HN user
Intel tried this more than a decade ago. The designs were as horrible as you might imagine, and a few OEMs did come out with a handful of models and parts.
As I recall, consumers didn’t care or wouldn’t live with the awful designs that they initially brought out. I don’t remember. I remember thinking I wouldn’t touch one after seeing a bunch of engineering samples.
Color laser has actually pretty terrible color, especially for photos, prints or any output that requires any sort of vibrancy or color accuracy.
Epson makes some excellent inkjet printers. The cartridge based ones are expensive to run, but their eco tank offerings have pretty good output and are cheap enough to run - still no eco tank model is photo print grade, but the 5 ink version isn’t bad and not too expensive.
Ink is a messy, nasty media, but is almost unavoidable if you want good to great color quality.
Check out the Fiat 500e. The 2021 will be Fiat’s own design, but older ones are basically Bosch internals stuffed into a Fiat 500 shell. Cheap off lease ones are available and so far (6 months in) dead reliable. And a very fun ride.
This. BOJ is propping up Japanese companies, with negative interest at times, in the hopes they can finally get out of their 20 year deflationary economy and the coming demographics issues. Not to say Japan is suffering horribly, but the odds of Japan growing organically through innovation and execution as an economy are practically nil, so a strategy like Softbank's is essential to their economy long-term, and they have the strategic foresight and positioning (they are one of the largest telcos remember) to do this.
Softbank also has the balls to make investments like this. The ARM investment was basically a bet on everything hardware-based for the next 20 or 30 years, so clearly they're good at picking the strategic foundations.
Traditionally, Japanese companies and culture is extremely conservative and consensus driven, and one of Softbank's advantages is that they make these calls.
Actually, our shipping infrastructure is fine. It's our geography, population density and relatively small population that gets in the way.
Square in Canada is good thing, and I'd say potentially far more disruptive than they were even in the US. Having been in a seat where I had to negotiate and deal with almost every payment provider in Canada, and all of them verging on being downright evil IMO, a service that focuses on the customer experience (both merchant and end consumer) will be a fun disruption to watch.