It is a negative as it is creating a market for deception, by paying for it they are giving money to people who specialize in deception who otherwise would have to do something else. These people will continue improving their abilities to take advantage of the borderline credulous who would have otherwise gone unexploited.
Perhaps in the best case it is less bad than what other things they would have spent it on.
It’s common to add weights to headphones to make them feel premium which is bizarre since actually premium headphones tend to try very hard to reduce weight as the weight makes them more uncomfortable.
I don’t know how to fix the market especially when consumers keep rewarding these practices, and I think the effectiveness of TikTok style influencer marketing will make it worse.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. B&W actually reduced the weight on the Px8 S2 compared to the original, and the headphones themselves are genuinely lightweight for what they are. The cable isn’t thick to “feel premium” (it feels kinda bad); it’s thick because it’s rated for 65W+ power delivery that the headphones don’t need.
The problem is the opposite of what you’re describing, it’s not a cynical design choice, it’s a lazy one. They probably just purchased a cable for capabilities irrelevant to the product and the result is worse ergonomics and misleading physical cues about what the cable can actually do.
“I don’t think..” Ok, you’ve made a number of assumptions and we don’t share the same priors so I’m unable to follow you to your conclusion.
I think you are underestimating the importance of perceived premium combined with the pressures of cost accounting, but I do think that is pretty normal for ‘audiophiles’ which is their target market.
Which assumptions? The weight reduction on the S2 is documented and the cable’s 65W rating is what the tester confirmed.
If the argument is that B&W deliberately chose a thick cable to seem premium, it doesn’t square with them actively slimming down the headphones. B&W are primarily a speaker company, their USB-C product range is basically just a few headphones and earbuds.
More likely they just sourced a generic cable that happened to support high wattage and didn’t think about the mismatch.
Either way, we’re deep in the weeds on B&W’s cable procurement now. The root point is that USB-C is a mess. You can’t tell what a cable supports by looking at it, and even premium manufacturers are shipping cables that don’t do what you’d reasonably expect.
That’s exactly the problem the Treedix from the article solves.
My point on weight was that the market for that it is common, which is probably a stronger statement than needed. I should have made the weaker argument and said the market exists which only needs one example. The company Beats can serve as that example, this company sells the majority of premium headphones but I don’t actually know what percentage have weights placed in them. I am assuming a non trivial percentage.
You are using circular reasoning in your logic, you assume the premise is true and from there you derive your evidence.
I would contend that someone thought about it and decided to go with the cheaper option because they could get away with it. I would consider my assumption to have more grounding given my experience with manufacturing and cost accounting.
You’ve gone from “companies add weight to feel premium” to “they went with the cheaper option because they could get away with it.” Those are opposite explanations. But either way, the cable doesn’t do what its physical presence suggests, nothing on it tells you otherwise, and that’s the entire point of the device in the article.
My position is entirely consistent, it is cheaper to signal premium quality than actually deliver it. The point I am making is that there is immense comercial pressure to do this is a highly competitive market when selling to consumers who don’t know better.
My example of weights is that the steel weighs are cheaper than the alternative of using heavier drivers, by adding weight they are signaling premium without delivering it. Similarly with the USB cable, consumers assume such cables are thick because of thicker wires and better shielding, it’s cheaper to make a thick cable without those those features, once again signaling premium without actually providing it.
That's a more coherent version of your argument, but it's still speculative. You're attributing a deliberate strategy to what is more easily explained by indifference. B&W make about four products with USB-C cables. This isn't a company with a cable strategy, cynical or otherwise.
4th times the charm. You’ve provided no evidence for indifference. My point remains, given industry standards indifference would be highly unusual and not at all a safe assumption.
The vast majority of high volume consumer manufacturers use cost accounting practices which would absolutely be tracking and attributing the usb cable costs and the whole point of that accounting practice is to constantly be thinking about minimizing costs of even the smallest inputs, all the way down to the individual screws used. Yes, they’re thinking about how to save 1/100ths of a cent from each screw.
Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of course that's an easy target, it's already text based. GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?
That’s the greater variability theory. The male median is also higher so when you combine the two the long tail to the right will be dominated by males, so will the long tail on the left but to a lesser extent.
Many IQ tests have been designed to minimize the difference between males and females, primarily by reducing g-loading. Males pull ahead after puberty, prior to this they have an IQ disadvantage. So you have to take these factors into account when trying to make a fair and proper assessment.
In theory but the difficulty in practice is that if you were to invest in local manufacturing you'd have to be sure that someone else won't be given a waver via lobbying / corruption and will then be able to completely undercut you. The current US administration lacks the credibility to give such assurances. Given existing models are exempt you're better of just delaying new models while you wait for a new admin.
I'm not sure the democrats could give such assurances either. If domestic manufacturing is 2x as expensive that's a lot of money that could be spent on campaign donations and still break even.
