Yeah I recently started switching from SolidWorks to Creo in a professional setting, it is amazing how slow and clunky SolidWorks feels in comparison. The downside is that Creo doesn’t hold your hand at all so you better know what you are doing.

Coming from that side, I have a hard time with the free/inexpensive options available for makers, they just don’t work nearly as well.

This is pretty minor on the scale of enshittification that it happening in pretty much every tech product, but stuff like this is just an example of features being added so someone at the company can point to “improving” the product (so they can point to it during raise or promotion time), because it is safer for kids ignoring that it degrades user experience for a large portion of the customer base.

Unfortunately we’ve lost our attitude that parents should actually parent and supervise their children. So instead they force everyone to deal with it.

Nope, I’ve long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it’s still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.

That really is the least of the worries, there just isn’t the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn’t feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.

Obsessive apologizing makes a person appear not confident in themselves. If it is a person I care about I want them to be confident in themselves.

Additionally the more you repeat something the less meaning it has. So if someone apologizes too much for things that really don’t necessitate an apology when they have something they genuinely need to show remorse for and apologize for the apology holds less meaning.

Some crappy product manager found some agreeable “tech enthusiasts” and/or worded their research questions in such a way that made it seem like this would be a net positive to the sales/profit of the product.

The engineers who had to design this terrible product were probably making jokes about it all the time.

Floorp is what I use and it is pretty decent.

Agreed, you look at how places in Asia treat the importance of education compared to how North America does and it isn’t a surprise how we are falling behind all over the place. Not to say there aren’t plenty of issues with how their education systems work, but with the status quo we are essentially throwing away any advantage we have over the East.

PTC doesn’t care about being a counterbalance to fusion360 or they would have a less restrictive free version. They only care about making money from subscriptions from corporate customers. They amen way more money from Creo and Windchill than they do with Onshape.

major tech companies are pretty good about giving reviewer samples to anyone with a large enough audience

That isn’t true, for example LTT doesn’t get seeded Apple products anymore because of what they have said about Apple. NVidia has also been caught revoking early access to products to some outlets because they were unhappy about reporting as well.

I had called out the bullshit about devices being less durable if you make them more repairable on MKBHDs video, but of course it got lost in the comments. Apple just refuses to make the compromises that would allow for durable and repairable devices. Not to mention that a repair being difficult shouldn’t be used for justification for blocking repair or making it impossible/not worth it to get parts.

Samsung M540 “Slyde” phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.

Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.

A local sandwich shop used to have maple bacon ice cream sandwiches during the summer and they were epic. Your buddy definitely did something wrong.

Not quite, conductor diameter is important to supply proper current, which will change depending on the impedance of your speaker. There are other values like inductance and capacitance in a wire that could affect how your speaker sounds. The good news is that you can pretty much buy any cheap 16 ga copper speaker wire and not worry about it, as it would take effort to make a speaker wire that sounds bad (and those companies are the type to try to charge you $1000/ft for it!)

Im not a coating scientist (I’m a design engineer) so I can’t really answer your questions in detail. But powder coats are typically polyurethane or polyester. There are different types of wet paints as well. Some surfaces also get an additional UV top coat for abrasion resistance.

For a phone button you might be looking at something like PVD coatings or platings. Chromating wouldn’t be used in those cases as it is not terribly durable but it provides a good surface for the coating that goes on top or it. All of thses coatings are on the scale of a few mils thickness.

Most of these finishes are done on industrial scales and even the manufacturers send them out to external places for finishing (e.g. in Asia that type of facility is strictly controlled for environmental reasons) . At the end of the day I just speak with my supplier and tell them the finish I want and they take care of the rest.

For die casting, it is post processing. After the part comes out of the mold there is the sprue, overflow tabs, and flash (extra material at the parting line) that needs to be cleaned up. Then the parts are often chromate conversion coated and then finished with either a wet paint or powder coat. Plating is also an option.

For injection molding, parts typically come out of the mold fully finished (or just requiring gate removal). The vast majority of parts are only textured where the final finish is part of the mold. You can do anything from a high polish to rough textures, or even any crazy pattern or simulated material you can imagine. For graphics you can apply in-mold decoration where a film is placed in the mold before the plastic is injected. There are some post processing finishes that are pretty frequently done such as wet painting and plating.

Lenovo should be out just by virtue of being a Chinese company. You should not trust critical security devices to Chinese companies.

One major downside of hybrid working really is that if you are having a meeting where even a single person is not there, then the entire meeting may as well be a video call. If you are on a video call, then why do you need to be in the office for it?

At my job we work with physical objects, so being in office is a requirement at least part of the time, but if I’m just going to be in meetings for most of the day, there is no way I’m going into the office just to sit on video calls all day.

Considering that HP is the other choice that most businesses consider, I’d take the Dell 100% of the time. HP’s laptops are complete and utter trash.