I’m all for a system that allows you to wipe the device to do a downgrade or upgrade (just like any PC with an unset bios password allows) but the idea that it’s a good design for someone without my OS password to be able to downgrade my OS or perform any operation on my OS is insane.
What’s even the point of setting a password if anyone can manipulate the system without entering it in?
The entire iPhone OS is on an encrypted volume and that is the right design choice. Not having the password means no access.
There is no general purpose encrypted volume operating system that allows unauthenticated users to perform OS manipulation. If you encrypt your FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows volume, the result is the same: no password, no access.
Your choice is to enter the correct password or wipe the disk.
The fact that Apple doesn’t allow you to set up a system without full disk encryption is not a user freedom issue, it’s a very sensible design choice especially for a device sold primarily to non-technical consumers who don’t understand the security implications of leaving the volume unencrypted.
The issue here isn’t that iOS security is designed wrong, the issue is that Apple broke basic password entry with an update.
Shame on Apple for having such lazy software development practices when it comes to implementing updates like this.
I just love how companies like this gaslight the whole world with announcements like this.
We started a company to make a big difference in the world and build an engineer’s dream company, and that’s why we have now decided to do the exact opposite and become employee numbers 32,463 through 32,510 at one of the largest tech companies in the world because money is nice.
Look, I’d have done the same thing, I’m not criticizing the choice. I just think we don’t need this kind of weird unnatural rhetoric.
Please just stop with the tech industry puffery. You’re not Steve Jobs, you’re just the DevOps team at OpenAI now. You’re dumping your worthless code on GitHub, and you’re kicking your customers to the curb.
There’s no PR spin left to do anymore. You’re not a company anymore and you’re not a founder anymore.
I just don't think there's much upside to telling it how it is in the press release that gets buried after a week and everyone moves on. For better or worse.
Maybe it’s just my age or how my brain works, but positivity with a touch of BS is just business-speak. My company sold itself to a crappy company who fired most of us, but my departure message for my colleagues was full of “I’ve enjoyed this journey, it’s been a privilege, blah blah” and not “I’ve actually been counting down the days to be done with this nonsense since even before the acquisition.”
You say this stuff because we all agree to sugar coat this type of thing. We all love money and most of us would sell a clearly-never-going-to-be-unicorn company we founded to just about any company if they offered a price that would make you or your whole team set for life. Like, I’d sell to Salesforce, or IBM, or Oracle, or Microsoft or Apple, or Monster Cable, or Ticketmaster. At least half of those, most of us would say are not innovative, and would ruin the product. But no one wants to work with or hire someone who comes right out and says “I hope we sell the company to some rich jerks (ANY rich jerks, really!) so I can retire to the Bahamas.”
I would actually love to work for someone with that much honesty.
I will just go ahead and rewrite the post because it seems like my message isn’t landing. Maybe seeing what it could have looked like would be helpful:
Cirrus has been acquired by OpenAI with the goal of integrating our technology into their products. We will continue to serve existing customers until the expiration of their contracts, at which point Cirrus will cease operations as a separate entity. We are open sourcing our current products and hope they prove to be useful. Thank you to our customers and employees.
Yes. Why the fuck are we pretending they are not? Even his husband is a valid target as he knows who he goes to bed with and where the caviar comes from. (I will probably say his kid no because he has no responsibility/understanding of this)
The first thing I wondered after reading this article is whether there might be a scheduled task to run the permission reset similarly to how the author ran it via the command line.
It seems most likely that this is some kind of bug where that command or its underlying actions should be called every time the user unchecks something in the settings panel.
This is what we get when the iPhone’s permission system is grafted on top of a desktop OS that was never designed for it. I think they could have done something that is more Unix-like and yet friendly to the GUI end user.
I remember verifying it really DID fix some problems (just not all) and it was so easy to do you might as well always do it.
(You could see permissions errors in the logs that would go away after running it, which often didn't really fix anything but could make it faster since it didn't have to error out.)
This article is written with a little bit of a journalist’s misunderstanding of a topic.
They seem to have done research but have strung together unrelated subjects due to their lack of expertise in the subjects.
As a result it reads more like a summary or recap of vaguely related stories.
