Customers who care should just sue. This is pretty strictly a civil issue, and the government isn't going to bother to intervene. It's up to the customers to force them to reverse that.

That said, 22 kW AC charging is absurd. It requires 32A of three-phase power or 90A of a single phase 240V, which means a three-phase 40A circuit or a single-phase 120A circuit. That's larger than the total capacity of my entire breaker box at my house. In a sane universe, the demand charges alone would be enough to discourage anyone from charging at more than about a third of that rate, because unless you just happen to be producing solar power locally at the time, it's horrible on the electric grid.

Even Tesla never went much above about 17 kW for home charging, and they stopped doing that years ago because there was approximately zero demand or real-world use of higher charge rates.

So while technically speaking, they are absolutely doing something wrong, they're still right that the number of people who legitimately care is likely to be within the margin of error of being zero.

They deliberately but in a system for verifying that the software is allowed to run, and deliberately used a certificate that has a fixed expiration date. Whether through incompetence or malice, Microsoft deliberately bricked the software. Technically, they did it a decade ago, and it is only just now being revealed that their time bomb is about to go off, but the effect is the same.

It is per se fraudulent dealing/false advertising to sell a perpetual license to software with full knowledge that it will stop working on a specific date.

This is, IMO, an open-and-shut Lanham Act/false advertising case. And any even remotely competent judge should absolutely throw the book at them.

If the class action lawyers are at all competent and the primary plaintiffs are not horrible people (bought off), the class action should demand that Microsoft release a hot fix that turns off the relevant validation. It's an hour of coding effort for Microsoft, though it would probably take half a dozen engineers a week or two to spin up a build environment capable of building it. The hassle of being forced to unlock the software would do far more to make them and other companies wary of such shenanigans in the future than any mere financial penalty ever could.

What we need is a clear duck typing law for digital purchases. If a purchase of a digital product looks like a sale, it is a sale, and there must be no known technological provision that is even capable of preventing its indefinite use. It must be possible to freely transfer it to new machines, to new users, etc. without limitation. Period. It must not be possible for the company to prevent this, either through action (deliberately disabling it) or inaction (failing to renew a certificate, failing to keep activation servers online, etc.).

If you can't do that, you should not be allowed to sell digital products. No grey area.

This means that your licensing servers must be available forever, or else you must not require their use. This means that when you buy a movie, it doesn't matter if the distributor's license for that movie is no longer valid, because you, the customer, bought a license that is perpetual, and it must be honored. And so on.

The grid was part of the problem. Texas' grid is largely disconnected from the rest of the country. So when there are failures, they can cascade quickly. The issue was not an area of Texas lost power. The issue was MOST of Texas lost power.

Shhhh. If you talk too loudly about Texas, Tony Isaac will start posting here about how wrong you are about Texas. See Tony Isaac is a Texan and lives specifically near Houston. Based on that, he can boldly claim things for all of Texas. For example did you know that " We don't have snow plows either, nor should we invest in them. We just shut down when it snows, and that's OK." When pointed out that parts of Texas like the panhandle gets annual snow and thus have snow plows, he was not wrong. Nothing gets in the way of narrative.

See major cities like Dallas do not actually use snow plows according to Tony. "No, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio do NOT clear the vast majority of their streets with snow plows. The vast majority of them are just allowed to thaw on their own, or at most, saline solution is dispersed." So every time the local Dallas TV news shows Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) snow plows on the road, they do not exist according to Tony.

When pointed to actual articles from TxDOT using 30 snow plows in North Texas storm, Tony says the population of Dallas is large so those snow plows don't count. Also the 700 snow plows that TxDOT has across the state don't count because Texas has a large population. So No "True" Snow Plows exist.

Define "rolling". If you mean up to a week in some places, most people do not call that "rolling".

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.

I would think that buying headphones that can only be used in a specific and newer ports would not appeal to the average consumer, the type of customer a $699 laptop is intended. The 3.5mm jack has been around forever. Also people have headphones they already own that use these jacks. It is not about technical capabilities; it is about friction in use.

Not having wired headphone jacks is a negative, not a showstopper. Just like not having the right amount of USB A or C ports. Wireless headphones require pairing which is easy enough for most part, but there are some people who do not like that little bit of friction. Personally, I cannot imagine that someone who cares about the DAC would buy the $699 budget laptop anyway.

There's probably too much metal between the cargo hold and the passenger compartment for Bluetooth to work anyway. I think all actual bombs on aircraft (other than the failed shoe bomber) have been triggered by pressure switches at altitude or timers.

So it's not just that they wouldn't be stupid enough, but also that it probably wouldn't be successful even if they were.

People who are using headphones jacks are people who probably do not care the DAC sucks or have high end headphones to use on a $699 laptop. For example for a video conference meeting, a headphone jack is fine for that fidelity.

I would say most people who are buying a $699 laptop do not know what a DAC is nor care about buying one. What they will see is this budget laptop requires an adapter to use wired headphones. Will it completely stop someone from buying this laptop over another model? Probably not, but it is a negative.

[sarcasm]But it will have Windows 11, the most beloved version of Windows right now.[/sarcasm]