I used to have a similarly priced Withings smartwatch clone; worked very well for years until I switched to a new phone and the app turned out to be gone from the store and the log in servers were offline. Without the app you can't get notifications or even sync the time and the watch is useless. Yes, well-known brands also discontinue software, but with a cheap watch like this, it's almost guaranteed to become a paperweight in a few years.
Now I have a real Withings, at 10 times the price of the fake, it honestly offers only a marginally better experience.
I will try very hard not to buy any product that requires a companion app for major functionality unless it's based on an open protocol (e.g. Matter), the app is open source (e.g. Pebble), or it's well-supported by a third-party open source solution (e.g. gadgetbridge.org).
Living was always expensive, in developing countries, goods are still expensive but so is living. Save for subsistence farmers, but those are a minority in all but the poorest countries.
Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug.
SaaS rots faster than the bits on your spinning rust. The incentive structure tends to drift away from a corp's long-term strategy. If you don't own it, you don't own it.
Even the bits you own rot faster than brick and mortar. It's just the nature of the universe - cosmic rays, magnetosphere, etc. Doesn't help that the integrated circuits are smaller, and hence much more brittle with each generation.
And do you even own the hardware you purchased? Even before the ongoing craze to turn fridges into subscriptions into landfill. Try some "retro" devices from 15, 20, 30y ago - many builtin websites/apps/services just 404, long before companies planned for obsolescence.
And that's the fundamental problem with web software, regardless of its technical merit (or lack thereof).
It's crazy that you can pay something for so long but whenever they decide it's not profitable enough, you not only loose access to the hosted ressources but also to the complete usefulness of the tool.
Meanwhile there are people still keeping around computers from the late 2000s. They might not be secure for browsing the web but at least the software can still be useful.
The update everything all the time is such a perverse incentive, tech is gobbling up value that could be better invested somewhere else.
Agreed, except none of those things (Saas, hardware, etc.) explicitly promises you a forever timeframe. That's really what I'm poking at--the promise, rather than the reality, which you quite accurately describe.
Like when people assume a "lifetime guarantee" is for the lifetime of themselves. More correctly it means for the lifetime of the company or the product support cycle.
Consider this too next time you read about a billionaire supporting charity (besides their motives likely being tax breaks). For example Zuckerberg donated $75 million to a San Francisco hospital, which was plastered all over the news. Proportionally it's less than what the average person spends on charity a year.
Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.
I found several websites switched to 'press here until the timer runs out', probably they are doing the checks while the user is holding their mouse pressed, it would be trivial to bypass the long press by itself with automated mouse clickers.
You are confusing installed capacity with power used. The consumed power is going down since the early 2000s, but since the generated power by most renewables depends on the weather and season, more reserve capacity needs to be installed.
The reserve capacity , would need to be 100% - to be able to supply the country for at least several days if/when renables are not able to produce , most likely due to weather.
That's why Germany is building a lot of new gas power plants. They're cheap to build and can be turned of and off really quickly, so it's okay if they're only really needed for a few weeks a year. The new power plants are also planned to be able to handle hydrogen which can be produced with electrolysis (during an oversupply of renewables) and then stored underground.
Currently about half of the gas in Germany comes through pipelines from Norway, the other half is mostly from the the Netherlands and Belgium (which I think import a lot of LNG to ship to Germany).
Russia - is now (thanks to Germany) one of the top exporters of LNG.
With some creative accounting (rewriting labels) of where the oil/gas/lng came from (Russia) -> even India is now a Net exporter of oil.
Please note that LNG is even more environmentally damaging than burning coal.
Australia is a big exporter of LNG...they even need to liquify it to use it themselves (where gas is available is often too far away from where people are to use just pipelines).
The contribution of renewables has never dropped below 30% over a full day in Germany in the last year. Good thing is that wind and PV are often complementary.
The capacity doesn't have to be constantly burning fuel 365 days a year in order to solve weather issues, just for however long the combination of startup/shutdown time and adverse weather duration.
Adverse weather conditions can be predicted sufficiently well in advance that this matters.
And yes, they know of the concept of getting electricity from south to north or vice versa - and there are already High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines in place and more on the way (much more efficient, to transport electricity long distances).
Portugal is within a stones throw of 100% renewables due to its pumped hydro storage and Spain interconnector. Extrapolate through Europe accordingly. Don’t stop building renewables, transmission, and storage.
Now I have a real Withings, at 10 times the price of the fake, it honestly offers only a marginally better experience.