I admittedly don’t have enough comparison, since my last phones were all pretty much stock android (2x pixel and before that a nokia/hmd with android one. I do have a Samsung tablet, but only a lower one without Samsung dex, which i assume would be the most interesting vendor feature? What special features am i missing out on?

What i do however like is that they don’t come with google apps and another set of vendor specific ones by default. Some of them might be better than the default, but when i am unsatisfied by that i rather just choose a replacement myself and download it e.g. from fdroid store.

Also I’m not sure Pixel actually counts as a premium phone.

As far as msrp price goes i’d say they are in the premium segment price wise, but at least here in Germany they pretty much immediately are available at great discounts at least in combination with mobile plans.

You are right that hardware wise they aren’t necessarily at the top, especially when compared to some of the chinese brands. But in return you get clean software and very long support. And even though the camera might not have the greatest specs the immediate results (which is what matters to most consumers) are consistenly ranked among the best.

Generally I think there are two questions: why does Spotify want messages and why would a user want them. The first one seems easy enough to answer: anything that binds a customer more closely to their product and creates switching costs in an otherwise relatively interchangeable product is good from a business perspective.

I could imagine some other use cases as well: Maybe it could be used to allow artists to engage their fans, inserting the platform deeper inbetween those two. I don’t really know how merch and ticket sales are currently handled exactly, but a messaging system might also be useful to fully keep users within the app while using those features.

I’ve always followed this guide on the xda forums to patch my own revanced YouTube APK, rather than downloading a prepatched one from somewhere else. Worked well enough for me so far, but I am sure there are plenty of other options to achieve the same thing.

Could you elaborate a bit how blockchain enables something unique here? I see that it enables trade between users, but if a single company controls the game and I assume supply of new cards, does the blockchain aspect for trading really matter?

Trading itself is basic and doesn’t need a blockchain. I guess with it you have it implemented in a public and tamper proof way, but that second part doesn’t seem to matter to me if the source is centralized.

So what exactly is gained from this approach over just your average ingame auction house?

Lego as a brand does imo substantially benefit from positive associations such as heritage, sentimentality, and other positive attributes. Otherwise how would they be able to demand such premium prices.

So I would see it less as them being “dinged” for this action, but more as them losing some of those privileges. Something they are not inherently entitled to.

Imo the title falsely implies that Lego not being a US company means they are completely independent and unaffected by US actions.

Lego presumably does substantial business in the US and thus is beholden to US jurisdiction and the whims of Trump to some degree. Them dropping diversity and inclusion from their reports just shows their priorities. However on that note Lego still being family owned lets us pin this decision more squarely on some particular individuals, rather than the usual vague mass of shareholders.

I think a partial explanation can be that for most international tourists a visit to the USA is a major trip that gets planned well in advance. Easily half or even a full year ahead. Things only really got bad in the last few months, so we might still see many holidays that were planned before the madness fully set in. If that is the case I’d expect a continued decline in the future, where people choose another destination when deciding their next itinerary.