ecarlseen

Having worked as a Synology reseller, I can guess as to what the problem is:

Hard drives are no longer "general purpose" like they were in the old days. Mechanical design and firmware are now optimized for all kinds of use cases: NAS / SAN, NVR, desktop PC, workstation, various types of servers, etc. Don't get me started on SMR vs CMR. Way too many users buy a NAS and then throw in whatever drive is cheap, or whatever drive has the biggest capacity, without any understanding or consideration of fitness for purpose. And when the drive is slower than trash or fails early, who do people blame? Themselves? Ha ha ha ha ha, no.

It looks like you can use any drive that Synology has tested / certified, and their tested / certified list generally contains virtually all of the makes and models that make sense to use. My only gripe is that it's often a few months behind what's released on the market. I don't have much trouble predicting what will and won't wind up on there, but that may be a hassle for people who want something that just came out. If you check the specs very, very, very carefully it's not exactly rocket science to figure out, but you have to be precise about it. Unless you have a lot of technical knowledge about hard drives and are excellent with details, just stick to their list.

I wish Synology HDDs were more cost-competitive. The quality is solid, but the markup is a bit much in a market that's pretty tight. Their SSDs are better in this regards and I almost always use those.

This is why it's difficult for medium and large businesses to adopt Apple products on a large scale. We have to plan our capital expenditures to maximize return over depreciation periods. Companies like HP and Dell will work with us by giving us access to their production schedules for 9-24 months out, depending on what products we are talking about. This lets us plan the best time to make purchases to maximize our returns not just on investment, but on the happiness and productivity of our end-users which is directly related to how well their gear works. Working with Apple is like: "Screw you. Guess." They put it more nicely, but that's basically what they're saying. The magic and mystery of surprise is great for consumer-level products, but for business it's a giant pile of unacceptable pain. When you wonder why iMacs and Mac Studios aren't found on more business desktops - and there is a case to be made for this - this is a big part of it. We don't like to play guessing games.

Building a cellular modem is crazy-difficult.

While the overall specifications are public, how to make them work in the real-world involves lots of very carefully-kept trade secrets. The successful vendors, especially Qualcomm, use these trade secrets instead of patents so that they don't have to disclose them publicly.

Essentially, Apple is having to re-discover / re-invent these trade secrets internally. It's a long process driven by trial and error. It's not something you can arbitrarily schedule a completion date for. Intel sucked at this, which is why their modems generally sucked, why they never had a decently working 4G model, why they were never going to get to 5G, and why they more or less had to give away their modem division.  If Apple is planning on having a chip taped out, debugged, and in production next year that means feel they've cracked everything. Once they're started with actual production, they will probably be able to produce modems for existing and upgraded standards at a reasonably fast pace. 

An interesting revenge move for Apple would be to publish everything they've learned about building cellular modems (all of the industry trade secrets). This would nuke Qualcomm's balance sheet as cheap competitors would spring up all over the place. Qualcomm would still control the bleeding edge in the short term, but if it creates an inability to over-license their patent portfolio (they force customers to license patents they're not using and are widely considered exploitative in their licensing practices for their chipsets) it will cut hard into their earnings.

Can everyone quit slagging the guy for not having sufficient backup? Should he have had it? Definitely. But there's absolutely, positively zero excuse for vendors like Adobe (and Microsoft last month with the Windows 10 update) playing so absurdly fast and loose with customer data. These software vendors are forcing their customers into far more expensive subscription pricing models in a vain attempt to maintain revenue growth and correspondingly high stock prices for just a little bit longer, which is sketchy enough, but they're also getting much worse at quality control in the process, which is flat-out evil. Adobe has been one of the worst custodians of IT quality and security in the history of computing with their egregiously and shamelessly poor stewardship of the Flash plugin. Microsoft infamously fired most of their QA personnel a few years ago in order to foist that work onto their "insider" fan base, which has made their extremely poor reputation in that are decline even further. Yes, users do stupid things, but in cases like this we need to focus hard on the deeply evil neglect that certain software vendors have had for our data as well.

It makes sense for Apple to put their first cellular modem into a low-end device, as one can reasonably expect a lot of teething problems.This isn't a knock on Apple, it's more that it's an insanely hard problem and pretty much nobody gets it right the first time.

foregoneconclusion said:

That's what eventually led to the warrantless wiretapping provision being eliminated by Congress: public pressure. However, there were plenty of people that were ignorant of the Patriot Act and what it contained, thus Edward Snowden's success in repackaging old news from the Patriot Act a decade later as if it were something new to be worried about.

Warrentless wiretapping was never eliminated. The only restriction put into place were wiretaps that affected everybody in the US. So you could still have one order for "all devices east of the Mississippi" and another order for "all devices west of the Mississippi" and still be in compliance with the new law. Or an order allowing surveillance of "all Democrats" (or "all Republicans") and still be in compliance. From a privacy standpoint, it was a completely worthless gesture. From a propaganda perspective, it allows those who favor panopticon-level surveillance to lie and tell people that "Something Was Done!!!"

But nice try, fedboi.

mattinoz said:

The point of a standard is to allow broad reliable adoption by publishing the requirments. If true, then 5G isn't a standard it's a cabal.

Yes, Apple should do something to make the traditional suppliers admit publically they were dicking around with the standard in order to protect a monopoly position.

Publicly admit they're a cabal? Are you kidding? They're openly quite proud of it.

mike_galloway said:

ecarlseen said:

Wow. I spent a lot of time in International logistics and about 12 years in supply chain management for companies that were moving production from Asia to North America (mostly Mexico, but some US), and you did a very good job covering the labor portion of it.

There's more to it: any consumer electronics contain tons of tiny parts (resistors and capacitors, wiring, etc.) that cost virtually nothing, as in a hundredth of a penny or so. Costs don't get added up the supply chain, they get multiplied, so having the price of these parts move significantly from virtually nothing can have a very significant impact. Producing them domestically or even in Mexico adds a lot of cost.

US customs is a complete joke. Parts can fly right through or be arbitrarily held for months. I think people can figure out the details, but this adds a lot of cost.

US regulation swings between inattentive / useless, and capricious / arbitrary. We all know about companies abusing this, but you don't hear as much about regulators deciding suddenly one day they're going to interpret a rule differently and make an example out of somebody: usually a smaller business that can't fight back. And a company somebody spent years or decades building is just gone because a bureaucrat had a whim.

I could go on and on, but it's a tough problem. Thinking they could move the supply chain back to the US in three years is hilarious. 15 years would be reasonable.

The article is spot on.

As an electronics designer I have been in manufacturing since the 1980s - but only small companies where at least you do get to see the entire operation.

Working with the Taiwanese and Chinese is a revelation to that of people in our own country (UK)

The exceptionally poor work ethic here (and maybe the USA) is why manufacturing will never come back without a major change in education and expectation. 

It will take more than a generation to achieve.

williamlondon said:

MplsP said:

Bloatware, takes forever to load, needs to be updated twice a week, crappy interface… I’ll keep using pages and Google docs. 

People have been horribly duped into thinking that MS Office is essential, when in reality the extra features they have over and above others, are used by almost no one. The vast majority of people would be perfectly fine with online and/or free offerings, and without having to forego (except Google of course) your personal details and activities.

MS really did a number on IT staff and the employees they support over the years with their ELA lock ins, so now everyone falsely believes it's MS Office or nothing, which is just crazy.

I tried OpenOffice / LibreOffice years ago, decided it sucked, and switched back.

I gave LibreOffice another try about a year ago, and now for the most part it's a serviceable replacement. I use it for my day-to-day work that's too complicated for Apple's very, very basic apps.