I kind of want a flip phone for the compact size when folded so it will fit more easily into my tiny pockets. But I don’t want a phone with a screen that likely need regular (and expensive) replacements if I want to keep using it long past the 2 year contract window like I do with most phones.

Is this company above the law or something?

They’re a megacorp. So yes.

The price was definitely a primary factor, but it wasn’t the only one. The Vision Pro is a bulky thing with a dingleberry on a string and many reviewers noted the uncomfortable headband situation. It, like may headsets, is also a royal pain in the ass to deal with if you wear glasses and/or need really specialized lenses.

But a really big factor was that it’s an Apple product. Word travelled fast about how limited the software is and how you can’t really do much with it. Apple is going to have a hard time selling these things until they crawl out of their own ass and actually let people use their products how they wish to. One of the biggest appeals of AR computing is how it bridges together computing with your imagination, and that doesn’t really work when Apple says “no, you can’t do that because it doesn’t match our company vision”

I made a Fiverr account once for my art services. I deleted it within an hour of creation after reading how much money they would steal from my commissions.

I put some of the blame on retailers as well. Retail stores just don’t want to carry inventory anymore, especially tech-focused ones with many of those just turning into glorified showrooms. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard some version of: “Sorry, we don’t have that in stock but we can bring it in for you.”

We needed a short length of garden hose here for the house so I went to two hardware stores and one garden centre looking for one. Nothing. Not even in their dedicated gardening sections. I had to order it off Amazon. A goddamn garden hose.

Amazon has done a lot of damage for sure but retail is suffering from several self-inflicted wounds too. Home Depot, for example, is a multi-billion dollar corporation and even they have a weaker retail presence now. That’s not Amazon’s fault.

The hardware and bandwidth demands of the first game were why I stopped playing it. I had a machine that could run it (and an even better one now) and internet that could handle it, but it still just wasn’t a smooth experience. I don’t have a cap on my internet data but my speed isn’t particularly high, which meant the 80-150gb per week of data the game consumed was certainly felt.

Much to the chagrin of those of us who can see and are bothered by the colour flicker.

Google and Microsoft would be scrambling to pay off every single person associated with that before it ever hit the first courtroom floor.

Yeah, this too. My dad’s last GPU was AMD and he had to flip flop between versions to fix crashes. I wasn’t as lucky as no driver version was able to calm the crashing.

Anything to help them take on Nvidia and stay competitive is a good move. However, I wish they would also announce a recommitment to driver and software stability. I had to move to Nvidia for my workstation rig after having constant stability issues with numerous AMD cards across multiple builds. I can handle a few rough edges or performance that isn’t top-of-the-line but I can’t put up with constant crashes ad driver timeout errors. It’s annoying in games and devastating when I’m working.

I wish their GPU line received even a portion of the polish and care that their CPU line did.

People do tend to hate theft, yeah.

This. If people really want to buy something they will check all available websites for the item(s) they’re looking for. I still use CL exclusively and refuse to touch FB Marketplace even with a burner account because it requires a phone number.

Meh. They had plenty of time to move to Firefox but they ignored all the warnings.

Simple indeed, but getting people to actually stop using that trash heap website has proven to be very difficult.

I am very tired of Twitter users doing nothing but complaining about site changes and Musk yet they still just sit there… doing nothing about it. You’d think it’d be easy to rip the bandage off when it’s covered in fascist propaganda but apparently not.

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.

This is a given for many kinds of services. Always purchase subscriptions on another device or direct through their website - never use your Apple devices’ app store.

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.

I love how they’re asking him gently as if he’s a toddler having a tantrum and not the criminally liable fascist he actually is.