To be fair, it says “bubba” and the Clinton link is speculative.

The republicans have started trying to blame Obama for this years hikes…

It’s quite a leap, but they are trying to say ACA blew it all up, but it just took almost 20 years for the pain to hit.

It’s a narrative that really only works for the ride or die republicans, but it’s all they have to try, since they have no actual answer they want to propose…

I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something “neat” and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I’m sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn’t have bothered if the same sort of device was not so “cool”

There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.

I continue to think at least his administration, maybe not him specifically, drove prices up in 2025 on purpose.

Imagine midterm campaign ads, bragging about how prices have decreased, and citing annual percentage decrease. Damn near impossible when you are always trying your best to manage affordability but perhaps actually doable if you blow things up the year prior.

If they did somehow cut a partial rebate check from the tariffs right smack in the middle of midterm campaigns, they brag about lower prices and people feel the weight of that bonus in their pocket, even if it was their own money in the first place. Lots of people act like tax refund is some sort of spring bonus instead of repayment of a 0% loan they have to the government.

In short, they are going to win midterms by botching the off year.

That’s just pointing out upgrades carry a large price, not that the base model is at a loss.

Which is a super common strategy in pre built, especially in systems that can’t in theory take third party upgrades. Commonly a mobile platform will charge a hundred dollar premium for like 20 dollars worth of UFS storage. At least at some points PC vendors have done DIMM SPD lockouts to force customers to first party so they can charge a significant multiple of market rate for their parts.

I doubt anything in Apple’s lineup is sold at a loss. They might tolerate slimmer margins on entry, but I just don’t think they go negative.

I wouldn’t be sure the mini is a loss leader…

I think that was overstated. Sure there were some “fun” projects for fun or publicity.

However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.

Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as “weird” as the cell processor.

OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.

Probably true, but there is a chance they might convert some console gamers…

But not enough to bet on it with a loss leader probably.

I have been predicting that the tariffs will be dropped as we go into midterms. They are going to have so many campaign ads about bringing pruces so far down year over year…

So much easier to make a metric good if you screw it up first.

"This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls,

That’s not ‘barely legal’…

Frankly, the Xbox One and the PS4 marked those vendors transition to ‘tiny prebuilts’, by the standards one might call this a ‘tiny prebuilt’.

One could fairly argue that Switch is “just a gaming tablet/phone”

I doubt this one. It would require that Trump ever would care about the pleasure of anyone other than himself.

There was no mention of motive, just of the consequences. Microsoft going the Apple/Google path was/is an existential business threat to a company like Valve. Microsoft’s coming up short on MS Store mitigated the risk, but still you have a platform that is geared toward Microsoft subscription revenue.

Just because those business concerns factor in, doesn’t detract from the positive ways that it has gone so far.

Pretty spot on, it was so worth it to remember, that Valve actually seemed to remember.

Their first go at it was “make a viable platform and the developers/publishers will make the effort to come over, and hardware partners will step up with offerings because of Valve’s brand strength and fear of the Microsoft Store screwing everything up”. That didn’t work, and Microsoft Store also didn’t pan out as far as Valve and others feared, but they have been kind of screwing up the platform particularly for games as they chase other things that would be subscription revenue instead of transactional revenue.

Valve learned they needed to work harder to bring the platform to the Windows games, so heavy investment in Proton. They learned that they had to take the hardware platform in their own hands because the OEMs aren’t committed until they see proof it can work for them. They learned that the best way to package their improved efforts was with a “hook” with mass-market appeal, enter the Steam Deck, recognizing the popularity of the Switch form factor and bringing it to the PC market at a time no one else was bothering.

So now they have a non-Android, non-Windows ecosystem that covers handheld, console/desk, and VR with a compelling library of thousands and thousands of games…

This is more thinking about material cost rather than relative value. If you save money on the passthrough and incur a few costs above the Quest 3 but nothing dramatic, then I’m just saying the pricing needs to be in the ballpark of Quest 3. Better value by making smarter choices that may not have a cost impact (e.g. using a maintstream high end SoC instead of a niche SoC, putting the battery at the back instead of making it front heavy).

Of course they may be hampered by different business needs. Meta affording to risk more money than Valve can risk might drive higher price point, but it would be unfortunate.

The SoC may be better, but I don’t know that it would be more expensive. Meta went with a more niche SoC and Valve selected a more mainstream, newer SoC. Better specs, but also larger volumes so cost wise I think Valve should be fine. Comfort certainly seems like it should be better, but I don’t know that I see more cost as a factor versus just making better decisions.

The wireless dongle certainly can be a thing in it’s favor, just thinking that on balance there’s some things that should contribute to BOM price and some that should save on BOM price and it should, roughly, be in the ballpark of Quest 3 when all is said and done, not 2x the cost.

A $1k would break it in this market… The specs suggest a little lower end generally than Quest 3 hardware wise, or in the ballpark (comparable display and optics, lower quality cameras). The only notable improvement is including eye tracking, which is nice, but not $1k nice…

$500 should be a good target, some tradeoffs with Quest 3 (worse ‘AR’, better eye tracking and PC connectivity).

They did at least do: https://www.meta.com/experiences/sid-meiers-civilization-vii-vr/5781689118524197/?srsltid=AfmBOoqbqaOcZk-uwva84T4NpmPU5A6M8h1LPhsJc2EkCyD5ujrcFI_m

No idea if it is vaguely any good or not…

Oh dear god I think you are joking but I know people who seriously do LFS as their production setup and get pissy anytime people say they are doing it wrong if they want to work with anyone else in the industry.

I think a key difference is that firefox is a eternally evolving codebase that has to do new stuff frequently. It may have been painful but it’s worth it to bite the bullet for the sake of the large volume of ongoing changes.

For sudo/coreutils, I feel like those projects are more ‘settled’ and unlikely to need a lot of ongoing work, so the risk/benefit analysis cuts a different way.