There are some companies as bad as Apple (John Deere comes to mind), but it's certainly not the norm. User-replacable standard m.2 SSDs are bog standard and non-standard formats are really rare. Apart from Apple I can not think of many companies that do that. IIRC Red Magic cameras, and Synology NAS but that's the only ones I can think of.

I'm pretty sure I disabled/removed it when I got this phone. I don't specifically remember doing it but when I get a new phone, I watch some YouTube videos on how to purge all the crap I don't want. I read an article that mentioned using command line stuff to eliminate it and it kind looked familiar. I think I did this. I really should write stuff down.

that's not just useless defeatism, but also false. effective end to end encryption exists in multiple forms today. signal, maybe even with a custom server. matrix if the server is being ran on trusted hardware. XMPP too with the right extensions.

AI has only one problem to solve: salaries

Clearly the author doesn't understand how capitalism works. If Apple can pick you up by the neck, turn you upside down, and shake whatever extra money it can from you then it absolutely will do so. The problem is that one indie developer doesn't have any power over Apple... so they can go fuck themselves. The developer is granted the opportunity to grovel at the feet of their betters (richers) and pray that they are allowed to keep enough of their own crop to survive the winter. If they don't survive... then some other dev will probably jump at the chance to take part in the "free market" and demonstrate their worth.

This is a weirdly aggressive take without considering variables. Almost petulant seeming. 6” readers are relatively cheap no matter the brand, but cost goes up with size. $250 to $300 is what a 7.8” or 8” reader costs, but there’s not a single one I know of at 6” at that price. There’s 10” and 13” models. Are you saying they should cost the same as a Kindle? Not to mention, regarding Kindle, Amazon spent years building the brand but selling either at cost or possibly even taking a loss on the devices as they make money on the book sales. Companies who can’t do that tend to charge more. Lastly, it’s not “feature creep” to improve the devices over time, many changes are quality of life. Larger displays for those that want them. Frontlit displays, and later the addition of warm lighting. Displays essentially doubled their resolution allowing for crisper fonts and custom fonts to render well. Higher contrast displays with darker blacks for text. More recently color displays as an option. This is all progress, but it’s not free. Also, inflation is a thing and generally happens at a rate of 2% to 3% annually or thereabouts during “normal” times, and we’ve hardly been living in normal times over the last decade and a half.

My head canon is that Satoshi Nakamoto... ... is Hideo Kojima. Anyway, Satoshi is the pseudonym used on the original... white paper, design doc, whatever it was, for Bitcoin. There's no doubt about that, I was there back before even Mt. Gox became a bitcoin exchange, on the forums discussing it. I thought it was a neat idea, at the time... and then I realized 95% of the discussions on that forum were about 'the ethics of fully informed ponzi schemes' and such, very little devoted to actual technical development... realized this was probably a bad omen.

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/