DreadPotato
The menu controls on the screen are snappy and load as quickly as you'd expect from a regular phone/tablet. Miles ahead of all other manufacturer's which indeed always seems to be slow as hell.
Web browser and Netflix/Disney+ are still fucking ridiculously slow on the "older" though. It's been significantly improved with the new hardware in the model s/x and 3 highland refresh, but still not good enough IMO.
It’s great for Tesla, for one reason - modularity.
Not really as far as the touch controls on the steering wheel goes. The icons are static and can't be changed, so their functionality is kind of tied to the icon.
As for configuring additional controls for them, it's exactly the same as if they were physical buttons, it's all a wiring harness going to the computer either way, what that computer does with the input signal is not any less configurable for a physical button. The limiting factor is the static icon, not whether it's touch/tactile.
In regards to selling incomplete products, this is unfortunately not even limited to Tesla. All car manufacturers release several updates and bugfixes for new cars, they just can't send them OTA, they need to get them in the shop. My colleague's VW ID4 has been in the shop for no less than 3 SW updates to fix various bugs and add basic features such as battery preheating for DC charging, it fucking shipped without that!
They also don't ship with the yoke by default anymore, the default is a regular round one and have been for a while.
Assuming regular cold tap water as starting point (that's ~10°C for me) you'd need a power output of something like 50kW to heat a gallon (3.8L) of water to boiling in 30sec, assuming a 98% efficiency.
Aside from battery and the electric motor itself, mechanical parts are easy to come by from other sources than Tesla. Parts related to e.g. suspension, brakes and steering are all easily bought without involving Tesla at all, and can be changed by any mechanic.
~~Tesla~~ stock is a pyramid scheme.
maybe we can get those on the cheap and install linux on them?
They're pretty much never thrown out when decommissioned, they're mostly sold to refurbishing companies that clean them and sell them to consumers or developing countries. So it should be pretty easy to get your hands on them actually. I recently bought a thinkpad T470 for $200 with decent i5 CPU, 16gb ram and 256gb NVME.
how can they cram 350 people in an aircraft that holds about 200 passengers
Ryan air figured this out apparently
You'd be surprised how often critical tools don't have backups.
More than once I've been to sites where the software needed to service a critical piece of equipment only existed on a single 15+ year old banged up laptop, or a 40+ year old PLC handling a critical part of a production line couldn't be turned off because there was a risk that it wouldn't be able to turn back on, and it was EOL'ed over a decade ago but they still hadn't ported the program to a newer platform.