"If you're building a house, you'll need solid foundations. But you don't design the foundations first and then ask, "What can I build on top of this?"
is brilliant. So simple, so obvious, but so right.
One perfect idea, distilled to it's essence can be easy shared in less than 140 characters. No all idea's but some. It's just a matter of finding the right idea and taking the time to express it correctly.
Having said that, I'm really not a fan of twitter, but that's for completely different and unrelated reasons
This seems to point towards a battery lease solution.
Having to worry about the relative cost of your battery vs the one you are swapping for could make this a bit of a lottery. Also possibly bribing the attendant to give you a much newer one instead of the old creaky pack that no one wants.
It looks like a great place for Tesla to find old batteries and remove them from circulation.
Leasing seems like a good idea (pay X per year and you can use these stations and you'll always end up with a battery of a certain acceptable quality), according to the video though it does cost money.
this seems like the only reasonable solution that would get people to use this. When people buy these cars they should get the option to sign up for this service that includes a yearly cost that covers the maintenance and replacement of batteries. This way they can just let people swap batteries without worrying about getting different batteries and it also alleviates the worries about having to eventually replace all the batteries in the car. If this way is not economically feasible than Tesla is dead already, this is the only option that will make sense to consumers and Tesla needs to make it happen.
I'm assuming the tesla doesn't phone home here but battery swapping also allows tesla to keep a much closer eye on the packs and possibly even swap faulty batteries without owners knowing.
That might be worth it to save the PR of a burnt out tesla from a failed battery.
It would be interesting to try to work out for certain types of people the cost of powering an Tesla.
When you fill up a petrol / diesel engine you have one option: petrol / diesel.
When you fill up an Tesla (and other electric cars have different possibilities) you have:
- Recharging on your home power, which would cost whatever your home power costs but can only be used when you are OK charging over night
- Recharging at one of those Tesla fast stations, which costs nothing, but takes 40min
- Swapping a battery at a Tesla station, which takes 90 seconds and costs $??
The price then depends on the mix of those three strategies, which is determined by your usage (drive to and from work every day, it's your home power etc)
Who says you have to lease one physical battery. Perhaps the battery lease is "a" battery and not "your" battery and Tesla takes care of maintaining them all. And when new batteries come out, you can have the option of upgrading to those. In the future, the station could have three types of batteries for customers to choose from, just like gas.
Sounds like when I get my propane tank filled. They don't care what condition it is in. I get a freshly painted filled one every time. And if I want, I can pay for a bigger one.
I don't believe batteries are solid units - I think they are made up of thousands of individual smaller batteries. So Tesla can probably swap out the smaller pieces in chunks to keep any one battery from getting too bad.
If Microsoft had said that this is a completely digital system where you can download the games, or if preferred pick-up on physical media would the response have been any different.
Another sad day where the indignant vocal minority have spoiled it all for the rest of us.
I don't think there was anything in the early schema that would have impacted the way I use the system (apart for multi day internet or server outages) but plenty of benefits
Game sharing was a huge positive step, even though I felt that most publishers would ignore or disable (like game sharing on the DS).
Not having to swap physical disks would have made life much easier and increased my playing time. I'm fairly lazy when I've settled down for an evening in front of the TV. A usual XBox session involves playing what ever game is in the drive till i get bored (anything from 15 minutes up) switching to something downloaded so i don;t need to get up (normally trials). Getting bored again and flipping to TV or a movie.
The ability to choose from my whole library with leaving my seat would have been a revelation.
Also, my two year old has lost my Forza disk, which really sold this idea.
My biggest issue with digital downloads is the cost.
My experience with Xbox live is that digital releases are launched at a price and stay there, apart from limited time promotions, for a long.
I can go on to Amazon or into HMV and get major releases from a couple of months ago for half the RRP, normally significantly cheaper than download. Plus i can give the disc to one of my friends when i'm done.
As someone who's never owned a mac pro can someone give an indication of how often "power" users are upgrading their CPU.
When I was a windows desktop user (up until about 8 years ago) I found that everytime i wanted upgrade the internals the CPU socket had changed along with the Mobo chipset necessitating a upgrade of not just CPU, but Mobo and memory.
