Bear
I just came across this YouTube video and I can't believe the comments:
A week ago Joshua Fluke did a video on Elon Musk, where he criticised him and now he's getting bullied by Musk's fanboys.
I couldn't find much about his phone but well… I don't think this will kill Apple, iPhones or even Samsung. I can't understand why people worship Elon Musk. He's actually a pretty awful person.
Bear in mind, I think the Internet’s obsession with Elon Musk is similar to its obsession with Nikola Tesla. Tesla was an early innovator of a lot of electrical technologies, but not everything he worked on would have been all that effective.
One thing the internet cult of Tesla is in love with is the idea of wireless electricity, but I think they fundamentally misunderstand the issues associated with it, they just think “magical free electricity off of the air”. Some of the problems it has, though, are efficiency (you generally don’t lose that much power over wires, but nondirectional broadcasts [think radio stations or TV stations, which wireless power stations would most resemble] are subject to the inverse square law and would have to run at super high power outputs to provide adequate electricity for electrical urban lighting at modern levels of electrification, and that’s not getting into electrical uses of HVAC, consumer electronics, and industrial electronics, oh, and electric vehicles), RF safety, and energy sources (widespread use of wireless electricity would basically require nuclear or hydrocarbons, renewable energy would be an absolute non-starter). And, contrary to the cult of Tesla, said electricity would certainly be billed in some way. Generally, those places and applications where wireless power transfer get used today are point-to-point systems, where transmission losses can be minimized (due to the use of highly directional antennas and narrow antenna bandwidths), or near field systems (smart phone induction charging). This is part of the reason why wireless charging IS induction charging and why whole room wireless charging hasn’t become a thing (it’s subject to the same issues as far-field wireless power transmission, smart antenna arrays in both the power source and device to charge could address this, but that approach likely only allows for the phone to be charged while it’s relatively stationary).
Musk, well, I’ve never been particularly fond of him because he sets himself up as some sort of face of the free market while none or almost none of his business ventures are free market, per se (Tesla is dependent on government electric car purchase subsidies, SpaceX is dependent on government contracts, The Boring Company’s technology is mostly useful for large government public works projects [hence, more government contracts], PayPal might be the one exception, and he hasn’t been involved in it in years). Then things like the hype concerning hyperloop made me even less inclined to like him. And I think buying Twitter is just money down the drain, I doubt Twitter will ever be truly profitable. But, I think a lot of Internet geeks/nerds see something of themselves in Musk, given his social awkwardness and his involvement in commercialized science. (Plus, a lot of crypto fans like his positions on cryptocurrencies, fwiw, which probably motivates the largest chunk of his fandom today.) I think Musk is being genuine when he states his goal of fostering interplanetary travel, so I don’t think everything he does is for show, but there’s enough about him that I dislike that I occasionally have to hold my nose and agree with him when he’s actually right about something.
This phone seems like a dumb idea, to be honest. It’s the first time Musk will compete in a market relatively free of active government intervention, and he’ll have to justify its existence despite the iPhone (which is probably the best selling consumer luxury phone) and all the flagship Android headsets. And, for over 15 years now (even before the public unveiling of the iPhone), we’ve heard so many phones hyped up as iPhone killers, yet the iPhone remains. So I tend to be jaded when it comes to supposed iPhone killers. But I’m hard pressed to think of any advantage Tesla could have as a new entrant in the saturated smartphone market, besides deep integration with Tesla cars. Starlink does appear to be higher bandwidth, yet cheaper, than existing satellite phone technologies, but it’s still lower bandwidth and slower than mmWave 5G or top of the line WiFi, not to mention the latency issue inherent to satellite communications (even low earth orbit satellites have higher latency than the cell phone tower likely less than a mile away, likely less than 10 miles away in rural areas).