I understand it's tongue-in-cheek, but you're actually describing a real problem Starbucks and other casual-style restaurants (McDonalds) have in Seattle. The downtown business districts are almost completely overrun by homelessness and many places in the area have stopped offering seating and only offer counter pick-up and standing tables/rails.
I spent a month in China and saw one homeless person there who was disabled and panhandljng by a tourist location. The subways and trains and stations had no one pissing on the ground, no one sleeping there (except officeworkers resting their eyes on their commute). There were no human feeces on the ground.
Maybe, just maybe we dont have to throw our hands up in the air and say theres nothing to do while we allow a small group of people to make our cities unlivable.
How does a company that builds buildings make cities unlivable? Replacing some SFH with an 8 unit apartment or whatever would make the city more livable.
Well, I was obviously kidding, developers who build overpriced housing, or unneeded office or retail are part of the problem just like developers who build homes, especially affordable ones, are part of the solution.
Be careful what you wish for. China also has the hukou system, which is sort of an internal passport that effectively prevents many people from moving into the popular tourist locations. Get out into the rural areas and you'll still see a lot of real poverty, although housing is cheap enough there that there aren't many homeless.
There's also a cultural factor at work. Allowing a relative to be homeless causes loss of face so family members feel more obligated to pitch in and help them out, sometimes to the extent of providing a free room. (I'm stereotyping a bit here but it's generally true.)
In my experience most countries put barriers in place to prevent people from moving into the country, from another country, when you don't have enough money to support yourself, but I believe the parent is describing a system that puts barriers in place for internal migration of its citizens.
In China there might not be people peeing in the subway, but when I was there a couple years ago there were plenty of people (especially children) peeing in the streets
> Now the public is on the hook for them. Plus, more jails will be needed if you wanna move all the unhoused in there.
> Maybe its easier just to build more housing.
Maybe instead of letting a George Carlin joke from 30 years ago become reality by calling them something different, patting ourselves on the back, then delegating responsibility to whoever's not building houses and subsequently (often) protest the construction of those houses, we should accept that the public is and should be on the hook for them. If not, then we're just a bunch of pathetic individualists who haven't realized the social safety around them is about as strong as cheap wet toilet paper.
Living somewhere is not on its own a contribution to society, and building more housing is not enough to uplift people out of severe fentanyl or meth addiction; people on the street are not having conversations about esoteric zoning policies and hoping studio apartments stay at only $2500/m because supply increased marginally quicker over the next 10 years while birth rates dropped and immigration slowed.
Supply is an issue, but it's often a red herring. Homeless people are the public, we are the public, blight and suffering within society is society's issue, not just when the Olympics roll around or the leader of a major foreign nation rolls up
having the public on the "hook" for them is more responsible than forcing private establishments to pick up the tab. starbucks doesn't want to be on the hook for them either.
They're not the kind of people that can afford housing nor the kind that are able to get a rental contract in the first place. And if they had money they'd just shoot up more. Not trying to diss them but that's just reality.
There's very few people homeless because they can't afford it even despite the insane rent prices. Usually it's a ton of untreated mental issues and/or drug addiction.
Building more houses will help regular people a ton but not the homeless. More shelters will. Good and affordable mental healthcare too. But that's "communism" so I guess that won't fly in MAGA America.
From the data I have seen you are incorrect. Certainly the most visible and disruptive of the homeless are the meth heads and folks with serious mental health problems, but a large chunk are people who simply can't afford a place to live. Los of people living out of their cars out there.
Ok I was speaking from my knowledge of here in Europe (my ex worked with homeless and unemployed) and here it's really not the case. People here don't live on the streets unless there's something seriously wrong with them. Anyone else is well supported by the welfare system. They won't be rich and it may take a while and often not in a good area but they'll have a place to live.
If this is common for regular people in the US then the system is really letting them down and I'm starting to understand why people vote for Trump (though I'm sure this will only make things worse for them)
Ah! Yeah we are having completely different experiences, since I'm in the US.
I expect you are correct about the votes for Trump. Voting for change without understanding if that change is likely to be good or bad. Public policy issues are complex and most people probably don't have the time or energy to understand exactly what they are voting for.
Like the other person said the welfare system is apparently that bad in the US.
But in Europe I've mainly seen people with mental/drug issues and those from fringe groups like gypsies. There have been plenty of projects involving giving them housing for free, but it never works. The neighborhood quickly becomes a no-go area with constant police presence. They sell all the inventory for drugs, flats become dirty and infested etc.
There's a reason these people are homeless and that has to be solved first.
But if regular people are homeless then the system is really failing them on basic welfare :(
Uhh as opposed to some private business that should just, what, deal with it? Who else should be responsible for solving homelessness if not the public?
Prison is the worst way for the public to solve this problem.
It’s more expensive (incarceration is extremely expensive), eliminates the possibility of the individuals being productive, introduces them to people who will push them towards more crime (not just the apparent “crime” of not being able to afford a shelter), etc.
Federal minimum wage is higher than that. I'm sure ether is some kind of job that can be created that pays more than $1.25 in order to try and pay their share.
Prisoners are not subject to minimum wage laws and are routinely paid wages far below it. In fact, the average wage for prisoners seems to much lower than my generous $1.25 an hour. But then, im a benevolent-ish overlord.
It's in the tax payers interest that prisoners make as much money as possible, while not threatening the rest of society. My point of bringing up minimum wage is that it is a reference point for the value of human labor that prisoners are competiting against others with.
I think it’s quite a stretch for you to interpret the parent comment like that. Surely they’re referring to people’s entitled behaviour in this private space.
I did, sort of, depending on what you mean by "public". My local pub provided a free desktop computer, my local library did too (and the librarian once allowed me to set up my own desktop), my community had two regular lan parties, you could rent the local hall for a pittance, and all my friends' parents owned houses with spare rooms or garages that they'd let us set up projects in.
I get that not all of these are strictly public spaces or places where you'd do office work, but it must suck to have nowhere better to go than a Starbucks.
Edit: even today, I think I could probably ask my local library and they'd let me, although someone might steal my monitor.
The words "steal" and "bathroom" reminded me of a funny case when hand dryers started disappearing in bathrooms of several shopping malls in a large Russian city. In all cases, there was the same person with a large bag filmed nearby, but as there is no camera inside, it is difficult to understand if he did anything or not. Guess unsupervised tablet (aka "monitor") would not stay there for long.
At this point I wonder why Starbucks hasn't diversified and started building actual coworking spaces in addition to coffee shops. They look like they should be in an ideal position for that.
They'd have to charge people for using those, which people won't be eager to. The point of coffee shops in this regard is that the use as free coworking space is "parasitic" on the space being financed by the café business.
imagine the multitude of laws and regulations in multitude of countries, if you offer co-working space, then you must also register as a landlord, handle mails (not the electronic ones, physical mails), business registrations, etc.
there will be people who would want to stay in after-hours, even if the store is not open. obviously they are paying the rent, hence they have the right to do so.
people will reserve tables/seats, what happens if it's over-booked? there are certain "cool" locations which are extremely busy hot-spots meanwhile others are pretty chill...
The point of coffee shops in this regard is that the use as free coworking space
Incidentally, back when I was doing startups, there were free coworking spaces in the under-utilized portions of the Seattle convention center. Big, squishy chairs, fast wifi, and power ports galore.
It was like a self-service micro tech incubator, and helped me bootstrap a company that lasted over a decade. The State of Washington more than got its money back in taxes.
I wonder how often they try large floor plans. Most Starbucks I see try to keep things small. What happens if you make it a bit larger, like a small library? I wonder if the increase in foot traffic and sales would offset the cost of extra real estate. They could keep it free, but also somewhat cross over into coworking.
simply, even cleaning and keeping it tidy is a quadratic equation compared to the space available. people leave their garbage behind or spill their coffee, making a single table somewhat unusable for some time. there are already min. number of employees, mostly busy at the bar. having extra space equals requiring more hands for cleaning, hence cost not linearly increasing but quadratic with the square meter.
another thing is, if the space gets full, people get out anyway, but chance to buy stuff.
for example, let's see there are 2 empty tables right now, you get in to the line, there are 6 people in the queue. imagine 3 of them somewhat occupies the those 2 empty tables, even if you resign the idea of getting coffee, i guarantee you that at least 1 of the other 2 would still get coffee but just move to a nearby park or bench. which starbucks obviously does not pay the rent for...
(as long as the campers are considerate) it's also low cost. even prime location starbucks have large lull periods through the day, prime for campers, even though only spending $5-10.
when people feel entitled to take up 2 spaces for hours while families roam for seats is when it's too far
This one[1] has a meeting space that can be closed off from the rest of the store, with a TV or projector, and I’m pretty sure they’ve got a copier or at least an all-in-one printer.
Free, common-use things are awesome - until the tragedy of the commons sets in and ruins it for everybody. This is true of so many things that start free and then later require payment. And everybody gets mad about it.
Chicago has "residential zone parking" for the areas of the city that are primarily residential. For $30 per year per car, you get to park on the street in your local zone (2-3 city blocks). Nobody else is allowed to park on the street in that zone. For visitors, you can buy a sheet of stickers for $1 per sticker that enable 1 day of parking. But you can't buy more than 3 sheets in a month (they keep track).
I've always wondered why NYC and other big cities don't do this. It costs so little, yet makes it much easier to park where you live.
Density. If you paid for a parking permit then there's some expectation that a parking spot will be available for you near your house. Except in NYC residents outnumber parking spots 20:1 in some neighborhoods.
> Surprisingly they charge $190/yr per car for this.
Don't feel too bad. In Chicago, it's a $30 optional add-on to the annual sticker that everyone has to buy whether they park on the street or keep the car in a garage. The annual sticker cost is based on the weight of the vehicle; it can run from $100 to $500 per year.
