How is that a “premium” or “flagship” phone, beyond price? I mean, midrange, sure. Mid-upper, maybe. Flaghsip… nnnnaah.
I get it, man, if you’re not monetizing data you have to charge full price for the hardware, particularly on small runs. You don’t need to misrepresent the spec to make that case. It’s a tradeoff.
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn’t even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go… you know… shush.
I don’t even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
“We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we’ll be looking into performance improvements in future patches”. It’s not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
Hell, it’s even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.
Having a single color rendition of your logo is good practice anyway (you can’t always print stuff in full color and it has all sorts of UX and branding uses). I can’t imagine of all the compliance requirements for apps going into the svg for your icon and making it black and white is the dealbreaker.
Plus in practice the Android apps that refuse to comply are Amazon, my banking apps and believe it or not my phone manufacturer’s first party apps (and I believe Facebook, but I don’t have that installed, so I’m not sure).
I say eff that. Work within the OS requirements for customization. I don’t care if it’s Linux, Android, Windows or whatever else. Let me set up my device the way I want it.
So turn that off. It’s always optional for users, this is about developers complying with the system-wide option.
I do turn on themed icons and it’s so annoying to have one random one in the middle that refuses to listen that I now bundle my apps into folders based on whether they comply with icon theming or not.
“Keeps”?
Someone is making a lot of assumptions about how the last decade of being terminally online has gone that reality isn’t willing to sustain.
Well, I’m still waiting for Twitter to “need a replacement”. It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, Facebook, too.
To be clear, I don’t particularly mean too little, too late for me. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.
I mean too little, too late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don’t think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won’t be because Masto added quotes. I’m fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I’m in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it’d be nice if the gross places didn’t keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front… yeah, too little, too late.
I used to be inverted until controller FPSs started to be a thing. I don’t think people realize how long PC FPSs were mostly a keyboard-only thing. By the time WASD+Mouse standardized, quite late into the Quake 1 era I had hundreds of hours on Tie Fighter/X-Wing and a bunch of other first person flight games.
Hell, Descent predates Quake, and I’d argue it figured out full 3D controls way before Quake did.
Now that I’m on board this train of thought, do kids these days think Doom played with full mouseview and just distorted all over the place? Is it well known for people not born at the time that Doom was mechanically closer to a twin stick shooter than an FPS or have all the source ports erased that from history?
That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.
Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.
I’d argue I’m doing the opposite.
I was turning this stuff off when my Google and Samsung phones kept suggesting that they could do searches based on the content of my phone screen or my camera feed. It’s only “normalization” in that it’s… you know, actually normal and widespread. I don’t think people are too alarmed now, I think they weren’t alarmed enough when the first wave of “smart assistants” started doing this like a decade ago.
Yeah. You’re basically buying a laptop crammed into a small box. May as well get a laptop if you need the small footprint and portability or a desktop if you need the price-to-performance.
Also, the Steam Deck thing people keep repeating is terrible advice. Even these can power their components somewhat robustly. A docked Steam Deck is still a 10W APU for no good reason. It depends on use case, in that you also get a handheld out of the deal, but if you’re looking for a primary device even a laptop would be a better choice.
Right, so when you said “forced it on everyone” you meant “the feature existing at all even if it’s optional or disabled”.
See, I don’t have a problem with the latter, that’s legitimate. But you implied the former, and the former is false.
Now, I don’t like the feature and I absolutely turned it off the moment it (finally) got patched into my supported PCs. But it’s worth noting that similar features are present on Android phones (from all the way back on Google Assistant to the upcoming Magic Cue), Apple phones (via Visual Intelligence and Siri) and other PC and phone manufacturers. I recommend turning them all off, but with the caveats you original omitted this isn’t a Windows-specific thing, it’s a pretty widespread fad.
Of course the reason people are latching on to the MS version is their initial implementation was hot garbage and entirely unaware of its own context, so now it’s a meme, particularly in tech-savvy, Linux-friendly circles. The biggest lesson we’ve all learned is that Microsoft is bad at PR and marketing, which I feel we already knew.
I mean, I’d rather not. I definitely take a number of steps to limit that. Same as I take steps to prevent that from Google on my phone or from both of them and others on my Linux devices.
What I don’t do is make up stuff to be paranoid about in case the very real privacy concerns you already have to pay attention to aren’t scary enough to make me feel superior online.
