Apple Finds Its Next Big Business: Showing Ads on Your iPhone

Sadly it's not the 80s anymore. A startup building their own hardware without VCs getting involved is basically impossible. Of course, I'm not talking about taking something like a Raspberry Pi off the shelf and making something with that. Wozniak was building something from scratch that could be sold as an actual product - no chance of that now.

There's Framework and Librem laptops, I'd rather buy those than a Mac (I didn't downvote)

It could possibly happen in robotics or home automation. SparkFun could get there, or Adafruit.

VCs aren’t that interested in hardware. Nobody bets on a crippled horse. The same with hardware startup. Why invest in something with tons of embedded software, connectivity software and all the problems with moving physical objects when one could invest just in software venture that has at least 10x higher chance to succeed?

Robotics - super expensive just to start. Think about 3 developers for mechanical, electrical and software parts plus expensive hardware. Timeframe at least 2 years. So $1M just for shy start.

Home automation topic goes for decades. However I don’t see wide adoption anywhere. Most tech savvy buddy is playing often with new products and stated, that the best thing is Philips Hue lights in home automation area. Other things barely work.

I wanted to buy a framework, but they don't accept crypto payments. So I bought apple gift cards with Bitcoin and bought a MacBook pro instead.

Interesting. Did you not have to disclose a similar amount of personal information to buy the Mac?

Have you considered buying used? This can be better for the environment and privacy.