Tragedy of the commons is caused by out of sync motives. Like a mismatch in protocols that people speak, which is partially explained by culture and upbringing (only partially of course). That is, tragedy of the commons is a symptom not a cause. Not something that happens just by virtue of something being a part of the commons. The more people you have, the more opportunity for those to be out of sync too
In the case of the coffee shop concept, I’d speculate since there’s not hundreds or thousands of years of history in Korea to establish a proper protocol for what is acceptable to do in a coffee shop, anything goes. Until Starbucks can establish from an early age that coffee drinking as the only culturally appropriate thing you should be doing in a coffee shop, and you may feel morally corrupt, be socially ostracized, or go to hell for your sins otherwise
They'd rather that than an empty seat, especially if that person is turning up 5-6 days/week.
Most coffee shops where I live (London, UK, specifically out in West London) are at best 20% full through most of the day, that's a lot of dead real estate not paying for itself.
When I tried working out of coffee shops a bit some years ago the "etiquette" seemed to be ~1 drink/hour to pay for your seat. I don't like coffee that much, so was consuming more like 0.66/hour (i.e. around 2 drinks every 3 hours), and people were fine with that, as it was effectively a rent payment of £20/day, or £100/week, which is a little under what a hotdesk would cost me in the same area but with a lot more flexibility (never pay for idle!), and of course its good margin sales for them.
Of course, they could just say "no laptops". There's a pub chain in the UK that did that (Sam Smith's - no screens, no swearing), but the rule is not widely followed or enforced and where it is the pubs are empty far more than the ones that welcome customers.
Obviously some coffee shops are gonna want that but some coffee shops are making all their money by selling to customers during short periods in the morning, lunch and maybe in the afternoon and if this person is sitting there blocking the chair that could be used by many customers during the time the total of two cups of coffee will be less than what they are losing from not being able to serve those customers. Of course for some coffee shops they are never full and they probably benefit from this and they would love to have those type of customers.
The problem isn't your one coffee an hour during the lull of the day. It's you taking up a table at lunchtime that could be occupied by 4 customers who will outspend your entire day by several times over. Sure the place is mostly empty for most of the day but your cheap ass is taking a seat during the precious hours where they make their profit.
I believe there was an HN article recently about a business that provides a service to cafes to formalize that rent agreement. Spend a certain amount (e.g. 8 euros every 3 hours) or you lose wifi access.
>> but the rule is not widely followed or enforced and where it is the pubs are empty far more than the ones that welcome customers.
I mean, I went to one in SOHO and it was packed and indeed, no one was on their phone and people were being actively told off if they used a phone. That was nice. The fact that I paid £9 for a pint was much less nice though.
For a busy cafe that's always short on seating and struggles to keep up with fulfilling orders, they want nothing to do with laptop squatters.
Every other case I imagine it's desirable to have at least some regulars presumably employed enough to be working from a cafe using modern tech.
One common problem I've noticed is van lifers and other quasi homeless folks spending ~zero money stinking up the place just for the free power and internet.
Now that battery life and cell-tethered internet is so good, some of my favorite urban cafes have adopted a no-outlets no-wifi approach, while still having tons of seating and allowing folks to be present with their computers all day. They just have to provide their own internet and power, which serves to exclude the true parasites while selecting for folks with $$ to spend because they have state of the art gadgets with their own unlimited data plans.
Customers attract customers. Even if some customers are not spending a lot of money, they bring in other customers who more than make up for them. This is the reason why so many coffee shops go out of their way to provide power outlets near every table.
When I worked out of free co-working spaces in Asia I would buy lunch and breakfast from them too, both to socialize with other patrons and to not lose my seat.
I work from a coffee shop a good bit. They don’t care for the most part. Assuming you tip reasonably, be nice to the staff, don’t be annoying, don’t negatively impact the other customers, be helpful when the occasion calls for it.
It was Lidl's red topped instant - don't even know the name - the jar with the red lid, and I made it pretty strong but without milk/sugar (which I thought would cook/burn onto the inside of the nozzle)
That's my printer recommends Bulletproof Coffee. The coconut oil helps ensure smooth flow without clogging while the MCTs improve coffee adhesion to the paper.
Sorry to bother you but I have so many questions! Like, did you actually do it or was it just a middle joke I didn't detect? If the former, wasn't you afraid the printer won't be usable after that experiment? Didn't that worry you? Do you often experiment in this way? (Just stopping there to give otherwise the list gets too long.)
I have literally hundreds of HP print heads from a project, many partly blocked or burned out (they burn if you send them the wrong signals, and like 10% of the time I hit 'break' on my debugger it burns a few jets out if they're firing at the time), and had a coffee sitting right next to my desk so thought "why not".
It's hard to run a global business. Different people have such different ways of doing things. Every day, tens of millions of people run pen tests on Starbuck's rules. And Starbuck's front line of defence? A bunch of shy college student baristas.
If this is such a pervasive problem you'd think the article would have had no problem sourcing a photo of this instead of some generic phone ogling group?
I've been living in Seoul for a few months now and often work out of different Starbucks and have never seen anything like this here. I spent a similar amount of time in Seattle and saw much "worse" set ups at the coffee shops there.
Or have actual public places? The Cafe's are there to serve coffee, it's just courtesy as business model to let you hang around in the premises and when the business model starts to fail in some way they adjust it.
After university, the most I miss is the actual places that are mine to use and are made for hanging around or working and not necessarily consuming anything.
> After university, the most I miss is the actual places that are mine to use and are made for hanging around or working and not necessarily consuming anything.
You just pre-paid for the consumption in your tuition fees.
given the OP nickname is mrtksn, I presume he is a Turkish person. There are many public (ie. govt. funded) universities in Turkey. Except various touristic places in Istanbul, it would also be possible to "hangout" for an hour in many of smaller cities. Obviously this is degrading as the cities are getting more crowded. Although, most shopping malls having food-court with a "public" area. (ie. An area that belongs to none of the food places, but the shopping mall itself) You could just coast there from 10am in the morning until 10pm in the evening, with free-wifi and no drinks.
Similarly, in Europe, some coffee shops kind of span to the street benches or the window-side seating. For the window-side (outside), you may not be able to sit there for an hour or so, but definitely coastable about 30 minutes. (ie waiting for someone). Meanwhile, public areas are always free-for-all, if the WIFI works, then for sure you can coast all day...
> The Cafe's are there to serve coffee, it's just courtesy as business model to let you hang around
Traditionally it's the other way around, the drink is a by-product of a public house where people can gather. Could you imagine a bar where people are just supposed to drink and leave?
> can you imagine a bar where people are just supposed to drink and leave?
That is what a "bar" was invented to do. In the old public house, patrons would remain seated and the alcohol was brought to them. A heavy drinker would drink until they couldnt walk, but would still occupy a chair. Then the "bar" was invented. Patrons now come to the alcohol and will generally depart before becoming legless. A single bartender can now dish out far more alcohol per hour than any table server. That didnt exist as a concept until a couple hundred years ago.
Proper sushi "bars" follow the same pattern. You eat solo, often with curtains between individual patrons. You eat fast. Then you leave. You dont hang around for a chat.
How does this work? Were these public houses literally owned by the public and someone noticed that they may sell something there? AFAIK it's more like people opening their premises to outsiders to hang around and sell them stuff.
Yes - to enter most houses you needed to be a member of the club, or know the owner, have an invitation, etc.
Some houses were open to the public ("public houses," "pubs") where anyone could walk in and grab a drink and a bite, and usually even a bed for the night.
Japanese Manga Cafes / Internet Cafes give you all you can drink coffee and tea for hourly pricing, and usually comes with a PC and a private booth. I'm not sure how much of a thing they still are though, but they were big in the 2000s and early 10s
For work oriented cafe, owners can partner with Teamviewer, license seats from it and then advertise this as a fast remote service. Iirc teamviewer requires payment only for host machine, clients can be free. Though I imagine the market for such setup would be extremely small and unprofitable.
devcontainers & github codespaces may help, but i agree with you, each day, i would spend just setting up my stuff, to start from scratch on the next day!
In my experience price isn't the only issue. One of the (smaller) coworking spaces I can have access to locally, closes at 6pm while a coffee shop at around 9-10PM and it's also open on weekends.
But then again, I find working in coffee shops too distracting, so work from home and randomly popping into a coworking space now and then.
Little overpriced but I've found Loop Earplugs to help working in coffee shops, etc. Muffles out most of the sound but not everything, enough to focus but not fly off your seat if someone taps your shoulder.
For many you really want a distinction between “work area” and “home” - one way is to have a separate office at home to do work in, but you can also leave the house and go somewhere.
If you work on the kitchen table and that’s where you play, also, the mind and body have hard times disengaging from work.
I thought about Improv Everywhere recently - they had some great things in the early 2000s.
Re watching this, at about 1:16 one of the agents looks familiar. "Huh, she looks kinda like Aubrey Plaza". Then the credits come on: It was actually Aubrey Plaza.
Amusingly, those are all available at a cafe i’ve frequented in Seoul.
They’re used as background dressing but they’re also available to use. It’s criminally underused and i’d love to do it but i have no idea what i would make with it.
South Korea is cyber café country. If you open a café there, people expect some specific services.
I guess the fact people come with PCs and printer is a way to demonstrate how they don't want this part of US culture and would like to keep theirs. So either adapt and start offering PC bang in South Korea or go home.
Starbucks Coffee Korea Co. is a Korean company, owned by a Singaporean wealth fund and a Korean company. US Starbucks provides licensing and supplies, nothing more.
So this is a decision by a Korean company, not an American one.
Or you know, you could just not go there if you don't like the place rather than be a prick to people who work there and customers who like going there.
I agree, following the logic means any customer from any shop can start doing anything regardless of policies and shops just need to adapt just because of my expectations ?
Hard to do when starbucks is a real estate holding company that sells coffee. They have sucked all the air out of the cafe space and driven out their competitors.
