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2 yr. ago

  • Edit: I’ve lost the thread a little as this started about laptops not mobile phones. I’m leaving this comment here as the points may be valid even for laptops, but I’m too bored to do any more research. Thanks for the great and civil discussion.

    I would agree that a theoretically completely upgradeable and repairable device is better, but I think the real world implementations generally aren’t that good.

    It’s hard to get to statista’s summary of lifespan of phones without a subscription, but many summaries that use their data say something like:

    In general, the average lifespan of a smartphone is 2 to 4 years. According to reports, the iPhone lasts 4-10 years, followed by Samsung units, which can last 3-6 years. Huawei and Xiaomi units have an average lifespan of 2-4 years, while OPPO units have 2-3 years.

    Perhaps there is better data out there that would change my mind, but I haven’t seen it. If Apple products are iWaste, then it appears nearly all other products are even more wasteful. All the data I have seen points to Apple products as generally having a long lifespan followed by an excellent free recycling policy (https://www.apple.com/me/recycling/).

  • If you are saying the “iWaste” comment is about repairability not reliability, I get that. My take is maybe that if something has a long lifespan despite not being repairable, it might be have a longer life before becoming waste or recyclables.

    I do like that the EU is mandating user replaceable batteries and other changes and support most right-to-repair legislation.

  • I tried to find a good study of laptop lifespan by brand. The best thing I could find was a consumer reports survey from 2023.

    https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/laptops-chromebooks/laptopreliability-a7029273631/

    They rated Apple as the #1 laptop for reliability. I don’t think that is “iWaste.”

    This lines up with what I’ve seen, but even as a career IT person my personal sample size ain’t that great.

    I dislike that current Apple products aren’t very repairable, but appreciate that they are very recyclable and durable.

  • I’m too lazy to look it up, but there is a settings in either the office products or group policy that makes it use the old open/save dialogs. I remember setting it up for an octogenarian relative who couldn’t adjust to change.

  • The only thing that really matters is the average milk fat %. I like Costco’s 40% heavy cream from a price and quality standpoint. My family drinks skim milk. If I mix those two equally I will end up with about 20% fat which makes a very nice ice cream.

  • It is hard for me to believe the people who are pro-volume have really tried the weight method with a decent scale. I am so with you on things like honey, corn syrup, molasses. Those require both a volumetric measure and a scraping spatula and it is still so much harder than squeezing the bottle until you hit the right number of grams.

  • We tested this in our kitchen. A glass pyrex used as precisely as possible was off by more than 5% in repeated tests. Our kitchen scale was off by less than 1% for weights over 5g.

    And honestly, I am comfortable just pouring the milk/water/vanilla directly into the bowl that is on the scale. No utensil to get dirty. I recognize that I could over pour and mess things up but it just doesn’t happen. I can hit 15g of vanilla more accurately with the scale than with a measuring spoon.

  • I had my wife try to measure water in a glass measuring cup accurately and consistently. I had her measure the same amount multiple times. Her variance was so far off the variance of the scale, that I convinced her that liquids should be done by weight when possible.

    I think that if I had a cylinder like I used decades ago in chemistry class, I might be able to get consistent kitchen measurements. But my glass pyrex measuring cup with numbers on the side is terrible.

    If I make a recipe multiple times, it gets re-written for weight versus volume.

  • The baking recipe sites I use regularly like kingarthurbaking.com and nytimes.com/recipes pretty much always use weights. Some old recipes will still use volume. Unless the source is old (printed cookbooks, historical recipes online) I definitely have a prejudice against sites that rely on volume.

  • Heavy cream weighs less, about 95%, than what water weighs. I can’t really think of a liquid that I would expect to weigh 50% more than water. I remember reading once about something called “heavy water”. Maybe that is what they were referring to?

  • I have had two different well-recommended scales for baking and neither does a good job measuring 1-3 grams of ingredients. Maybe I just need to spend hundreds of dollars I don’t have on some pampered chef thing….

    I do have what we call the “drug scale” in our house. It can measure to 0.01g but its capacity is so low it is useless for baking. I don’t want to weigh my baking soda badly enough to get it out.

  • Thanks so much! I was kind of on that line after I read your earlier comment, but thought I would just ask. My jackery doesn’t have barrel plug outputs—just inputs. But it does have a 12V, 10A cigarette plug port. I’ll get an anker car charger like you suggested and use that.