In my experience the Snapdragon X Elite is about the same as an M2. It's got slightly worse battery life but still a battery that blows the competition out the water.
Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices
Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores
> you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc
If RAM is all you need on a M_ air type of machine sure, but the selling/buying point of apple silicon's unified memory is mainly around GPU/memory bandwidth at a low energy consumption level, which is yet to be rivaled (maybe AMD recently took steps towards there). If one's workload optimises for CPU-only and very high RAM, apple silicon was and probably will be the worst choice cost-wise.
Also, for me, the no-no reason for snapdragon x elites until now is having to use windows, plus, as it turned out, the early unreliability of the actual products sold by laptop manufacturers.
But the market has opened up, so prob we will see more competition towards there, which is great. Apple's good but not doing anything magic that others cannot eventually do to some extent. Though I am far more optimistic for AMD than Qualcomm tbh.
Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year
In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)
If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life
People in favor of Iceland joining the EU should be honest and transparent that it's a pro inflation policy. In fact, Icelandic inflation would probably skyrocket.
The higher Icelandic rate is set for Icelanders by Icelanders in order to bring their 4.8% inflation rate down to the 2.5% target.
If Iceland adopted the EU's interest rate which is mainly set for France and Germany, that would be a 5% interest rate cut which is a massive stimulus. Icelandic inflation would skyrocket and there would be no chance of hitting the 2.5% target.
The US Dollar works because of massive fiscal transfers from states on the coasts to states in the interior. The US also allows whole areas to deindustrialize like Detroit in order to solve the unavailability of currency adjustments between states.
Are Icelanders willing to subsidize Greece? Are they willing to forgo their ability to devalue their currency like in 2008? Without devaluation that means deindustrialization.
For all the above reasons, Iceland joining the EU would be the stupidest and most economically illiterate decision in it's history.
There isn't a simple functional causal relationship between interest rates, inflation and currency rates.
And in fact, I think you have it exactly backwards in this case.
Many countries have dollarized their economies - replacing a local currency supported by high interest rates with the US dollar which has even lower interest rate than EUR - as a tool to tame inflation or kill hyper-inflation. Other - small non-EU countries have adopted the Euro for the same reason.
And with the same result - a massive fall in inflation.
This isn't just theory, this has been observed to work over and over again.
Sorry but you have it backwards. The examples you have in mind are South American and Eastern European countries 20 years ago ie emerging markets struggling to maintain a currency peg.
Iceland doesn't suffer from hyperinflation and it's already got an established central bank and trusted institutions. Lowering the interest rate in this environment would 100% lead to more inflation.
Plus Iceland relies on currency devaluation to cope with shocks. It would be crazy to give this up.
> People in favor of Iceland joining the EU should be honest and transparent that it's a pro inflation policy. In fact, Icelandic inflation would probably skyrocket.
It would not, simply because joining the Euro Area isn't a one time thing, but a series of steps, and they wouldn't move forward as long as the inflation is higher than in the rest of the EU.
> If Iceland adopted the EU's interest rate which is mainly set for France and Germany, that would be a 5% interest rate cut which is a massive stimulus.
Interests rate is only one of the factors involved in controlling inflation, and the fact that Italy has been able to adjust its economic policy in order to align its inflation figures to Maastricht requirements and join the Euro Area is a good proof of that.
> People should also look into Optimal Currency Area theory popularized by Paul Krugman
It has been popularized by Robert Mundell in the 60s, for which he got the Sveriges Riksank prize (the "Nobel") in 1999, not by Paul Krugman.
> For all the above reasons, Iceland joining the EU would be the stupidest and most economically illiterate decision in it's history.
The creation of the Euro is IMHO the "most economically illiterate decision in […] history" but moat of your arguments above miss the mark.
Inflation will always be higher in Iceland, because they have a very specific pro union setup which guarantees salary increases each year. As a result of the unions, Icelanders work very few hours and earn some of the highest wages in the world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Confederation_of_Lab... It won't (I hope) be following Italy as an economic model.
By "popularized" I mean brought to a modern audience in Krugman's New York Times column. It's Mundell's theory of course.
Interest rates are the main way to fight inflation. Glad we agree that the Euro is a silly currency union!
> Inflation will always be higher in Iceland, because
They cannot join Euro until inflation stops being higher, because that's simply how it works: countries must achieve “convergence criterias” before they can enter the single currency.
