271–280 of 385 posts
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You missed the point. He only need to take one cable with him to charge his pixel and MacBook (not at the same time) you’re suggesting him to take two cables. I will take the first option as I hate having to remember of multiple cables.
Two cables is far better than two bricks.
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I'm indifferent. On the one hand, yeah, USB-C works great, and everything else I own takes it. On the other hand, Lightning also works great, USB-C isn't an improvement on the merits, and iPhone users have a bunch of accessories for it. Like in my car, I have a 12v charger with one USB-A port and a built-in Lightning cable, and I'd have to either junk it or just ignore the built in cable if they went USB-C. I'm prett…
USB-C depending on implementation has enormously greater throughput (USB 3.1 gen 2 is 10Gbps) than lightning (480Mbps/60MBps). This might not be relevant for your needs, but increasingly Apple are marketing the iPhone as a 'pro' device, specifically for media creation. And it is finding a home in videography and event photography and streaming for example (I work in this area). Given this, the speed available through…
The most generous outcome I can see is Apple ditching ports on the iPhone and Mini, and moving the Pros to USB-C.
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The lightning port does support USB 3 speeds, the old iPad Pro (pre-USB C) models supported USB 3 over the lightning connector and Apple even released some adapters that took advantage of the speed: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0W2AM/A/lightning-to-us... But for some reason Apple has never brought this support to the iPhone's lightning port.
Maybe their flash storage is too slow so people would notice? Right now it takes hours to back your phone.
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Yup. Also, the shape of the growth curve matters. It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design . If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.
Can you explain why amount of waste grows over time by design? Here's my reasoning. Miners spend electricity. They're getting block rewards and fee rewards, they'll exchange earned bitcoins to dollars and pay their bills. So ultimately energy spent per block = (block reward + fee reward) x bitcoin price. Right now block reward is 6.25 BTC. Last block fee reward was 2.13 BTC. Block reward will go down as time goes on.…
Since supply will become more and more constrained over time, while demand has no realizable upper limit (that we know of), this assumption is wrong:
> Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.
If bitcoin were to be fully adopted by the mainstream, BTCs would be easily in the M$ range.
I really hate arguments about how much electricity wireless phone charging wastes because it makes people feel like they’re doing something when in fact they aren’t. Charging a cell phone every day for a year consumes about 1-2 kWh per phone. The average American household consumes 10,399 kWh per year, meaning that a typical smart phone consumes one 5000th, (0.02%) of a typical home’s electricity (excl. natural gas)…
stop supporting new devices. Do we really need them?
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Can you explain why amount of waste grows over time by design? Here's my reasoning. Miners spend electricity. They're getting block rewards and fee rewards, they'll exchange earned bitcoins to dollars and pay their bills. So ultimately energy spent per block = (block reward + fee reward) x bitcoin price. Right now block reward is 6.25 BTC. Last block fee reward was 2.13 BTC. Block reward will go down as time goes on.…
While the network with no new participants is in some sense static, the participants themselves aren't. The income of most people tends to grow over time, which would imply an increasing demand for bitcoin from those participants. Since supply will become more and more constrained over time, while demand has no realizable upper limit (that we know of), this assumption is wrong: > Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to…
So that's a rough estimate upper bound if Bitcoin would become our civilization currency of choice: 1.2% of total energy spent.
Not the end of the world, if you ask me.
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>Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. And add to that every other manufacturer that thinks they have to copy what Apple does (looking at you Samsung), and also removes ability to swap batteries and other things we used to be able to do every easily.
I know people have ragged on non-removable batteries for a decade now--and I'm not saying there shouldn't be any phones with that option--but it was terrible in practice. I've tried juggling batteries and it was super annoying. Sure, on a plane you could swap your dead battery for a new one (after turning off your phone). At the end of the day you have two dead batteries and have to charge one, then swap. Most phones…
My phone is fine, but the battery is slowly becoming too weak for my needs. I don't want a new phone, just a new battery.
I mean, just don't buy iPhone every 2 years. 4+ years with iPhone 7, I'm very friendly towards environment.
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Yup. Also, the shape of the growth curve matters. It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design . If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.
Can you explain why amount of waste grows over time by design? Here's my reasoning. Miners spend electricity. They're getting block rewards and fee rewards, they'll exchange earned bitcoins to dollars and pay their bills. So ultimately energy spent per block = (block reward + fee reward) x bitcoin price. Right now block reward is 6.25 BTC. Last block fee reward was 2.13 BTC. Block reward will go down as time goes on.…
Mining bitcoin is essentially printing money, so miners with profitable setups have an incentive to expand these setups. As mining capacity grows, a parameter called "difficulty" - which represents how much power you need to waste to mine a block - is adjusted so that the mining rate remains constant. Since mining is necessary to maintain network security, difficulty will grow to compensate for expanding mining capacity, but not high enough to kill it off.
If you look at the history of the adjustments to difficulty, you'll find a pretty much clean exponential.
(In other words, Bitcoin is as close as we've ever come to expressing greed in units of kilowatt hours.)
I really hate arguments about how much electricity wireless phone charging wastes because it makes people feel like they’re doing something when in fact they aren’t. Charging a cell phone every day for a year consumes about 1-2 kWh per phone. The average American household consumes 10,399 kWh per year, meaning that a typical smart phone consumes one 5000th, (0.02%) of a typical home’s electricity (excl. natural gas)…
IMO the single biggest environmentally-unfriendly move Apple made is not allowing user serviceability. Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. But they want you to spend $$$ on new stuff, so they make it hard for you to fix. And on laptops, soldered SSDs, soldered RAM, non-swappable batteries. You HAVE to buy a new PC even if you just want a little more hard d…