LeonM

> How are you spending 5000+ EUR per year on electricity?

Energy prices are high in my country, and price spikes have become more frequent.

My house is currently heated by natural gas, which costs about €200/month avg plus another €550/year in standing charges. Prices for natural gas is expected to rise. By switching to heat pumps and induction cooktop I can disconnect from the gas distribution grid completely. This will safe about €3k in gas costs annually (against current rates) but obviously increase my electricity usage significantly. So in my country €5k/year in electricity isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.

I'm projecting my electricity consumption to be ~€3.5k a year once I have fully switched to electric heating, so this is where generating my own electricity starts to make sense.

The PV array I'm planning is very much over dimensioned for my use. To make financial sense my PV installation must produce more than I consume over the year. Not only will my electricity bill be effectively €0, I will also be able sell overproduction back to the grid during summer. By using variable rate discharging I can optimize the return. I am projecting that selling overproduction will net about €1k annually.

The rest comes from from dynamic energy tariff trading. The battery will be used as a grid stabiliser, so it'll charge (from the grid) when electricity is cheap/negative and discharge back to the grid when return rate is high. This is projected to net another €500~€1000 annually.

If I add an EV I'll safe about 3k/year in fuel, though my electricity use will obviously go up, I won't have as much overproduction anymore.

In my country PV only really makes sense when it's combined with batteries and connected to the grid with a variable rate contract. The more battery capacity you have the more value/income it can create stabilising the grid. So really the price per kWh of battery capacity is the driving force in the ROI of a PV setup.

For me it's the other way round. I wish they would offer a space-gray or black option like they have on their laptops

Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...

I found most people fixate on the price of the cells/panels, but forget that the rest of the installation required to use said panels easily exceeds the price of the panels by a factor of 3~4. Think mounting hardware, cabling, inverters, batteries, control hardware, labour, etc. It all adds up.

I've been pricing a PV system recently, and I was surprised at how low the price of panels already is. In most estimates I received the panels itself were less than 20% of the total installation costs. Granted, I am looking at a 3-phase system with plenty of battery capacity. For a more typical household setup with 1-phase and moderate battery capacity that percentage will shift a bit.

In my case the quotes are roughly: 40x430Wp panels (~€4000), 3x (3-phase) inverter/chargers (~€5000), batteries (~€5000), auxiliaries (~€1500), cabling (~€2000), mounting hardware (~€2500), labor (~€5000), planning/permissions (~€1000). So total project price is ~25k, of which the panels are only ~€4000. And that doesn't even count the construction of a utility building to house the batteries and inverters, the EV chargers, etc.

On a side note: I found that battery prices have also dropped significantly already. If you're willing to do some assembly yourself you can get ~15kWh of LiFePO4 for just over €1k.

Also, for those wondering: for my situation the ROI of this setup is expected to be about 5 years. This will be quicker if I get an EV, which I am planning on.

I'm on the same boat with a 4080, the extra GPU RAM of the 4090 over the 4080 would have been nice, but it still wouldn't be able to run any decent models.

I configured my PC in December 2023 with a kit of 2x32GB DDR5-6000 for €249, thinking I would upgrade that RAM later to 128GB by just adding another kit. Now nearly 3 years later that same kit is over €1500 :-(

I've also lost all interest in upgrading to a 50-series GPU. With exception of the ludicrously expensive 5090 the entire 50-series lineup is capped at 16GB, I don't see the benefit of upgrading.

What you get is not what you cost.

40% overhead is quite typical, so you'd be looking at $120k/year. In the USA I'd consider that a competitive salary for an admin capable or keeping a $6M rack of specialized hardware running 24/7.

No, 27-7 for the rest of the world.

The separator is often the only way to distinguish American notation from ISO, so please use a dash for dd-mm-yy and a forward slash for mm/dd/yy

> in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality

That's just basic marketing. You'll see that in most countries, I don't believe that it is unique to Switzerland.

For example: in the US you'll see many products that say "made in America" on the box. Those will likely outsell competing products, even if those are cheaper and better quality still.

And similarly: if you try to sell the "made in America" product in a different country it'll likely by outsold by the "made in [country]" products there.

I was wondering the same thing. I had never heard of Portal before seeing this post. Actually had to pause the video to search what a Meta Portal even is...

Too bad because it looks like a neat device. This feels the same as discovering a neat SaaS product through a "XYZ is shutting down" post on HN.

Similar story, I had a customer who wanted me to change the entire UI of a legacy application, because some information would not fit on the ancient 1024*786 15" desktop monitor of one employee, meaning he would have to use horizontal scroll constantly.

I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks.

Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!".

In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper.

A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.

I don't think that it would take that much.

It is my understanding that the A18 CPU is pretty well understood already. AFAIK it doesn't have the new architecture that is keeping the Asahi team from supporting the M4 and M5 for example.

But I guess we'll have to wait for devs to get their hands on a Neo device

I'm not sure what Hector's personal choices have to do with not "trusting" a piece of software? It's open source, so if you don't trust the quality of the software, then just inspect it yourself?

Also, FWIW: Hector/Lina is no longer associated with Asahi anymore.

I'd take that claim by Mecha with a huge grain of salt.

How are they going to fund 7 years of support for a device that sells maybe a few thousand units? How are they going to guarantee they will still be around, and interested in maintaining the device drivers in 2033?

The Linux kernel project will remove the device drivers from the mainline kernel if they are no longer actively maintained and in use. So it is very likely that the support will be dropped from the mainline kernel way before 2033, as there probably won't be any users of this device remaining, and the original developers long gone.

Call me negative, but I expect that this company wil just vanish after some time. The team will just move on, maybe even start again under a different name, but there will be nobody to be held responsible for promises and claims they made in the past.