>A retail price of $250 seems way over the mark for what it is.
There are, in 2026, dozens of models of mp3 players selling from around $120 to even up to $400 or so, from brands from Chinese OEMs to Sony, including a few that mimic the iPod interface. From iPod style to expensive DAC ones with impendance tailored to high end headphones.
>But seriously, who would be the target here?
People interested in mp3 players.
People who want to focus on music listening, and not have a constant distraction device at hand when doing it.
>Phones already do a great job of offline with downloaded music and movies so that doesn't seem like the right crowd.
Seems like you've missed the whole "back to focused use device" trend going on for the last few years and that general niche.
It cools down the machines by evaporating, and is then released into the atmosphere. That also means the water needs to be clean, pretty much drinking water, because otherwise the evaporation would deposit minerals and stuff.
Turning water into steam uses much more energy than heating water, which means it's a much more effective means of cooling.
We also know that there have been multiple instances of employees and low paid contractors listening to people having sex and talking about very personal things.
> including a repair obligation for manufacturers of certain products
Unfortunately regulations often don't go far enough.
I have a ~10 year old iPad Pro in perfect working condition. I can basically do nothing with it, and increasingly it can no longer even browse the internet because Safari is so outdated on it.
The next generation of cellular service, 6G, will include something called Integrated Sensing and Communications. ISAC will be a millimeter radar that uses cellphones to see all sorts of behavioral stuff like, who you are next to, are you/they breathing/walking/running/standing. No opt out at all. Similar to how some researchers are using WiFi signals in your home to see where you are in your house.
Meta literally ran a man in the middle attack to spy on it's user's encrypted network traffic when they used third party apps [0]. More recently (and relevant to this issue), the engaged in industrial scale piracy to get training data for their LLMs [1]. The idea that they have changed since Zuck was a college student creeping on his female classmates and now wouldn't commit actual crimes against their own users in order to get a bit more data is just demonstrably false.
> A study of more than 450 engineers at Microsoft in 2025 showed developers spend only 14 percent of their time writing code
This feels about right as an average across project cycles and different types of companies, and is the same type of number I've suggested here before.
The obvious conclusion is that even if AI reduced coding time to zero, then it would only reduce software development time by that 14%.
Of course AI may be used for other aspects of the job as well as coding, but on the flip side any serious use of AI requires a human in the loop to give work to the AI, steer the AI, assess the output, etc.
It's interesting that this 14% figure is close to Uber's choice to limit AI spend to 10% of developers salary. I wonder where that Uber number came from?
Another rather startling datapoint on the perceived value of AI comes from Microsoft who are also adopting budgeted AI usage, and are looking for "outcomes that move the needle". Their budget guidelines apparently refer to (current? targeted?) per-developer AI usage of "hundreds of dollars a month to a few thousand dollars in tokens".
I guess accessing a streaming service without permission is considered a copyright violation, but blanket-blocking them based on copyright infringement will be legally difficult now...
DRAM shortages are already causing (not projectioning to cause) visible demand destruction in many categories.
Smartphone shipments are down 11% YoY Q2 2026. Full year projected drop of 14%.
Consumer PCs are down around 5%. Only the trend bucked originally by the new Mac neo by Apple.
There was news that the price hikes killed Steamdeck sales 82%! [0].
The Apple product price hikes from a month ago were more brutal than I could have imagined. Especially on stuff like the iPads with like 30% hikes. I can picture that it would have caused some serious demand destruction even given the Apple ecosystem lock in amoung cost conscious buyers.
> The UK government has officially scrapped the idea of restricting virtual private networks (VPNs) to enforce its impending social media bans, delivering a massive victory for digital privacy advocates.
> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."
> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."
There are, in 2026, dozens of models of mp3 players selling from around $120 to even up to $400 or so, from brands from Chinese OEMs to Sony, including a few that mimic the iPod interface. From iPod style to expensive DAC ones with impendance tailored to high end headphones.
>But seriously, who would be the target here?
People interested in mp3 players.
People who want to focus on music listening, and not have a constant distraction device at hand when doing it.
>Phones already do a great job of offline with downloaded music and movies so that doesn't seem like the right crowd.
Seems like you've missed the whole "back to focused use device" trend going on for the last few years and that general niche.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00lLrwHQPns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaTRhWazMPs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFVo1bmUXzw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viU9JhIsbl4
https://www.audiophileon.com/news/hd-music-player-top-10
https://www.whathifi.com/best-buys/portable/best-portable-mu...
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mp3-players-techradars-g...