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The Model Y will be a test of Tesla's popularity
Tesla announced at the end of February that it was finally ready to make and sell the long-awaited $35,000 Model 3, an affordable electric car that was part of Musk's original "master plan" for the company, published in 2006. Closing most of the company's stores and switching to a completely online sales model was how Musk was able to finally achieve this goal, and it also allowed Tesla to lower the price on its other cars.
Normally, that might be seen as a good thing. But many customers who purchased Teslas before the price drops felt jilted. One of the most vocal critics was comedian Chris Titus, who complained to his 125,000 Twitter followers on March 2nd about how his wife bought a Tesla two days before the prices dropped. "@elonmusk lost a loyal customer," Titus wrote. "[T]he people that supported you, praised you and cared about you [sic] dream got boned."
Anger about the price cuts bubbled up in China, too, which is the world's largest market for electric cars. After Tesla cut prices on all of its models there, a number of owners protested at the company's store in the Hunan province capital city of Changsha. The upset owners wrapped the store in a banner that apparently translated to "don't buy now, buy tomorrow at a discount."
[...] [There] is some data backing up the apparent change in sentiment around Tesla. In an Axios-Harris poll of 18,228 adults conducted between November and January, Tesla's ranking slid across a number of categories. It dropped from being the 14th most trusted company out of 100 to 46th. The company's "character" ranking fell from 7th to 57th, and its "ethics" ranking slid from 5th to 56th.
See also: Did Ford just tease an electric Mustang as Tesla debuts Model Y?
Tesla's Model Y sales goals 'aggressive,' analyst says
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:48AM (3 children)
That right there is the specific public sentiment that led to the Great Depression when Deflation set in.
With Tech we have quite a serious problem: when will our boxes be juicy enough? I assert we hit that "Inflection Point" long ago.
There's no Damn good reason an iPhone couldn't cost a hundred clams but were that to happen, it's not so much that Tim would get sacked but that the entire planet's economy would go down in fucking flames due to the resulting Deflationary Spiral.
That's long been an active area of research for me [warplife.com], but I haven't posted much about it as I have yet to elucidate even a way to ease this oncoming Economic Holocaust...
... other than to stockpile dried beans, rice and canned goods, as well as that I'm already saving up not for a Deep Freeze but a Chest Freezer [orwell.ru].
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:33PM (1 child)
Our phones currently struggle to keep up with AR.
>inb4 phones shouldn't be doing AR
Phones clearly aren't phones anymore, they're just the next step in mainframe->minicomputer->microcomputer->laptop->phone->implant, and until they surpass at least where desktops/laptops are now they're not juicy enough.
>inb4 the screen isn't good enough to take advantage
With stuff like chrome-cast finally getting going the screen attached to your portable computer doesn't much matter, nor does the input since you can just use a bluetooth keyboard.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 16 2019, @09:54PM
Good Point.
_That_ will happen a couple years after ARM64 becomes widely deployed in desktops and laptops.
This because Mobile Systems-on-Chip have lots more than CPUs in them - for example the ARM7TDMI in the Oxford Semi OXUF922 has an IEEE 1394a and b core, a USB2 core, a UART - I expect for Oxford's own engineers to debug it with, as I never used it myself - somewhere in there was a firmware upload client though I don't know whether that was an actual core, it had 128k of 16-Bit Flash, there was some 32-Bit DRAM but not much, something like 8k, there was a watchdog.
Desktop, Laptop and Server CPUs of course generally have no other cores than for Integer, Floating Point, L1 and maybe L2 Cache.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:40PM
Well, that and epically bad government policy for a decade.