Driven out their competitors where? In Seoul, Twosome Place and Hollys are ubiquitous, there's a few more chains whose names I don't remember off the top of my head and plenty of single-location cafes remain as well.
They had a policy of saturating an area until all the competition closed then withdrawing shops until they were profitable. It was quite common to see two Starbucks across the road from each other.
Having lived in Korea, I have always enjoyed the cafe culture. Starbucks there is known for accepting you to work there. Although I haven't seen anyone bring a printer yet, some do bring extra stuff such as a stand for their laptop that take up a lot of space.
The only thing this article mentions is that Starbucks prohibits people of bringing stuff that would take up more than a single seat, which seems reasonable?
> I worked for a Japanese company. Paper is a big deal, there.
About time they evolved to the next level then.
My point still sticks. Paper waste is a large impact to climate change. We shouldn't be using paper anymore, why do we proceed to waste such as by printing out email's?
In Tokyo, coffee shops seem to have embraced the work culture. Tables and seating have been adapted to working, and you often get a receipt with the time when you are expected to leave printed on it. Most (if not all) people in a Tully's in Tokyo are there to work.
Seoul is similar. Many Twosome Places have study desks and some of the chains known for small footprint also have bigger locations for meetings and work (Ediya Coffee Lab).
I never understood why people who are frugal would go to Starbucks in Korea to work, when local chains are beside them, have cheaper drinks and their desk/chair setups are less hostile to working.
A food court near my house has slowly turned into an improvised coworking space.
It's relatively quiet (as food courts go). For a while, the café even offered a whole day's worth of coffee for a reasonable price.
What I don't get is why the increasingly empty malls in my state don't incentivise this more. At the very least they'd earn something from parking and some food and drinks.
The solution is to bring back cybercafes, or cafes which were set up up to go online. Such culture existed in the 90s but was then ended by the widespread online accessibility by home ADSL and later mobile internet.
The 'problem' with those for remote workers is that you pay per minute/hour in a cybercafe - in a normal coffee shop you can just nurse one coffee for hours and pay a single low cost (and get a coffee).
I can't remember the name of it now but back in 2010s there was an 'OK' managed drop-in office space you could rent for £10 a day in central London - which came with free coffee and printing - I haven't looked at the prices lately.
Wow, I'd be curious about the details if you can remember.
I was working from cafes in London at that time, and I would have loved to find a place like that. I had to either use actual cafes (free besides getting a coffee and maybe a sandwich, limited privacy and security) or pay for a dedicated space, generally with too much tedious bureaucracy. Maybe I misremember, but to get prices as low as £10/day I think you had to commit to a large number of days per month. I don't recall anyone offering low prices a la carte.
Just looked up my email - and in 2012 I paid £10 4 hours in the Regus shared working space in central London - I think a 7 hour day might of been £12 but I don't have a full booking. From memory it was behind Bond Street - I was working for a small company in East London, and was taking the afternoon off to interview for another role. I wanted to be able to work right up until the interview and have somewhere to get changed into my suit, so didn't want to work from a cafe. I'd seen the offer in various 'business' magazines at the time, it wasn't brilliant, and I wouldn't have been happy their full time, but it was perfect for the day I needed it for.
Prior to that time we had been paying £330 a month for a desk on Dean Street Soho - but that was a monthly rolling contract as you say, and we'd just moved to some free space in Farringdon, where a friend was letting us use a desk (I think in part to make their office look busier).
There was a drop in place in East London that offered similar day prices back in 2010, as I went to look around it - but it was too noisy for me - was walking distance to the Silicon Roundabout - but I can't remember what it was called.
I mostly used the British Library, which was lovely and just the right level of quiet. But it gradually got more popular -- when I popped in recently, the (expanded) working areas were very crowded.
Nice - I tried libraries and also used friends club memberships - but I needed to do a lot of video calls, so a place I could talk freely was needed.
A friend of mine seemed to manage to join nice clubs early on good terms (and low costs), and ran a mobile advertising business for a good few years without ever having a proper office space - just working from home then the clubs as needed for meetings etc. But his line of work seemed rather boozy.
Cybercafes are already a big thing in SK, but why is the above comment downvoted? I, for one, miss net cafes very much. They used to be big in Greece, and I made many many dear friendships in small, cozy net cafes.
I can recount hilarious and even heartwarming stories; turns out that having a cafe (i.e. leisure space) with computers used by people in close proximity makes for dynamics and interactions that you cannot recreate with remote connections.
Hah, probably comparable to running a desktop for an equivalent amount of time - most ebike chargers are 100 - 200 W, and the bikes usually have a battery between 0.5 - 1 kWh (which in my area would be 5 - 10 cents). Less disruptive though, assuming they detached the battery and left the bike outside.
Dude it's middle school math. Average pedal assist e-bike battery, estimate at 500 watt-hours. Electricity prices at my home are about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour.
(0.5 kwhr) * (20 cents/kwhr) = 10 cents. With an additional 10-15% due to charging system inefficiencies (lost to heat). 11 cents.
It can be good exercise to do an 8th grade level word problem every now and then.
The actual arithmetic is easy but most people don’t know about the batteries in e-bikes. They might not know about the electricity prices at the top of their heads either.
You could google those…but it seems easier to just use GPT if you’re going to google that stuff anyway.
Well considering the GPT reported '30 cents' a charge, it is either a. considering 3x larger battery than I would consider average e-bike sized (and I got my 500Wh number based on a 10-second google scan), b. price of electricity it is considering is 3x higher (highly doubt it) or c. it is imagining that modern lithium ion charging efficiencies wall-to-battery are way, way worse than they actually are (possible to hallucinate and integrate into its calculation).
Either way, we don't know, and the original commenter doesn't know either, because they didn't google anything about e-bike battery sizes or their local electricity prices and thus didn't take the opportunity to actually learn something.
The estimate was based on a battery of 750Wh (bikes seem to range .5-1 KWh) and CA prices are around 30 cents/KWh. That's 2.25x your meanly worded estimate.
I did learn how simple the cost calculation is though (capacity * $/KWh), thanks.
> Starbucks South Korea implemented a policy asking patrons to not bring bulky items like desktop computers and printers into stores.
.. says the caption under a Getty image which shows no such thing! No wonder people don't respect the media.
The only reason I would click on this sort of thing would be to see a video or image of Koreans bringing their desktops and printers to a Starbucks and setting them up.
Without that, I can imagine it just fine without relying on any words in the article.
Searching YouTube, I'm not able to find any videos footage of people with desktops that they brought to a Starbucks in South Korea. The story is circulating and there are various new stories in various languages from various news networks, but all have only generic footage unrelated to the story.
What makes you think they’re desperate? IME people from Asian cultures sometimes have ways of thinking that strike at least me personally as basically alien. And then my brain interpolates their motives wrong based on biases that are shaped by western versions of politeness etc.
Who the eff lugs their desktop machine and printer to Starbucks instead of just use it in their house if that's a workable option? You'd have to be sorely motivated by something. Asians are in fact human dude.
I am more than happy to "take my coffee and fuck off". But I'll do it with a 50 cent instant coffee from a supermarket, not pay 10$ for it just to not be able to relax in a coffee shop.
In Japan I’ve seen at Starbucks: a guy bring in a giant power supply and plop it down on top of the table to power his tower and monitor like it wasn’t the most sociopathic thing in the world. And another guy used to set up six or seven screens at his table to “daytrade” — turns out he wasn’t day trading at all, they were all running videos of fake daytrading / stock tickers. (I had a friend at that Starbucks who would give me all the details; they had to ban him eventually for disrupting / getting surly with other customers).
There's already a large offering of such spaces in Korea. You have cafes where you can bring your laptop and work in peace, there's pc cafes / pc bangs which are more for gaming but provide a desktop, there are places where you can rent co-working spaces or spaces for co-working that you can use with a membership.
Co-working spaces of all types are ubiquitous in Tokyo FWIW. Near my midsize station I had about 10 different providers in a 10 minute walking radius, some with multiple locations even!
Most have a selection of plans to choose from: hourly, daily, monthly, etc
I chose a bit more upscale one without a fixed seat. I pay ¥1100 (7.5 USD) I think for each day I use it, with a monthly minimum spend of ¥2200. It comes with free mediocre coffee/tea. It is consistently clean and library quiet as people follow the posted rules including minding the volume of their typing and headphones.
I would be surprised if the situation in Seoul was significantly different.
They actually have exactly that for gaming: a "pc bang" like a internet cafe. I wonder if it has been tried in earnest for co-working. You would think it is an easier business so long as the demand is there.
There's also study cafes, which are aimed more primarily at students but often have working spaces for laptop use. These are quiet spaces to focus compared to something like Starbucks or PC bangs though.
Isn’t that how most coworking spaces work already? I’ve worked from a lot of them, and it always worked like that: I check in when I arrive in the morning, and when I check out at the end of the day, I pay for the number of hours I have spent there (often capped to a maximum of 5 hours or so, even if I stay longer).
My original comment was an offhand observation, but the difference under assumption is that co-working spaces require a contract/commitment, whereas the scenario I had in mind was no commitment other than paying for each time of use.
Maybe that's already a thing; my sense of self is not dependent upon being "right" in this matter.
Why would anyone except a gamer buy a desktop computer anyway. I guess some people still have their old computer and a lot of south korenas are gamers, but laptops are just better overall because of the portability.
If people bring printerS pural then starbuck could "just" have a free-ish printer
> Why would anyone except a gamer buy a desktop computer anyway?
Because you get a beast of a machine for the price of MacBook Air, and because you prefer looking at a big ultrawide monitor instead of alt-tabbing like crazy on a 13" screen, and you prefer a full keyboard and a proper mouse to the cramped layout they stuff in laptops because there's no room.
Oh, and maybe a proper sound system.
