Disagree. We have had to replace the battery twice in our Dyson cordless. Dyson charges $130 for the OEM replacement battery (yes there are cheaper aftermarket batteries available).
The last time the battery failed we decided to buy an entire Shark cordless vacuum + accessories kit for less than an OEM Dyson battery. That shark vacuum is still going today 5 years later on the original battery.
This is exactly why I love Cesar salads. I have always disliked vegetables, trying many times in my life to eat them more because that's what health "experts" say we need to do.
I don't like vegetables fresh, I don't like them grilled, I don't like them stewed.
Cover them in Cesar dressing tho and I can eat an extra large salad (hopefully with some protein too).
Its not health "experts" but literally whole nutrition science, or science in general. Its like saying "experts" claim evolution, but I know better.
Jeez, I know this is predominantly US forum which is a place with its own fucked up nutrition and general eating problems that whole world sees, but this?
You simply have some (easy to dispose of if actually tried) mental barriers when food needs to be salty, greasy, sweet etc. and rest is untolerable, and salads are a rabbit food (or variant of these, heard it many times in many cultures). This all can be unlearned and new things learned, human mind is not that complex and can be molded like clay with a tiny bit of resolve, it doesn't even take a long time.
Nutrition science is a cesspool. We know there are essential vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids, beyond that it's all "well, we asked people what they ate and tried to match it with some health outcomes." Bodies are complex, determining causation is hard, and we are mostly not there yet.
You can order the Mac mini with 10gbps networking and it has 3 thunderbolt 4 ports if you need more. Plus it has an internal power supply making it smaller than most of these mini PCs.
That's what I'm running as my main desktop at home, and I have an external 2TB TB5 SSD, which gives me 3 GB/sec.
If I could get the same unit for like $299 I'd run it like that for my NAS too, as long as I could run a full backup to another device (and a 3rd on the cloud with Glacier of course).
9W at idle for the N100 is similar to what I get with my N100 based PC. Although under windows it's often sitting at 10-12W.
I also see lower power consumption with an 8th Gen intel Core system.
The small cores that the N100 use are size efficient, but not necessarily power efficient. The N100 chip is just not that efficient power-consumption wise.
I bought a 13 Pro Max on launch day and I am still using it today. I have never kept a phone this long in my life. The cameras and performance are still fantastic. The only thing that would be nice is USB-C and USB 3.0 transfer speeds. But that is not enough for me to upgrade.
I actually enjoy the Touch Bar on my 2018 MacBook Pro. The screen brightness slider offers more granular control. On my M1 air there is often a brightness gap where the screen is either too bright or too dark when using the keyboard to adjust brightness. Then I have to go to the menu bar to get the brightness level I actually want.
It's even better on the 2019+ models when they brought back the escape key.
I would agree that the added expense of that oled touchscreen isn't worth it tho. The M series Macs often go on sale at pretty large discounts (seemingly even more than the Intel Macs), and removing the oled touchscreen and the T2 chip that controlled it probably contributes to that.
If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it.
Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.
These are primarily people delivering food orders at lunch time for less than $10.
The people paying for these services will not pay what it would cost to have a “personal assistant”.
Also they can only deliver so many orders at a time. If all of your clients order lunch around the same time, it’s not possible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above. The driver sits around in the restaurant parking lot twiddling his thumbs and then 10 lunch orders come in over the course of an hour, most of which while the driver’s out delivering the first order. The last order ends up taking 2 hours to get to the customer who is not at all pleased with cold, soggy food long after the lunch break ended.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
If the business has a delivery driver, that driver should get priority on the app. But that'll never happen, because that's a slippery slope to just being an ordering platform - a much smaller moat.
I was a driver. When not delivering,
we waited, checked out, cooked food, got ahead on end-of-night cleaning, etc.
If the orders piled in, we made them ourselves then delivered them. If it was a slow night, they let a line cook go and we took over, while the manager filled in while we were out on delivery.
We were the ones who stayed late to clean the kitchen, because we delivered right up until close. On slow nights, we got out the door right at close. On busy nights, it might be two hours later as we handled the backlog of cleanup / closeout.
Delivery drivers are efficient flexible resources with less overhead than the apps.
I thank the lord I got to have a driver job as you describe in the 2000s before the gig economy. I would have ground myself to dust for an extra dollar under the current conditions.
You can't really fix the problem that everyone tends to order during lunch and dinner hours. No matter how you arrange the delivery staff, there will be too much demand during those times, and too little the rest of the day.
There's arguably been some efficiency lost, as some restaurants had the drivers cross trained to help with making the food.
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above.
And yet somehow we had restaurant delivery for 50 years before the invention of the cell phone. And grocery delivery for a hundred years before that.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
The only thing that's changed is that a certain cohort of people are terrified to pick up a phone and speak to another human being, and so delegate that most basic of human functions to a computer program.
The only actual utility of these apps is the ability to track and obsess over the precise location of my food, as if I'm going to die of starvation if I don't know exactly where it is.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
This is the crux of the matter. We're not living in the "2 pizza joints and a Chinese place" world anymore. In my city there are hundreds of restaurants serving cuisines from half the countries on the planet. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, British, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (including Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), Indian (too many to count, likely from every province in the country), Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, ...
We also have movie theatres selling popcorn, Dairy Queen selling Blizzards, StarBucks selling frappuccinos, and McDonald's selling McFlurries, doughnut shops selling Boston creams, dessert shops selling matcha roll cakes, ... I didn't even mention pizza joints!
