2calazm

You only need your motherboard to support ECC (not sure if they all do), that's the only prerequisite.

Counter-argument: that's how most suspects are handled in Japan (sadly), but people care about it only now that it affects a rich westerner, as you comment demonstrates ("stunning corporate turnaround and creating billions of dollars of value").

These places already exist outside of the US, and that type of repeated stunts from Duke, Brown, Reeds, etc, is probably a boon to them. I believe the current climate is a deterrent for foreign students, who in the US are caught between anti-immigrant sentiments on the right, and reactionary identity politics on the left (such as African and Indian students being called race traitors at Reeds). International students represent a significant source of income in higher ed and their enrollment has nose-dived in the US in the last few years. If this continues this will benefit non-US international universities who will manage to attract that population, not just in terms of revenue but also in standing.

So my guess is the places you describe already exist and they're about to be better known within a few years as trust in US universities erodes.

I was working in the telecom industry back then, and had to test phones' OTA compatibility with some enterprise software. I had to deal with Motorola's awful software for years, and as a result RAZR evokes something different for me than the hardware.

The flip side of the RAZR's skunkwork origin was the not-skunkwork-part. That is, being part of Motorola, which meant: (1) relying on Motorola firmware that was slow, ugly, and an UX joke, even by those years' standards, and (2) as soon as they found out those things would sell, the started milking it endlessly, with only minimal updates. The "it's a slim phone!" gimick got old fast. As a matter of fact, Motorola would not produce anything headline-worthy until the Droid. That's quite a long time.