And it can also double as a NAS (more physical space for storage) and home server.
Not everyone needs portability all the time. For when I do, I have a Thinkpad I can get by with, with Tailscale VPN so it has access to the workstation.
(for anyone curios, yes, it's still cheaper than top-of-the-line laptop + nas/home server combo, but my main reason is ergonomics).
I have a VPN so all its resources are available in a Starbucks via ssh and/or RDP.
This one was a custom build with maxed ram, heaps of storage, a modest Nvidia card with as much VRAM as possible without breaking the bank, etc.. stuff I personally needed. A cheap workstation (or a much more expensive Mac) won't have that exact combo.
So aside from ergonomics, it's also customizability to my idiosyncratic wants and needs.
Anyone who doesn't need to work while traveling actually.
A desktop is both cheaper (at the same spec), while being much more durable due to being upgradable and reparable.
Sure laptop win in terms of portability, but since we can do so much on our phone, I don't really feel the need to bring a computer with me everywhere.
Show me that quiet, 16 core, 5 GHz, 128 GB RAM laptop that's actually pretty cheap, too.
I do need the CPU performance, that computer is used to compile C++ code. The RAM is for local LLMs - not fast enough to be practical most of the time tbh, but I like to experiment anyway.
The MacBook Pro with M4 Max will give you 16 cores (12 of which run at 4.5Ghz) and 128GB of RAM, and will likely pretty closely match the speed of the desktop processor for compiling C++ (at least we've done benchmarking of rustc in /r/rust the top-spec Apple chips somehow match top-spec x86 chips).
Thinkpad with Linux and it's got 8 cores as well (thanks AMD!) because remote development isn't great for what I'm doing and how fast a connection I can rely on.
I've had mine about ten years and it's still on the original CPU and mobo and PSU I think. I've probably saved a few hundred bucks from not buying another whole computer. It might not be as fast as a new laptop but it has more RAM and storage than most.
If I want to go into LLM stuff I will buy a newish used GPU for it. If the CPU is a bottleneck then I'll get a new mobo but I won't need a new chassis or PSU maybe ever. And the hard drives just rotate as I buy bigger ones
- fake performance (good luck with your 105W "5090")
- OS confusion about active screen, keyboard and mouse (how many times have I experienced that only the built-in keyboard works during booting, or the OS showing the login screen on only the built-in screen),
- most of them have to be open or have ports in awkward places, and take up space comparable to a desktop.
Everyone has different needs. A lot of us get by very nicely with a good laptop and a big monitor (or two). Very few moving parts to keep track of, and you can be productive both home and away.
There is a photo in the Korea Herald article linked in op's article. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10550038
OMG someone brought in a cubicle
And what looks like a keychron mechanical keyboard! (Loud AF)
What the hell .. that is crazy.
Reminds me a bit of when TPUG in Toronto used to set up entire Commodore PET rigs in coffee shops.
For reference, a Commodore PET weighs about 25 pounds, and is the size of a toilet bowl.
Double all that if you want to use a floppy disk.
Having used a Commdore PET, I cannot stop laughing at this size comparison.
It reminds of the observation that some people will go to great lengths to avoid the metric system.
That must be a tablet made to look like a desktop setup right?
Could be a monitor with a mini PC on the back.
wonder if you can bring a tent inside and camp
I understand it's tongue-in-cheek, but you're actually describing a real problem Starbucks and other casual-style restaurants (McDonalds) have in Seattle. The downtown business districts are almost completely overrun by homelessness and many places in the area have stopped offering seating and only offer counter pick-up and standing tables/rails.
Homeless people do it all the time in certain cities. And because judges won't jail them for crimes police have stopped trying.
How will jailing them help? Now the public is on the hook for them. Plus, more jails will be needed if you wanna move all the unhoused in there.
Maybe its easier just to build more housing.
I spent a month in China and saw one homeless person there who was disabled and panhandljng by a tourist location. The subways and trains and stations had no one pissing on the ground, no one sleeping there (except officeworkers resting their eyes on their commute). There were no human feeces on the ground.
Maybe, just maybe we dont have to throw our hands up in the air and say theres nothing to do while we allow a small group of people to make our cities unlivable.
"A small group of people [who] make our cities unlivable"... you mean, real estate developers?
How does a company that builds buildings make cities unlivable? Replacing some SFH with an 8 unit apartment or whatever would make the city more livable.
The people who are regularly blocked from building housing are the ones making our cities unlivable?
Well, I was obviously kidding, developers who build overpriced housing, or unneeded office or retail are part of the problem just like developers who build homes, especially affordable ones, are part of the solution.
Developers can't build "overpriced housing". If it's overpriced, it won't sell and the developer loses money until they right-price it and it sells.
Ah, the wisdom of the market. I could rephrase that as "housing targeted for the rich" who are already pretty well-served, unlike the poor.
It's not the "wisdom of the market" it is simply that pricing isn't set by the seller, it is set by a dynamic process between seller and the buyer.
If you don't believe me, try selling a luxury good targeting a rich buyer on FB Marketplace and see if you can set the pricing arbitrarily high.
You're completely missing the point. Unless your name is Ferrari or something like that, you didn't build said luxury item.
Be careful what you wish for. China also has the hukou system, which is sort of an internal passport that effectively prevents many people from moving into the popular tourist locations. Get out into the rural areas and you'll still see a lot of real poverty, although housing is cheap enough there that there aren't many homeless.
There's also a cultural factor at work. Allowing a relative to be homeless causes loss of face so family members feel more obligated to pitch in and help them out, sometimes to the extent of providing a free room. (I'm stereotyping a bit here but it's generally true.)
Countries generally have a immigration system that prevents people from moving there when you don't have enough money to support yourself.
In my experience most countries put barriers in place to prevent people from moving into the country, from another country, when you don't have enough money to support yourself, but I believe the parent is describing a system that puts barriers in place for internal migration of its citizens.
Russia has a similar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_in_Russi...
Read again. This is for Chinese citizens.
In China there might not be people peeing in the subway, but when I was there a couple years ago there were plenty of people (especially children) peeing in the streets
I've been there last month for a week and didn't see any.
> Now the public is on the hook for them. Plus, more jails will be needed if you wanna move all the unhoused in there.
> Maybe its easier just to build more housing.
Maybe instead of letting a George Carlin joke from 30 years ago become reality by calling them something different, patting ourselves on the back, then delegating responsibility to whoever's not building houses and subsequently (often) protest the construction of those houses, we should accept that the public is and should be on the hook for them. If not, then we're just a bunch of pathetic individualists who haven't realized the social safety around them is about as strong as cheap wet toilet paper.
Living somewhere is not on its own a contribution to society, and building more housing is not enough to uplift people out of severe fentanyl or meth addiction; people on the street are not having conversations about esoteric zoning policies and hoping studio apartments stay at only $2500/m because supply increased marginally quicker over the next 10 years while birth rates dropped and immigration slowed.
Supply is an issue, but it's often a red herring. Homeless people are the public, we are the public, blight and suffering within society is society's issue, not just when the Olympics roll around or the leader of a major foreign nation rolls up
having the public on the "hook" for them is more responsible than forcing private establishments to pick up the tab. starbucks doesn't want to be on the hook for them either.
They're not the kind of people that can afford housing nor the kind that are able to get a rental contract in the first place. And if they had money they'd just shoot up more. Not trying to diss them but that's just reality.
There's very few people homeless because they can't afford it even despite the insane rent prices. Usually it's a ton of untreated mental issues and/or drug addiction.
Building more houses will help regular people a ton but not the homeless. More shelters will. Good and affordable mental healthcare too. But that's "communism" so I guess that won't fly in MAGA America.
From the data I have seen you are incorrect. Certainly the most visible and disruptive of the homeless are the meth heads and folks with serious mental health problems, but a large chunk are people who simply can't afford a place to live. Los of people living out of their cars out there.
Ok I was speaking from my knowledge of here in Europe (my ex worked with homeless and unemployed) and here it's really not the case. People here don't live on the streets unless there's something seriously wrong with them. Anyone else is well supported by the welfare system. They won't be rich and it may take a while and often not in a good area but they'll have a place to live.
If this is common for regular people in the US then the system is really letting them down and I'm starting to understand why people vote for Trump (though I'm sure this will only make things worse for them)
Ah! Yeah we are having completely different experiences, since I'm in the US.
I expect you are correct about the votes for Trump. Voting for change without understanding if that change is likely to be good or bad. Public policy issues are complex and most people probably don't have the time or energy to understand exactly what they are voting for.
There have been a bunch of recent studies of this and yes, providing housing seems to dramatically reduce homelessness. https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/data...
Like the other person said the welfare system is apparently that bad in the US.
But in Europe I've mainly seen people with mental/drug issues and those from fringe groups like gypsies. There have been plenty of projects involving giving them housing for free, but it never works. The neighborhood quickly becomes a no-go area with constant police presence. They sell all the inventory for drugs, flats become dirty and infested etc.
There's a reason these people are homeless and that has to be solved first.
But if regular people are homeless then the system is really failing them on basic welfare :(
The public is already on the hook for them. With jails at least we get our public spaces back
> Now the public is on the hook for them.
Uhh as opposed to some private business that should just, what, deal with it? Who else should be responsible for solving homelessness if not the public?
The public should be responsible.
Prison is the worst way for the public to solve this problem.
It’s more expensive (incarceration is extremely expensive), eliminates the possibility of the individuals being productive, introduces them to people who will push them towards more crime (not just the apparent “crime” of not being able to afford a shelter), etc.
>Now the public is on the hook for them.
Prisoners can pay for their share by providing their labor.
Yay neo-slavery!
yeah! and at $1.25 an hour, we can keep them working it off for life! what a great plan.
Federal minimum wage is higher than that. I'm sure ether is some kind of job that can be created that pays more than $1.25 in order to try and pay their share.
