This is the best combo possible. It feels like the ideal trade-off between the autonomy of car ownership and the flexibility of ride-sharing. I've been hearing about this concept for literally over a decade now.
The easier option I'm afraid would have almost been to just not pay your bill.
No, I'm not even kidding here, Verizon has apparently in the last year randomly just been turning on multi-month past due accounts and going "lol we'll just let you come back if you pay your next month's bill like nothing ever happened" and zeroing out thousands+ dollar past due balances in the name of "customer loyalty".
I'm actually frustrated we lost web browser access on gaming consoles, especially in the era of people calling for technical support to their internet providers for "it's too slow" and we can't run a proper speedtest to the world from the console to figure out if it's the gaming provider or the Internet connection...
We'll know the price in two more weeks. I'm yolo'ing it and I can't wait for my little orange-wrapped pickup.
So far their manufacturing and progress videos are quite impressive. The fact there's 25-50+ basically production-ready prototypes if not more now driving around their factory and doing testing compared to most of the other vaporware companies out there has me holding out strong.
(How many Elios are out there doing testing? How many TELOs? Oof.)
Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.
To be fair to Ford, the Maverick launched in 2022 right before a period of accelerated inflation, especially in the car industry.
You’d be hard pressed to find any new vehicle that hasn’t seen a significant price increase since that time.
It’s still a truck you can get for $26k-28k and is only about $3k more than the cheapest cars sold in America.
I think your sentiment is an understandable bit of cynicism around EVs, and one that US consumers have felt for a while. It seems like the whole concept of the EV is dead. Nobody wants it, carmakers are pulling back.
Meanwhile, EVs are exploding in popularity and value basically all the other markets outside of the United States.
In my opinion, the idea that a good and affordable EV product will not become mainstream is sticking around because American car buyers have been starved of new EV models due to a market of weak demand and revoked incentives. This is going to change soon, and this change will hit the consumer market relatively suddenly. A lot of the cost challenges with EVs have evaporated.
In other words, yeah, Ford is easily going to make a $30,000 EV pickup. I totally believe it.
Remember when Toyota said they’re done bothering with EVs? Then all of a sudden the 2026 bz refresh is a legit EV, and now the new Lexus ES is launching with the EV model being the highest performance and cheapest model.
The Rivian R2 is yet another huge deal about to launch on the premium side of the market. I’d have a hard time figuring out why what I would choose something like a gasoline BMW X3 over the R2 - they’re pretty much in the same price range.
In other words, the era of EVs costing $10-20k more than an equivalent gasoline car is abruptly ending.
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
So basically people from Africa won't be allowed to use their phones in the USA by order of the government? (If they can even get into the country without ending up in an ICE camp, of course)
IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime.
Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience.
Amazon's toxic culture finally caught up to them. Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down into producing just abomination after abomination of any business besides, just throwing bodies at AWS.
I'm trying to think of a single Amazon-made product I've used that has a good UI/UX. I guess their main shopping website gets the job done (I would argue their messy product categorization would harm my UX rating of them) but their iOS app is one of the ugliest thing I have installed on my phone.
> I know there are good product people inside Amazon
For UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?
This is true. Amazon Seller Central, AWS Partner Central, and Glue Databrew are all Amazon productivity-style apps, and I hated every minute of using them. Quicksight is okay these days, but it took them a decade to get there. They really struggle outside of devtools and consumer-facing web experiences.
When AWS had meetings with us we’d insist on setting up the call ourselves to avoid using the steaming pile of garbage that was Chime. AWS folks confided that they didn’t mind and weren’t thrilled about being forced to use dogfooded stuff that literally seemingly no customers wanted to buy.
American Airlines captain Warran VanderBurgh once called this phenomenon "the children of the magenta"[1] in his talk on automation dependency in the 90s.
I wonder what we'd call the children today in hindsight and what line they're chasing now...
I noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747
Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...
Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!
What is the purpose of refurbishing old phones like this? Is it just to sell to enthusiasts/collectors? In most of the world, 3G has been shut down and 2G is either already shut down or in the process of being shut down, so you wouldn't be able to get much practical use out of the phone.
Tell you what though, I would jump on a modern N95. I only really want a basic phone with a good camera, and sure, Python. Only need LTE and a thinner form factor.
It's probably just old stocks and newly built surplus parts. People don't care too much about book values of unsold items in parts markets in China and/or third world Asian countries.
fun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned.
OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.
EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
That's actually a very interesting idea - do you have any good resources for setting this up ?
There are some cars that can only access 3G for certain features and it would be cool to test around and see what my vehicle can do and if I want to disable it for reliability reasons
My powerful Android tablet is limited to 72mbps link due to a quirk with the way the XDA developer implemented wifi support on the lineageos branch of my tablet, meaning the device can't see the region specific 5ghz band of the modem of my ISP is outputting, so it can only connect to the 2,4ghz band of that SSID meaning it's stuck to 72mbps.
And despite this, it works ok for what I used it: Brave web browsing, youtube via newpipe, Plex and Jellyfin streaming.
Like I'm bummed I don't get the Gigabit and Wifi 6 speeds of the router and my internet plan is theoretically capable of, but somehow 72mbps seems sufficient in most of my use cases of that device so .. yay advanced video codecs I guess!?.
> OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
Indeed, but good luck setting something like that up and not upset a legitimate cell tower or other user of a frequency band that can be spoken by LTE equipment.
I would love a modern version of the N900/N810. If I could get one with a recent ARM processor, good slide out keyboard, and running a more desktop-oriented Linux install (meaning more hacking/developer friendly than just Android), I'd be seriously tempted. Sadly, I assume the current component prices would mean it would be too expensive to be realistic.
As an original N900 user, I got one of the eBay "refurbed" N900s from China I think a few years ago for fun. It was a piece of junk, literally, like arrived with broken keyboard etc. A clear case of false advertising. I got a full refund.
YMMV. I was really thinking I was buying a proper refurbed N900. Maybe they're out there. Buyer beware.
I had an N900 when it came out, after falling in love with the N810, one of my favorite devices to this day, I'd buy a new one with modern guts in a heartbeat. The N900 was junk. The build quality was terrible and the software was half baked. Right after it released Nokia said they were cancelling everything about it and pretended to care about software going forward but didn't. In the VERY short time I had one I had the ear piece speaker break (common), the magnets fall out (also common), the screen slide break (also common!), and even when it worked the slide felt janky and the OS was extremely slow. They never fixed MMS, despite promises.
https://vay.io/
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