Your comment is the first I’ve seen even hinting at the thought that the foldable iPhone or the touchscreen MacBook is revolutionary. Even Apples own announcements and marketing seem somewhat subdued on this.

Where are all these people claiming it’s actually revolutionary?

The call to lower prices seem a bit odd after the MacBook Neo. Apple can provide good value. Sometimes it’s through good prices. Sometimes it’s by building quality products that last a long time and get software updates for a long time. Though it should be said they often mess up on the quality part of this (hello butterfly switches… and now the iPhone Duo hinge?).

I see comments all the time now writing how their M1 MacBook is still their primary laptop. Hell, I myself have a 2015 MacBook Pro I still use occasionally.

Yes, they can also sell you $700 Mac Pro wheels. If you want to waste money for a status symbol they will gladly let you. But generally, it’s just a matter of avoiding the vanity items, avoid the upgrades, and perhaps don’t buy the first gen products when they’re brand new.

The other side of Apples focus on image (and on providing software updates) is that their products generally retain a lot of value in the second hand market. That’s actually a rarely acknowledged pro-consumer effect IMO. It’s good for both those buying and the ones selling. It lowers the effective price of those who buy new, if they want to upgrade after a few years. That 2015 MBP I mentioned was second hand btw.

China is still benefiting from their incredible demographic dividend. Comparing us to them is misleading. It should be said that the west built all its reactors during its demographic dividend periods as well, maybe that’s relevant, maybe not. But food for thought.

The lifespan of the reactors are not that interesting. What matters are long term costs. With renewable power plants you generally replace a larger part of the power plant when you repower the power plant. But that’s because they don’t need a huge concrete structure and building to contain them, if you replace the part doing the work that’s already most of it. Repowering a renewable power plant is significantly cheaper than building a new one from scratch. How that pans out in the long term remains to be seen. But most likely costs will fall further as the world moves to mostly maintaining/repowering what it has rather than building new sites from scratch.

The size of the nuclear fuel (end product) is not at all interesting unless you’re building a space ship. I should say that future space exploration is one reason why I hope nuclear power stays alive in some form.

This fuel comes from ore. You need ~10tons of ore for 1kg of fuel. For the HALUE fuel needed by the SMR reactor that are supposed to save the industry you need ~40tons of ore. Still much better than oil and gas, by a wide margin. But it’s fundamentally not a renewable process and there are significant concerns around the supply chain of this fuel. Read up on France’s issues and concerns with its supplies from Niger and Namibia.

Fun fact btw: nuclear power contributes directly to global warming from the heat they emit. The effect is surprisingly significant. All thermal power plants equate to about the climate gas emissions from airplane travel if I remember correctly. The only upside is the effect disappears instantly when the power plant shuts down. But this is not an effect we can afford to multiply when we’re on the precipice of ecological collapse due to a warming planet.

Well, yeah if we had bet more on nuclear two decades ago and kept building them, this would have been relevant.

But now renewables are expanding at a rate faster than nuclear power ever did, and unlike nuclear the growth rate is not flattening out yet. I don’t see how nuclear is much more than an irrelevant distraction when it comes to new energy production (existing is another matter, please don’t shut them down).

The base load problem is essentially solved IMO. Just a few years ago the duck curve was made to be insurmountable, and now it’s basically fully solved. Long term months long storage is also partially solved for colder regions where they are the most relevant.

But most importantly, this all ties into all the work we have to do to decarbonise industry. We have to make a lot of hydrogen and build a lot of electrical industrial heat production (which comes with free energy storage). Modern gas power plants are already hydrogen ready. We just need to build lots and lots of hydrogen electrolysis plants (for steel and ammonia production) near the gas power plants, and put some aside to use during dunkelflaute. That means many places already have much of the infrastructure needed to balance 100% renewables.

As dumb as Germanys shut down of nuclear has been, I think their strategy will be considered brilliant in 30 years time. The reason they have relied so much on gas is they need a that gas for the industry they specialised in anyway. The trick now is just to transition them to hydrogen and electric heating. There are already factories and fertiliser plants with on-site hydrogen production. It has started.

The code, or parts of the code, may not be under copyright, but why does that matter? I suppose in the rare cases when it leaks we could freely use the AI generated parts of it, but how do you untangle the AI stuff from the human written stuff? It’s a minefield for a for-profit company. And for the open source community it doesn’t really matter since AI can reverse engineer pretty much any game now and generate copyright free code from it.