Prisoners are not subject to minimum wage laws and are routinely paid wages far below it. In fact, the average wage for prisoners seems to much lower than my generous $1.25 an hour. But then, im a benevolent-ish overlord.
"They earn, on average, between 13 cents and 52 cents per hour nationwide. " https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
It's in the tax payers interest that prisoners make as much money as possible, while not threatening the rest of society. My point of bringing up minimum wage is that it is a reference point for the value of human labor that prisoners are competiting against others with.
It's a nice idea. Unfortunately literally nothing about the modern prison system works in the taxpayers interest.
Interesting. Can a tourist set up a tent in New York City in order to not pay ridiculous hotel fees or this is allowed only to citizens?
If you have anything to lose you can’t be homeless (or they’ll take it from you first).
Once you’re judgement proof do whatever you want.
In Switzerland you can rent a tent on a balcony on airbnb
how prevalent. is hate on homeless people in the usa?
Bizzare entitlement
[flagged]
I think it’s quite a stretch for you to interpret the parent comment like that. Surely they’re referring to people’s entitled behaviour in this private space.
A generation ago we didn't have public third places where people could plug in a desktop computer and printer.
I did, sort of, depending on what you mean by "public". My local pub provided a free desktop computer, my local library did too (and the librarian once allowed me to set up my own desktop), my community had two regular lan parties, you could rent the local hall for a pittance, and all my friends' parents owned houses with spare rooms or garages that they'd let us set up projects in.
I get that not all of these are strictly public spaces or places where you'd do office work, but it must suck to have nowhere better to go than a Starbucks.
Edit: even today, I think I could probably ask my local library and they'd let me, although someone might steal my monitor.
They're not "wishing" they're just "taking". And yes that's kind of definitionally entitlement.
That's absolutly crazy
Imagine you can get up to the bathroom and nobody steals your monitor
The words "steal" and "bathroom" reminded me of a funny case when hand dryers started disappearing in bathrooms of several shopping malls in a large Russian city. In all cases, there was the same person with a large bag filmed nearby, but as there is no camera inside, it is difficult to understand if he did anything or not. Guess unsupervised tablet (aka "monitor") would not stay there for long.
Well, Russians stole washing machines from Ukraine, of course they also steal other smaller appliances as well.
[flagged]
At this point I wonder why Starbucks hasn't diversified and started building actual coworking spaces in addition to coffee shops. They look like they should be in an ideal position for that.
They'd have to charge people for using those, which people won't be eager to. The point of coffee shops in this regard is that the use as free coworking space is "parasitic" on the space being financed by the café business.
they could integrate it with their loyalty points system, whatever it was called, starbucks card or sth
either pay with points, or get a cheaper rate for points, or even get points if you pay normal for the cowirking space
the card could also double as a validator, either for the reserved space or as a key card to a closed one, saving on in-store admin work
if i were starbucks, i would 100% try this
clearly there is a demand for quick and informal working space, instead of a formal, multi month tenant agreement with one limited provider
just go to any store location, and in case of need, pay an hourly rate with your coffee to get a seat
not trying to be sarcastic but;
> if i were starbucks, i would 100% try this
which is why you _are_ not starbucks
—
imagine the multitude of laws and regulations in multitude of countries, if you offer co-working space, then you must also register as a landlord, handle mails (not the electronic ones, physical mails), business registrations, etc.
there will be people who would want to stay in after-hours, even if the store is not open. obviously they are paying the rent, hence they have the right to do so.
people will reserve tables/seats, what happens if it's over-booked? there are certain "cool" locations which are extremely busy hot-spots meanwhile others are pretty chill...
PS. they could even apply surge pricing for this. in fact they should.
If they can get Coca Cola to bring back Surge[1], I will happily pay for Surge pricing
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_(drink)
I was about to make that joke-not-joke, but you beat me to it.
There was a thread about this exact situation a week ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811602
At thy point its no longer a loyalty card; its a fealty system, with landed lords (Starbucks) and serfs.
The point of coffee shops in this regard is that the use as free coworking space
Incidentally, back when I was doing startups, there were free coworking spaces in the under-utilized portions of the Seattle convention center. Big, squishy chairs, fast wifi, and power ports galore.
It was like a self-service micro tech incubator, and helped me bootstrap a company that lasted over a decade. The State of Washington more than got its money back in taxes.
I wonder how often they try large floor plans. Most Starbucks I see try to keep things small. What happens if you make it a bit larger, like a small library? I wonder if the increase in foot traffic and sales would offset the cost of extra real estate. They could keep it free, but also somewhat cross over into coworking.
That's a Barnes and Noble
proudly serving Starbucks coffee
It's like parking, if it's free people will take all of it quickly
simply, even cleaning and keeping it tidy is a quadratic equation compared to the space available. people leave their garbage behind or spill their coffee, making a single table somewhat unusable for some time. there are already min. number of employees, mostly busy at the bar. having extra space equals requiring more hands for cleaning, hence cost not linearly increasing but quadratic with the square meter.
another thing is, if the space gets full, people get out anyway, but chance to buy stuff.
for example, let's see there are 2 empty tables right now, you get in to the line, there are 6 people in the queue. imagine 3 of them somewhat occupies the those 2 empty tables, even if you resign the idea of getting coffee, i guarantee you that at least 1 of the other 2 would still get coffee but just move to a nearby park or bench. which starbucks obviously does not pay the rent for...
(as long as the campers are considerate) it's also low cost. even prime location starbucks have large lull periods through the day, prime for campers, even though only spending $5-10.
when people feel entitled to take up 2 spaces for hours while families roam for seats is when it's too far
Idk. Anti-Cafés are popular some of them specialice in exactly that, being a coffee with coworking/studying atmosphere. It works for them
This one[1] has a meeting space that can be closed off from the rest of the store, with a TV or projector, and I’m pretty sure they’ve got a copier or at least an all-in-one printer.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/47RMhPAGNHXSnED9A
Our local Panera has this. It's popular with the MLM ladies.
Ive seen some coffee shops do this, where part of the space is a “coworking area”.
I imagine it requires a bit more capital investment and knowhow; I get the feeling that franchisees don’t have a lot of freedom.
Some Korean coffee shops should try this though!
Free, common-use things are awesome - until the tragedy of the commons sets in and ruins it for everybody. This is true of so many things that start free and then later require payment. And everybody gets mad about it.
Chicago has "residential zone parking" for the areas of the city that are primarily residential. For $30 per year per car, you get to park on the street in your local zone (2-3 city blocks). Nobody else is allowed to park on the street in that zone. For visitors, you can buy a sheet of stickers for $1 per sticker that enable 1 day of parking. But you can't buy more than 3 sheets in a month (they keep track).
I've always wondered why NYC and other big cities don't do this. It costs so little, yet makes it much easier to park where you live.
Density. If you paid for a parking permit then there's some expectation that a parking spot will be available for you near your house. Except in NYC residents outnumber parking spots 20:1 in some neighborhoods.
I imagine you use prices and rationing to restrict the number of permits to avoid this issue.
Seattle has this. 2hr parking if you dont have an residential parking zone registration for your car (it's based on license plate).
Surprisingly they charge $190/yr per car for this.
> Surprisingly they charge $190/yr per car for this.
Don't feel too bad. In Chicago, it's a $30 optional add-on to the annual sticker that everyone has to buy whether they park on the street or keep the car in a garage. The annual sticker cost is based on the weight of the vehicle; it can run from $100 to $500 per year.
30$ per year basically means it is subsidized. Imagine the revenue if they would rent out that space for anything else.
Maybe my view is too European, but why would you subsidize car ownership in a city?
Residents love these policies but local businesses tend to hate them.
Business zones (IE arterial streets) use metered parking
Tragedy of the commons is caused by out of sync motives. Like a mismatch in protocols that people speak, which is partially explained by culture and upbringing (only partially of course). That is, tragedy of the commons is a symptom not a cause. Not something that happens just by virtue of something being a part of the commons. The more people you have, the more opportunity for those to be out of sync too
In the case of the coffee shop concept, I’d speculate since there’s not hundreds or thousands of years of history in Korea to establish a proper protocol for what is acceptable to do in a coffee shop, anything goes. Until Starbucks can establish from an early age that coffee drinking as the only culturally appropriate thing you should be doing in a coffee shop, and you may feel morally corrupt, be socially ostracized, or go to hell for your sins otherwise
> a proper protocol for what is acceptable to do in a coffee shop
i had thought that the accepted protocol for making a cafe a working space is to purchase at least one item on the menu per hour.
Except a space owned by corporation is not a commons. It’s not free and not controlled by the people who use it.
It is designed and completely controlled by a for profit corporation for the purpose of making profit.
Or maybe Starbucks should install a common printer with a fee?
The large items policy still makes sense, though
Is that a business they even want, someone occupying a seat for 8 hours only to consume two coffees?
They'd rather that than an empty seat, especially if that person is turning up 5-6 days/week.
Most coffee shops where I live (London, UK, specifically out in West London) are at best 20% full through most of the day, that's a lot of dead real estate not paying for itself.
When I tried working out of coffee shops a bit some years ago the "etiquette" seemed to be ~1 drink/hour to pay for your seat. I don't like coffee that much, so was consuming more like 0.66/hour (i.e. around 2 drinks every 3 hours), and people were fine with that, as it was effectively a rent payment of £20/day, or £100/week, which is a little under what a hotdesk would cost me in the same area but with a lot more flexibility (never pay for idle!), and of course its good margin sales for them.
Of course, they could just say "no laptops". There's a pub chain in the UK that did that (Sam Smith's - no screens, no swearing), but the rule is not widely followed or enforced and where it is the pubs are empty far more than the ones that welcome customers.
