bluescrn

Just replaced the keycaps on my M1 for the second time to make it feel new-ish again.

Still a great machine, shame those keycaps wear so badly (developing shiny greasy-looking patches)

Some people can't even be convinced that 60fps is significantly better than 30fps for gaming.

Convincing them they need more than 60hz is going to be a hard sell.

The difference is extremely noticable on a PC when you're dragging windows around with a mouse (or gaming of course). Especially if you have a dual-monitor setup and only one of them does the high refresh rate.

Not sure I'd notice it much on a phone.

And for decades we've had people claiming that 30fps is just fine for gaming...

AI inflated the price of everything with RAM in it.

I can't see the next generation ever launching unless the market recovers.

And I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap RAM or GPUs again. There's clearly more money to be made at current price levels, and not much potential for competition to fix the market.

It's a bit of a mess at the moment, with the ExBox and the PwnedStation.

No, there'll just be fewer big-budget games. Streaming is always going to be a sub-par experience (latency and video compression). And the mess that AI made of the hardware market has likely killed off (or at least indefinitely postponed) the next generation of games consoles

But we've got 4-5 decades of games to enjoy.

Part of the reason that the games industry is struggling is that there's been no real generational leaps for a long time. Gaming used to be driven by those technological leaps, but these days we just get incremental improvements. 10-15yr old games are just as entertaining as brand new releases and often don't look too dated.

Also, ever more people are getting into retro gaming, enjoying the classics from the 80s and 90s, from well before microtransactions and hyper-competitive online multiplayer.

They're averaging 2-3 Falcon 9 launches per week. That's not 'very very far away' from one per day.

Nobody else comes close, whether considering individual companies or entire nations.

Custom flex PCBs designed to line up precisely on top of an existing PCB seems to be a fairly standard technique for games console mod chips (particularly Nintendo Switch) these days.

But yeah, putting a cellular modem and eSIM on there is certainly taking it to the next level

But why? What's the USP here?

Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.

The bottle caps have become a meme, but one that symbolises Europe strangling itself with overregulation.

A $2200 device and still limited to running dumbed-down touchscreen 'apps' from the App Store.

I used to obsess over audio quality. But then I reached my 40s, and it started to become clear that my ageing ears were becoming the limiting factor.

Now I just embrace the convenience of Bluetooth and usefulness of noise cancelling.

(But then again, even my AirPods or Sony XM4s are high fidelity compared to what many of the kids these days are listening with, small mono bluetooth speakers or playing music out of their phone speakers)