I waited for AI to get better before adopting Nix as it seemed to be rather arcane, a bit like Arch Linux, and I was worried I wouldn’t have the time for it. In preparation I shifted my development environments entirely to docker scripts where I can copy and paste working snippets from the internet.
Nix and AI is a match made in heaven and I think we’re going to see a lot of good software that’s amenable for us by AI that is both cheaper to build and easier to use.
during the beginning of the last Iraq war, I was at a social event and somehow ended up saying that 'at least this is been so obviously foolish that it should cause us to really think twice about doing anything like it again', and someone 20 years my senior turned to me from another conversation and said 'we said the same thing about Vietnam'
People get complacent thinking the system just keeps working no matter what, and not that a lot of effort from talented people goes in to to keeping it working. So they vote in a total moron and discover the good times aren't innate.
I guess someone right after the Great War / the war to end all wars could be forgiven for thinking people wouldn’t be trying that again anytime soon.
What I would consider different this time is that I think the US is in the looting stages of collapse and will be unable to credibly fight such a war even if a minority wanted to.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Trump starting the Iran war as a grift to get $200B appropriated only to abandon the region and have the money disappear.
I mean, the US was deploying significantly more renewable energy projects during the last administration than ever before, but the corrupt trump administration stopped many of them immediately after reentering office.
The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.
You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
I wasn’t even thinking about the US but consider this administration an interlude. I’m hearing other countries they’re putting the breaks on Chinese solar in an effort to build indigenous production capacity which is incredibly stupid. At least solar scales down so individuals can circumvent and get their own.
Cost, especially if bootstrapping as your more expensive electricity is used to make your still more expensive panels. If you are going to onshore production it would be far cheaper to bootstrap on Chinese panels.
I'm not sure its such a bad thing for the climate though: its not like the Chinese photovoltaics will sit in a warehouse gathering dust, they would probably be sold in other nations, too poor to afford Western domestic production, at least initially. I don't see a reason why Western photovoltaics couldn't be made at the same price or even cheaper than Chinese ones eventually. Automation eventually nullifies differential wage labor and environmental safety costs compared to China.
It’s economics of scale, no one really has the money to bootstrap to get to scale now that China is already in the market at scale, not even wealthy western countries, so in effect requiring indigenous production is just a way to put the breaks on solar adoption in general. When governments have to subsidize with taxpayer money that money trends to go to donor happy companies that understand the way they make money is through political donations not efficient production. There is no real incentive to be competitive but plenty of incentive to pretend that they’ll be competitive. Any company that actually tries to be competitive will be ‘out competed’ by companies focusing on getting more government grants. The bad push out the good. There is a whole gravy train for facilitating this. Which is one of the reasons I call our current era the ‘looting stage of collapse’. People are biased to believe it will return to normal and it would be in someone’s interest to save our sinking ship, but the problem is there is still much more money to be made in looting, and it’s really hard to stop things that make so much money.
The west does not yet understand just how much was lost through financialization of our economies and the loss of our manufacturing industries, we are no longer competitive and cannot remain competitive long term. Not only can we not take on solar production but we can’t even maintain vehicle manufacturing in Germany. The US is about to lose its edge in military manufacturing and in many ways already has. We still maintain an edge in aerospace and software but we’re likely to eventually lose that battle as well.
I think there are plenty of opportunities to get to scale. Solar panel technologies evolve. Some Western company might scale up solar panels with say quantum-cutting phosphors, there is plenty of room for growth and scale up for panels with higher efficiencies.
On a wing and a prayer. Still hoping for a wunderwaffen to come along and fix everything. Why can’t we retain our relative advantages in technology we’ve already lost. Like a politician claiming they’re going to start to focus on growth, why are they just staring now, why not earlier, why did no-one else have this seemingly self evident idea…
Also ignores how captured government funding is, I was offered many millions in research grants so long as I kicked back 80% to the big 4 firm that administered the scheme. Their pitch, sure they get 80% but I still get 20% of free money. I think people really underestimate how much corruption has rotted out the west and how much of our perceived wealth is lie I am highly confident I will outlive.
Corruption is of course deplorable, but a tiny quantum of solace is that it also allows adversaries to underestimate a nation state or block: when push comes to shove, a controlled level of corruption can be suspended and suddenly true productivity is observable...
An non-US anglosphere country. Our adversaries do not underestimate us, 'we' are over estimating ourselves. Corruption necessarily impairs the feedback loop of information so the participants lose the ability to properly understand their interests in a way that leads to counter productive actions even in the well intentioned.
There is the anti-fragility idea that when something is attacked it becomes stronger - the attack creates a true signal for information which is now capable of aligning internal interests. The problem is if the adversary is intelligent and avoids attacking for this very reason. This is what I believe China is doing, they keep threatening to attack to promote the various grifters, without actually attacking which would inspire effective collaboration. It was a trap and we are firmly caught in it and I know of no way out of it.
Perhaps in the best case it is less bad than what other things they would have spent it on.
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