Obviously some coffee shops are gonna want that but some coffee shops are making all their money by selling to customers during short periods in the morning, lunch and maybe in the afternoon and if this person is sitting there blocking the chair that could be used by many customers during the time the total of two cups of coffee will be less than what they are losing from not being able to serve those customers. Of course for some coffee shops they are never full and they probably benefit from this and they would love to have those type of customers.
The problem isn't your one coffee an hour during the lull of the day. It's you taking up a table at lunchtime that could be occupied by 4 customers who will outspend your entire day by several times over. Sure the place is mostly empty for most of the day but your cheap ass is taking a seat during the precious hours where they make their profit.
I believe there was an HN article recently about a business that provides a service to cafes to formalize that rent agreement. Spend a certain amount (e.g. 8 euros every 3 hours) or you lose wifi access.
>> but the rule is not widely followed or enforced and where it is the pubs are empty far more than the ones that welcome customers.
I mean, I went to one in SOHO and it was packed and indeed, no one was on their phone and people were being actively told off if they used a phone. That was nice. The fact that I paid £9 for a pint was much less nice though.
I presume it's highly subjective.
For a busy cafe that's always short on seating and struggles to keep up with fulfilling orders, they want nothing to do with laptop squatters.
Every other case I imagine it's desirable to have at least some regulars presumably employed enough to be working from a cafe using modern tech.
One common problem I've noticed is van lifers and other quasi homeless folks spending ~zero money stinking up the place just for the free power and internet.
Now that battery life and cell-tethered internet is so good, some of my favorite urban cafes have adopted a no-outlets no-wifi approach, while still having tons of seating and allowing folks to be present with their computers all day. They just have to provide their own internet and power, which serves to exclude the true parasites while selecting for folks with $$ to spend because they have state of the art gadgets with their own unlimited data plans.
Customers attract customers. Even if some customers are not spending a lot of money, they bring in other customers who more than make up for them. This is the reason why so many coffee shops go out of their way to provide power outlets near every table.
They want people, but I think a printer crosses the line. It's a Starbucks not a Kinko's.
It's even worse, I don't think you can bring your own printer to a Kinko's.
When I worked out of free co-working spaces in Asia I would buy lunch and breakfast from them too, both to socialize with other patrons and to not lose my seat.
I work from a coffee shop a good bit. They don’t care for the most part. Assuming you tip reasonably, be nice to the staff, don’t be annoying, don’t negatively impact the other customers, be helpful when the occasion calls for it.
That will ruin them at $1,500 to $2,000 per litre of ink...
They could provide Starbucks branded ink of which 95% of the cost is licensing fees which they pay out tax-free to themselves.
They could scribble each customers name on the printouts with a sharpie
"Got a flat black and white parking ticket appeal form for Kim"
- Name?
- Sauron.
- Sharon it is.
Maybe they could do some R&D to see if coffee could be used as ink.
I just put coffee in my printer to see...
It kinda works, but the printouts are very faint.
I was expecting it to clog immediately (the jets are ~10um), but it didn't.
Damn. The kind of friends I need in my life.
I'm not surprised if you used the Breakfast Blend. Did you try the Caffe Verona or Espresso Roast?
It was Lidl's red topped instant - don't even know the name - the jar with the red lid, and I made it pretty strong but without milk/sugar (which I thought would cook/burn onto the inside of the nozzle)
That's my printer recommends Bulletproof Coffee. The coconut oil helps ensure smooth flow without clogging while the MCTs improve coffee adhesion to the paper.
Sorry to bother you but I have so many questions! Like, did you actually do it or was it just a middle joke I didn't detect? If the former, wasn't you afraid the printer won't be usable after that experiment? Didn't that worry you? Do you often experiment in this way? (Just stopping there to give otherwise the list gets too long.)
I have literally hundreds of HP print heads from a project, many partly blocked or burned out (they burn if you send them the wrong signals, and like 10% of the time I hit 'break' on my debugger it burns a few jets out if they're firing at the time), and had a coffee sitting right next to my desk so thought "why not".
This is incredible - you should write a blog about it. I want to see what that printout looks like!
When the main project is done, there'll be a blog post and the coffee test will make an appearance!
I'm also super curious what one might get up to with that many print heads, so maybe there's two posts in there!
yeah, but can you bubble jet maybe a photo onto a flat white?
That is a stretch goal of my project, but right now I wouldn't be confident I have a method to flush out the OEM and probably toxic ink.
Then they'd have two problems: people camping out in the stores and managing thousands of printers.
It's hard to run a global business. Different people have such different ways of doing things. Every day, tens of millions of people run pen tests on Starbuck's rules. And Starbuck's front line of defence? A bunch of shy college student baristas.
Most of those people arent in college, especially outside the US.
If this is such a pervasive problem you'd think the article would have had no problem sourcing a photo of this instead of some generic phone ogling group?
I've been living in Seoul for a few months now and often work out of different Starbucks and have never seen anything like this here. I spent a similar amount of time in Seattle and saw much "worse" set ups at the coffee shops there.
I've been to Starbucks in Seoul 100+ times (not proud of it, more the opposite) and have never seen anything like this.
Cafes provide two distinct products, usually bundled into one: seat rental and food/drink.
How about charge separately for each? I get that it would be awkward to try, but why not.
Or have actual public places? The Cafe's are there to serve coffee, it's just courtesy as business model to let you hang around in the premises and when the business model starts to fail in some way they adjust it.
After university, the most I miss is the actual places that are mine to use and are made for hanging around or working and not necessarily consuming anything.
> After university, the most I miss is the actual places that are mine to use and are made for hanging around or working and not necessarily consuming anything.
You just pre-paid for the consumption in your tuition fees.
outside of USA, i do not think that's true,
given the OP nickname is mrtksn, I presume he is a Turkish person. There are many public (ie. govt. funded) universities in Turkey. Except various touristic places in Istanbul, it would also be possible to "hangout" for an hour in many of smaller cities. Obviously this is degrading as the cities are getting more crowded. Although, most shopping malls having food-court with a "public" area. (ie. An area that belongs to none of the food places, but the shopping mall itself) You could just coast there from 10am in the morning until 10pm in the evening, with free-wifi and no drinks.
Similarly, in Europe, some coffee shops kind of span to the street benches or the window-side seating. For the window-side (outside), you may not be able to sit there for an hour or so, but definitely coastable about 30 minutes. (ie waiting for someone). Meanwhile, public areas are always free-for-all, if the WIFI works, then for sure you can coast all day...
Well, then it was a great deal. Significantly better than what I'm getting for renting a table with a coffee for hour or two for $5.
> Well, then it was a great deal
You can go back to university.
that’s totally among my retirement plans :)
You can go as a lecturer in which case they might even pay you.
> The Cafe's are there to serve coffee, it's just courtesy as business model to let you hang around
Traditionally it's the other way around, the drink is a by-product of a public house where people can gather. Could you imagine a bar where people are just supposed to drink and leave?
> can you imagine a bar where people are just supposed to drink and leave?
That is what a "bar" was invented to do. In the old public house, patrons would remain seated and the alcohol was brought to them. A heavy drinker would drink until they couldnt walk, but would still occupy a chair. Then the "bar" was invented. Patrons now come to the alcohol and will generally depart before becoming legless. A single bartender can now dish out far more alcohol per hour than any table server. That didnt exist as a concept until a couple hundred years ago.
Proper sushi "bars" follow the same pattern. You eat solo, often with curtains between individual patrons. You eat fast. Then you leave. You dont hang around for a chat.
How does this work? Were these public houses literally owned by the public and someone noticed that they may sell something there? AFAIK it's more like people opening their premises to outsiders to hang around and sell them stuff.
Yes - to enter most houses you needed to be a member of the club, or know the owner, have an invitation, etc.
Some houses were open to the public ("public houses," "pubs") where anyone could walk in and grab a drink and a bite, and usually even a bed for the night.
> Could you imagine a bar where people are just supposed to drink and leave?
Yes.
Local Library?
That, or an old-school “gentlemen’s club” which do still exist in some areas.
And if you’re near a college, you can become a donor and known to the school and be polite and gain access to the public areas.
Japanese Manga Cafes / Internet Cafes give you all you can drink coffee and tea for hourly pricing, and usually comes with a PC and a private booth. I'm not sure how much of a thing they still are though, but they were big in the 2000s and early 10s
This is what we had all over the world (...) when Internet Cafes were a thing. Perhaps they should come back?
The "Santander Work Cafes" (https://www.santanderbank.com/workcafe/cafe) are an excellent implementation of this.
Most developers could not really do their own thing on a PC/laptop that is not theirs.
Are they supposed to set up their development environment each time?
You could still bring your laptop? Swap out the HDMI if you want to use the monitor...
For work oriented cafe, owners can partner with Teamviewer, license seats from it and then advertise this as a fast remote service. Iirc teamviewer requires payment only for host machine, clients can be free. Though I imagine the market for such setup would be extremely small and unprofitable.
Seems overly complicated when you could just give a plug for charger and let them use their own laptops.
Clearly StarBucks should rent out StarBucks branded developer machines in the cloud, which you can access from home or from StarBucks terminals.
only for JAVA
devcontainers & github codespaces may help, but i agree with you, each day, i would spend just setting up my stuff, to start from scratch on the next day!
How interesting - so the other extreme. 0 cost on drinks, 100% time in seat cost.
Newer Coworking places generally seem to have some Starbucks-vibes, but AFAIK they are not doing to well.
Maybe the price of a coffee is exactly what people are willing to pay for a seat, a small table, and wifi for some hours.
I haven't seen a coworking place that isn't insanely overpriced compared to a coffee shop so it's no surprise they're not doing well.
In my experience price isn't the only issue. One of the (smaller) coworking spaces I can have access to locally, closes at 6pm while a coffee shop at around 9-10PM and it's also open on weekends.
But then again, I find working in coffee shops too distracting, so work from home and randomly popping into a coworking space now and then.
