The most interesting part of Apple Silicon is the RAM is inside the CPU package, located directly adjacent to the CPU/GPU. This lets them run the RAM way faster than you can with socketed RAM on the motherboard.

It's still DDR5, so it can't compete with GDDR6 based designs, but it comes a lot closer than you'd think.

For starters, the PS5 has 16 GB RAM and a more powerful GPU than Apple devices.

More importantly, everyone buying a PS5 is buying it to play games. People buying a Mac are buying it for some other purpose, and then maybe also using it for games.

You'd have a point if there were better storefronts for selling Mac games, but there aren't.

If you're using a major engine, yeah, Metal's a non-issue. If you're rolling your own tech or using a smaller engine, a Metal port is a big pain. It's not easy to port to the modern, low level graphics APIs like Vulkan & Metal, so it's a deal breaker for some devs. The shaders are trivial - all the shader languages are pretty similar, so unless you're doing something with bleeding edge shader tech, it's usually easy to port them.

But yeah, the market size is the real issue. It's not a question of whether or not people can port to Metal. Even if you're using an engine that handles that part of the job, it's still usually not worth the time and effort to do the port.

It's even worse than that. A Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB is regularly on sale for under $100. That's a premium brand. You can get cheaper brands for even less.

They merged 15 years ago. The FCC dragged out the merge for years before approving it, and both companies stock prices tanked due to the uncertainty.

The argument from both Sirius and XM was that with the rise of internet radio, there wasn't a large enough market for two satellite companies. They probably were right. Both companies lost money before the merge, but they're profitable now. Not crazy profitable, but solid.

Those radio shows drive a huge chunk of subscriptions tho. You have to move up to a higher subscription tier to get access to them, and there's not much point in the higher tier otherwise, so they're actually really valuable.

I've never been able to cancel on the website. Any time I try, it just tells me to call.

I've been doing the "try to cancel then get a big discount" thing for many years.

Those costs are tacked on as an additional fee above the base subscription cost. You don't get a discount on that part.

Ended up that way as a weird quirk of the Sirius & XM merge. FCC allowed it but banned price increases for a certain number of years. They ended up splitting the licensing fees out into a separate cost so they could pass them on to customers instead of eating the loss.

That's the whole point - there will never be a safety recall on the homeopathic ones because there are no safety standards or checks on them.

Ugh, that's from an older recall. Not the most recent recall, which was what the previous poster had linked to. The last I heard, there was no evidence of anything bad happening from the recent recall, it was just precautionary.

Yeah, it's all bad.

It's not that the eyedrops were destroying eyes. The safety levels weren't up to standards, so the eyedrops potentially were unsafe.

The standards and safety checks don't apply to homeopathic eyedrops, so the odds of them being safe are much lower. The FDA probably has a reason to suspect the quality isn't good, but they don't have the power to act directly.

Sigh, the stupid, it hurts. Gotta make everything about stupid culture wars. Clearly expanding your audience kills it!

E3 was a press event. Originally it was the best way to get press attention to new products. It thrived when it was a press only event and it was the can't miss event of the year.

Then the internet got bigger. It became easy for anyone to stream events. We got social media to distribute news and build hype. The press didn't need E3. E3 tried to survive by opening up to everyone, but it just diluted the value of the event for the companies demonstrating products. It was a cost effective approach when you were demoing to the press, who would then magnify your message many times over. It wasn't cost effective when you were targeting the customers directly.

E3 was dying before COVID hit. There had already been multiple times it almost got cancelled. The console makers and the big game publishers were no longer consistently showing. Many of them had success with their own dedicated streaming events, and were favoring those. They cost way less to do, you get more control over the event, and it's more effective. COVID greatly sped up the demise of E3 and forced everyone else into online events. Now no one wants to spend a fortune for an in person event.

On that note, I've found that YouTube's recent war on ad blockers is far more effective on Firefox than Chrome. I've got AdblockPlus installed on both browsers, but for a while now YouTube has only worked for me on Chrome. Firefox just shows a "You're using an ad blocker" message instead.

Allowing ad blocking in Chrome but not Firefox would be a very effective way to get me to switch more toward Chrome.

"Render things properly" has always meant "the sites I want to visit work correctly" and has absolutely nothing to do with standards.

The standards tend to influence that heavily when we've got multiple browsers with large chunks of the market. At times when one browser completely dominates, the standards don't mean a lot.

That was the plan for Social Security, and it worked until enough politicians realized they could eventually kill it by just not making the necessary adjustments over time. I think part of why we see so much interest in schemes like UBI is out of fear that politicians will just let Social Security collapse when the fund runs out.