avon b7

9secondkox2 said:

Don’t really care what China’s spokespeople say. Self-serving propaganda. Once they start talking up their willingness to negotiate in good faith for the benefit of America, the ears will park up once again. Until then, it all sounds like Charlie brown’s teacher. 

Is there anything from the current US administration that isn't self-serving propaganda? 

Isn't that what MAGA is all about? 'Us' and forget the rest, who are all out to 'screw' the US.

Has Trump uttered a single word (even when not in the presidency) that wasn't self-serving propaganda?

Why should anyone negotiate in good faith when it was the US administration that sent the world's business and financial markets into a tailspin without even a minimal effort to negotiate prior to Liberation Day? 

And why on earth, given the aggressive path that Trump has taken, should anyone negotiate for the benefit of America?

China has zero reasons to bow down to Trump. China has to be approached in an entirely different manner. The same applies to the EU although here, 'diplomacy' is still the preferred option. 

That said we already know that the EU is moving to reduce strategic dependence even further than they were and even faster. 

Especially in technology and energy. 

Just like China has. Several EU states are now much more open to China trade options than they were just a few weeks ago. 

One person (plus cohorts) is to blame. 

paulk91 said:

I can understand why Synology did this.  I have been burnt (pretty bad) by buying four high volume drives that were marketed by Western Digital as "NAS" drives, and that totally failed hard in my Synology.  The compatibility requirements are really very fiddly and opaque for me as a very savvy prosumer.  Not an expert, but definitely in the weeds in detail.  The level of detail required to ensure that drives are compatible is crazy - many vendor sites for HDD don't have the level of precision necessary - don't show all of model specs or swap out as interchangeable minor differences without disclosing it.  I lost hundreds on those unreliable drives.

Personally, have been bitten by Western Digital cutting corners, I view this as potentially similar to the "Apple tax" on memory but more understandable.  People may kvetch about it, but it's hard for Synology to not lose their brand reputation if Western Digital can't be trusted.

As long as you stick to certified drives and pay attention to firmware requirements (compatibility listings sometimes also provide firmware versions too) you should be OK with just checking which drives are good for you (from a price/capacity standpoint) on the NAS vendors compatibility list. 

Another key consideration IMO is to purchase drives from authorised resellers or trusted vendors. There is a lot of fraud in the market with re-badged, refurbished or outright different hardware under the label. 

I use Toshiba N300 drives (RAID1) which some consider noisy but they have been ultra reliable for me. 

Most analysts seem to accept that any tariff over 50 or 60% effectively kills trade options so anything far over that is just a meaningless number.

That is why China said it wouldn't be further increasing it's own tariffs but take other non-tariff measures. 

We've seen the rare earths option and now there are rumours about Boeing taking a hit. 

Meanwhile, on the US side, Nvidia has announced a charge that could hit $5B due to new US restrictions on chips it specifically designed for the Chinese market due to previous sanctions. The US thinks it will also stall China's supercomputer efforts but China stopped reporting it's supercomputing numbers a few years ago and they were said to be already ahead in that race but laying low on the marketing side. 

And this is happening on the same day that rumours claim that Huawei is moving forward and testing a huge AI Supernode in its Wuhu data centre complex.

Nvidia must be fuming. 

charlesn said:

Zero surprise. Galaxy Fold 6 ranges from $1600 to nearly $2K at Best Buy, depending on storage, So it sounds like Apple will be within a few hundred of those numbers. Why Apple would introduce this extremely niche and expensive bridge to nowhere is beyond me, but I also can't believe that all these predictions of its arrival are wrong. Apple has never felt the "me, too" need to chase Android gimmicks. and it's hard to see the Galaxy Fold as anything more than that when it has generated such little sales traction after six years on the market. Same for the Pixel Fold, although that has been around for only two years. Who knows? Maybe Apple will have come up with some compelling use cases by the time it arrives that will justify its stratospheric price and fragility when you inevitably drop it to a broader audience than either Samsung or Google has reached, but I'm not sure what those would be. 

There are some things to consider here. 

Apple is having a tough time competing in China. There are a few reasons for that but I'll highlight just two. 

NEV sales are going through the roof there and the 'smarts' in those cars are very smart - blowing way past anything CarPlay can offer. Hundreds of thousands (and rising fast) of those cars are running HarmonyOS so anyone with a Huawei phone tied to a Huawei-partnered car will see the benefits. The opposite is also true. If one of those cars takes your fancy, getting a Huawei phone (or tablet, wearable, TV...) makes a lot of sense.

Xiaomi is another example although so far they only have one car. 

What can Apple do to counter that situation if they have no competing product? 

Folding phones are reaching maturity in many ways but remain expensive. That keeps the marketshare of folding phones down. 

Prices especially of flip phones however, are seeing more affordable versions come to market.

Similar to the car situation if you want a folding experience, Apple is not going to get the sale because it has no folding option. You would have to look elsewhere. 

It has been said that if the Huawei Mate XT hit sales of 500,000 units (unthinkable to my mind) it would bring in $1.5B in revenue. Yet just last week there were (unsubstantiated) reports of it having sold 400,000 units (in spite of the incredible price tag). In basically one quarter. 

That model has now got a 'global' release so it's anybody's guess how many will be sold. Prices start at 3,699€ in the EU. 

Now the Pura X has hit the Chinese market too with it's unusual form factor but great screen ratio. 

Throw in the likes of Oppo, Honor, Samsung etc and there are lots of folding options to choose from and thinness, weight, creases etc are beginning to look like non-issues. 

It's hard not to see Apple losing sales (especially in China) as a result of not having a folding phone. 

There will clearly be a threshold to lost sales beyond which Apple must respond. Perhaps these reports are simply Apple gearing up to stop a trickle of lost sales turning into a flood.

The outlier here is maybe Google. While the US is shielded (quite literally now) from a wide spread of folding/flip options on home soil, if a Pixel Fold came to market offering Chinese level engineering, Apple would possibly be in a spot of bother (assuming there is untapped demand for foldables there). 

jfabula1 said:

That’s good…..China is not reliable. The world now will think otherwise to build their own rare earth material supplies. Why did the US so reliant on these? We do have different priorities that are bad, relying on cheap goods will bite us in the ass.

I'm not sure where you want to go with that. China has been far more reliable than the US and is non-interventionist.

Rare earth processing is not done much on the US because, while the ore is easy to extract, processing it requires technology that isn't easy to find in the US. It's also very environmentally unfriendly unless you want processing to cost a lot more. 

China has only imposed the threat of restrictions (through licencing) because of US policy actions. You can't blame them for using what they have to push back.