I agree with some reservations about this being completly generalised. There are still some successfull companies that rewards good players. But yes, there are very few and most of the rest are stuck coasting at a glacial pace, doing stuff that are not very competitive on so many levels it is impossible to describe succintly.
I would also argue that it is not just about the software industry. Many EU industries have become extremely uncompetitive on so many level.
Even when you are ready to pay more for EU made products, it is not easy to find something that is decently competitive and not just a pale copy of better offerings.
It is clear that the EU has become too collectivist but they are still stuck blaming capitalism (just like the soviets I guess).
In France, even old big players that were once at the top and/or were (semi)public organisation have fallen very hard or have been scandalously sold piecemeal to foreign actors.
The problem is not even that they are governement funded but it really is rooted in the collectivist organisation model that gives too much power to politics and very little lattitude to consumer/key actors choice.
Those systems become necessarily corrupted because they rely too much on human behaviors and most humans are fundamentally corrupt.
Yes, I completly agree with your point of view, which is exactly why I said that.
They are using capitalism as a boogeyman for everything, when in practice the system in place is so far removed from "real" capitalism that ones need to be either blind or ideologicaly corrupt to put the blame there.
Unregulated capitalism has many weakness, the most potent one being that there is pruning of useless actors and that results in poverty and some people being left behind.
But the remedy that is applied today isn't really much better, people are still left behind, just more slowly and that comes with massive oppotunity cost for those at the bottom, since they are the ones most likely to really benefit from the freedom that comes with capitalism.
This is just what the ideologues working in academia and politics (deeply linked) always come up with, even though their existence and ability to make such critics is fully funded by capitalism. There are just keeping the tradition of Marx that was completly funded by capitalists but came up with the argument that it was the worst system possible.
It has gotten a bit cheaper, a lot easier and somewhat better lately.
But I agree that it does not make that much sense because you end up with a product that has many flaws and is a bit annoying to use.
The main factor is being able to sell the iMac for that relatively high price. I can't figure out why they are still so expensive because most of the early 5K models are kind of useless nowadays (on low end version, the compute just cannot cope with modern media/files at such a resolution). But maybe it's people converting them to display driving the market...
Genelecs are a no brainer if you have the money (the small ones are not too expensive but if you want power, wallet will get hurt a lot).
It's crazy how good those speakers sound for how small they are. And extremely well built of course, the aluminium casting was a very good decision, albeit an expensive one of course.
For nearfield, I think so; the 8341A is basically unbeatable there. But it still suffers from three problems (even more in midfield): the ridiculous price of their subwoofers, the way too primitive handling of multi-sub by GLM and the eye-watering price of the W371A compared to other fully cardioid solutions (D&D 8C, AsciLab BX8C); I'm also skeptical of the (unpublished) directivity matching of the combination.
Still, Genelec's legendary reliability and GLM are worth it.
Yeah I think the 40s series is the sweet spot for nearfield, definitely.
I am not a subwoofer guy, in fact I am pretty much against subs. In my experience, the result never really match the theory. Bass frequency are not directional but if the speaker producing them isn't setup physically at the same location as the other speakers you get phase coherence and power mismatch problems.
On top of that most peoples do not have access to speakers that can produce such low frequencies, so it is not really worthwhile to use them to produce. You end up with results that don't sound that well in most systems because they lack a part of the work.
Sub frequencies are also felt physically and quite tiring for long term listening. It always feels nice at first, because it's suprising and powefull but really it is not where the focus in music production should be.
I have had access to some recording studios (even built a small one with friends in association) and my experience is they don't really use subs. If they need more power they just get bigger speakers that will reproduce the relevant frequencies coherently.
There is basically no instrument that goes below 20Hz, even a pipe organ which is a massive object basically requiring a church, does not get there. The energy requirement to produce sub 20Hz sound just doens't make sense and it doesn't add much to the music, you just feel a rumble, most people cannot even hear that low.
In fact even between 20 and 30Hz is not that important. It still requires a lot of power and either you get something that is dominated by the rest of you put the power and it covers everything else.
I played french horn in various harmonies and the tubas were right behind me. It's one of the few instrument that can technically hit sub 30Hz while still being of manageable size. Whenever they had a low part, their sound was much more quiet, the wind volume requirement to sustain those notes is tremendous and I can tell you there was not many compositions that would go that low, because composers know that.
Even if you want to focus solely on modern music, sub notes are just a gimmick, because like I said, they become tiring and overpowering really fast. I had a friend who was listening to dub constantly and over time it was boring, monotonous and tiring because of the omnipresent bass part. This genre is linked to the creation of massive sound system that tries to produce bass as low a possible for the physical factor but past the wow factor, it's not really pleasant and very likely to damage your ears if they play them over the 90db level.
So yeah Genelec sub are overpriced but this is not really a problem confined to Genelec. Every sub is overpriced for the benefits they have. It is mostly about dick measuring contest or being able to say we have the best and can produce frequencies most people don't care about.
