It doesn't have the same business model as the rest of Meta (which by the way, is to get advertisers products in front of users eyeballs, optimized by their personal data. Not to hand said personal data over to advertisers or anybody else, which would be a bit dumb as it's Meta's crown jewels)
I am no environmental activist, but Hetzner's carbon footprint is so much worse than the rest that it's hard to ignore. I've always avoided them as a matter of principle.
Two of their 3 datacenters are located in Germany, which has some of the worst carbon emissions in Europe due to their stubborn refusal of nuclear and reliance on coal/gas.
As I write this, we're talking 20x higher carbon intensity compared to France or the Nordics (https://app.electricitymaps.com/).
Besides carbon, coal-related air pollution is responsible for dozens of thousands of early deaths per year in Europe, and Germany has 6 of the top 10 worst offending plants. Until they fix that (not anytime soon), it's not a country that should be hosting foreign workloads on top of their national needs.
Hetzner seem to have a DC in Finland, which can only be better. Not sure if prices are competitive.
Scaleway and OVH are good alternatives if you want to host in Western Europe.
1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night.
2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier.
The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x.
Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation.
Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.
Land use per kWh is almost completely unimportant. Here in Denmark solar farms take up 0.09% of the land area and produce 7% of our electricity or ~2.5% of our energy use. That means 4% of our land area would be enough to cover all our energy needs.
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time
They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26.
EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
I’d also believe that he was able to ride his past reputation and his sponsor’s memory enough to get the commitment to ship Liquid Glass, but that gamble blew up once most reviews revolve around how they’ll probably make it less bad in an update. Apple values keeping users on current releases and this is the first one where so many experienced users and fans have been advising people to hold back. I think Dye knows he had enough capital to bull the release through but not to recover from making the story about the release about his shortcomings.
No that's an accurate TCO calculation.
It's interesting that on this topic, the inventor of the PC also seems to be caught in that supposed "Apple reality distortion field" and can't confirm the "price gouging" that you're trying to convince yourself Apple practices.
> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.
That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)
No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.
So let's see :
- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).
- They don't want nuclear because politics.
- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")
- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.
The two main end results of this policy are :
- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...
Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?
Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.
No. Because Fukushima. At the end of 2010 Germany enacted a law extending the operating life of nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened and all political parties in Germany closed nuclear reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561
Yes, coal is a disaster. Nuclear risks (major accident, waste, proliferation...) is a potential disaster.
> deaths in neighbouring countries, every year
True, and quite sad. No nation yells because each is a culprit: emissions caused by France's fossil fuels (transportation, industry...) is far superior to those of the German gridpower system. We can agree that all this is a catastrophic state of affairs. Germany's nuclear phaseout is a drop in the sea and wasn't conducted due to some whim.
> Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer
The amount of victims of past accident is controversial, therefore this is controversial.
It doesn't have the same business model as the rest of Meta (which by the way, is to get advertisers products in front of users eyeballs, optimized by their personal data. Not to hand said personal data over to advertisers or anybody else, which would be a bit dumb as it's Meta's crown jewels)
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