Various & Sundry 6/6/26

It’s a bit of a stormy day here. Let’s see what’s going on elsewhere. The “K”-shaped economy comes for laptops: There’s been a trade show this week called Computex (there seems to be a big event in the tech field every other week or so), and Michael Crider of PC Week notes that at the show, the new laptops come in two flavors: The really cheap ones, designed to compete with MacBook Neo, which has completely swamped the low-end of the laptop market, and the really expensive ones, which most people will have to think twice about buying. The middle ground laptop for the middle-class buyer? It’s just not there anymore. This is evidence, Crider argues, of a the “K-shaped” economy at work, the economy where the upper 20% of consumers are doing just fine, and the bottom 80% of consumers are… not. A couple of things about this: One, you can still get middle-ground laptops in the real world (here’s an Acer laptop with a 14-inch screen, 32GB of memory and 1 TB of storage, plus a couple of…