I can understand swapping out gfx cards fairly regularly but are there that main users who completely gut their mac pro on a regular basis?
I've used both Mac Pro and HP Z800 workstations, and currently use a HP Z800 that is probably 3 or 4 years old, but also have used a Mac Pro as recently as 2 years ago.
I've never upgraded a CPU in a workstation.
The CPUs I buy are chosen for performance at a sane (relative) price. I'm currently running a couple of Xeon X5560 CPUs, I think they cost £1,600 each at the time.
I also buy as much RAM as is reasonable for the box, I started this Z800 on 24GB ECC RAM which was dirt cheap (relatively - as many slots on the motherboard meant I could get lots of the smaller sizes which were cheap). When the price later dropped on the larger modules I upped it to 192GB RAM.
As for graphics card... now that is something I upgrade every 2 years or so. I started on a Quadro FX1800 and am now on a Quadro 6000.
Aren't the names of these things wonderful? You know you get more when the number is HUGE!
I think this is basically the norm: Upgrade RAM, upgrade GPU... leave CPU until you replace the whole box.
PS: And whilst I'm here, the Mac Pro is a good design... but for the wrong product. I think this is a new design that is the right design with airflow, cooling and silence in mind and would suit desktop users well... but desktop requirements are not workstation requirements and not being able to replace GPUs is a non-starter. I'll skip this design of Mac Pro entirely, or at least until a very wide range of upgradeable GPUs are available. The RAM is also going to be costly, given the few slots available and the higher price for denser modules. I love the design, but this is the wrong class of computer for the constraints that come from the execution of that design.
Apple does not support CPU upgrades in the Mac Pros. You need non-standard tools to do it, it's not as easy as in a typical PC, and occasionally have to hack a firmware update depending on what Mac Pro model and what new CPU you want to use. The firmware hack is because Apple does not update firmware in older models to support newer CPUs, even though the hardware is otherwise capable of it.
I think people who upgrade their CPU in Mac Pros are a minority of Mac Pro users. I'm probably not a typical Mac Pro user (a "mid-range" tower would've been fine for me), but I bought a 2007 Mac Pro with the least expensive CPU option, then in 2012 upgraded the CPUs in it to extend it's life. The Xeon CPUs I used were ones Apple never offered, but they happen to work in the machine I had.
Also: I upgraded the graphics card several years ago, to an official Apple supported graphics (ATI 5770), but my Mac Pro model isn't officially supported by Apple (but it works fine). I also did a hack to get the current OS X version, Mountain Lion, running on my machine (it isn't supported by Apple). My Mac Pro borders on being a Hackintosh at this point.
Note: For a Mac Pro 1,1 (2006), you may also want to update to the 2,1 firmware depending on what CPU you are using (have to create an account and login on these forums to download the file): http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,1094.0.html
(The 1,1 and 2,1 are identical hardware except for firmware)
Xeons never shipped in sufficient volume to make up for the huge discount that the system assemblers like Apple, Dell, HP &c were getting; I remember looking at upgrading a ~2009 era MP CPU, and you couldn't get the fastest CPUs for significantly less money than just upgrading the entire box.
I could be wrong as I've been out of the powerful-beige-box world for quite a few years. However when I was in it, the upgrade and replace thing was always with consumer grade CPUs and was like this for everyone I knew. The xenon isn't really targeting the same market. Rock solid stability and sustained performance wasn't something the gaming crowd I was in was after. Massive over-clocks, super hot chips (that died hot deaths) and a GPU clocked to the threshold of showing artefacts. The frame rate must stay high at all costs. This is nothing like what the Xeon targets. Just a thought, and again, I may be wrong.
Not a Mac guy, but I believe the Mac Pro normally uses a Xeon chip, which I believe have used fairly stable sockets over the years. For example, socket 604 was used by the Xeon for 5 years, and LGA771 has been supported from 2006 to present.
"If you're building a house, you'll need solid foundations. But you don't design the foundations first and then ask, "What can I build on top of this?"
is brilliant. So simple, so obvious, but so right.