In theory EU and the Euro area are the same, because the TFEU says so. But in practice it's more complicated than this as Danes negotiated and opt-out clause during the negotiation of the treaty of Maastricht, and even though such clause isn't open to new entrants, in reality nothing prevents negotiations to eventually lead to such an outcome.
The case of Sweden is interesting though, they don't have an opt-out clause so they are obligated to adopt the Euro eventually, but they exploited a loophole by not joining the newest version of European Exchange Rate Mechanism after the 1999, which prevents their entry in the Euro.
Of course, the EU often ignores its own treaties. So that's not a hard guarantee. But the first rule of the EU is that everyone has to pretend it follows its own rules even when it doesn't, so it's not like Icelandic leaders can just announce they'll join the EU but won't adopt the Euro.
> Since the convergence criteria requires participation in ERM II for a minimum of two years, and non-eurozone member states are responsible for deciding when to join ERM II, they can delay their compliance with the criteria by not joining ERM II.
> Denmark has a treaty opt-out from the obligation to join the eurozone even if it complies with all criteria.
This is angels-on-pins level stuff, though. In normal English lax enforcement of a rule doesn't mean you're not required to obey it. It just means you're gambling that you won't be put under sufficient pressure to crack your resolve.
All EU countries have to publicly commit to joining the Euro and doing the work to do so. They are therefore required to join it, under any reasonable interpretation of the treaty language. The fact that some countries realized they could just not do what they agreed to and/or hack their economy to avoid the entry criteria, without any consequences, is good evidence that the treaties are indeed meaningless. But lax enforcement isn't the same as no requirement. The EU Commission could change their stance at any time.
It has been a while since I last looked at this, but from memory a pre-condition for Euro adoption is spending a certain amount of time within some formal "convergence mechanism", however there is no obligation to join that convergence mechanism.
I think you are required to join it, but proceeding to actual Euro rollout requires a currency to be within a certain range for a period of time, and that requires active intervention in currency markets. Governments can just either not do it or claim they can't intervene enough to stay on target.
Because the Icelandic krona is basically universally agreed by everyone to be garbage monopoly money that only stays because of the oligarchs that are in power.
Also, yeah, the Danish Krona is pegged to the euro at ~7.45 so there is little incentive to switch over.
Why? It’s in the EUs interest to not create horror stories about what happens when a country joins. It makes a lot more sense to make Iceland decide on the timeline for adopting the Euro themselves, so the transition is more likely to be smooth. And this is exactly what the policy for adopting the Euro has been.
A shock therapy Euro adoption is not in the interest of anyone.
> massive fiscal transfers from states on the coasts to states in the interior
That's because of how US politics work. Less populous states have disproportionately higher political power. It's not a monetary policy thing. It's a core difference between US and European politics.
> The US also allows whole areas to deindustrialize
That's because Americans are free to live and work where they choose.
There's a lot more nuance here, if you look at Obama's memoir, he writes quite frankly about the dilemma of propping up the US auto industry with government dollars. When they (US automakers) asked for bailouts, he found them quite mismanaged, but if they went under a large portion of the US economy would find itself unemployed.
EU needs to evolve to become closer to USA (imo). Not be a loose union with a central suggestion organ, but a real federation, with unified laws, army etc, provisions to punish sabotage and collaborators with enemies of such new federation and so on. Then internal monetary transfers would make sense, because Iceland and Greece would just be two internal regions.
PS: of course it's ok if that never happens. But then EU can't expect to compete, due to not having good properties of truly decentralized collection of countries and neither of a true federation. Any startup will/is be hobbled by the mandatory EU law framework and structure, but won't benefit from the single law set or single language because those don't exist in EU.
I wonder in the coming years if we'll see the US actually become more like the EU. I expect there to be significant competition between Texas and California, in terms of industry, polity and philosophy. As the US continues to be internally fragmented politically, we're bound to see states compete actively, sometimes even to the detriment of other states. While we won't see a significant fragmentation like the EU, we will see a country that's so internally divided, there would be saboteurs and collaborators with enemies. We're kind of already seeing this, for example Texas and Florida shipping their illegals into Massachusetts and NY, states being firmly in the control of one party, with no room for switching governments, and the ever present question of states' rights.