Little overpriced but I've found Loop Earplugs to help working in coffee shops, etc. Muffles out most of the sound but not everything, enough to focus but not fly off your seat if someone taps your shoulder.
What's the purpose of doing this over working at home where this problem doesn't exist?
I work at home 99% of the time but occasionally it's nice to get out of the house and see the world of the living.
For many you really want a distinction between “work area” and “home” - one way is to have a separate office at home to do work in, but you can also leave the house and go somewhere.
If you work on the kitchen table and that’s where you play, also, the mind and body have hard times disengaging from work.
Yeah, but isn't the question whether the co-working place is overpriced or if the coffee shop is underpriced or maybe both?
I tried wework. The seats were unbelievably uncomfortable. For the low-low price of $500 usd to get a hot seat, it's just much worse than coffeeshops.
Coworking spaces need to colocate with services. Starbucks, Fedex Kinkos, massage chairs....
Imagine if a little critical thinking like this had been allowed to enter the minds of WeWork investors.
Companies pay more than coffee prices for offices
Last week's submission is a company created to do this, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44811602.
https://badgeapp.co.
Reminds me of the Improv Everywhere sketch where they did this exact thing.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EKEeHREK2nQ
I thought about Improv Everywhere recently - they had some great things in the early 2000s.
Re watching this, at about 1:16 one of the agents looks familiar. "Huh, she looks kinda like Aubrey Plaza". Then the credits come on: It was actually Aubrey Plaza.
I thought that too!
17 years ago - wow!
Are 3d printers allowed?
How about a soldering station?
Or a desktop scanning electron microscope?
Amusingly, those are all available at a cafe i’ve frequented in Seoul.
They’re used as background dressing but they’re also available to use. It’s criminally underused and i’d love to do it but i have no idea what i would make with it.
My friends got into tabletop wargaming last year, we print almost everything.
Also, great for organizers for drawers, tools, etc.
I have soldered in a Starbucks before.
All of those sound more reasonable than my Model M keyboard.
I have a water cooler … on wheels. Yes? No?
People bring printers to Starbucks… really ? I’m kind of surprised it feels like an abuse to me o_O it would never cross my mind
There needs to be a resurrection of the Canon NoteJet laptops.
Ooh, yes I want one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_NoteJet
Fire !!!
Yes, and not only in Korea.
https://laist.com/news/starbucks-swag
South Korea is cyber café country. If you open a café there, people expect some specific services.
I guess the fact people come with PCs and printer is a way to demonstrate how they don't want this part of US culture and would like to keep theirs. So either adapt and start offering PC bang in South Korea or go home.
Starbucks Coffee Korea Co. is a Korean company, owned by a Singaporean wealth fund and a Korean company. US Starbucks provides licensing and supplies, nothing more.
So this is a decision by a Korean company, not an American one.
https://stories.starbucks.com/asia/stories/2021/starbucks-tr...
Or you know, you could just not go there if you don't like the place rather than be a prick to people who work there and customers who like going there.
I agree, following the logic means any customer from any shop can start doing anything regardless of policies and shops just need to adapt just because of my expectations ?
Hard to do when starbucks is a real estate holding company that sells coffee. They have sucked all the air out of the cafe space and driven out their competitors.
Driven out their competitors where? In Seoul, Twosome Place and Hollys are ubiquitous, there's a few more chains whose names I don't remember off the top of my head and plenty of single-location cafes remain as well.
I couldn't tell you where the nearest Starbucks is in Philly but I can name at least 9 other cafes within a short walk.
> They have sucked all the air out of the cafe space and driven out their competitors.
How?
They had a policy of saturating an area until all the competition closed then withdrawing shops until they were profitable. It was quite common to see two Starbucks across the road from each other.
By addicting consumers to coffee flavored sugar I suppose?
Is this to the point that no internet cafes exist?
[flagged]
Having lived in Korea, I have always enjoyed the cafe culture. Starbucks there is known for accepting you to work there. Although I haven't seen anyone bring a printer yet, some do bring extra stuff such as a stand for their laptop that take up a lot of space.
The only thing this article mentions is that Starbucks prohibits people of bringing stuff that would take up more than a single seat, which seems reasonable?
I used to travel with a Canon PIXMA printer. Quite portable. Could carry a laptop and printer in a small backpack. The paper was heavy, though.
What were you printing that required a print to be carried with you?
Personally printing should be banned. The amount of paper waste we create disgraceful.
I worked for a Japanese company. Paper is a big deal, there.
Also, I have long subscribed to Tufte's "supergraphic" methodology, when giving presentations.
In which way? Can you elaborate? What type of document would you need to print on the go? What for or for whom?
> I worked for a Japanese company. Paper is a big deal, there.
About time they evolved to the next level then.
My point still sticks. Paper waste is a large impact to climate change. We shouldn't be using paper anymore, why do we proceed to waste such as by printing out email's?
Have you actually worked out how much paper waste is? It’s minor and minuscule compared to basically everything else.
Still requires a tree to be culled for the paper.
It's old fashion and no longer serves purpose in the 1st world countries.
Why we still use paper I do not know, I don't. Tell me what for and why it can't be digital.
In 2014, in a Starbucks in Los Gatos, CA, I saw someone bring in a (small) desktop PC and a monitor and set it up at a table.
My roommate claims she saw the same in the Valley (in Sherman Oaks/VN in LA) in 2019
This joke was closer to real life in 1999: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FE_acveWUBMMJNU.jpg
I’ve seen that as well a few times.
In Tokyo, coffee shops seem to have embraced the work culture. Tables and seating have been adapted to working, and you often get a receipt with the time when you are expected to leave printed on it. Most (if not all) people in a Tully's in Tokyo are there to work.
Seoul is similar. Many Twosome Places have study desks and some of the chains known for small footprint also have bigger locations for meetings and work (Ediya Coffee Lab).
I never understood why people who are frugal would go to Starbucks in Korea to work, when local chains are beside them, have cheaper drinks and their desk/chair setups are less hostile to working.
Even McDonalds has seats with power outlets, I mostly see groups of students studying rather than people working.
A food court near my house has slowly turned into an improvised coworking space.
It's relatively quiet (as food courts go). For a while, the café even offered a whole day's worth of coffee for a reasonable price.
What I don't get is why the increasingly empty malls in my state don't incentivise this more. At the very least they'd earn something from parking and some food and drinks.
Absent owners of malls don't want to think or work with the community to earn money. They just want big anchor store contracts like it's the 90s.
The solution is to bring back cybercafes, or cafes which were set up up to go online. Such culture existed in the 90s but was then ended by the widespread online accessibility by home ADSL and later mobile internet.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/worlds-first-ever-cyber-cafe...
South Korea has many pc cafes, so called pc bangs / pc방, and there are also many study cafes where you can work for long periods.
The 'problem' with those for remote workers is that you pay per minute/hour in a cybercafe - in a normal coffee shop you can just nurse one coffee for hours and pay a single low cost (and get a coffee).
I can't remember the name of it now but back in 2010s there was an 'OK' managed drop-in office space you could rent for £10 a day in central London - which came with free coffee and printing - I haven't looked at the prices lately.
Wow, I'd be curious about the details if you can remember.
I was working from cafes in London at that time, and I would have loved to find a place like that. I had to either use actual cafes (free besides getting a coffee and maybe a sandwich, limited privacy and security) or pay for a dedicated space, generally with too much tedious bureaucracy. Maybe I misremember, but to get prices as low as £10/day I think you had to commit to a large number of days per month. I don't recall anyone offering low prices a la carte.
Just looked up my email - and in 2012 I paid £10 4 hours in the Regus shared working space in central London - I think a 7 hour day might of been £12 but I don't have a full booking. From memory it was behind Bond Street - I was working for a small company in East London, and was taking the afternoon off to interview for another role. I wanted to be able to work right up until the interview and have somewhere to get changed into my suit, so didn't want to work from a cafe. I'd seen the offer in various 'business' magazines at the time, it wasn't brilliant, and I wouldn't have been happy their full time, but it was perfect for the day I needed it for.
Prior to that time we had been paying £330 a month for a desk on Dean Street Soho - but that was a monthly rolling contract as you say, and we'd just moved to some free space in Farringdon, where a friend was letting us use a desk (I think in part to make their office look busier).
There was a drop in place in East London that offered similar day prices back in 2010, as I went to look around it - but it was too noisy for me - was walking distance to the Silicon Roundabout - but I can't remember what it was called.
I mostly used the British Library, which was lovely and just the right level of quiet. But it gradually got more popular -- when I popped in recently, the (expanded) working areas were very crowded.
Nice - I tried libraries and also used friends club memberships - but I needed to do a lot of video calls, so a place I could talk freely was needed.
A friend of mine seemed to manage to join nice clubs early on good terms (and low costs), and ran a mobile advertising business for a good few years without ever having a proper office space - just working from home then the clubs as needed for meetings etc. But his line of work seemed rather boozy.
Boozy?
Meetings with clients then ended in 'booze' (British slang for alcohol/beer/spirts/wine).
Cybercafes are already a big thing in SK, but why is the above comment downvoted? I, for one, miss net cafes very much. They used to be big in Greece, and I made many many dear friendships in small, cozy net cafes.
I can recount hilarious and even heartwarming stories; turns out that having a cafe (i.e. leisure space) with computers used by people in close proximity makes for dynamics and interactions that you cannot recreate with remote connections.
In my town, this one guy, set up his whole kit. 25” monitor, gaming setup. Disk drives. And then he could be there for 13 hrs a day. A little extreme!
I saw someone with a portable monitor and Mac mini in our local Toronto Second Cup location.
Printers?! Desktop?! They need to wheel the stuff in. Hilarious how far people go to save a few bucks.
I saw a guy (in america) charge his e-bike battery once at Starbucks. GPT estimates a full recharge to be around 30 cents.
