>Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time

Famously Gemtek Technology (https://www.gemteks.com/en/about/about), Apples small obscure modem OEM at the time, when presented with contract to manufacture 1999 AirPort Wifi cards made first batch of complete duds because factory owner saw picofarad smd caps and decided it will be more profitable to for him to GLUE tiny plastic rectangles instead, after all picofarad is like nothing so nobody will tell the difference.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273798...

Gemtek’s headquarters is established in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Republic of what?

>rust protection was maybe a bit on the lighter side

Iv seen MG cars in Poland come pre rusted straight from the dealer.

In Poland main opposition candidate for the next prime minister Przemysław Czarnek declared he has solar panels, but he will be removing it because solar is bad (1). He also announced new election slogan "Renewables, shite-wables" (loosly translated oze sroze).

https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/przemyslaw-czarnek-tlumaczy-...

1 Solar was pretty good until PIS party lost elections and became Trump bitch, now they toe the coal/oil good solar/wind bad line.

PIS already has one of their men poorly performing function of Poland president. His main election slogan was lowering energy prices, you can guess how that went :-) His latest trick was vetoing super cheap EU military loan because it was conditioned on buying European/Polish equipment meaning none of the money could be funneled to USA.

Why? Because company you buy stuff from didnt have to pay license? I always imagine people saying this havent seen riscv assembler code.

You can do that right now with random raspberry pi, a string of addressable leds and a tub of glue

Dell, Lawnmower Man

>ESDI to IDE transition

ESDI and ST-506 MFM/RLL before it lived in universe of dedicated HDD interface cards.

And for the more prosumer level, there were (non-RAID) SCSI controllers with big fat cables before there was eventually SATA.

You really need 4K to appreciate all the hallucinated details in games.

Apple is more interested in getting people into ecosystem to milk services recurring revenue. They even killed high end top ram options to pump more NEOs.

Nowadays this stuff is standardized by hardware extensions.

Arm Top Byte Ignore (TBI), Intel Linear-Address Masking (LAM) and its fixed version Linear Address Space Separation (LASS), AMD Upper Address Ignore (UAI) still unsecure from SLAM exploits. Then you have security extensions build on top of this like ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE).