I have seen similar features on phones. Luckily my LG G4 has replaceable batteries. I can confirm that multiple times I have seen my battery reported as fully healthy, only to open up the phone and find a spicy pillow.
So it may be useful for some things but I would not be too heavily reliant upon this without fully understanding where that % comes from.
Yeah my problem is not that they offer smaller sizes, but when they try to deceive consumers about how much they are getting in order to increase the unit price. Calling attention to it the way that this pizza box does almost feels honest in comparison to what most companies do.
I can’t find that Sonos has ever made hearing aides. They make wifi-based “smart” speaker and, more recently, headphones that are part of that ecosystem.
They’re way overpriced for what they are, similar to the Apple model. Just charging really high prices and trying to create an aura of “premiumness” to justify it. Not the most egregious offense, but annoying
The app launch. The app now takes forever to open and I often have to retry opening it around 4-6 times anytime I want to do anything. Considering these are speakers, and that often means that I want to pause, play, change the track, or change the volume. Those are all usually functions where having to wait 60-300 seconds is an unbearably long time, especially when you need to lower the volume. Worst of all, I have my living room TV going into the Line In on one of the speakers, and the entire section of the app called “Sources” where I can select that just disappears entirely ~80% of the time. So if I go to watch TV or play videogames or whatever and my wife was listening to music earlier now I’ve got to wait several minutes of reloading the app to be able to just use the direct line-in.
They also removed the feature to play audio files that were on the controlling device. Other users have complained of other features like alarms that got removed or broken, though I didn’t use those.
The old version of the app was not particularly great, but the replacement was a clear downgrade and made previously purchased hardware worse.
A bit ago they had another controversy where you could “retire” of devices you didn’t want anymore. What did this feature do? Why, it just bricked the device and turned it into e-waste no one can ever use again! What could go wrong?
More of my complaint for my specific speakers because I don’t know if they’re whole lineup is like this, but really annoying that only 1 of my 2 speakers even has a line-in, and neither of them have Bluetooth options. I’ve got to just hope everything i want to listen to is on a specific supported service, or find a way to get the audio to play on the TV if that isn’t in use.
They were gifts from my in-laws. I was kind of skeptical about it but they weren’t too bad until the app change. I was even considering maybe getting another speaker to fill out the house before all this. But now I’m looking to get out of the ecosystem- maybe just build my own home theater speaker system for the living room and get a plain old Bluetooth speaker for the bedroom.
So as a digital artist I…
Sure sounds to me like they are claiming this is digital.
And it’s just gatekeeping art. I wouldn’t tell a painter they aren’t a real artist just because they can’t play guitar. And all art forms have long history of passing on information across generations. The saying “good artists borrow, great artists steal” is far older than any computer.
There’s a lot of problems with AI in general, but most of these complaints I see about AI art in particular are really misdirected complaints about how terrible copyright and other intellectual property laws are. For almost all of human history until about a century ago it was common and encouraged to take and build upon the ideas of others- it’s only because capitalists found a way to profit off of restricting ideas that we started to do so.
Among other criticisms, “using technology” does not mean something is “digital”. The example on the rock seems to be analog from everything in the post above.
I can tell you don’t play Pokemon .
Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.
I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.
I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.
I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.
I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.
I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.
That might work, but I’m not sure all of the tradeoffs would line up there.
At $350-$400 you’re competing with the Steam Deck. I think that’s asking for failure. Sony might allow Linux on it (like the PS2 and PS3), but I would expect the main gaming OS to be fairly locked down with DRM. The Deck is a couple years old so maybe they could beat them on price/performance/battery life, but not by a huge amount of we are talking about the power to play PS4 games. They would have a miniscule fraction of the library, and probably not the track pads and key software to allow the Deck to play M&KB games.
And then there is the Switch. The regular version is $270, the OLED is $330. Huge install library already. Plus you get the versatility of handheld and home use, plus the JoyCons (which there would be legal hurdles to try to copy). And the Switch 2 is right around the corner. I would bet (and I think Sony would too) that the Switch 2 is going to be a similar price and competitive performance/battery life. I don’t think you’re proposing would compete.
And you’d still have the problem of splitting the dev base. I could be wrong, but I thought Sony announced they are no longer publishing for the PS4 (the last game would have been Lost Soul, but the PS4 version was canceled so the last game they published was MLB 2023) and expect 3rd parties to end in 2025. Heck, a PS5 Pro has been rumored for a while now. So it seems Sony is trying to get away from PS4 development.
Don’t get me wrong- I like your idea. But i think something like that would be a sudden reversal of the direction Sony has been signalling they want to go for a few years now.
I see two unrelated articles that it hink address similar problems.
