There is something terribly ironic about Apple ruining your disk with Xcode, making another developer write the solution for it, then taking 15% of their profits when they try to sell the program (presumably to pay for Apple's annual developer fee).
That is very good to know, thank you. I can't imagine the intersection between devs who need this and devs who would pay for this versus scripting it themselves is that large. But who knows [shrug]
Sold to Gilette in 1967, expansion into many different areas after. Then, I guess their story is not really unique, they shared the fate of all European household appliance manufacturers — increasing competition from Asian companies, so by the 1990s, Braun was dead.
After Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005, it now mostly exists as a brand to be licensed (everything other than shaving and electric toothbrushes).
> [...] they shared the fate of all European household appliance manufacturers — increasing competition from Asian companies, so by the 1990s, Braun was dead.
Miele and Bosch etc are still going strong. So I'm not sure what you mean by 'European household appliance manufacturers': they have faced the competition from Asian companies and survived.
Bosch AC units are just the brand slapped on products designed and manufactured in Asia by the likes of Gree, TCL and Midea. Probably their washing machines, too.
You seem knowledgeable about these companies, but can I just please point out that the Dutch company is "PHILIPS" [1] with a single 'L'. I wrote it in all-caps to make it more clear, but see the logo on the linked Wikipedia page of course. Thanks.
You're quite right, sorry. My uncle worked for Philips back when I was growing up and due to his staff discounts, our house was filled with all their products (back when they made TVs, audio equipment, and even computers), so I should know better!
Now days I'm still loyal to their excellent toothbrushes, beard trimmers, and LED smart lighting products.
> "they've sold off most of that and moved into health tech"
They've kept health tech and "personal care products", which includes the Phillips shavers and toothbrushes. Phillips is a global market leader in those products and sells just about as many shavers as Braun does.
Nah bruh. Philips and Electrolux are mostly just name brands today that license their badges to be placed on goods from OEM Chinese or Turkish appliance makers.
Electrolux doesn't license out their brand names to anyone, AFAIK. They do operate manufacturing facilities in 16 countries, and 2 of their 3 largest factories are in Europe: Vallenoncello, Italy and Ljungby, Sweden (the third is in Rayong, Thailand - not China!)
With Phillips its more complicated because they've spun off many of their divisions into separate companies, such as the lighting division into Signify NV. So Signify now makes the Phillips Hue lighting products under license. But it's not like they're licensing the brand out to random companies - they're companies that were previously part of Phillips itself.
“Part of the Herald (Hong Kong) group of companies, Zeon Ltd is a leading manufacturer and distributor of clocks and watches, operating internationally in wholly owned offices in London and Hong Kong.”
Not only that, but they're frequently the top position in the year-end 'best of' on both the legitimate consumer review sites and the more credible outlets
Japan is interesting. Maybe the Braun brand is still pretty strong over there. But in Europe and elsewhere you no longer see prominent "Braun" branding on the packaging - and it's been that way for a long time.
You're right that the Braun logo co-branding still features on the devices themselves, though.
That's not the problem I found. My problems were twofold:
1) The Braun toothbrushes are just nasty. No matter how much I rinsed them off after every use, they collected a bunch of nasty crap in the holder. My Panasonic toothbrush never does this.
2) The Braun toothbrushes only work on a single voltage, because their charger sucks. You cannot take the charger with you when you travel between continents. Any decent modern electronics these days don't have this problem. My Panasonic toothbrush's charger works with 100-240V, 50-60Hz power (worldwide), and this is a model that seems to only be sold in Japan.
Also, the Braun toothbrush is huge. My Panasonic is much more compact.
> "No, the electric toothbrushes are called Braun in markets outside the US. I've only seen them labeled Oral-B in the US."
I can assure you that now days they're Oral-B in most, if not all, markets globally. Certainly in the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand they are no longer sold as "Braun", just "Oral-B".
Tricky to confirm (no need to follow links), but the first hits on Amazon UK[0], Amazon AU[1], Amazon US[2] are clearly labelled Braun in the images. Amazon Germany[3] and Amazon France[4] too.
Well, yes, but both the toothbrushes and the brush heads are sold only with the "Oral-B" name in most countries. That is: Braun logo still appears on the device, but not in the product name, box, and marketing materials.
My toaster, kettle, coffee maker, emersion blender, hand mixer, shaver and toothbrush are all labelled Braun (the toothbrush also says Oral-B, but that co-labelling started in 1984[0]). That said, Proctor & Gamble makes finding Braun appliances in North America rather tricky (special order only, never on a store shelf).
Nuclear already is the expensive alternative. Just in the beginning of Nov, NuScale Power terminated its much hyped SMR projects in Utah [1]. Target price for these was $89 per megawatt hour. Wind and solar are what, ~$25/MWh currently?
Note that the target price (which probably wasn't going to be achieved) also involved about $30/MWh of federal subsidies, and the target assumed 40-50 reactor modules being built (it was not the price for those first six modules for CFPP).
It was clear what was going to happen after they announced the price increase late in 2022/early 2023. NuScale carefully stopped making positive statements that could get them personally sued and the executives started unloading their stock.
1. A group of highly skilled people voluntarily associating with each other
2. in an organization working on potentially world-changing moonshot technology,
3. born of and accelerated by the liquidity of the free market
4. with said workers having stake in the success of that organization
is very American. We should ponder the reasons why, time and time again, it has been the US "system" that has produced the overwhelming number of successes in such ventures across all industries, despite the attempts of many other nations to replicate these results in their own borders.
It seems this is a server-to-server protocol? Subscriber is required to accept HTTP requests, which makes it mostly useless for most contexts where RSS is used.
