> Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.
phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.
The point is, with your example the link speed of the iPhone isn't the limiting thing of your example. You'll likely be limited by the speed of your storage before you saturate that link.
isnt that how the modern telephone system works? digitize your voice, encode, transmit, decode, convert to analog audio. with buffering or keeping bits in memory all along the way?
and taken to it's extreme.... isn't the atmosphere secretly taking the vibrations in the air right outside out mouth and propagating them through a physical medium, making them available to anyone to capture?
In the video, the waitress said something, then the guy looked up on his watch what she said. Where's the part where he enables anything? Clearly it was already listening, otherwise it wouldn't have caught what she said.
I agree! And this is always recording. It remembers what people said and can produce a transcript of it; that's a record. The "hey siri" feature doesn't keep a record of what everyone said (except when it triggers incorrectly I guess).
If a Nissan commercial cuts right to someone cruising along a mountain road, would you assume that Nissans are always moving, never having to be started?
No, but I'm not sure what the point of this kind of feature would be if it isn't always listening. Do you usually plan out in advance when you're going to miss what someone said so that you can enable recording just for that?
Siri Recap records throughout the day without the user needing to constantly enable it. It provides AI summaries of conversations recorded including direct quotes.
Live Rewind shows an exact transcript of conversation but only of the 15 seconds immediately before the user activated it.
How is Live Rewind able to show a transcript of a conversation which happened before it was activated? That makes no sense, it needs to record stuff continuously in order to at any time tell you what was said 15 seconds ago
>Live Rewind, which can help users recall what was just said in conversation. A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet...Users can ask Siri about the content of the text or save it to the Siri app to revisit later.
Yeah so there's no input to activate recording, it always records what you're saying so that at any point in time, it can go back 15 seconds. When you double press the crown, it can't go back in time to start recording 15 seconds ago, it needs to have already recorded the last 15 seconds.
I assume for something like a phone these things are non-linear. going from 2 PCIe lanes (nand, radios) to 3 (another radio) may cause an SOC to jump from entry-level to mid-level, larger PCB and increased layer count, more antenna for simultaneous use, etc. so its not just the cost of the chip but all the secondary effects.
A non-linear cost for a small fraction of the phone. A slightly larger PCB with two more layers is about twice the price for the PCB, more antennas is a couple dollars, a one lane PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC. And if it shrinks your battery 10% you save money on that part.
I blame niche-ness far more than the actual design and production costs.
> PCIe switch is a few dollars if that's cheaper than upgrading your SOC
perhaps you're more familiar with these options than I am, but I see 4 lane PCIe switches are 10x10 mm and maybe they are a few dollars but take more board space, new/larger power supplies, etc so it seems that the costs are more than just a few dollar PCIe switch chip. not sure how many phone PCBs can handle additional 100 mm2 but definitely looking forward to learning more.
add to the antennas are likely based on best/cheapest efficiency for the available area, then additional antenna would reduce the area for each and require more effort/cost.
> Grocery stores have very small margins, as little as 1%.
Looking at the Kroger 2024 Annual report shows that they have 22.3% gross margin . they pay dividends, had a stock buy back, etc so its entirely possible that they had a very low margin but gross margin seems to be similar to a home builder.
The net margin of around 1.5% seems more relevant: the gross margin is just the revenue minus the cost of good sold plus cost of transportation. The net margin is the money you have left after paying things like Rent, employee wages, electricity, taxes, interest on debt.
not sure how you can make a cable that doesnt connect power from end to end. I can see if it doesnt charge as fast as others if it doesnt have the bits required for higher current support. and if a device requires >5V to charge, thats on the device not the cable.
> other cables won't transfer data
again, not sure you can make a cable that doesnt connect the USB2 pair from end to end. but if device doesnt use USB2 and requires something else without mentioning it then that again seems to be on the device not the cable.
FWIW the PS5 controller is super particular about what charger you use due to Sony being dumb, but the deciding factor there is the charger, not the cable.
It's probably a problem with my devices. I've never seen these problems with more expensive devices, but my cheap bluetooth speakers will only charge with certain cables.
I also have cheap cables that don't seem able to do data transfer. Guessing it's not actually following the USB-C spec.
Are your bluetooth speakers connected over a C-to-C cable or is there any legacy USB in the mix (type-A and/or microusb)? The reason I ask is legacy USB expected 5 volts to be supplied by default, whereas in type-C you have to specifically request any current. So some C-to-A / A-to-C adapters/cables include the resistors to request the current whereas others do not, leading to legacy USB devices not getting power through some adapters/cables.
> Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements
did you have a specific example in mind? It seems that the price of the hardware generally stays the same from year to year.
for example, from iphone 3g to iphone 6s was $199. and iphone 12 through today's iphone 17 is $799. I think the change in the middle was due dropping carrier subsidies and going to full-screen with face id.
2012-2018 was an insane run for MacBook Pro prices. Doubly so in Europe. Apple loves to adjust (read: gouge) prices when the Euro weakens against the dollar, but they never adjust down when the dollar weakens against the Euro.
The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.
phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/usa/2025-full-year-usa-for...
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