somethoughts

It would seem like such an obvious win-win if these cleaning robotics companies just won a couple of contracts with some tech forward hotel chains.

  - Faster R&D since hotel rooms are regular/familiar
  - Cost center for hotels so revenue would be higher/straightforward
  - No privacy issues since robots would not be present in rooms with guests
  - Easier servicing/maintenance since multiple robots at same location

My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.

Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.

Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.

Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.

I don't think its quite so easy anymore that I can tell, with parental tools today - on a properly provisioned device you can require parental permission for app installs such as VPN, etc.

Yes it doesn't show up probably because you were able to pretty easily mindlessly click through the part where you were asked if this is being provisioned as a child's computer.

When you provision a Windows, Mac or Chromebook these days as a child's device using your parental account, it will require a parental account to enable new user accounts and/or re-enable guest user on the device.

Like I said - my preference would have been for Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta and TikTok to have made an industry effort to educate parents about the existence of such tools a priori of any legislation, we could have avoided Linux etc. getting sucked in.

From a parent's perspective, that's the great part about bubbling it up to the OS user account level.

Its trivially easy to see if the user (child) has indeed created multiple OS level user accounts with different permission levels if you want to spot check the computer.

You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.

Its very much near impossible to verify that the child is not just going to Facebook etc. and using separate accounts and just logging out religiously.

That said I wish Apple/Microsoft/Google had more aggressively advertised their Parental Control features for Mac/Windows/ChromeOS as a key differentiator to avoid Ubuntu/Open Source distros from having to implement them.

While not exactly parallel, it seems slightly hypocritical that this is coming from the party of "a baker should not be forced to bake a wedding cake for a customer that they ideologically/morally disagree with."

I guess the rules are different if the customer is the government? If it's the government, then if the government doesn't get its wedding cake then the government can go so far as to prevent the baker from selling cakes entirely to any other customers.

My hot take as some one who follows the space is that traditionally a big blocker of factory built housing has been unionized trades people who lived in the area of the housing developments. These trades people had purchased their homes prior to housing costs skyrocketing in California.

For them, blocking factory built housing meant they had a monopoly on the local housing development projects and easy commutes from their homes (which are protected from property tax increases by Prop 13) to the local job sites.

As these original local trades people have aged out of the workforce they are replaced by younger trades people who can't actually afford housing in the area face 1-2 hour commutes, I think there will be less resistance..

The thought of living in a huge home in Riverside or Fresno with a 10-20 minute commute and building in houses in a climate controlled, OSHA inspected building will start looking more attractive.

I think this is the issue - if the NIMBYs want to protest things they should really start when the office space gets built.

The filled office space full of white collar jobs paying $200K is what triggers the eye of the residential developers of high density housing as it provides a basis for the profit margin spreadsheet model.

Interestingly it's popularity or unpopularity would prove out two things - both of which are somewhat of a win win for Apple:

1.) If MacPhone/MacPad is popular then it would prove that there does exist a currently untapped, unaddressed market who wants Apple HW and are willing to pay a premium but do not want the locked down iOS garden which means more money for minimal effort.

2.) If MacPhone/MacPad is unpopular then it would prove that their motivation and hypothesis was correct - people do indeed come to Apple and pay the premium precisely for the walled garden and the convenience it affords.

If its indeed unpopular you could keep it around for a couple of years as an EU regulatory compliance device. Then you can say to any future regulator who wants to tear down the iOS walled garden - we tried that back in 2026 and nobody wanted it.

I think the reverse offering on the Apple device roadmap would be interesting.

A MacPad and a MacPhone. Given its eventually going to be completely the same silicon this would enable them to offer a non App Store experience for people who want to experiment with alternative app stores like Epic.

In that way they could keep the average Apple target iPhone/iPad customer within the walled garden of iOS while being able to point specifically to EU regulators that they are allowing alternative app stores on the MacPhone/MacPad platform.

Pretty cool!

My hot take is that there are seem to be really two markets here:

1.) Candy crush type board games targeting kids with well-off parents. Basically really focused on immersive and interactive visuals like effects and cutscenes.

2.) Serious board games targeting older teenagers and adults playing heavy games with BoardGameGeek weightings of above 3.5 with money to spend on their own hobby. Think games like 18XX, Brass Birmingham, Dune, Terraforming Mars or Gloomhaven. They would find the digital board game experience useful for accessing expansion maps (i.e. 18xx) or expansion campaigns (Gloomhaven). Additional features of interest might be solo play against automated players, game state/score tracking, game tutorials.

It almost feels like these two groups would have such different profiles that two separate marketing approaches should be attempted.

I feel like they should target commercial applications first before worrying about trying to get into people's homes.

It would seem like the ideal target for this would be say a hotel operator. A team of these could clean a large number of rooms on an unoccupied floor of a hotel at once. Even if this was tele-operated remotely, this seems like it could be particularly beneficial for hotels in remote locations where its harder to hire people locally.