My decision to stop playing online games a few years ago continues to prove that it was a good choice. The games industry in general is going to shit but online games in particular are in race to the bottom of greed, malice, and contempt.
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My decision to stop playing online games a few years ago continues to prove that it was a good choice. The games industry in general is going to shit but online games in particular are in race to the bottom of greed, malice, and contempt.
Steam needs to offer refunds when a game does this - at the publisher’s expense. They should put it right into their ToS for game publishers that want to sell on the platform.
You’re 100% correct, but I will point out that the iPhone hasn’t really seen any significant design changes since the 11 - arguably the X. That was seven years ago. The same thing has been happening with their Macbook lineup where only just recently have they made major product design changes to replace their 10+ year old designs. The new Macbook Pros were a welcome breath of fresh air and indicated a shift in a new, positive direction for their Mac platform. *
The iPhone needs a similar refresh, imho.
*for the hardware, at least. They’ve made some questionable software choices for MacOS such as iPhone-ifying the settings menu.
It’s an LG G8. One of the few phones that has a high quality DAC and amplifier in it. It sounds amazing with a good set of earphones and has plenty of options to tweak to your liking.
I wanted a dedicated DAP such as one made by Fiio, but they are astronomically expensive. My LG G8 was $200 after tax and a Fiio M11S is $700 before tax. I could bargain hunt for a better price but the G8 would always be cheaper. And because it’s a phone, it has more features and power than most dedicated music players (many of them are powered by ancient chips and struggle to do basic tasks) I just stick a large SD card into it and put it into airplane mode if I’m not using a streaming service.
I likely will when my contract expires. But for now it is what I have.
The iPhone is stagnating really badly. This is yet another generation of overpriced, oversized, and overpowered glass slabs that bring nothing new of substance to the table. If anything, the interesting stuff is in iOS18 but that’s not saying much because iOS is kneecapped by its own limitations.
I got a 14 pro on sale a while ago and it’s simultaneously vastly overpowered for what I use it for and also frustratingly useless. All of that horsepower and tech… just sitting there doing nothing 97% of the time. It has 1tb of storage which is almost completely empty because you can’t use iPhones as storage. You can’t even drag-n-drop music onto them. I use an LG phone as my music player because it has both a headphone jack and allows me to simply drop my FLAC albums onto it.
ASD - Autism spectrum disorder.
Mostly about the same, but I am now more aware of them and able to manage them better and, hopefully, catch myself before things get too bad.
There are ways to properly educate people on customer rights, privacy, right-to-repair, and ownership.
And then there is whatever annoying slop you just spewed out here. If you actually care about this and want to make a difference - do better.
I switched to an iPhone after having many similar hangups with Android devices over the years. Biggest for me was how little update/software support Android phones got. I think they’re better these days (or so I hope) but they had awful support for years. Buying a brand new Android phone and only getting 1 OS update and 2 years of security updates was not uncommon and I have several old Android phones in a drawer that succumbed to that fate.
My experiences with iOS have largely been positive but I do have some issues which annoy me constantly:
Apple’s ecosystem is great and is so polished and tightly integrated, but trying to do anything outside of that ecosystem is incredibly painful. You are actively punished when trying to do anything outside Apple’s box. Even something as simple as transferring music files from your PC to your phone is frustrating at best and impossible at worst.
Every. Goddamn. App. is a subscription. The app store is almost completely useless and I practically never use it. I’m not joking when I say that the vast majority of downloadable apps are subscription-based, and usually a WEEKLY subscription instead of monthly. Sorry, but I’m not paying $5/week for a goddamn calculator or weather app. This means that using an iPhone can be very frustrating if the stock apps don’t suit your needs. This reason alone is enough to make me want to jump ship again sometimes.
iCloud sucks. No other way to word this, really. It’s a relic of bygone times and Apple really needs to overhaul it and make it more useful in the modern day. Everything from the clunky, Fisherprice UI to the base storage which barely has enough gigabytes to hold a single fart. On one hand upgraded storage is only a few bucks a month. On the other hand I’m goddamn tired of subscriptions.
Almost nothing. I don’t like how loud they are.
Used to a lot, but use dropped off a lot as I started to work more. I do use it often when I travel… but I don’t actually travel much at all. It was free (game awards) so I’m not too upset over that. Maybe I’ll look into getting some of my old childhood favourites running on it as a challenge project.
Potentially yes as at least the Bethesda NPC will say lore-accurate lines.
Or line.
For basic behaviour and pathfinding, yes. But aesthetics, outfits, dialogue, backgrounds, etc etc was all made by humans. The reason why NPC’s can feel so immersive and part of the worlds they exist in is because they’re made and written by the same people that made the rest of the game.
NPC’s with awkward AI-gen voicelines spouting hallucinated nonsense that has nothing to do with the game or the player’s actions is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.
Base model 15 is $1130 here. Base model 14 (last gen) is $1000. Both before tax. At a time when millions are struggling to put food on their tables. And even assuming you could afford a new iPhone, it will be almost indistinguishable from older generations excluding a few software differences. Even the camera output is almost exactly the same among recent generations.
Gross.
I’ve repeatedly seen people claim that the latter generations of the Vision Pro will be what launches it into success but like… how? The Vision Pro is incredibly expensive, limited in functionality, and has an ultra locked-down ecosystem not because it’s a first-gen product but because that is how Apple operates. All of their products follow that trend. In fact, additional Vision Pro generations are likely to be more expensive just like how new iPhones and Macbooks are going up in price and staying there.
The majority of people are simply not interested in VR/AR and Apple’s pricey take on it isn’t going to change that.
People-pleasing and excessive conflict avoidance. Been there before.
I usually get around 1 spam call per day, but sometimes I can get as much as 12 per day. I legitimately wonder why I even have a phone plan at this point and I know I’m not the only one who has considered that.
They’re a megacorp. So yes.