That is a shame, I figured Harris would be the last small shop left.
Unfortunately, I have seen a few family owned shops taken over by a "large" company, namely Trek. Others have just closed. I only know of one or 2 family owned shop left these days.
If you're into this, you may be into a series on the Usagi Electric YouTube channel where he's building a homebrew computer based on the TMS9900 processor from the TI-99/4A.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more investment from Indian firms. India is really trying to raise their game in the tech economy beyond the services industry. You don't need the most cutting-edge chip fabrication equipment to manufacture these processors.
The Indian government was actually a very early adopter, they had one of the first RISC-V processors that wasn't based on the vanilla Rocket designs, starting back in like 2016 or so. Unfortunately they made some other weird decisions, like not supporting compressed instructions so the chip wasn't compatible with any mainstream Linux distros, and I don't think the project really went anywhere. Although looking at Wikipedia the project seems to still exist.
Fragmentation in the non-x86 world really hurts adoption. RPi presents a very well documented configuration that can be used as a target for development.
RISC-V is going through this exact same problem right now. All of the current implementations have terrible documentation, and tailoring Linux for each of these is proving to be difficult. All of these vendors include on-board devices that have terrible doc and software support.
ARM has a mitigation for this called SystemReady. It's basically "does your board support UEFI enough to usefully boot a battery of generic ARM Linux images". The Raspberry Pi can be made SystemReady, and Radxa also makes SystemReady-compliant SBCs you can buy.
RISC-V would do well to adopt and promote a similar spec.
Data point: I'm in the US on an old pre-paid plan that gets me 5GB per month at fast speed, dropping down to unlimited "2G" speed after that cap is hit, which I've done only twice in the past 12 years. $30 per month, and I always "bring my own device" (ie, I only buy unlocked phones, not through the carrier). I haven't shopped around for a while.
You should shop around! Some of the MVNOs are offering unlimited fast data at a similar price these days, and something similar to what you have now for cheaper.
Visible here, as well. I've been paying $25.00 per month, flat (no extra fees/taxes) for years.
It's perhaps worth noting for others that there are 3 different tiers of service with Visible, ranging from $25 to $45 -- although all 3 are "unlimited."
(I can't tell the difference between them, myself, with my phone in my use.)
I second this! I switched to mint recently. They are offering unlimited data including hotspot for $15/mo for up to a year if you prepay. I think then it goes to their standard rate which is $30/mo for unlimited, or $15/mo for 5gb.
Yeah, I feel like the major providers must be coasting on people who just dont bother looking into it and ares till on the same $100 plan they've been on forever (this was me until recently) and people who really want new flagship phones all the time but can't afford them outright, so they finance with a postpaid plan.
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