For example, Tesla’s pivot to robots has nothing to do with their advanced nature of their wiring harnesses, but it’s spoken in the same breath as if to imply that a Tesla Cybertruck (which is a Model Y with paneling literally glued on top) is more similar to a humanoid robot than a Mustang Mach-E.
In reality, what has happened is that the Model S and X have been discontinued and they’re the only products the Fremont, CA plant produces. Tesla has literally nothing else they can make in that plant. They either make Optimus robots or shut the plant down.
Optimus robot production is a face saving move. Tesla barely needs a fraction of that factory to build robots…it’s a much lower-volume and physically smaller product.
I should note that none of that has anything to do with Tesla being great at robotics and seeing it as a better business than automobiles. It has everything to do with competitors catching up and Tesla having insufficient development capability to iterate on those vehicles.
Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
Who in the buyer demographic for the Model X won’t take a Kia EV9, Lucid Gravity, or Volvo EX-90?
Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.
> Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.
In practice they essentially got replaced with the Model 3 and Y, which didn't exist when the models being discontinued first came out.
It's because of the decline in battery prices. When the Model S came out, an electric car with that range had to be that price. Now it's overpriced for what it is so they'd either need to design one which is significantly more premium while still selling into an inherently lower volume market segment, or lower the price to reflect the current battery costs and then have it be too close to the Model 3.
What they really need to do is continue to move down, i.e. release a subcompact with less range than the Model 3 but on the cheap.
> Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
I guess me, though I’d probably opt for the Y instead. I have a friend who drives a Taycan, one of the sportier variants with 4 wheel steering and blistering acceleration, and it’s nice, but it’s clear that they’re still crap at computers and interfaces, and I just really don’t want to go back to traditional car industry software interfaces and feature sets after our Tesla. I doubly don’t want to deal with a dealership ever again. Also, love their mobile service which comes to our garage and fixed a flat on two different occasions while I was working at home, super convenient. Roadside assistance was great when we got a flat in the middle of nowhere with no shops open anywhere nearby, they coordinated getting a tow truck out to us to tow it to a Costco like 40 miles away, gratis. Also, it’s just been a great car for us, extremely practical, great for long road trips, fun to drive, the autopilot works well and makes long drives much more pleasant, especially traffic. I don’t know why people confidently declare them to be bad cars - our experience hasn’t been flawless, but as a total package, it’s been the best car ownership experience I’ve had, including Acura, Toyota, Subaru, BMW, Nissans. I guess some combination of not liking Elon, and the issues from the scale-up period when they were making model 3s in tents, though those are long gone.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You are not actually in the market for the class of vehicle the Model S or X competed with in the first place.
I'm not actually saying they are bad cars. What I am saying is that they now lack a buyer persona, which is why they're being discontinued.
When the S and X first came out, $90,000 was the price of entry for any electric car of that caliber. Anyone who wanted an electric car with that kind of range and charging network had just those two options.
But the reality is, the vast majority of people who want Teslas will choose the 3 or Y because, duh, obviously! You have to squint real hard at the door handles to even visibly tell the difference between the X and Y.
What I'm really getting at here is that the majority of buyers in the luxury segment, the kind of people blowing $90,000 plus on a vehicle, those are the people for which the S and X are not competitive. They don't give a shit about how good the software is on the iPad that was slapped on the Tesla dashboard. They probably just want CarPlay and Android Auto anyway. They are looking for hand stitched everything, paint to sample and semi-custom interior colors, and either overstated or understated luxury: they want to look like they belong at the country club (Range Rover, Volvo) or they want to look like they belong at the club (BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, etc).
For the Model S, it existed in a struggling segment of full-size sedans where you either have to be sporty as in driving enthusiast sporty or luxurious as in massaging seats. The Model S was a Toyota Crown with the leather package that went fast in a straight line.
