Caveat emptor though, I trusted this policy as well and got my account closed for unclear reasons. They hinted at returns fraud (not the case) and a high return rate (not the case either).
I provided detailed records of everything and even escalated this to jeff@amazon.com, no luck.
Still have a few hundred euros in Amazon Echos in storage that I cannot use anymore.
Their support department must be quite understaffed too and heavily amplified by AI. I've had multiple lengthy interactions with them since Sunday due to a bug that has lost me money (yes literally, see [1]) and I am saddened by the low quality of their responses.
First time I run into an AI-replaced-humans wall, and it gives me a very uneasy feeling for the future.
[1]: Sent 0.05 BTC from personal wallet, Coinbase acknowledges transaction, blockchain confirms transaction, two days later transaction disappears from the Coinbase UI, I now have no money and no coins.
I wish shibboleths were real (https://xkcd.com/806) so that I could stop wasting time with chatbots and would instead be able to file a bug on Coinbase and get to someone who would read logs.
Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail...
Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either.
The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%!
I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected:
- It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time).
- It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon.
- It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time.
- It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account.
No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.
Anecdotally speaking, the 80% limit seems to be key to better battery aging long term.Anecdotally speaking, the 80% limit seems to be key to better battery aging long-term.
My launch-day iPhone 15 Pro Max is at 95% battery health. That phone has had the 80% limit enabled since day one, and I very rarely have had to increase it for specific busy days.
My previous iPhone 12 Pro Max very quickly descended to 88% battery health after a year.
My charging habits remain the same: fast and furious Magsafe/Qi/Qi2 charging every time there is a charger nearby (remote worker, so that’s almost all the time).
I do have unpleasant thoughts about the 80% battery charge limit not being available on anything older than the 15, since it turns out it can be sideloaded via Nugget and MobileGestalt manipulation.
Not enough to push me away from the walled garden (these phones are aging better than my previous flagships from other ecosystems), but a reminder of the rough edges in it.
It seems strange, though, that one would habitually charge to their "effective" capacity of 80% for the purpose of preserving the battery for the next owner
I do it for the purpose of preserving the battery for myself down the line. I'll go for a full charge if I expect to need it, but 80% is usually more than enough so why put unnecessary wear on the battery?
isn't that intentionally creating a lot of mental anguish every day (trying to make 80% last the full day) in exchange for just one day of simplicity at some theoretical point in the future?
Feels a bit like worrying about tomorrow stealing joy from today
> isn't that intentionally creating a lot of mental anguish every day (trying to make 80% last the full day)
Not at all, I only use around 40% per day.
> in exchange for just one day of simplicity
More like avoiding months of that mental anguish in the future because my phone can still easily handle the 40% I use instead of having degraded down to where that is the limit.
Homo sapiens is a genus full of anxiety, as our ancestors who didn't "worry about tomorrow" either died from hunger, or got killed by those who did. Anxiety is an evolutionary feature.
I used to think this way. Spent decades justifying it as a motivator. It's a trap.
It made sense if you were risking your life whenever you went to get food. If you're trying to recreate those feelings by undercharging the battery of your smartphone, you're just bored
It doesn’t matter. You’re not trying to recreate anything. Your brain is just wired that way already. You’ve got it from your parents, who got it from their parents, all the way to our predecessors in Africa.
There's a wrapper over this called Whisky (https://getwhisky.app) that makes it really straightforward to install and run Steam or other Windows binaries.
I use it on an M1 Air and an M1 Pro. Less demanding titles run very well, heavier games like Cyberpunk 2077 don't really reach a stable 30fps even with Steam Deck-like settings so keep your expectations in check.
Even Crossover doesn't work all that well. It has a small list of supported games, many hundreds of untested games, and even on the games it supports, there are frequently glitches, significant slowdowns while loading new textures & levels, occasional crashes, etc.
I'm a paid customer, occasional beta tester, and frequent compatibility database submitter. I don't think I'll continue using it after my subscription expires, though. It reminds me of the DOS days of having to tinker with config.sys to get your game to run... which is the last thing I want to do these days, in middle age, just to play a game for an hour or two. I often end up spending more time fighting Crossover than actually playing the game =/
Some games work better in Parallels than Crossover, too. (Parallels uses Windows for Arm, which uses Microsoft's own x86 emulator instead of Wine.) Some the other way around. Neither is anywhere near Proton-level seamlessness, much less native Windows gaming. Neither would come anywhere close to passing the "girlfriend/wife/mom test" in terms of ease of use.
I still game on my Mac everyday, but almost entirely in Geforce Now (streamed from the cloud) instead of fiddling with all the virtualization and emulation. Hugely better graphics and no local fan noise or heat to deal with, or any incompatibility issues. Just one click and the game launches and runs at max setting and runs flawlessly for hours, which is definitely not something that I can say about Crossover.
> even the windows doesn't have electrical motor for the passenger
I guess this may depend on the specific trim you purchase? I personally have a 2022 Jogger something or other and all of my windows are push-button electric.
Compared to actual medication, no. It can help though… and that’s how you may unintentionally develop a pretty high tolerance for caffeine (200mg caffeine pills and energy drinks every day at sunrise).
Turns out I had ADHD and I had been using caffeine my entire life as a crutch.
Diagnosed in my late thirties, and although finding the correct medication and dosage that works is an ordeal… once you are there you realize you’ve been swimming with a hand tied behind your back this entire time.
It’s not a magical cure motivation-in-a-pill though, it requires you to do the work. It simply enables you to try instead of completely failing to attempt anything.
FWIW my M1 Air 2020 is at 93% health. We could speculate about the potential root cause of this different (I always use optimized charging and the author appears to have it disabled on their screenshots)... but it's quite more likely that it's simply bad luck of the battery draw.
I love videogames, understanding how a speedrun is made is technically fascinating for me and I am also known to love some other things under the appropiate set and setting[1]... but I'll defend the OP because certainly don't think it follows that someone is a bad human that needs to do drugs just because they don't see the allure of Super Mario 64 and the people who are knowledge-hungry and obsess in understanding its guts.
[1]: Readers please do the research before experimenting, you are tweaking your brain's running config with extremely opaque tooling that is not fully understood. Most of the time the calamity-event chance is low, it's a high impact event if it happens. Plural of anecdotes is not data, and oh do people confuse these.
Caveat emptor though, I trusted this policy as well and got my account closed for unclear reasons. They hinted at returns fraud (not the case) and a high return rate (not the case either).
I provided detailed records of everything and even escalated this to jeff@amazon.com, no luck.
Still have a few hundred euros in Amazon Echos in storage that I cannot use anymore.