• 12 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle




  • I am surprised the age would be so young. My dad retired at 67 but went right back to work a year later, still working now (71). Health insurance do be expensive. I wonder how this statistic would capture someone like him. My mother was working until she died at 60, but would have likely been in a similar situation, trying to keep working as long as possible, certainly was not looking at retirement within a year or two.

    My wife’s parents are younger (late 50s) but in the same boat, there is no path to retirement for them and they plan to just keep working. The only people I know who managed to retire by any conventional definition are or were Silent Generation.


  • Also if a quick Google result is anything to go on, Apple sells hundreds of millions of iPhones a year. 3% of that is still a fuckload of people and IMO proves there is a market for it. Just maybe not a market that needs yearly attention. You also have to remember that’s split between tons of SKUs, so you would expect all of them to hover in the single digits to low teens.

    I got my wife a 12 Mini - she loves it. The battery life is absolutely the worst thing about it, but it sounds like the 13 Mini was a huge upgrade in that regard and I had hopes it would continue to get better with future versions.

    Something else that may not be taken in to account - the kinds of people buying the Mini are I would wager on a longer upgrade period than the kinds of people who buy e.g. a base iPhone or Pro model. The kind of person buying a Mini I would bet is closer to the kind of buyer that has historically bought the SE - they probably only upgrade every 3 or 4 years rather than the more stereotypical 2. Pro numbers are also skewed by the hyper fans who upgrade yearly and therefore show up in the stats a lot more, even though they’re both a firm Apple customer.

    There is also this interesting note at the end of the article:

    “Other reports … overwhelmingly presented the same picture of low ‌iPhone 14‌ Plus sales, to the extent that Apple was forced to slash production, suggesting that the low sales of the ‌iPhone 12 mini‌ and ‌iPhone 13‌ mini may not have been caused by the device’s size after all.”

    I think the Mini should become the new SE. Keep it on 2+ year old CPU, keep it 60Hz, at least the form factor and design language will match the rest of the lineup unlike now where the SE has a design from 2016. That would be perfect for people like my wife, who want the smallest cheapest phone that’s technically an iPhone, and are only going to upgrade every few years.







  • If prices were coming down commensurate with rates increasing you could make a lateral change and buy the same amount of house for the same amount of money, but raising rates has only slightly reduced the rate house prices are increasing, rather than bring them down. It’s insane. Every month is the new worst time in modern US history to buy a house. It sucks for property owners too because taxes based on fair market value are rising crazy fast as well.


  • Prebuilts from brands like Ducky? mechanicalkeyboards.com

    DIY kits are generally best bought from their mfg’s - Akko, Keychron, GMMK, Keycult.

    More general retailers will have some mix of keycaps, switches, kits, maybe prebuilts and accessories - Novelkeys, Canon Keys, Mekibo, Bolsa Supply (mostly GBs), Vala Supply, KBDFans, KPRepublic (mostly caps), Kono Store, Drop (mostly caps).

    To track upcoming and live GBs, at least for keycaps and keyboards - mechgroupbuys.com. It’s pretty dead at the moment but I think the number of active group buys has tumbled recently due to several high profile scandals in the industry (namely Mechs & Co and Rama). Also several major keycap manufacturers piled up huge backlogs during the pandemic that are only just finally clearing up, namely GMK and Milkyway. All of that is causing there to be very few new GBs starting right now, and they can be kind of hard to find unless you’re already in the communities of the designer(s) or refreshing Geekhack.