Unless you trully have an end game monitor what you really want is just a better monitor that can produce the really usefull frequency range with more power without distorting while keeping everything in phase.
The biggest main monitor from Genelec (1236A), technically goes as low as 17,5Hz and this is what you really want, but in practice it's no even really needed.
There is a recording studio in my town, that got built by some friends and they produce music for Netflix. It's not a small studio size wize, the main room is big enough to handle a mid-sized orchestra (it was a disaffected cinema, they built around this to be able to work with projected movies), it's 1200m2 main room with 50m2 control room.
But they don't have subs. They have multiple mains, some are Neuman, some are older Genelec models and some are Adams for 5.1 handling (I think they technically have Atmos capacity since they have overhead speakers but they don't use it, it was too much trouble for little commercial benefits).
You can check it out there: https://www.instagram.com/studiospalace/
If you think you need a sub but don't have the biggest speakers your room can handle, you are misallocating money. They are just the cherry on top when everything else is near perfect. Like the cherry, they can add a subtle touch but not really necessary for good music production or even good listening. The quantity of music that will make use of them meaningfully is so vanishingly small it's not very relevant. It's like looking at cars and choosing solely on the top end speed, you are unlikely to need it and even if you want to use the capacity, the risks are not worth the reward.
This is why GLM doesn't handle multi-sub well, it's just not a feature that would get used a lot by their high-end customers, they can already pay for the high end monitors. And generally GLM isn't really the best for room correction but it is just a convenient solution that will work well with no hassle if you only buy hardware from Genelec.
I see Genelec as the Apple of monitors. If you have the money, it is hard to find a setup that will get results as good without spending a lot of time building a custom solution that can use speakers from mismatched brands. Just like you can buy hardware cheaper than Apple but it will require a lot of work to end up with a solution that is transparently integrated as well.
What is legendary about Genelec is not just their reliability (most monitors are perfectly reliable if you treat them well, unless you go for bottom of the barel made in China) but the quality of their frequency reproduction (especially if you consider size for the nearfields).
There are a few competitors that make comparable speakers (like Neumann, ATC or JBL pro line) but they are not necesseraly cheaper and don't really have a integrated solution like GLM.
In the nearfield range, Neumann does quite well but they are not as good as coax Genelecs, but they are cheaper.
I don't want to brag too much, but when I was in music theory while young, I always got very close to perfect score in music dictation. I have listenned to quite a lot of monitors from the most reputable brands (Genelec, Neumann, Dynaudio, Focal, JBL, Adams, KRK) or even less reputable brands (Presonus, Yamaha, Tannoy, Monkey Banana, Mackie, Behringer, Prodipe, etc) and my experience is that Genelec is up there in the quality of reproduction which is why they can commend such a high price.
I actually wish someone could come up with monitors that would match Genelecs but at a much lower price. So far, every niche maker that I have heard about only came close and weren't any cheaper (often more expensive actually).
In that sense, it's a lot like Apple laptops, the brands who come close to the quality are not doing it for much cheaper if at all...
While OLED definitely has this problem, his real issue is using a too small DPI monitor.
It's not a real problem in OLED equiped smartphones with high DPI so it really shouldn't be a problem on monitors as well.
If you wan to point out that there is no large OLED display with a DPI > 200, yes that's the real issue at the moment but since 5K displays are becoming more common, I think it will be solved in relatively short time.
It's a very cynical view but I kind of agree. In those kinds of jobs, the only rewards for doing the job well and fast is just more mindless jobs of the same type.
It would be usefull if you would receive a benefit for doing the job better or you could leave earlier for the same pay but that is rarely the case, since as you said, employers generally pay for your time instead of task completion (which is rather dumb because it offers bad incentives for both sides).
I have talked about this with some business owners who were getting kinda angree that some employes were not putting in a lot of efforts. In all case they were paying the minimum wage with absolutly zero compensation for doing the job better and/or faster.
I can't decide if they are just stupid or simply corrupt but they really should realise that with a strong welfare state and plenty of similar shitty jobs available, the stick really cannot work all that well and they should really use the carrot a lot more.
But of course those people generally make at least 3-4 times the minimum wage and they feel they deserve the premium because they deserve it and are so much better. Funnily enough, those that I know consistenly do a worse job than their employees at most things and it's obvious they didn't get there by starting at the bottom.
> I can't decide if they are just stupid or simply corrupt but they really should realise that with a strong welfare state and plenty of similar shitty jobs available, the stick really cannot work all that well ...
That assumes the manager level above them isn't doing the exact same thing.
What is funny to me is that once the plan was drawn, much of the usefull "hard" work was done.
Humans are not perfect like robot so it is pointless to try to find the "perfect" path, in any case, mistakes will be made.
It is also solving for the wrong thing, there is not much benefits travelling less distance, but minimising time spent on the task is the real problem. For those sort of tasks, it is very much like driving: the shortest path is not necesserally the fastest.
Another very important point is that ease of application is of prime importance, it's not very usefull if you need to think hard about which way you should go just to minimize distance, it increase task complexity tremendously for no real benefit.