Fortunately, even if hypothetically Texas and California will diverge even more and implement even more diverging laws, they will still be more similar than two random EU countries. They will have common legal language, they will have common federal law applied to both, they will have the same freedom of personal movement as exists today. All of the more important things for the business. I'm talking about business outlook here, not personal freedoms or other problems applied to individuals.
Let's imagine for a second you want to create a startup making cell phones, or cars, or TVs etc. You base in say Texas for the taxes, but workforce can freely move to the Texas from California. They have zero language barrier, they have zero legal barrier. Legal, highly skilled immigrants in California can freely move to Texas for work. The product you make has to conform with both Cali and Texas laws, bud federal ones are unified. It needs to be localized for 1 single language. And it can be immediately sold to the 350mil market with minimal changes. Now if you do the same in France, you are limited with French workforce, because of the language barrier and legal barriers. Then to sell to the whole EU you need to comply with 24 laws and localize to 21 language. And support all that. EU company is less competitive on this basis alone, plus USA doing brain drain (which they foolishly want to limit now) is not helping.
That's exactly what I meant by the US becoming more fragmented (but not as fragmented as the EU). There's going to be a lot of separation and distinction between states, including some cultural, but also regulatory and policy-wise. The only thing differentiating it from the EU is the language bit (which is now increasingly solvable with AI translations).
Exactly, which is akin to a country self-sabotaging itself and dividing itself internally. It's a very unique problem that frankly doesn't exist elsewhere in the world.
It will never happen because maybe the EU is faaaaar more diverse than the US? Yes there were/are more than one ethnic group, but it's always been massively dominated by Anglo-Americans, culturally as politically.
The US states are a mosaic between themselves, and I would say that they diverge more aggressively than the EU in terms of politics, philosophy and policy.
In the EU, you don't see countries arguing about which bathrooms people should use, or what model of creation they should teach children in schools. Yes, there is linguistic separation, but there is very little political and even cultural distinction between European countries, save for some hot button issues like immigration (which is also seeing alignment now).
Ask any European what European culture is, and you'll get a fair melange of what make Europe European (they might mention elements such as architecture, classical music, heck Roman Empire even). Ask an American about American culture and you'll get definitely different answers between Americans from even two red states.
The US isn't the only possible model for states to cooperate as part of a larger entity. There are many examples of federations with little fiscal transfers - which are also highly successful - Switzerland is an extreme example.
Switzerland is a perfect example, thank you. Even without going deep into laws and nuance, the mere fact that we are referring to it by a single name and consider a mostly single entity at least as far as outside is concerned, tells us all. That's what EU needs to become (again, only in my opinion) - a bigger Switzerland.
Startups and bigger companies too, up to international megacorporations. Companies get more workforce and faster time to market for less cost. EU gets better financial regulation (not more, but better). Competitive products means competitive salaries, which slows brain drain and allows for better export to import ratio. It is always better to export as much refined and hitech product as possible.
I recently ran extensive performance tests comparing WireGuard-based VPNs against traditional solutions, and the results were eye-opening. On 10 Gbps networks, WireGuard implementations achieved speeds that absolutely demolished older VPN protocols.
My testing covered multiple scenarios: same-VPC, cross-region, and cross-cloud (DO/GCP). I standardized the configurations across tests, using machines with 1-4 vCPUs and 1-8GB RAM.
The most fascinating finding was Tailscale's behavior under load. While it initially showed promising speeds around 5.25 Gbps, things got interesting when I started tweaking MTU settings. Performance became highly unstable, sometimes plummeting to just 35.6 Mbps. This was particularly surprising given Tailscale's reputation.
The 20x performance gap between WireGuard implementations and traditional VPNs really highlights how far VPN technology has come. Pure kernel WireGuard and Netmaker are clearly leading the pack, pushing close to the theoretical limits of 10 Gbps networks.
Interesting, but OpenVPN can be configured in many many ways, whereas Wireguard can do fairly little in comparison (even though it does its things remarkably well).
Needless to say, the way you configure OpenVPN affects its performance.
So I would like to ask, how did you configure OpenVPN?
Because the hard part isn't the compute, vector dbs, or whatever. It's the huge evergreen index of the whole internet. Getting over the hump of "every site lets your crawler work, gives good results to it, and bypass paywalls" is a massive barrier.
