I mean if Elon / Tesla could give me a high-end Android phone with the latest hardware, a high res screen, a 3.5" headphone jack, and a micro-SD card slot I might be tempted.
But that also means I have to find a major carrier that would even let you bring it on their network. Back when I bought my LG G7 (5 years ago), Verizon wouldn’t let you bring the previous gen LG G6 as an unlocked phone - ie paid for out right. I mean technically it’d work fine, because my damn LG G3 had been working on Verizon up to that point. Grumble, gumble.
The only significant selling point of such a phone would be “endorsed by Elon Musk”. For all their obvious passion, I’m not sure that Musk fan-boys constitute a large enough market to justify the expense of tooling up a production line.
Maybe he could do some kind of cross-licensing deal with the folks behind the Freedom Phone.
Bandcamp (the example I picked for reasons) are a big company and well able to handle credit cards, I have to buy on their website because Apple are rent seeking scum, and they do it without ripping off artists.
For this specific case I get it. To me the original Roadster is only mildly impressive. It’s not a ground up design, which irks me when articles talked about the best handling EV on the road. Well shouldn’t be? They were literally buying the best handling small petrol car on the road and converting it into an EV. $45k for a Lotus Elise and $55k for the conversion. Obviously, there was engineering involved, but not nearly as much as say a Model S Plaid. So, in a way Elon is right, it really came down to gambling their money on the longevity that they could make Tesla something.
It’s a good thing I have a VPN…
Joking aside I’ve thought about it and loading a custom ROM, but again it comes back to being let on to a major carrier and not having to do prepaid. The older I get the more I do want things to just work. While I hate to use my wife’s iPhone I get the draw of it.
I didn’t quite follow that first time, do carriers force you to get phones from them in the Us rather than just rock up with your own?
That’s mad.
Chinese phones are Android so they are leaking your data anyway. Arsebook, Google etc are going to, here in Ireland the carriers obviously break the law in data retention.
Oh, its definitely too high a fee, especially when you consider that Apple gains as much value from a developer participating in their environment as the developer does. The fee should be about 5%, tops, to cover the actual services Apple is providing. The current price is ridiculous and is just a made up number.
Do not underestimate the internal costs associated with CC handling though - I have moved fortune 500 companies off of handling their own CC processing because it made business sense. It is really a business unto itself and should not be left to amateurs (or experts in other fields)
ETA: a LOT of companies outsource CC payments to another firm (even large ones). The issue is that Apple requires you to use theirs, at an outrageous markup over everything else available.
Out of curiosity, I looked up what other mobile OS he could look into in the event that Apple and Google (rightly) decide to remove support for Twitter. Most are, unsurprisingly, Android clones. There is an open source Linux OS that might be a good move for him, especially as it would appeal to tech bros. But how sad would that be?
It’s never going to come down to it, but creating his own phone would probably require finding more investors. After this debacle, who is going to monetarily bet on Musk?
IIRC the innovation was with using off-the-shelf 18650 cells, putting the innovation into pack management, bringing the cost down because at the time lithium ion batteries were obviously better for EVs but too expensive.
ETA: I always had it in my head that the original AC Propulsion tzero was the “real” original Roadster, so yes by the time Tesla actually made one the innovation was done.
A better way of looking at electric vehicle fires is to compare the number of fires per 100,000 vehicles sold. Researchers from insurance deal site Auto Insurance EZ compiled sales and accident data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the National Transportation Safety Board. The site found that hybrid vehicles had the most fires per 100,000 sales at 3474.5. There were 1529.9 fires per 100k for gas vehicles and just 25.1 fires per 100k sales for electric vehicles.
It’s not the OS - it’s the app ecosystem that it runs.
For better or worse, there are exactly two alternatives: Apple and Android.
I doubt that a serious third option will emerge, simply because you’re not going to get the sheer number of developers on it. Microsoft tried with Windows Phone and failed so hard they took Nokia down with them.
So if he wants to make the ElonPhone, it would almost by necessity have to be Android.
(Yes, I know Nokia is still around, but their mobile phone business was sold to Microsoft.)
He tweets from an iPhone, too, so… yeah, fuck Muskrat. We already know he doesn’t design shit himself, so what’s he going to do? Buy up the remnants of the Microsoft phone team and try and recreate that?
He’s fucking toast. All he has left are childish threats and sticking his tongue out. Let it die, folks. Just move on from twitter.
I’m suddenly seeing a lot of “This was Elon’s plan all along!” Tweets, and it’s hilarious. (Especially after the utter incompetence Musk has shown at Twitter in the last month.) Even if this was his plan (and it so clearly wasn’t), as plans go, it’s incredibly dumb: pay four times more for Twitter than it was worth, fight it in court, lose, saddle the company with far more debt than it can pay off, slash all the workers (in unnecessarily illegal and therefore expensive ways) who keep it working and bring in revenue, alienate advertisers directly and send more fleeing, bring back the Nazis (and a flood of scammers) to alienate the remaining users and break the Apple store’s TOS, break European law (necessitating Twitter’s eventual removal from those markets), all to… release a phone? That presumably will be the only way to get the Twitter app? (You could still use it via a web browser, of course.) People are going to give up their existing phones and all their apps for what would likely be a cheap Android phone with one app? Or is Musk going to create a full phone app ecosystem with its own marketplace? Sure…
It is, at best, another “Boring company” situation, where Musk makes a bunch of promises he never intends to keep to sabotage something else. Except I don’t remotely see it working that way in this case, so it’s almost certainly just Musk getting high and shit-posting.
Pure Dunning-Kruger on his part - again. He doesn’t just have to make a phone, and an OS, he’s got to make an app marketplace… all of which compete with Apple and Android. (And then sell a couple hundred million of those phones in a year.) I don’t even think he realizes that. The only question is if he’s actually going to throw away some money on this hare-brained scheme before he realizes it’s not going to work out for him.
I’ve been reading various articles and posts that came out recently from (former) SpaceX people, and it very much sounds like a case of despite Elon, not because of. It sounds like there’s a fair number of people whose job it is to keep Elon from doing something dumb - managing him, steering him toward smart decisions (and away from doing generally dumb things), and he’s still a bad influence, making unreasonable demands, changing his mind frequently, etc. that all causes working difficulties and high stress for employees. The only reason people put up with it is because they feel they’re doing important work.
If Musk manages anything, it’ll be a skin-deep rebrand of some existing, janky Chinese Android phone anyways. But at a considerable mark-up for the rebranding.
Now that’s exciting! So many things that propelled Twitter forward actually came from third party apps. Either the app maker themselves made it, or they formalized something that users were doing. Twitterific made hashtags work, extended retweets, and (I believe) invented pull-to-refresh. Established developers turning their attention to Mastodon, and other activity pub services, will be great!
But will you be able to get the Play Store on it? The only other mainstream app store for Android is the Fire one, and it suuuuuuuuucks. People aren’t going to line up for a phone you can only side load apps on to.
