happens to the best of us 😆

Apple’s absence in cloud services and GPU dominance like NVIDIA’s CUDA is striking. But gaming feels like an interesting frontier—especially with their shared audience with Nintendo. Could this be Apple’s next move? What do you think?

Google Wallet launched early but struggled with poor adoption and trust. Apple waited for widespread NFC terminals and bank partnerships, creating a secure, user-friendly experience. Result? Apple Pay processes $6T annually, dominating mobile payments.

Early wireless earbuds like Jabra and Bose struggled with battery, connectivity, and design. Apple waited to develop the W1 chip for seamless pairing and comfort, turning AirPods into a cultural icon. Result? AirPods own 60% of the market, generating $12B annually.

BlackBerry and Palm led early smartphones with keyboards and poor touchscreens. Apple waited for better processors and interfaces, launching the iPhone with a seamless design and revolutionary App Store. Result? iPhone captured 85% of global profits and generates $390B/year for Apple.

This looks awesome! 🤩 so sad I couldn’t make it

(the northern irish representatives to the UK or locally) will also be able to intervene on your behalf and have done so for other talented immigrants

a little more back-channely but if you’re set on Belfast, just hit up Farset Labs hackerspace - if you come around someone can likely give you invites to all the Northern Irish tech slacks and the community is generally very supportive of immigrants and helping then secure visas. Our MPs and MLAs

if you have an Irish passport you’re also allowed to live, work, or travel here indefinitely under the Common Travel Area which is separate from the EU so unaffected by Brexit.

main pathways are: job (relatively easy, any major company is likely willing to sponsor), study, or there’s lots of routes for talented individuals like the HPI
Visa for graduates of top universities (most US ones should qualify), innovator visa for entrepreneurs, start-up visa for founders, etc

it should be relatively easy! I’m not going to lie, it’s the same UK immigration process so you may also want to try out London - personally I prefer Belfast but I love both (despite being Irish). You can always try one and swap to the other on the same visa so not a huge deal

Oh plus on the bright side our politics is genuinely occasionally beautiful - when a small number of fascists tried organising they got CRUSHED. Everywhere they went we formed walls of humans to kick them out of towns and cities, outnumbered them 1000:1. Makes me proud of what we’ve achieved 🥲

emotional baggage tied to the city (for very good reason).
For anyone travelling, I super recommend trying it - especially if you’re from the US, it feels very close to certain US culture except a much bigger welfare state, and we are a national that steals recipes for the better 😋

then I landed on Belfast, the moment of realisation came after I brought a business partner to the city and they also fell in love with it.
Cheap-ish housing, kind people, lots to do, great opportunities, great food, and so on. The only disadvantage is my own personal that I grew up here and I have

Klagenfurt was great except just a little too small and I’d struggle speaking German, Vienna was horrible (no further explanation), and so so on. It doesn’t super matter why/why not for every city because they all mostly had one major flaw

then I tried a bunch of other cities across Europe and visited US a bunch (for legal reasons, I have not lived in the US)

Lots were nice: Florida was great except I genuinely got a sense of impending doom from the healthcare and the heat. LA made me consider maybe a city could be made of imposters

so in Finland I tried living in Tampere
with my then girlfriend, as I mentioned it was just wildly isolating. There’s a couple of other bad factors in that like you get this deep sense no one cares about you (food/housing/social services/products/etc)