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)

Some sort of signatures to verify legitimate unmodified photographs (taken with a relatively secure device, e.g an iPhone) seems like a reasonable idea

But even then, people will be able to point that camera at a manipulated/generated image (either printed or on a screen). Maybe that one could be solved if the photo included some depth information?

TV shows on the other hand, have suffered extreme shrinkflation.

From 20+ episode seasons every year to maybe 8-10 episodes every 2-3 years.

Yeah, budgets/production values are higher. But characters and storytelling were often better in those old shows (Star Trek TNG/DS9, Lost, 24, Breaking Bad) where they could make those longer seasons every year for 5 or more years in a row. Simply far more screen time for character development.

Retro gaming is rising in popularity for good reasons. And it's not purely nostalgia.

A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)

TV quality isn't what it used to be, though.

Got a fairly expensive LG OLED and after 5 years it's developing clusters of dead pixels down one edge. And even if the hardware doesn't fail/degrade, the software is often enshittified (ads pushed to smart TVs)

There's also 'Drinkflation', the ABV of beers being reduced. (Maybe it's mostly a UK thing due to the tax system, weaker beer = less tax)

Pretty sad state of things when simple pleasures like beer or chocolate are hit so hard by enshittification.

At this point, it’s the ExBox :(

Why are cold drinks with sugar and caffeine seen as problematic, while hot drinks with sugar and caffeine are seen as perfectly good?

What I liked about the older, simpler Arduino was that you could move an ATmega328p project from an Arduino board to a chip on a breadboard then to a custom PCB with minimal complexity - with just hobbyist-level skills.

But the boards and modules just seem to be getting ever more complex, with lots of tiny SMD components, removing that path.

It's just down to age. I had a C64 growing up, but it was mostly a games machine. I played with BASIC a bit, but C64 BASIC wasn't great compared to BBC BASIC on the school BBC Micros. And I was a bit too young/lacked resources to learn assembly language and get serious about C64 coding.

For me, the Amiga was the truly magical machine, where endless creative possibilities suddenly opened up (via Blitz Basic, DPaint, OctaMED and more) as well as all the great games.

(Then going to a Pentium with Win95 a few years later felt like a step backwards in some ways... Lots of power but lacking in accessible creative software)

Aside from games, most software is available for both these days

The first one was 8 years ago, in the pre-Covid world.

But their timing was amazing, doing it just days before they announced that they were ending releases of games on physical media.

Retro gaming is an increasingly popular option, too. These days I have more fun messing with Amigas, C64s, and cheap emulation handhelds than big modern games.

Retro hardware prices have been going up fairly significantly though, especially for Amiga stuff.

Consoles don't have true 'generational leaps' any more either, the huge leaps forward in tech used to drive excitement/sales.

Now we get incremental improvements, cross-generation games, and backwards compatibility. And AAA game development isn't exactly doing well these days.

PC gaming isn't exactly in a healthy place either (at least when it comes to hardware pricing/availability). Post-Covid GPU prices were bad enough even before the AI bubble ruined everything.

Taking metalworking tools to a very expensive machine with very limited spare parts availability seems rather extreme.

Bad experiences with heat, fan noise, and poor battery life on Windows laptops.