useful, 10-15 year old hardware is not only perfectly viable but actually widely and actively used. I myself am running a modern up to date Linux on a 14 year old CPU with adequate performance and have zero intention to change it unless something physically breaks in the short term.

There's no reason to depreciate hardware unless a specific feature is absent (maybe things will change if we mandate TPMs - but right now that is optional for every Linux distro)

Hardly. Windows 11 depreciated perfectly viable hardware. On the flip side trying to get a modern Linux distribution running on a K5 would be like a trip to the dentist. Actually you could do both because your system probably won't have finished booting by the time your dentist is done with your root canal ;-)

There's a big difference between depreciating a 8 year old CPU and a 37 year old CPU.

They aren't pretending anything about the engine. They are providing multiple control interfaces that work in different way for people. There's good technical reason to do that, simple linear control is not always the best way to control something. It's the same principle that is in play as to why a car with a single pedal driving mode still benefits from having a brake pedal. Despite both of them in theory acting on the same ultimate degree of freedom (acceleration) there's technical reasons why you split the control in two, and why the actuated response of both isn't linear.

This isn't an engine related topic. It's a human interface design topic.

Except that's false since FedEx aren't unionised so clearly there's no correlation between your claim and what is going on. That's not to excuse Amazon's union busting, and it's a shame that in a 3rd world country like the USA this still is allowed to happen.

The USA so desperately needs unions (most other western nations don't because the government works for the people rather than fucking them over).

A 3D printer is a product not a communication network benefitting from the network effect. It's likely a very different dynamic, especially given the evidence that Bambu doesn't think this is worth while enough to the point of actually threatening the developer.

Yes and no. You can absolutely classify correspondence that is unsolicited as confidential. While in practice the publishing of this itself is legally not much of an issue, if the result can be shown to cause a direct impact on parties you can of course be sued for it.

And even if you are legally in the right, can you afford to defend yourself? I absolutely understand that a voluntary hobby hacker has better things in life to concern himself with than fighting with a company.

Anyone even remotely clued on hasn't purchased a Bambu product in a long time.

We literally run stories https://hardware.slashdot.org/... every https://hardware.slashdot.org/... year https://hardware.slashdot.org/... about what a shitshow this company is in terms of consumers lockout and their shitty cloud print service.

The EU sales are holding steady but it's still a colossal underperformer in the EU despite what you see. How many Skoda Elroqs do you see? Because they have sold more in Q1 in the EU than Ford has sold the entirety of the past 12 months rolling, across all models in the EU ... and the Skoda Elroq isn't even the best selling EV in the EU (In Q1 it was the refreshed model Y).

Ford expect to lose $4.5bn in the Mach-E division this year.

Kind of ironic that a company that at the turn of the 20th century killed off so many coachbuilder automobile competitors by pioneering machine tools, mass assembly etc. is now finding itself on the wrong side of the equation because it can't keep up with electric tech.

Ford does make other EVs in Europe but even there a couple of their models are just reskinned Volkswagens ID.5s. They have the in-house developed Puma Electric I guess which is generally considered an okay car but nobody really talks about it. And of course the Mach-E which looks cool but is too expensive and getting kind of old. And a few electric vans. That's it.

Just like with other US companies they're watching their market shrink because they're simply not investing in emergent technologies. I'm sure they'll hang on for a bit in some niches but their consumer offerings outside of the Americas look like they are in terminal decline.

Not necessarily. Providing multiple degrees of freedom to modulate an input to a power train does present some real benefits to humans, especially if both control inputs work in different ways with different characteristics.

We are not machines. We can't perfectly modulate a linear input to achieve what we want in every circumstance.

No they aren't. They are taking a superior simple power source and simulating a control scheme that previously was used by riders using two degrees of freedom to modulate powers to the wheels in a way that is for the rider easier to achieve than using a simple linear throttle control alone.

I get where you're coming from, on the face of it it sounds similar to the IONIC 5N's fake gear shift that Hyundai introduced, but in this case it's vastly different. The point here is not to simulate the feeling of some inferior kludge that made an ICE engine work, it's to simulate the control input that riders are used to using for some very specific scenarios.

No one will wonder what they were thinking about this. We know what they are thinking (and we know what Hyundai were thinking too), and they both make sense. One from an actual technical point of view, and the other from a sales to idiots point of view.

Why provide a mechanical part that does something more poorly than the parts you already have on the bike? Clutches solve problems created by the nature of the internal combustion engine...

... they have no purpose in a system where you can modulate the full engine power delivery itself.

Kinetic energy assistance systems are not remotely what anyone is talking about here, but they would potentially have a place. But it is very much worth noting that such a system has an adverse affect on bike stability. Storing energy in a moving flywheel enough to make a meaningful difference results in a gyroscopic reaction effect. Do you like high-siding? Because that's how you get high-siding.