I think starlink is more than that as even more things rely on a (good) Internet connection ingeneral than rely on satellites, and traditional connectivity methods leave many people underserved even in countries like America let alone the world.

It definitely has its problems, if nothing else that it’s privately owned and anyone who wanted to compete would then massively amplify those problems.

it sounds like the unlikely outcome of two reasonable policies.

1. you might not get back the device you send in - say it’s a simple broken screen and they’re willing to cover it. its easier to just send you an already refurbished identical model and then toss your phone into the queue to be fixed later.

2. unauthorized parts may violate your warranty and whatever you send in isn’t going to get repaired.

They should still just return it. but if you know it’s not covered you shouldn’t really send it in and it makes sense to cover their ass policy wise even if they do make an effort to just return them.

It depends on the package really. Sometimes you’re better off without the fixes that occurred in the last 2 years if it means avoiding the new bugs in the last 2 years.

IMO the more you try to stick to the latest releases, the more important it is to continue to stay updated. but every upgrade is a chance for new bugs or just breaking changes, so for new users starting with a stable distro is a good choice.

… except for browsers, where you both need the newest features but REALLY need the newest fixes.

There’s a lot of things that make the Bluetooth experience better… it’s just almost all focused on mobile phones, maybe apple laptops if you stay in their walled gardens, but definitely not stock windows.

I say stock because if you do use windows and want to use Bluetooth you can improve things with a third party driver https://www.bluetoothgoodies.com/a2dp/ it’s still not great but at least you can use better codecs than default

for earbuds it’s useful as many modern phones can share their battery to wirelessly charge another device, so you can top up your earbuds off of your phone while you’re out somewhere and not need to lug around a charger and cable.

For wirelessly charging phones, I agree the pad style chargers defeat a lot of the point, but I am a fan of the dock-style wireless chargers. I have one at my desk and can just glance at my phone to see notifications, and I have to set my phone somewhere anyways, so this lets me top up my phone without really thinking about it.

Yes. and why it’s wildly complicated on Windows machines where you have an audio output device for headphones and for headset, and once something starts using the mic the output device itself changes.

So joining team chat in a game will either make audio sound horrible or break it entirely if you had specified the output device instead of using default device.