Posts by Tom Kerrigan 6 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Saying these phones cost $99-$199 is like saying you can buy a car for $0 because dealerships offer "no money down" deals.
Eventually you have to pay for the phone/car.
I suppose advertising the phones as costing over $1680 would not be good for sales. (Two years on the "cheap" $70/mo. plan.)
How many years are left on this asinine Apple-AT&T deal?
Didn't think it would matter to anybody... but, the Volt's 16 kWh battery actually operates between 30% and 80% charge... first of all, it's bad (even fatal) for Li-ion batteries to be fully charged or discharged... second, when running on gas, the Volt does not completely recharge the battery but maintains a 30% charge, and there needs to be a buffer between ~20%-30% to provide bursts of full-power acceleration when running on gas. There is also presumably a buffer towards the higher end to allow for some regenerative braking after a charge.
(The reason for the 30% charge target is that your "electric car" is not really running on electricity if the gas engine has recharged the battery by the time you pull into your driveway...)
What this boils down to is that 8 kWh of charge => the advertised 40 mile range. If you add another 16 kWh battery, it won't need the same percentage of buffering, so your range will end up being closer to 120 miles than 80 miles.
The "small" battery + gas engine combo is an advantage.
Most people drive ~30 miles/day in the US. The 40 mile battery covers this perfectly.
If you put another 16 kWh battery in the car, you roughly triple the range (complicated explanation, won't bother), but you also increase the weight of the car by 400 more lbs, you increase the price by at least $10,000, and you triple the time it takes to charge... i.e., 18 hours via a regular 110V US wall socket.
How is this desirable, again?
Maybe the bit I wrote about the Volt in my last post went unnoticed.
Chevy is releasing an electric car, called the Volt, in 2010. It will solve all of the issues and complaints raised here. You can go to the site http://www.gm-volt.com for details.
* It is being built on the next-gen Cobalt platform, meaning it's the size of a regular "compact" American sedan (midsize to Europeans)
* Its 0-60 time will be around ~8 seconds and it will have a top sustained speed of 100 MPH
* It will have an electric range of 40 miles but can also run on gas because it has a small, built-in gas generator. (When running on gas, it gets 50 MPG.)
* Its battery will not be excessively heavy or expensive because it is relatively small--only meant to cover the typical 40 mile use case
* The battery has a novel chemistry, available TODAY from A123 (not some Stanford research project), which is safer, longer-lasting, and more tolerant of low temperatures than typical lithium-ion batteries
In short, the whole electric car debate has more or less been resolved and in 2 years there will be very little reason NOT to buy an electric car.
Hopefully Google, with its open phone platform and its intention of creating a 700mhz network, will solve this problem in the US.
The cell phone ecosystem is currently in a proprietary, pre-IBM PC state and the network system is in a pre-Internet state akin to Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy/etc.
And the reason we're all in this primitive state is because T-Mobile/Verizon/AT&T/etc. have the resources to lock us in. It will take a company like Google, with billions to bid on spectrum, to break this stranglehold and allow us to progress beyond this kind of nonsense.
AMD doesn't try to make faster or slower processors and charge more or less accordingly. They always make the best chips they can. A certain percentage of the chips coming off the assembly line will run at 2.0 GHz, a certain percentage at 2.5 GHz, etc. A very small percentage can run at 3.0 GHz. If AMD charged by the GHz, their limited stock would sell out and they would be left without that product. Thus, asking why 3.0 GHz chips cost so much more than 2.8 GHz chips is kind of like asking why a 2 karat diamond isn't twice the price of a 1 karat diamond.
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