I’m so exhausted of social media nonsense latching onto meme crap to push preconceived narratives and flipping over to ignoring reality altogether the moment any facts at all don’t fit their dumb little package of memes.
You know what, I hope it’s not actually off and anybody with the trivial means to check what their Windows PC is sending to the mothership notices so we can get the EU to GDPR the crap out of them and build some nice hospital somewhere with the fine money.
In the meantime, go do conspiracy theories over on Twitter. There’s plenty of real stuff to be mad about at Microsoft without having to make shit up.
I swear to Torvalds, if the amount of old ladies using Linux because their Fedi relatives installed it on their laptops is accurate we are in the middle of an major demographic crisis.
Yes, that’s toggleable on settings and set to off by default. Do remember to turn off Click-to-Do, though, if nothing else it’s annoying to trigger it by accident. I also remapped the copilot button back to being right mouse click.
I mean, they’re pretty useless features and I wish they had spent more time working on better stuff, but… you know, I turned it off.
They did what now? I have no Copilot features turned on in my PCs, and I actually have a certified Copilot+ laptop.
Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.
We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.
WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:
Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.
Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.
August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.
Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.
Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.
That’s almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they’re reporting on shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just “too many”, but the original report says 8.5%.
Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. In the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.
While we’re at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don’t often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%, although it’s worth noting that Windows has been pretty stable between 94 and 96% since the survey started.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other “good” versions of Windows and it’s not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They’ll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they’re willing to pay and most legacy home users won’t even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it’ll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.
The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can convince tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.
Yeah, ok, so… don’t wash your phone with a spray nozzle regardless, is going to be my advice. Wet tissue? Sure. Under the tap with light soap? If desperate. Just… don’t hose your phone down, what are you doing.
But let’s be clear, IP ratings are certifications. You can still be water resistant under the conditions of the test and not have the certification for it.
It makes perfect sense for… you know, people not using water jets on their electronics, to get just the certification that covers most real use cases (in this case the one that covers rain, accidental pool falls and the occasional toilet dunk) and communicate that. It doesn’t mean your phone won’t survive a bartop spray nozzle wash (which, again, you shouldn’t be doing) or even that it wouldn’t have gotten the IPx5/6 cert if the manufacturer had gone through the process, but it’s extra cost that will only muddle how you communicate with your user.
Are people not clear that IPx5/6 and IPx7/8 aren’t on a linear scale? They are not. That’s on the IEC’s poor formatting of the ratings. Are manufacturers leaning on the implicit user assumption that the higher number just means more protection? Sure.
Is it relevant/annoying/effectively problematic in real use? Not unless you’re using a waterjet cutter to rinse ketchup off your phone. Which, again, don’t do that, that’s not a good thing to do.
This is a bit obtuse for the sake of pedantry.
I mean, is it possible that you could build a device resistant to submersion but not splashing? Maybe?
But this isn’t “a device”, this is a phone. The problems with water ingress are very specific. You have a couple of speakers, a few microphones, a sim card slot and a USB port, plus the seams for the screen and backplate. If you secured those well enough for the immersion tests they’re going to be splash-resistant. If you have a way in which you can somehow have a phone screen adhesive survive being underwater for several minutes but not falling rain or being placed under a tap/hose please do share, because I can’t think of one. The scenario where your speaker seals are good enough for being fully submerged but get water damaged by shooting high pressure water directly into them is so niche it’s probably not worth it to further confuse people by having two different IP ratings listed.
Plus… you know, don’t be shooting water hoses directly up your phone’s holes regardless? I don’t see why you would in the first place, but… just don’t? It’s not gonna happen by accident, so it doesn’t need to happen at all.
It is absolutely insane the amount of computing you can buy these days for 300 bucks in the form factor of half a packet of cigarrettes. Screw jetpacks, man, that’s some future tech.
I’m just frustrated with the framing here. If they think they want to go after premium clients with tons of disposable income they should be less ashamed of being overpriced and go for broke. Look at boutique PC handheld manufacturers. They’re making computers to order for 2000+ bucks now with zero shame and doing alright.
Oh, you want to cram a AI MAX+ 395 in a shell that makes no sense for a AI-focused productivity APU and use it to play AAA games poorly? We got you, bro. It’ll be 2.5 grand and we’ll get back to you in a year or so. Here’s our Indiegogo.
Samsung is out there selling foldables in that price range that will all be broken in two years and everyone is cool with it. Apple and Samsung both make dumbed-down phones just to make them look thin and charge premium money for them. Embrace the consumerism, man.