That’s a big difference but not all. The sub-$1000 ultrabook sector has SO MUCH garbage, like Intel Celerons that stutter when you scroll down a web page designed in 2022+. Manufacturers are happy because they can sell rubbish and uncle John with no idea about computers will say “I want a laptop with 1 TB so it’s faster, and it must have free office 365 and an antivirus”…

So when someone puts a phone processor in a laptop and builds a chassis that isn’t a $5 extruded plastic shell, they panic because it still manages to be better in both benchmarks and real world use despite the paltry amount of RAM.

Unlike the equivalent Windows 11 laptop with 32 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron, where you’d get to experience that speed… Never. But sure, you can have all your apps frozen at once.

They have the expertise, just not the desire. Which explains why in 2026, proton and wine manage to run more Windows apps (well) than Windows.

Performance wise it’s an interesting one. I think from a price and energy standpoint it sits squarely against windows ultrabooks with a Snapdragon X, for example, a Galaxy Book 4 Edge.

Based purely on benchmarks, the A18 Pro is weaker than that, plus you have only 8GB of RAM.

However - I have a Surface Pro X with the original SQ1, with roughly 40% of the performance of these… And even at that level, the problem is Windows on ARM, not the performance. It only lets you down for things it’s clearly not meant to do, like video editing.

Another alternative I see for that price is a windows laptop with an i5-1334U, which theoretically gives you a raw performance within 2% of the A18 Pro.

Given that at this price Linux compatibility is an absolute lottery, would I sacrifice half the RAM for having an OS that isn’t Windows? Yeah there’s not much to think. W11 will probably eat half the RAM on telemetry alone, and Apple’s BS is easier to put up with than MicroSlop’s…

Absolutely not, even disposable cameras from 30 years ago are far better than midrange phone cameras. Maybe not so much in low light, but unlike phones they had a usable flash that solved that problem entirely for anything near the camera (e.g. group photos).

I’d be not just content but thrilled if a phone could get close to analog 35mm full frame performance, but I’d say we’re at least about 10 years away from a flagship phone taking photos as nice as a “normal”, mid-range compact film camera from 1995.

The LLM is whatever you want it to be. Self hosted or from any provider with a compatible endpoint. It’s likely a proprietary one… Because the cost of training LLMs means most are proprietary ones.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running Openclaw. What is way too brave for my taste is giving it access to accounts with your personal data, or the filesystem in your computer. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.

I run it in an isolated server, and it doesn’t have access to my data - if it goes tits up, it deletes unimportant stuff only. If anyone gets access to the credentials in it, it’s a bunch of budget-limited API keys, so they can spend all of $4 on openrouter. Maybe the riskiest bit is its Google account. I went with the approach of giving it its own Google account, so that it can create docs and calendar events and then add me, rather than getting access to my Google account. But then again… That account has no payment info, nothing that I would be mega worried if it got leaked…

Sure, it might limit the usefulness a bit, but I think installing something like this is only acceptable if you sandbox it and don’t let it access valuable information. Going full mad scientist on something as “alpha” as this, letting it run wild with your info is nuts.

Some really good advice that someone gave me once is that the internet doesn’t exist.

Sure, it obviously does exist, but this was about communication style. When you send an email, you change codes and don’t write in the same way as a WhatsApp - you can expand your points more… But you should never forget you’re talking to a person - just because it’s internet, you shouldn’t talk any different to them.

You shouldn’t assume that the message is anonymous just because it’s internet. You shouldn’t assume certain things are okay “just because it’s internet”.

I don’t think they were 100% right because they were disregarding that code changing between different mediums and audiences is normal (you don’t talk the same way to your boss and your partner, or in written form vs spoken), but I do stand by the point that you shouldn’t change code or make assumptions just because “internet”.

Hell no, leave us gays alone - between Altman and Thiel we have more than enough gay evillionaires!

FR, I had a £4k top spec one, Intel i9, 64GB as my work laptop… And even back then, I wouldn’t have bought it myself for £800 if given the chance. Absolutely atrocious, particularly in terms of thermal design. I remember one summer, having Intel vTune installed and seeing the CPU laptop throttle to 0.25 GHz with Zoom open, because it would wake up the power hungry GPU and the laptop couldn’t deal with a British 30°C summer.

The Apple Silicon ones are lovely in comparison. When I swapped it, I remember going through a whole flight using my laptop without charging thinking “what sorcery is this”.

Shame there isn’t a decent equivalent ARM laptop that can do Linux.

I wish they had a flagship. I would be able to accept compromises of course - thicker, more expensive… But still with top notch components.

There are two things stopping me:

The first one is that for the first time ever, I have a phone that I can just about take on a holiday, not take my DSLR, and not regret the decision. I reckon different people have different thresholds for this, but for me this bar sits at the recent crop of 1" camera sensors (maybe from 1-3 years ago, like Xiaomi 13U/14U, Vivo X100, etc).

The second one is that I tend to get flagships as a way to guarantee some longevity when doing some resource intensive tasks. I consider myself a power user, and while it’s true that phones have plenty of horsepower these days, there are tasks that are quite demanding. For example, I use Ente which does local indexing on the phone for the ML image search (which isn’t an “easy” task) and I do run small edge-type ML models (such as whisper, of re-train the transformer model in FUTO)… Now I know probably I could do those things on a 2025 mid-range processor, but I worry that by 2027 I will want to replace the phone because the things I want to do will have rendered the phone obsolete. A faster processor allows me to go for an extra year or two without suffering a painfully slow phone, so I’d also want this before making the switch.

It’s okay - according to the type of articles they’ve been writing themselves, now they can feel more human and have more quality time. https://archive.ph/hYnrE

Billionaire leopards eating workers’ faces once again.

This is true but at the current computer prices, nowhere near as bad as it sounds. I spend £100/year or thereabouts for GeForce Now, and

• there’s no way I could play games on a £500 laptop that I renew every 5 years,
• no way that a £1000 laptop could get me to play AAA games for more than 1-2 years
• and sure, I could play games on a £2000 laptop, but no way that will last me 20 years.

If you have a life and can’t play any more than 25 hours a week, the value proposition right now is great - there’s no viable alternative that allows you to keep playing AAA games for the equivalent of £100/year.

It was created as a bit of an art experiment. What happens when AI agents take prompts for another AI agents. What do they “discuss”, do they give each other tips and advice, how much weird shit do they do…

From that point of view, it’s been rather interesting.

Only if people stay. Ending remote work is a way to lose 20% of the workforce to attrition. An office costs far far less than 20% of the salary mass, and if they were doing any sort of hybrid work, they might even have enough desk space already anyway…

At this point, and given the current state of Proton (👍) and the current state of Windows (👎), the question should be, “Does the new version of Wine run Windows apps better than Windows?”

It is… if it’s a screen from 2015.

I keep my phones for 2-3+ years and I haven’t managed to get burn-in since the Nexus 6P. I’d say anything newer than a Pixel 3 is free from burn in unless you do something weird (like a demo unit in a store displaying the same image 14 hours a day).

Devs ≠ C-Suite Execs

It might not be sexy, but I’d argue it doesn’t need AI to be.

Take the SMEG ones as an example - they’re not my cup of tea, but the amount of people who are willing to pay a premium for a fridge that doesn’t do anything special other than looking nice shows clearly that.

I think it’s ok, the comment literally says “according to Lisuan”. Which I see as factually correct - that’s the marketing claim, or the performance according to them, just like Teslas have been self-driving according to Tesla since 2012.