The Model X is even more lost on demographics. It's an SUV with a bad 3rd row and wonky doors. More critically, it fails to hit any of the demographics you might want to hit: families don't want it because it doesn't have the minivan-like utility of vehicles like the Lucid Gravity, Kia EV9, or any of the gas competitors like the Telluride - or minivans themselves! For people who want a luxury SUV, it doesn't satisfy either type of club folk. You'll get a more refined build and luxurious experience in something like a Volvo EX-90. You'll stand out more in a BMW iX. And finally, the most successful segment of luxury SUV right now is the performance offroader: The Model X can't scratch the itch that the Rivian R1S, Sequoia TRD Pro, Ford Bronco Raptor, Lexus GX, Mercedes G Wagon, and a laundry list of other options I can't even think of right now because there are so many.
As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA. This is not something Tesla invented. Roadside assistance is included with my car insurance. People who buy Porsches definitely get themselves a similarly good experience. These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.
Yeah fair points, I don’t really know the people you’re describing. My demographic wants a really good car, as comfortable and headache-free as possible, and would be happier if no one knew it was pricey. I was considering an X because of the supposedly better suspension, better ergonomics for kids/more passengers, and slightly better third row, but I think they’ve generally not focused on them enough in recent years, and the doors seem like a bit of a maintenance nightmare. So yeah, I guess it DQ’d itself a bit.
> As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA.
Haha do they come to your garage for routine maintenance? If so, I need to have another look at them. My point was that it’s a packaged experience that adds up to be pretty delightful, with a minimum of work on my part.
> These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.
Last dealerships I have experience with are Mercedes and BMW, same shit, different veneer, arguably douchier salespeople.
While I agree that at home service a convenience perk and won’t deny you that, Tesla (and Rivian/Polestar/Lucid or any of those other smaller brands) are only doing that service at home because they have to, because there aren’t service networks in place and people won’t buy their cars if they have to drive multiple hours to find a service technician.
I think problem with coming to your house for routine maintenance is that a shop is a proper environment for service. They have things like car lifts and equipment that are not mobile. In that sense I’d rather my car just be a car that can be serviced by the dozens of mechanics and dealerships that are located within 5-10 miles of my house.
I would also point out that this mobile service setup is not convenient if you don’t own your own private garage with ample space to work in. If you park on the street, in a lot/public garage, or have a really tight condo garage you’re SOL then. Many condo and apartment rules don’t even allow you to do car maintenance in the place where you park.
What happens if your parking space is on an incline? Or when you’ve got weather like snow and rain, where being inside a proper shop versus out in a parking spot would not be ideal?
All of these variables are why a dedicated shop makes sense. Tesla would absolutely go that route and end if they sold as many vehicles as Toyota.
As far as dealer salespeople, you only interact with them, what, once every 10 years to buy a car? Or less if you’re financially frugal.
From what I can see doing some quick searches the EV9 sold 22,017 in 2024 just in the US, while Tesla's global deliveries of "other models" (S, X, and Cybertruck combined, which includes over 10,000 Cybertrucks) totaled 85,133. This, critically for this comparison, includes China.
The X is not competitive with proper 3-row SUVs as the 3rd row is not usable enough, and it was cannibalized by the Y which is not an upmarket luxury SUV as luxurious as EV SUVs that are in the Model X's price range.
Similar story goes for the Model S: they're discontinuing their upper luxury full-size sedan and no longer compete in that market at all.
Since Tesla doesn't split the numbers out it's hard to say but I would say anecdotally, seeing a Model S on the road is most common with older model years as most of those buyers clearly switched over to the Model 3 or Y instead.
The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with, which is why they're being discontinued.
Someone spending that much in 2016 on an S or X was getting a vehicle that was bleeding edge technology you couldn't get anywhere else.
Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.
> From what I can see doing some quick searches the EV9 sold 22,017 in 2024 just in the US, while Tesla's global deliveries of "other models" (S, X, and Cybertruck combined, which includes over 10,000 Cybertrucks) totaled 85,133. This, critically for this comparison, includes China.
Cars in the US. As in the Taycan, A6 e-tron, and Air. Maybe the Air had more sales in '25.
> The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with
> Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.
This is a silly internet trope that doesn't align with reality. Many factors go into a car purchase. ADAS, appearances, software, reliability, performance, efficiency, charging network, trends, etc. The affordability of a car doesn't inform the preferences of the buyer.
But yes in 2026 they don't really have a choice unless they buy used.
> Which is why they're being discontinued.
Or they're being discontinued because they no longer serve a purpose for Tesla.