For handhelds, Sony is good at making hardware, but has generally failed to develop a good library of 1st party games. In order to be successful, a platform needs enough hardware sales to be an enticing platform for 3rd party developers, but you need a game library to drive hardware sales. That’s where 1st party support comes in, and where Nintendo has generally been great with their handhelds. Sony tried to have a more even split, but ended up focusing on their home consoles when they were pushed.
The second is emulation. Sony has a significant library of old games, and even more if you count 3rd party titles for Sony’s old consoles. Really popular games often merit full re-makes. Slightly less popular games get re-released or remastered, sometimes in collections. A lot of games aren’t popular enough for that, but if you could find a way to charge people anywhere from $1-$10 to play through the original version it would probably sell (and having a platform the 3rd party publishers to also sell their old PlayStation Roms would probably let Sony take a % for almost no additional work). The problem is… The Shadow of the Colossus remake released for $40 initially and is still $20 initially today. If we were able to pay $5 or $10 for the PS2 version back in 2018, would the remake have even been possible?
Beyond that, does would a greater emphasis on releasing older games on emulators possibly cannibalize new game sales? Are there going to be people who, when GTA 6 releases for $70+micro transactions, would eye up Vice City or San Andreas for $5 or $10 and no micro transactions instead?
I think they could address both issues with a retro handheld. Cheap Chinese retro handhelds have been really popular the past few years- imagine one with the build quality, controls, support, legitimacy, and increased price tag of being from Sony? If it could play PS1, PS2, And PSP games that a gigantic library available that’s mostly sitting idle right now. You could probably get by with a 480p screen too, although if Sony wanted a more premium feel 720p would still be fine. I’m also not sure if they would go 4:3, or expand to 16:9 to allow for the games that did support widescreen to use it, and for the PSP. Vita and PS3 would be cool, but I’ll assume they aren’t realistic for now.
From my experience with the Steam Deck- having dedicated extra buttons for save states and fast forward/slow down/pause/rewind breathes tons of new life into old games. Not enough check points? Really long unskippabke cutscenes or load times? The classic “unskippabke cutscenes before a long and challenging boss fight that makes you rewatch the cutscene every time you die”? All solved with save states and fast forwarding. It also helps with these games being designed for longer play sessions than would be typical for a handheld.
What I’m not certain of is- would this be differentiated enough to not cannibalize any new game sales? I suspect confining it to a separate, handheld platform would help to make it make sense. Maybe the dark horse candidate is Sony releasing a PC app on Steam as well, but I think cannibalization would be a different concern there.
Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.
One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.
It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.
I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.
It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.
The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.
I might be out of the loop here. I know Nintendo is constantly swinging their lawyers around and Microsoft has put some barriers in front of running emulators on Xboxes. I’m trying to remember the last time I heard any Sony news about emulation though.
Last I can think of is whenever they removed the PS3 support for Linux in the name of “security” and had to pay out a class action settlement, but even that wasn’t directly about piracy.
Even as late as the 2016 RNC debate. He was speaking coherently, responding to opponents, making logical points. He was still lying and promising to do terrible things, but he seemed in control of himself and I could see how some conservatives might call him charismatic even.
Nowadays he just kind of picks a vibe and spews out words vaguely related, and the audience projects what they want him to mean onto it.
For my library of 390 games, only 2 are “Borked”.
One is Magic: Duels, which was discontinued by WOTC back in 2019. It’s still playable on Windows, but seeing as it was kind of a weird experiment they did that ultimately got replaced by Arena I can understand the lack of support there. Also it was free, and I got clean a few years ago, so I’m not salty.
The other of Flatout 3 (the car racing/destruction game, not to be confused with the similarly named Fallout 3). I remembered seeing ads and reviews for Flatout back in PSM when I was a kid. Never got to play it back then, but I grabbed the series bundle on sale at some point. Still haven’t played any of them yet, but it appears the issue with Flatout 3 in particular is… It’s a bad game. Just learned this now, but apparently it was made by a different developer than the first games and is, by review score, one of the worst games of all time. So there’s probably not a whole lot of demand for it on Linux.
Fun stuff. Always neat to find a new way to look at the library.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m failing to see how accusing Biden of supporting things that he has explicitly condemns is going to help stop genocide here?
Is that a sourced quote from Biden or the administration, or are you just making up a quote to get mad at?
There’s plenty of room to criticize Biden for his actual actions in the Israel-Palestine conflict. No need to make shit up.
In fact, the only reason I could think to do so would be if you were his political opponent. Like, hypothetically speaking, if I were a conservative on the Internet trying to undermine Biden’s support and also draw attention away from the fact that it’s Republicans in the House doing this, I might (hypothetically) post this article with a purposefully vague headline and a picture of Biden on the Internet. Seems doing something like that would serve GOP goals rather nicely, wouldn’t it?
If you scroll up a bit, someone else was kind enough to post Biden’s quote opposing this piece of legislation.
Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?
It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.
Funny because Faking Gong believes Trump is a divine intervention to bring down the CCP.