In other words, the delivery apps bring customers an explosion of options they never had before. That is their highest utility for customers (while offering the risk pool solution to restaurants).
In my city there are hundreds of restaurants serving cuisines from half the countries on the planet. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, British, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (including Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), Indian (too many to count, likely from every province in the country), Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, ...
In my city, too. But I don't presume that I have the right to have every single cuisine that exists delivered to me at near-zero cost. Sometimes you have to make an effort in life.
What do rights have to do with it? We’re talking about supply and demand. There is supply, there is demand, and the delivery apps provide the logistics to connect the two.
If we go back to the way things were 30 years ago then we have fewer restaurants, less economic activity, less diversity, and a less interesting life for everyone!
No, we don't. People still have to eat. If anything, we have fewer restaurants today because of consolidation in the industry and the way massive-scale delivery enables ghost kitchens that take customers away from actual restaurants.
less economic activity
Uber Eats barely generates any "economic activity." It doesn't rate against the economic activity generated when people go outside.
less diversity
Now you're just making things up. People don't become Ethiopian because they sat on their couch to eat at Ethiopian delivery compared with actually going to an Ethiopian restaurant.
a less interesting life for everyone!
Leaving your house is more interesting than being inside. It's pretty much the definition of "living."
It’s -15 C outside here and the snow is blowing sideways. NO ONE is going outside to grab lunch. They’re all ordering Uber Eats. If Uber Eats didn’t exist they’d be eating egg salad sandwiches for lunch, not ordering a pizza from a place that pays a full time driver.
Sure someone is. The Uber Eats guy. Because of you. Not considering other people to be equal human beings is the root of the problem.
Part of being an adult is to be prepared. Surely you knew it was going to be -15 more than an hour before you got hungry. You DO have a smart phone, after all. It comes with a weather app built in.
What do you think people did before we had smartphones? They didn't sit around and whine about the temperature and not eat lunch. They bought stuff ahead of time, including egg salad sandwiches.
Oh, the horror of having to pack a lunch like a caveman, and not a self-entitled knowledge worker!
I hope you somehow manage to recover. Perhaps clutching your emotional support water bottle will help.
And for that I am happy with simple web site. List of options I can have, basic modifications like remove or add. Some extras, and option to pay there and then.
Not only do a few of my local restaurants employ their own drivers, but they also use websites to allow for online ordering so I do not have to pick up the phone anyway.
Unfortunately it’s management is opaque and manipulative, in the hands of a one self-interested actor.
If anything, this sort of market would be well served by a publicly funded (not necessarily by a Government, let’s throw blockchains into the mix) neutral and transparent platform
Well, you can also - shock horror - drive (or bike, if possible) over to the restaurant and pick up your order yourself! That's of course assuming that the restaurant has another means of placing orders than through the delivery apps (e.g. a phone number)...
This is what I do. Dealing with the uncertainty of the delivery apps as a customer in my area is approaching the levels of nightmare it is as a driver in others. I didn't keep track when I was using them but let's just say it was a pleasant surprise when I received everything I ordered. Usually something was "forgotten".
While I personally make 95% of my food, I order delivery when I am so busy that if I don't, I will not eat.
Sounds like a problem that solves itself.
Or at least a wake-up call that you're doing something wrong. Unless you're safeguarding nuclear launch codes, there's no such thing as "too busy to eat." It's just people trying to make themselves and others think they're important. Guess what? You're not. The actually important people do eat. It's their lackies who pretend they're too busy to do the same.
Yes, I've owned my own company. Yes, it required extensive complicated international travel. It's still true. If you can't plan meal breaks, you can't plan.
"Important people" eat because they can afford to pay people to make eating convenient for them. "Unimportant people" are busy because they have to actually work to pay their bills and do their laundry and dishes and clean their homes and take out the trash and do all the stuff that "important people" magically don't have to do, because "unimportant people" do it for them.
I like food delivered to me but I am willing to pay for it. The minimum wag applies to gig workers too- and with an aging society and shrinking workforce the pay is usually a lot better than that.
Ofcourse in the US with tens of millions of illegal immigrants who will do anything to survive the situation must be very different.
most of the folks getting ubereats delivery are not the target demo for being a PA client. but you don't have to be super wealthy for the economics of it to work out.
most tech employees make enough that they could pay 10-15 hrs of low wage work every week to do stuff like pick up your laundry/groceries, pick up a food order that you've called in, take stuff to the post office, etc.
An L5 at FAANG is making close to $450-500k/yr in total comp. Let’s assume the minimum wage is $15/hr, and the people doing the tasks get paid $25/hr (on the higher end). With 15 hours of simple errands a week, it comes out to $375/week or $1500/mo.
Maybe it is a bit of a stretch for an L5 to spend that much in a month on helping with chores (gotta consider taxes, after all), but it doesn’t seem that wild at all to have $1500 in spending on getting chores taken care of. And it is definitely very doable for an L6. No need to be at L7 to be able to comfortably afford that at all.
No need to live in SF for that either. Seattle pays pretty much comparably, no state income tax, a bit cheaper cost of living, and all big FAANG companies have a major presence there. At director level, you would be able to afford much more (been to a director’s house once for a team bbq, and yeah, the gap between director level and L5/L6 is rather large; and it wasn’t a director of one of the higher-paying FAANG-tier companies either).
The last time the battery failed we decided to buy an entire Shark cordless vacuum + accessories kit for less than an OEM Dyson battery. That shark vacuum is still going today 5 years later on the original battery.