You think Tesla is discontinuing the cars because they no longer serve a purpose to Tesla? Isn’t the purpose of the company to make money by selling products?
Can you think of any other successful cars that are being discontinued for a similar reason and aren’t being replaced with a new model? Doesn’t pass the smell test.
You said people buy because of trends…well, the trend is away from Tesla and toward other brands. I don’t see any “I bought this before Mary Barra went crazy” bumper stickers on Silverados.
As of the first 9 months of 2025 before tax incentive expired, GM sells about 1/3 of Tesla’s EV sales volume. They grew EV sales by 200% between 2022 and 2024. The #1 EV brand in Europe is Volkswagen. #1 in China is BYD. Reports indicate that the Shanghai Tesla factory is far below capacity and that Tesla has its largest unsold inventory ever.
You don’t have to agree with me on the current situation but we’ll be seeing how it all goes in a few short years
It's more plausible than what you're implying. Lucid, Rivian, and Tesla all have the same playbook. Sell luxury cars to fund a path towards an affordable platform.
Not all products need to continue to be made to be viewed as successful. S and X were low volume, high tech cars that paved the way to 3 and Y. The latter two have now consistently dominated US EV sales. By all accounts they were successful halo vehicles.
This idea makes sense conceptually, but in reality as we observe it, the companies that make low volume luxury products are often the most profitable carmakers in the industry.
BMW is the 2nd most profitable car company in the world and sells many mid/low volume vehicles like the 7 series.
This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?
I don't think Tesla is a normal car company. If they actually wanted to compete with the luxury car makers they have the capital to do so. Even with the brand death, they could easily compete.
> This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?
Well it's not my theory, it already happened. Tesla built a brand with S and X and dominated the EV market for a decade.
The Cybertruck is about as halo as you can get, so I have no idea why they made so many. That said I also can't believe people actually bought it. It outsold the f-150 lightning in 2024. If I were to guess, I'd say the Cybertruck is a product and victim of Musk's psychosis.
(I promise I’m not intending to reply endlessly and generally be annoying I just still find the discussion interesting)
I think they are way more like a normal car company than they publicly admit. I make the argument that they are entirely like a normal car company, just a vertically integrated one like Hyundai/Kia.
They’d really like to have more upside than a normal car company due to their software and AI and robotics, but until the day they start selling those things to other companies it’s all unrealized.
Why wouldn't they want to compete with luxury automakers? It's the more profitable market segment. Every mass market car company selling a similarly high unit volume as Tesla has a luxury marquee because it's simple to reuse/modify the same platform, chuck in some more leather, massaging seats, and sound isolation materials, and toss on a fancier badge and marketing campaign.
The Cybertruck is indeed a strange halo car, but it really should have been a truck with more mainstream appeal. Elon psychosis is indeed highly responsible for that truck's failure, along with an inability to deliver the ballpark promises regarding price and range.
As of 2025 before the discontinuation of the Lightning F-150, the Cybertruck actually did not outsell the Lightning despite Ford essentially selling down remaining inventory, while the Silverado EV/Sierra EV (the best EV truck on the market for actual truck usability, IMO) is picking up the most momentum. GM is already outselling the Cybertruck:
Cybertruck is also going to in the future have the “Chrysler PT Cruiser” problem where it’s just about impossible to iterate on the styling for a second generation. Arguably they’ve already run through the Chrysler PT Cruiser lifecycle where it was incredibly cool on release but became something of a joke by the end of its run. Unfortunately with an overstyled car like that it’s difficult to predict whether it’ll be a timeless classic or…a PT Cruiser.
Although I'm wrong about it being closely enough related to the Model Y's platform to really say "it's a Model Y," many of those stainless steel panels are absolutely secured with fasteners and glue.
“The question for your portfolio: who becomes the Corning, the Qualcomm, the TI of this stack?”
and it feels like a reading comprehension exercise, as the answer is right there in their article, even if they miss what the hard part about humanoid robotics is - hint, it’s not the actuators.
The answer is Nvidia. They’ve got the full stack, ready to license to everyone and anyone who wants to jump into autonomous vehicles or robotics - and as the article points out, they already are.
To be honest while I’m not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I struggle to understand how this is true by any measure.