Considering all that, it is obvious that the real winner solution would be just look at the map and draw a path by hand, using human intuition and heuristics as an algorithm. Even if you would have to make a few corrections, this could be done in minutes instead of hours.
But of course I understand that the point was really to find an application as an excuse to practice working with optimisation algorithms. In that sense, it is a well done job !
Now for how "normal" humans would do it: they would try a few ways and settle on an approximate optimun depending on how much time each pass took and how easy it was to complete. The thing about those sort of task is that they are not really uniform (some places are bound to be dirtier than others and it is easier to approach some features in a certain way), so a naive optimisation like that is unlikely to be what's truly needed even if the solution is technically perfect.
I think you are right because people who bought minis got them for a specific reason and now there is just nothing in the market that can pretend to replace it.
My own mini has not been upgraded to latest iOS but I know it is in short probation before it gets really unusuable. It's pretty bad with swapping already because Apple was so stingy with the godamn RAM (it's insane how much modern apps use for not much more utility).
The problem is that I have really no clue what to buy, even if I were to go Android.
I just can't find a phone that I think merit the tradeoffs of form factor, I just don't have much use for all the modern gimmicks. A better battery life would be nice but it's not even a big deal in my case.
The problem is basically the same as for cars. People are buying larger phones with many useless features for social status reasons or aspirational/fashion statement.
The smartphone as a tool was a finished product a long time ago but now they keep adding all kind of extra stuff that even manage to kill the initial feature of conveniently fitting in an average pocket.
I would compare that to Victorinox Swiss knifes: there are a handfull or reasonably sized models with all the tools you are likely to need for small tasks and there are monstrosities that have 100+ tools that are so large, even using them as a knife is inconvenient.
If people would buy Victorinox Swiss knifes like they buy smartphones, most would get the largely useless bigger ones.
Most people are not very rational and make purchasing decision not on their needs but because of trends, marketing, social status, peer pressure, etc...
When a market becomes very large and target the whole population at once, products tends to get pretty bad because they are not focused on specific use case and try to please everyone, really pleasing no one in the end. Since there is not much other choices than to follow, people deal with it and that's that.
Same.
Something like the Citroen AMI but with better range and speed, probably slighty bigger and around 10K.
I doubt it's going to happen because that would kill a large part of the market : every familly that needs 2 cars just because they go to work to different places but would only use a single car for the heavy duty or long range needs.
At the start it would be a hard sell for many because of social status but overtime people end up voting with their wallet, so it could work. But that would be a pretty bad deal for the industry, so they'll only turn to that if they can't sell anything else.
Nowadays even the smallest cars starts around 20k, which is absurd and it even affect the second hand market because cars maintain their value better thanks to this pricing.
It's pretty much the results of inter-platform competition. None of the actors want to use what the others are making for various reasons which I think are valid. For example, history has showned that being completly dependant on Apple tooling/frameworks/APIs isn't really a good idea because they are not a trustworthy player.
The same thing could be said about the reverse I guess and about most companies in general.
Software really has a big dependency problem because the sellers always bundle it with a service or a hardware in order to make money. I doubt it can be solved, since one has to make money somehow.
Yeah but I would argue that they just used cheaper ressources since historically has been cheaper than compute.
It's not clear if compute can be cheaper than storage still today.
On one hand you can afford to use less storage but you have to use GPU power everytime to draw graphics, if the chip can support the compute requirement you can save on storage, but you pay with higher power draw at every interraction.
On the other hand you can just put more storage, chip assest that are rendered for the device they'll be used on and be ok.
Outside of crisis like now, storage should be cheaper in the long term I think. I doubt there is that much benefit in having assets being able to resize to any arbitrary resolution. The definition used in phones isn't that far away than what is used in laptops, monitors and now even TVs.
Something to think about is that icons/assets often need to change shape slightly as they become smaller or bigger for optical reasons. So even if you manage a fully vector scaled UI, you might still need to have difference depending on DPI to reading distance ratio. Rasterized assests might still be the real answer for a very long time.
Considering how bad is the iOS 26 release on performance, because of its dynamically computed interface, I'm not sure it's worth pursuing vector UIs, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a more powerfull chip just to draw prettier or more "pure" interfaces...
I would also argue that it is not just about the software industry. Many EU industries have become extremely uncompetitive on so many level. Even when you are ready to pay more for EU made products, it is not easy to find something that is decently competitive and not just a pale copy of better offerings.
It is clear that the EU has become too collectivist but they are still stuck blaming capitalism (just like the soviets I guess).
In France, even old big players that were once at the top and/or were (semi)public organisation have fallen very hard or have been scandalously sold piecemeal to foreign actors. The problem is not even that they are governement funded but it really is rooted in the collectivist organisation model that gives too much power to politics and very little lattitude to consumer/key actors choice.
Those systems become necessarily corrupted because they rely too much on human behaviors and most humans are fundamentally corrupt.
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