If you're looking for a backpack, I can't recommend Osprey enough. They are still a independent US company with a lifetime warranty they actually stand by. I had to call their customer service just last week after I ordered the wrong size bag. I was connected to an actual human immediately, and he sent me a prepaid return label, even though it was my fault and I was fully expecting to pay for return shipping myself. I own several of their bags and have never had a single issue with any of them.
There is a whole community of bag enthusiasts who intricately review backpacks. Packhacker etc. It's super easy to find reviews of most backpacks and plenty of video reviews detailing every feature on the bag - and even in some cases reviews after a few months of usage. Day one might feel great, but after a few trips you start noticing flaws.
I'd echo what one of the other commenters here said about AER and Cotopaxi. Although I have to say wearing my Cotopaxi Alppa 35l feels like a small child is trying to drag me to the floor compared to the comfort of having the AER straps on my back for the travel pack. I still love both though.
Aer is sort of an interesting case to me. At its core the nylon material they use certainly make the bags feel like they'd last forever.
But I feel like Aer also tends to include features or materials that are just not designed for BIFL longevity. Two that jump to mind are the PU coatings on a lot of their zippers and their use of elastic straps as the main way to secure water bottles (but they might be moving away from the elastic on their newest bags). Both of those feel like they have a much more limited lifespan (relative to some of the other aspects of the bags).
+1 to that and I'll also add Cotopaxi and AER (quite expensive but built like a tank) to the list.
My year-ish old backpack gave out so I recently committed to extensively researching and buying a new set of travel + tech bags that will last me basically forever, and I've been very happy with my purchases from these brands.
I have an Osprey backpacking pack that's about 10 years old. I had a squirrel chew through the zipper on the removable pouch. I sent it off to Osprey to be repaired and they sent me a brand new pouch.
Osprey USED to be good, but their quality has been on a sharp decline for the past decade.
The Farpoint is a case in point. I have an older one where the mini-backpack actually zipped onto the bigger one, and had a proper lifting handle integrated for lifting when it's lying flat (among other niceties). I accidentally left butter in it, and the smell was so bad that no amount of cleaning would expunge it. I just bought another one.
Absolute SHIT quality compared to my old one, the mini backpack now buckled rather pathetically to the big one, and no more solid handles (except the top one). Structural integrity is WEAK.
Needless to say I spent a LOT of time and effort cleaning up my old Farpoint, which I'm now using again. The "new" one? Sitting in storage along with the rest of my buyer's remorse.
My favorite bags I've had are from Mystery Ranch, but they're from before the Yeti acquisition, and I haven't tried any since, so I don't know how quality has held up. I do know they've eliminated a ton of their catalog.
Mystery Ranch is still doing pretty well for themselves. (I'm amused knowing that they crank out harnesses for Amazon employees left and right for their robot safety systems.)
I'm also a Red Oxx guy. Love my Sky Train backpack when I'm flying out. They quote a "no bull" warranty, and their CEO suggests to "be sure to include them in your will."
I'll add that I've had a very positive experience with a Projekt Gravy backpack since we're dropping favorite products. Excellent quality and I've been using this thing daily since 2021.
Top 1st-level comment tree involves passionate, math-based analyses of several decades of economic adjustments. Redefinitions of inflation adjustments ad nauseum; a math geek's approach to social sciences - which is not the subject of the article at all.
2nd 1st-level comment is a response to the title alone: a current, good backpack brand, with really no relevance to the subject of the article at all.
The same thing it was designed to do and has always done: create unimaginable sums of money out of thin air that it loans to the government, with interest.
How about if you run this loop (one year from now) on this kind of hardware but with something like Claude/Kimi K2. How about that? Because that's where it'll go.
I can't shake the feeling that the RAM shortage was intentionally created to serve as a sort of artificial moat by slowing or outright preventing the adoption of open weight models. Altman is playing with hundreds of billions of other people's dollars, trying to protect (in his mind) a multi-trillion dollar company. If he could spend a few billion to shut down access to the hardware people need to run competitor's products, why wouldn't he?
From what I understand the RAM producers see the writing on the wall. They’re not going to invest in massively more capacity only to have it sit completely idle in 10 years.
RAM shortage is probably a bubble indicator itself. That industry doesn’t believe enough in the long term demand to build out more capacity.
It's very difficult to "intentionally create" a real shortage. You can hoard as much as you want, but people will expect you to dump it all right back onto the market unless you really have a higher-value use for the stuff you hoarded (And then you didn't intentionally create anything, you just bought something you needed!).
Plus producers will now feel free to expand production and dump even more onto the market. This is great if you needed that amount of supply, but it's terrible if you were just trying to deprive others.
In my late teens, I worked as a bill collector. If I suspected an account owner was deceased, I'd call the Social Security Administration and ask them if they had a certificate of death on file. If they didn't, they'd tell me they couldn't comment. If they did, they'd say so, because dead people don't have a right to privacy.
Everyone has easy access right now. Everyone had easier access before the TikTok deal. That's the wrong direction for a free country and it's particularly alarming because the deal was forced by the government.
You should see what Google has done with the latest version of the Phone app. You used to be able to click on contacts and that would show you.. your contacts. Now it shows recent calls with a search bar for contacts. Say I want to call a friend named Dave. As soon as I start typing, search results begin populating, but none of the names it offers start with "D", they just contain "D" somewhere. It could be the middle of a last name. And I can't figure out why they'd fuck this up. There are no ads to be injected into my attempts to find a contact, so I have to wonder if this is just the beginning of a push to ruin every convenience so users will turn to Gemini for everything.
It's not as bad as you say. If you search in the Phone app, a single letter search returns contacts with a name field (and then a company field, and then a notes field) starting with that letter. It works reasonably well.
The Contacts app is worse and returns anything with a string anywhere in the contact details starting with that letter.