The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint.
My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.
So thunderbird have 2 search bars, one on top, other in directory itself. The top one does what I'd expect browser search bar do, opens new tab and search everywhere, the bottom, again, inside a directory listing, I expect to search within directory.
If you type text, it does that, filtering messages in current view
If you type text and press enter, it does exact same thing the top one does, searchs everywhere, instead of the fucking directory I explicitly clicked and navigated to the other search bar
But fine, that's a quirk, you can get used to it... if not for how bad the opened search window is.
You get a list of messages where there is just enough text to not know whether you care about content of the message and whole thing fits like 4 mails (I get hundreds a day from various system stuff of hundreds of servers) and the ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE is empty and unused, and as it defaults to showing all mail, not mail in directory I was in, it's mostly useless. It also only shows last part of the path, not the whole dir mail is so instead of <A>/<B> dir you just get B
BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE. THEY MADE BETTER VIEW!
Just click on "Show results as list". Its just a list with a browser, same you get with normal directory browsing. It still wasted space, but it's at least usable
Let me just use the search to narrow down the list.... oh, it for some reason stopped searching in message bodies despise "body" option being selected and the same setting working in "main" directory search... and guess what enter does ? Of course, contrary to all good UI/UX design, it will run another tab with search that forgot your original query so when you might think you could narrow it down, nope
If you’re doing a new install and are generally fine with Thunderbird, Betterbird is a good option. It has additional good stuff that Thunderbird is lacking or took longer to get implemented/fixed.
What I don’t like about Thunderbird is that the profiles aren’t portable. It seems like every Thunderbird install is its own unique mess. I’d love to find something that allowed me to move the same configuration around between computers and platforms. I’m not sure if that exists.
I like how Thunderbird has the ability to handle mail, calendar, and contacts, but the implementation especially for calendar leaves a lot to be desired.
My favorite clients are Apple Mail/Calendar for their simplicity and being local-first clients but I’m using macOS less and less these days.
The “new outlook” that’s offered by Microsoft to consumers for free seems to be creepy and syncs your emails to Microsoft servers even if you’re using a third party client.
I’d also say you only need a truly local client if you have multiple email addresses. If you have just one email, let’s say you’re with FastMail or something, their web mail and mobile/desktop apps are great.
Thank you. Am moving away from Outlook and Thunderbird is my default option. Betterbird looks promising, so I'll give it a try (or some of the ones in the thread)
It’s a shame that such fantastic engineering work is buried behind a product with so many annoyances dictated by the marketing/revenue teams.
I wish Dropbox would make some kind of “classic edition” that removed annoyances from their desktop client.
Until then, I’m using Filen. It’s fine, I have some qualms with it but it runs on every platform including Linux, it’s affordable, and end to end encrypted.
It's just a non-intrusive little menu that lives on your system tray. No ads, nags, bloat or unwanted new "features" pushed onto you. It resembles their original software much more than it does the latest garbage to come out of that company.
The context menu shortcuts in File Explorer for Copy Link, Share, and View on Dropbox still work. Sync works. Most of the other crap is gone. It's great. It was so refreshing when it got installed. I would have left Dropbox by now without it.
Wow! It looks maybe a little hard to trust given that it’s clearly designed for older OSes but maybe I’ll play with it since my account is free tier anyway.
(I guess for Linux I could run the headless daemon, I think only the standard desktop experience is available)
What’s even the point of setting a password if anyone can manipulate the system without entering it in?
The entire iPhone OS is on an encrypted volume and that is the right design choice. Not having the password means no access.
There is no general purpose encrypted volume operating system that allows unauthenticated users to perform OS manipulation. If you encrypt your FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows volume, the result is the same: no password, no access.
Your choice is to enter the correct password or wipe the disk.
The fact that Apple doesn’t allow you to set up a system without full disk encryption is not a user freedom issue, it’s a very sensible design choice especially for a device sold primarily to non-technical consumers who don’t understand the security implications of leaving the volume unencrypted.
The issue here isn’t that iOS security is designed wrong, the issue is that Apple broke basic password entry with an update.
Shame on Apple for having such lazy software development practices when it comes to implementing updates like this.
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