Hah, probably comparable to running a desktop for an equivalent amount of time - most ebike chargers are 100 - 200 W, and the bikes usually have a battery between 0.5 - 1 kWh (which in my area would be 5 - 10 cents). Less disruptive though, assuming they detached the battery and left the bike outside.
(0.5 kwhr) * (20 cents/kwhr) = 10 cents. With an additional 10-15% due to charging system inefficiencies (lost to heat). 11 cents.
It can be good exercise to do an 8th grade level word problem every now and then.
The actual arithmetic is easy but most people don’t know about the batteries in e-bikes. They might not know about the electricity prices at the top of their heads either.
You could google those…but it seems easier to just use GPT if you’re going to google that stuff anyway.
Well considering the GPT reported '30 cents' a charge, it is either a. considering 3x larger battery than I would consider average e-bike sized (and I got my 500Wh number based on a 10-second google scan), b. price of electricity it is considering is 3x higher (highly doubt it) or c. it is imagining that modern lithium ion charging efficiencies wall-to-battery are way, way worse than they actually are (possible to hallucinate and integrate into its calculation).
Either way, we don't know, and the original commenter doesn't know either, because they didn't google anything about e-bike battery sizes or their local electricity prices and thus didn't take the opportunity to actually learn something.
The estimate was based on a battery of 750Wh (bikes seem to range .5-1 KWh) and CA prices are around 30 cents/KWh. That's 2.25x your meanly worded estimate.
I did learn how simple the cost calculation is though (capacity * $/KWh), thanks.
> Starbucks South Korea implemented a policy asking patrons to not bring bulky items like desktop computers and printers into stores.
.. says the caption under a Getty image which shows no such thing! No wonder people don't respect the media.
The only reason I would click on this sort of thing would be to see a video or image of Koreans bringing their desktops and printers to a Starbucks and setting them up.
Without that, I can imagine it just fine without relying on any words in the article.
Searching YouTube, I'm not able to find any videos footage of people with desktops that they brought to a Starbucks in South Korea. The story is circulating and there are various new stories in various languages from various news networks, but all have only generic footage unrelated to the story.
I found this 17-year-old prank video (not Koreans): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEeHREK2nQ
One 7-year-old video (likewise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBRkRZzCeTo
Ho-hum content. They brought a computer, set it up and sat down.
I'm guessing this Korea thing was probably a very small number of people in specific locations (possibly pranksters) and not a national trend.
I feel genuinely sad for anyone who's in such a desperate spot that they're doing this
What makes you think they’re desperate? IME people from Asian cultures sometimes have ways of thinking that strike at least me personally as basically alien. And then my brain interpolates their motives wrong based on biases that are shaped by western versions of politeness etc.
The apartment is small; the missus wants you out of it so that she can clean it; you have a deadline; there's a café nearby; bingo.
Who the eff lugs their desktop machine and printer to Starbucks instead of just use it in their house if that's a workable option? You'd have to be sorely motivated by something. Asians are in fact human dude.
aww shucks, there goes my plan to pack my Threadripper into a 90s vintage Dolch "portable computer" housing and let Starbucks pay the power bills.
If there's no cost, people will take advantage of it.
I am more than happy to "take my coffee and fuck off". But I'll do it with a 50 cent instant coffee from a supermarket, not pay 10$ for it just to not be able to relax in a coffee shop.
In Japan I’ve seen at Starbucks: a guy bring in a giant power supply and plop it down on top of the table to power his tower and monitor like it wasn’t the most sociopathic thing in the world. And another guy used to set up six or seven screens at his table to “daytrade” — turns out he wasn’t day trading at all, they were all running videos of fake daytrading / stock tickers. (I had a friend at that Starbucks who would give me all the details; they had to ban him eventually for disrupting / getting surly with other customers).
[dead]
[dead]
They did build something people want, why are they rejecting it now?
Making something people want isn't enough, unless they want to start paying their employees and leases with smiles.
People shouldn't have to bring a desktop computer, they should already have one there.
Seems like an opportunity for a coworking-lite space -- rent a seat/desk spot for 1 hour blocks.
There's already a large offering of such spaces in Korea. You have cafes where you can bring your laptop and work in peace, there's pc cafes / pc bangs which are more for gaming but provide a desktop, there are places where you can rent co-working spaces or spaces for co-working that you can use with a membership.
Co-working spaces of all types are ubiquitous in Tokyo FWIW. Near my midsize station I had about 10 different providers in a 10 minute walking radius, some with multiple locations even!
Most have a selection of plans to choose from: hourly, daily, monthly, etc
I chose a bit more upscale one without a fixed seat. I pay ¥1100 (7.5 USD) I think for each day I use it, with a monthly minimum spend of ¥2200. It comes with free mediocre coffee/tea. It is consistently clean and library quiet as people follow the posted rules including minding the volume of their typing and headphones.
I would be surprised if the situation in Seoul was significantly different.
They actually have exactly that for gaming: a "pc bang" like a internet cafe. I wonder if it has been tried in earnest for co-working. You would think it is an easier business so long as the demand is there.
There's also study cafes, which are aimed more primarily at students but often have working spaces for laptop use. These are quiet spaces to focus compared to something like Starbucks or PC bangs though.
What a novel concept!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_bang
I first assumed this was a YouTube video where someone eats a PC in front of their livestream audience.
I somehow doubt that people are lugging a desktop and printer around the city, only to set it up and work for 1 hour in Starbucks.
By the hour, implying multiple are possible.
With starbucks delivery, starbucks printing, etc.
Isn’t that how most coworking spaces work already? I’ve worked from a lot of them, and it always worked like that: I check in when I arrive in the morning, and when I check out at the end of the day, I pay for the number of hours I have spent there (often capped to a maximum of 5 hours or so, even if I stay longer).
My original comment was an offhand observation, but the difference under assumption is that co-working spaces require a contract/commitment, whereas the scenario I had in mind was no commitment other than paying for each time of use.
Maybe that's already a thing; my sense of self is not dependent upon being "right" in this matter.
Why would anyone except a gamer buy a desktop computer anyway. I guess some people still have their old computer and a lot of south korenas are gamers, but laptops are just better overall because of the portability. If people bring printerS pural then starbuck could "just" have a free-ish printer
> Why would anyone except a gamer buy a desktop computer anyway?
Because you get a beast of a machine for the price of MacBook Air, and because you prefer looking at a big ultrawide monitor instead of alt-tabbing like crazy on a 13" screen, and you prefer a full keyboard and a proper mouse to the cramped layout they stuff in laptops because there's no room.
Oh, and maybe a proper sound system.
And it can also double as a NAS (more physical space for storage) and home server.
Not everyone needs portability all the time. For when I do, I have a Thinkpad I can get by with, with Tailscale VPN so it has access to the workstation.
(for anyone curios, yes, it's still cheaper than top-of-the-line laptop + nas/home server combo, but my main reason is ergonomics).
External monitor, keyboard, mouse, sound, stuck in closet and used as a NAS... I do all these with laptops just as much as with desktops.
Laptop price disadvantage can even flip when buying used due to cheaper shipping.
Laptops can't hold as many internal devices nor the fastest parts and have worse thermals/sound though.
> it can also double as a NAS ... and home server
Devil's advocate, but it can't if it's in Starbucks ;)
There's far cheaper workstations out there than Macbooks, especially if you're running Linux on them.
I ain't lugging that setup around :)
I have a VPN so all its resources are available in a Starbucks via ssh and/or RDP.
This one was a custom build with maxed ram, heaps of storage, a modest Nvidia card with as much VRAM as possible without breaking the bank, etc.. stuff I personally needed. A cheap workstation (or a much more expensive Mac) won't have that exact combo.
So aside from ergonomics, it's also customizability to my idiosyncratic wants and needs.
Anyone who doesn't need to work while traveling actually.
A desktop is both cheaper (at the same spec), while being much more durable due to being upgradable and reparable.
Sure laptop win in terms of portability, but since we can do so much on our phone, I don't really feel the need to bring a computer with me everywhere.
Show me that quiet, 16 core, 5 GHz, 128 GB RAM laptop that's actually pretty cheap, too.
I do need the CPU performance, that computer is used to compile C++ code. The RAM is for local LLMs - not fast enough to be practical most of the time tbh, but I like to experiment anyway.
The MacBook Pro with M4 Max will give you 16 cores (12 of which run at 4.5Ghz) and 128GB of RAM, and will likely pretty closely match the speed of the desktop processor for compiling C++ (at least we've done benchmarking of rustc in /r/rust the top-spec Apple chips somehow match top-spec x86 chips).
It certainly won't be cheap though!
Keep that beast humming at home and get a cheap MacBook Air to use ssh at the coffee shop.
Thinkpad with Linux and it's got 8 cores as well (thanks AMD!) because remote development isn't great for what I'm doing and how fast a connection I can rely on.
An AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 should do that.
They used to be cheaper. Might still be?
I've had mine about ten years and it's still on the original CPU and mobo and PSU I think. I've probably saved a few hundred bucks from not buying another whole computer. It might not be as fast as a new laptop but it has more RAM and storage than most.
If I want to go into LLM stuff I will buy a newish used GPU for it. If the CPU is a bottleneck then I'll get a new mobo but I won't need a new chassis or PSU maybe ever. And the hard drives just rotate as I buy bigger ones
If you don’t need the portability, desktops are strictly better.
Laptops are terrible -
- Too small
- too loud
- too hot
- too few ports
- fake performance (good luck with your 105W "5090")
- OS confusion about active screen, keyboard and mouse (how many times have I experienced that only the built-in keyboard works during booting, or the OS showing the login screen on only the built-in screen),
- most of them have to be open or have ports in awkward places, and take up space comparable to a desktop.
Everyone has different needs. A lot of us get by very nicely with a good laptop and a big monitor (or two). Very few moving parts to keep track of, and you can be productive both home and away.