Tandem OLED costs more the bigger the screen and that is the reason why they’re not more prevalent in PC land.
It is also the primary reason why Apple, with its native monitors being 5K and 6K, cost more and unfortunately a nasty side effect raised its head 5K and 6K require more info running down the cable, and that is the primary reason Apple moved over to Thunderbolt 5, 5K or higher at 120hz requires thunderbolt five if you want to use a single cable.
I’ve got an Apple Watch Series 6 that has had an always on clock face for 5 years. In the flashlight mode in the lowest brightness I can see burn in, but nowhere else can I see any sign of burnin.
So oled burn in is not a totally solved issue but it’s not a big enough deal for me to care when the literal worst case scenario of an always on clock face does not cause real issues after years.
Glossy displays are much better for image quality in light-controlled environments than matte. I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings, maybe you just live in a sunnier climate and want to work outdoors? I would never buy hardware with a matte display over glossy, given two equivalent choices. You just lose so much clarity and pop to basically rub a layer of vaseline over your monitor, diffusing the nice image quality into something oily/grainy looking.
> I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings...
Most folks cannot prevent every source of light from shining behind them. In my apartment, even sunlight leaking around curtains and indirectly illuminating the Landlord Standard White walls was image-damagingly bright on the handful of glossy-screened monitors I tried.
If you have total control over the lighting situation in your room, then, yeah, glossy screens can work... but most folks want to be able to use their computers and televisions in a wide variety of lighting conditions. [0]
> ...something oily/grainy looking.
I guess you've only seen bad AR coatings. The difference in image quality between the glossy screens I tried and the matte screens I have and have been continuing to use for the past great many years wasn't all that large... and the bonkers reflectivity of the glossy screens nuked what little difference there was.
[0] Most folks also don't like so much looking at their ugly mugs during dark portions of a program... glossy screens are -while not as bad as a mirror- so incredibly reflective.
Too little, too late. With the growing enshittification of macOS and the Apple ecosystem in general, I couldn't be happier having made the move back to Linux on a Framework laptop, after almost 2 decades.
It's available and it works well. Staring at one right now. I don't like it better than glossy for my use, but if I spent a lot of time outdoors with it, I probably would.
Apple has offered matte screens for the majority of their timeline. Matte screens were available on portable computers from ~1989-2009, and as high end option from 2009-2013. The nano texture was introduced 2019 and has been available to varying degrees until present day.
So it was really only about 6 years in the last four decades that matte was not available. I always advocate for more matte options.
It was with the first generation of unibody macbooks in 2008, if I remember correctly.
I have a Powerbook G4 with a nice matte screen, and I distinctly remember the first generation of non-unibody MBP also having a similar matte screen.
So it's been a while. 18 years with glossy screens.
Oh! You brought to mind my beloved 2004 17" PowerBook with the pulsing light: I loved that machine. I tried to use it recently but it's hopeless: only a couple websites come up.
Back in the PowerBook days, Apple shipped matte screens by default.
The magazine reviews made a big deal about the matte coatings of the day making the screen a little dimmer, so after years of being dinged on the reviews, Apple finally dropped them.
Unfortunately, the state of non-Apple hardware makes your parent’s comment a defensible position. Btw, using Linux in general means having “some unpaid volunteer do it for you”
I'm using Intel Thinkpad. And I'm pretty sure that Intel does a good amount of work upstreaming Intel support in Linux. So I'm not sure that using Linux in general means having some unpaid volunteer do it for you. In fact I believe that most Linux development nowadays is pretty far from unpaid volunteer work.
Regarding state of non-Apple hardware. Well, my laptop just works. Literally zero hardware or compatibility issues. Maybe Macbook is faster in artificial benchmarks, but in my day to day usage, Thinkpad is more than fast enough.
Where does the assertion that most of this is fraud come from? The City Journal investigation claims IHSS loses roughly $6 - 12 billion a year (out of a nearly $30 billion program). That’s 20 - 40% of dollars not employment. And that data is contested. I think the real problem here is that there isn’t enough oversight so we don’t have the data, which allows stories like this to fester.
What I’m reading into what you are saying: this is the most uncertain time to be alive. And I think that is true. Societal change at this pace is a relatively new thing for humans, and it’s speeding up. Simultaneously, we are losing many anchors and touchstones at once. In the past, even in times of great uncertainty, there were always constants that humans could lean on. From family, to country, to religion, to occupation, even to art and media. That is less and less the case. Everything is uncertain, everywhere, all at once.
For most of human history humans weren't really certain of anything other than their own poverty. Anchors like family and nationhood disappeared with a premature death in the family or the king's family and the most constant thing about religion was the punishment meted out to those who didn't keep up with changes, in doctrine if not in deity. And people lived in mortal fear of gods frowning upon them because at an individual level famine and pestilence were commonplace and at a tribal and civilizational level conflict seldom ceased and ordinary people were expected to be ready to contribute. With great regularity throughout history, people pointed to pace of social change as evidence that religious prophecies were coming true and the world was ending.
Now most people based in the West are relatively safe from infectious diseases and war, we have the luxury of being uncertain about what the chatbots are going to do with us.
I mean, if I had a choice of people to rule superpowers or dish out the AI investment I'd probably pick different options, but in most respects life is pretty cushy and its basics pretty certain compared with most of history. I'd certainly pick uncertainty about next year's employment than certainty I'd be a subsistence farmer but uncertainty about whether my farm would produce enough to subsist....
This is something, but it is not enough. I live in Virginia. Virginia has been increasingly importing more and more electricity from West Virginia (coal) and Pennsylvania (natural gas) to power new data centers. Between 2019 and 2023, imports grew 61% [1]. Even though Virginia has been building out solar and offshore wind, between 2023 and 2025 low carbon electricity (renewables + nuclear) actually decreased as a % of the energy mix (28% to 26%) [2]. Virginia won’t commit to building the clean energy generation needed to power the data centers and it won’t build fossil fuel powered generation (which is on paper something I agree with). So it imports the electricity that is both dirty and expensive, and we pay for it. It’s the coward’s way out.
The post says the purpose of exploring this space (which is a fun one) wasn't speed, but representation. The speed gain was an added value.
I'm not saying SQLite's varint implementation is ideal for every application. It's just an implementation that is one of the most used implementations, if not the most (I'd bet it is by a large margin though). It just seemed like a missed opportunity to compare it with the implementation they landed on.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, thanks for sharing that link. Interesting!
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers:
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
So true. A legislator in Virginia finally pitched ending the tax credit that brought all the data centers to VA in the first place, and I hope it passes (I know it won’t). But seeing the upcoming rate increases already on the books and the number of data centers they are planning to build is pushing me to consider solar again. The payback time is getting shorter and shorter :)
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