When you pay for enterprise equipment, you are typically paying a premium for longer, more robust support. Consumer products are less expensive because they don’t get this support.

Can I interview with you lol - this sounds great!

Re: your last paragraph -

Think of it this way. Google pulls in 300 billion USD a year and 80% of that is advertising revenue, not leaving a whole lot of the pie for Pixel phones once you take out subscriptions, Chromebooks, GCP, etc etc.

Sure, they’re probably making some money on every pixel sale but the point of them making mobile phones is to support their advertising business.

I’m not a Graphene user, but that’s the way I see it. At the end of the day if you get the phone secondhand you’re not giving them any money at all.

That’s the great thing about open source though. Sure, you might drop off the face of the earth tomorrow. But if you do, the code is there, and maybe someone who was using it clones the repo and carries on that work.

It was a joke, I think

I think they mean more user friendly than plain Ubuntu.

I think this was a misunderstanding of a bit of shitty functionality in threads. If you had Instagram and made a linked threads account, you would see follow suggestions for people who hadn’t made an account yet. It was basically “if this person makes a threads account I want to be following them”. I don’t believe it meant those suggested people had a shadow account or anything like that though. Still sketchy and probably drove inorganic growth, but I believe the number of users is counting the number of people opting into opening an account.

It’s just naturally going to be incredibly high, because so many people use Instagram and would’ve been exposed.