I use a 3430 for work, and it’s a piece of shit. The palm rejection on the touch pad is hot garbage. All the ports are on the right side(?!?) which is the side I use the mouse, so it’s inconvenient as hell.

I wish I could get my Latitude 7470 back.

Whether it’s a self-employment situation or a mega-corporation, the same thing holds - it is never worth making a purchase you don’t need in order to “save on taxes”.

For ease of math - let’s say revenue of $10,000, expenses of $5,000, 20% taxes. In that situation, you’ll pay $1,000 in taxes on your $5,000 of net income because yes, you can deduct legit expenses from your taxable business income.

If you decided during that year to spend $1,000 on a computer you don’t need, now you have expenses of $6,000, so you’ll pay taxes instead on $4,000 of net income - 20% of that would lead to a $800 tax liability.

So you spent $1,000 to save $200 - purchasing that computer still cost $800.

Saw the old pi zero wireless come in stock yesterday and immediately disappear.

As someone that uses public transport yes, extra pounds start being a nuissance real fast

I would want the 400 earnestly but the decision to ship it at 4gb is sucks. 8gb and I’d have a gd lab of them.

in eu also

Business laptops are like Business class plane tickets or Marriot hotels. only exist because some corporate black hole is paying for it where $1000 vs. $200 is a rounding error.

What would make it a tax write off? Its just a regular business expense.

I’m aware of the realities of corporate procurement. It’s actually not really about the durability. It’s about the fact that Dell can provide laptops for a 10,000+ person organization and the fact that they will provide five year warranty. I know why things are done the way It does not make me hate my Dell latitude any less.

Wait why wouldn’t that work? I always thought that was exactly how that worked

What a dumb argument. They can expense both a $1000 laptop and a $2000 laptop. The relative difference is still going to be the same. Just because that $2000 effectively becomes $1500 doesn’t mean it’s less than the $1000, which effectively becomes $750. The $2k one is still twice as expensive.

Employess don’t take care of company property because it’s not their property. Hell, some people can’t even take care of their own shit, let alone something lent to them.

its becuse you block it, it requests an ad, connection gets holed. so it retries to fetch the ad ad infinitum.

DDR4 instead of LPDDR5? Good bye.

> without finding the NIC has changed and the drivers I’ve bundled don’t work.

Man, I wish that was true. Sure, they’re not going to change it without saying, but finding that your exact model number is no longer available, and now they can only supply one with slightly different internals due to parts shortages, is not as rare as I would like.

Luckily we’ve moved on from imaging devices, so it’s no longer a problem.

> We use them at work because there’s a 3 year onsite warranty[…]. This is what you are paying for.

That’s misleading. That warranty does not come as standard in the price. You’re paying for a laptop that can have that warranty, if you’re also willing to pay extra for it on top.

> if you are getting other stuff in the deal like on-site service,

You’re not. It’s an additional paid service. They only offer it on certain ranges of laptops, though.

That’s not included in the price, though - it’s an additional service on top with certain products, and you only pay for it if you really need it.

Yes you could, and if you now buy that laptop for every one of your colleagues lets see how the costs will soar. These devices are consumer devices. They are built to be cheap not to be durable and last. IT will have so much shit in supporting these devices. Hell I’ve even thrown out the Microsoft Surface line because the amount of issues we had with those was 10 times of what we had with the other laptops we had. Stop comparing business laptops with consumer grade devices…

The 400 is a good tool to learn basic programming which is admittedly what the goal set out by the foundation all those years ago.

The way I see it there are 3 primary consumer groups of pis: students, makers, and industry. 400 can work for students which is great, the other two need to share the original form factor. It was the makers who saw the potential of the pi and turned it into the richest ecosystem and best selling computer in history. They spent the money and made industry possible. I think to shun the makers for so many years in favour of industry is not right. It’s not a money issue either, makers could consume those 400000 pis a month.

If we want to talk about small business, what about all the little companies that sell pis and make this possible? What about the little companies that designed and built all the HATs and cases? Can’t imagine many people are buying those like they used to.

The competition has not been idle for all these years, there are alternatives. We will have affordable, performant risc-v boards this year. We have the rk3588 boards which are highly performant and will be the platform of choice for years to come. We have the rk3399 boards which are 100% supported in mainline and can be booted completely blob free. The software is not often not as complete as the pi but that is actually changing because they are actually available so we are developing for them.

All in all I’m just sad. I want to develop for the pi but they have decided we aren’t even worth the scraps. I want to spend my money and huge amounts of my free time to make this a better product for everyone but I can’t. I just think they have lost the goodwill of the makers and it will never be what it once was. That’s sad.

I hate ThinkPad for putting the fn key on the right of ctrl

Edit: I meant left

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$400 Steam Deck is a great deal.

Yet again…more insults that aren’t even relevant. I’ll just assume you’re a leftist.

As for who said tax benefits, it’s everyone who isn’t super wealthy, but for different reasons, except for tax professionals, obviously. I’ll give one example for each type of payer.

Ordinary employees benefit from a simplified tax code with reduced time and cost during filing season. An obvious counterpoint is that the IRS could do our taxes for us, and I agree. While, yes, many would pay more, nobody would escape taxes through the various schemes available to those with the ability, or means to hire pros, to hide profits legally.

Business owners would have a double-edged sword, ‘tis true, but the simplification would help many potential entrepreneurs who aren’t mathematically savvy to be able to determine the legitimacy of any business ideas, without acquiring expensive accounting experts. The downside is the obvious issue of being flat taxed on revenue, which was part of the original discussion, could easily lead to severe losses early.

Large corporations will likely lose out since revenue, generally, isn’t as easily hidden as profits. Thus, it’s likely a net loss to them.

As for billionaires, it’s definitely a loss. They’re forced to pay a flat tax on all personal income. The loophole of borrowing money against their corporations’ earnings is no longer viable due to the aforementioned business taxation.

Progressive taxation is wrong. The best way to pay for a system if governance is to have everyone pay an equal percentage. A flat tax both accomplishes that and simplifies the process, thus leading to better efficiency and lower cost of enforcement. You’ll notice that’s the argument for universal health care, lowered costs through efficiency and economies of scale.

As for the consumption angle, shifting our economy to a different form, likely with less unnecessary consumption and, hopefully, to more useful spending of time, should be good from the left’s angle. Reducing consumption, reduces inflation (hopefully leading to a period of deflation to bring our economy in line with main street), while helping the environment.

There’s much more to be said, but that’s enough for tonight.

No one calls that a tax write off. That’s just normal operating expense, of course you can deduct depreciation expenses from taxes but as a business you don’t make decisions based on depreciation expenses and buying computers to save money on taxes. You’re buying assets to help you produce more and grow your profits at the end of the day which is the primary goal of the business. So I would argue those computers will make your employees more productive which will raise profits and taxes at the end of the day, which is perfectly normal.