I have one of the Voltera dev kits. It’s not bad. It probably runs at almost the same speed as the m1 mini or maybe closer to the dev kit. The x86 emulation is decent. It doesn’t do well when running old games like Age of Empires 2 HD. For doing light development it is okay. The nice thing is that it is far more efficient than anything Intel puts out. Whether Qualcomm can keep the performance per watt to levels like the M series chips remains to be seen.

The facts are that large companies rarely innovate anything major. They tend to buy up smaller companies that have taken the risk and succeeded. Look at Google and Microsoft and tons of others. It’s a problem with growing big. The forces that make a company a successful scrappy little startup die out in the name of organizational efficiency. If you want to know what Apple innovated you have to look at what they did in the 70s or extend your criteria to companies they have bought.

People laughed their assess off at Bill Gates’s epic failed demo of usb on windows 95. Live on stage he plugged in a peripheral and the machine blue screened. No way in hell would Jobs have taken that risk.

The real crime is marketing the driver assist capability under the name autopilot when it is anything but that.

The answer is always “laid off”. They don’t usually verify because the former employer will only verify that you worked there and your start and end date. They don’t want to open themselves up to slander lawsuits.

In my experience a PIP is just a nice way to say it’s not working out, go ahead and start looking elsewhere, you can stay on a while longer until you do find something else. With all of the tech layoffs over the last 18 months, they might as well just dispense with PIPs too.