*subscription make-up app.

Lost in Play, Lies of P and Honkai Star Rail are the only non-subscription apps, and the last one has IAPs up to $100. The best apps and games on the shittiest app store.

And that change they’re avoiding… is to subscription-only access!

It’s gonna be a Safari browser based app charging $9.99 a month to essentially load their website inside the app. Notice how those aren’t in the App Store? Apple banned that practice.

The App Store is absolutely, overwhelmingly flooded with garbage subscription apps…

Is the “higher standard” you are referring to the basic and fairly widely-established consumer right to not have faulty products else the manufacturer addresses the issue?

Pretty much the same thing did happen to Apple but with MacBooks, there’s actually a few 2015-ish models that are banned on planes.

https://www.techradar.com/news/macbook-pro-flight-ban-everything-you-need-to-know

I think they might try 3x 3GB or 3x 4GB first lol…

There’s no reason they can’t do both. In March when you can sideload on iPads in Europe someone probably will.

Not only did Valve maintain the same price, they made a bunch of refinements to improve repairability and component accessibility.

This is Valve subsidizing the PC gaming industry as a whole, content to make a shitload ($6b+/year) off their sales commissions that will grow alongside the industry.

Apple on the other hand expects to get paid for the device, the repairs, the software and digital content, and by the developers too.

You can game on it, but you wouldn’t buy this laptop for gaming unless you had more money than sense.

There’s two advantages for Apple: the upgrade pricing is lucrative, and having specs that provide zero buffer for the future when apps and the web inevitably use more RAM will drive sales of new devices.

The amazing thing is 8GB might not even be enough for the iPhone anymore, the stuttering and frame spikes in Resident Evil could easily be caused by not having enough RAM and having to shuffle art assets between storage and memory.

On the other hand, it’s a hard game to actually recommend playing on an iPhone. Performance is compromised with frequent frame-time spikes and punctuated occasionally by severe bouts of stutter.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-full-fat-resident-evil-village-on-iphone-is-a-captivating-tech-demo-but-hard-to-recommend-playing

So how would you pay for the ongoing development of developer tools, store infrastructure, backend development and upkeep of the ecosystem, etc.

They literally net a billion dollars a week profit just from selling the iPhone itself. On top of that they net another billion dollars a week profit from all their services and other hardware. If you subtract their profit from the App Store, in the unlikely event it was entirely wiped out by competition, they would still have 2/3 of that or about $1.4 billion a week profit after all expenses. They would be just fine, making massive profits off iPhones after all iPhone-related costs, even if they lost the App Store entirely.

Pretty wild that just a year ago Macs were considered an absolute joke when it comes to AAA gaming.

In that time Valve has orchestrated compatibility with over 7000 games on Linux… Valve sold the Steam Deck at break-even to subsidize growth in the gaming market, while Apple waits for developers and consumers alike to subsidize their stock buybacks. Macs have all the potential, none of the momentum.

Tech bros and sisters with 6-figure salaries and an under-developed perspective on value, $1300 isn’t even half a puppy to these folk.

I think the unrealistic dream would be having AAA gaming ambitions but expecting people to buy an MBP or Studio to achieve mid-level graphics performance. For the same price as an MBP you can get an MBA and a 4060 laptop right now, nobody who wants to game on Mac is going to pay $1000 - $3000 extra just for mid-to-lower-upper level graphics capacity. Baseline model has to be much better or games just won’t get enough sales to make Macs an attractive platform.

I find this device fascinating:

https://shop.boox.com/collections/all/products/pageboxlumi?_pos=3&_fid=c47f50ecc&_ss=c

But at that price I don’t want to pull the trigger on it and not like it lol.

Bump everything down a model and it would be nicer…

• M3 = 4060 (a $1000-or-less machine)

• M3 Pro = 4070 (a $2000 machine)

• M3 Max = 4080 (a $3000 machine)

• M3 Ultra = 4090 (a $4000 machine)