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.

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.

charlesn said:

Hey, if you've got the desire and disposable income for a Hermes edition Apple Watch, I say go for it! But PLEASE: if you're dropping big money to essentially get a watch band from a company whose reputation is largely based on its leather goods, don't spend it on this god-awful looking piece of knitted nylon that looks like some home-crafted crap you bought for $20 on Etsy. It's not even Hermes orange! Spend the extra bucks and get a proper Hermes leather band. 

By the way: thanks Apple Insider for posting this. It was a fun read. Like 99.9% of the Apple Watch crowd, I'll never be buying the Hermes edition. but I was Hermes-curious about what you get for that much extra money. Gotta admit that I like that Lucky Horse watchface. But not worth $1299 to get it. 

I bought the original Apple Watch Hermes. The leather band still holds up beautifully and remains one of my favorites. I absolutely agree that paying that kind of premium for any kind of plastic band is just silly and ridiculous; this is just being cheap and catering to the woke crowd.

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.

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.