Were you thinking about his penis the entire time?

I'm not surprised that Valve is dropping 32-bit support; the 'gaming on 32-bit windows' market cannot be all that large or all that lucrative; what does surprise me a little bit is that the announced end of support doesn't line up with anything I immediately recognize. End of 2025/beginning of 2026 actually puts them considerably later than most stuff using chromium for UI rendering(not sure if they've been doing a bunch of backporting or if they consider the fact that they are mostly rendering their own content a security control); but doesn't line up with the deprecation of any other 32-bit dependency I recognize offhand.

Anyone have a plausible speculation on whether there is something else getting deprecated that likely drove the decision; or if it's just a matter of having to pick a nice round number to pull the plug on something that could be continued but isn't really worth the hassle?

AMD has superior power management in their chip, in terms of being able to shut down functional units when not in use, so now that they are on the same or superior process technology they have an efficiency edge over Intel. Intel was only ahead of AMD in mobile because they had superior process tech. That is now over and there are no signs it's coming back (Intel having failed at getting acceptable yields with two process shrinks in a row now) so AMD has the clear edge for the time being.

What official statements, as if those were relevant? What evidence?

Which is pants on head retarded.

Both from a moral level, keeping people in debt to ensure they're indentured to someone and from a business perspective as it's a imperial shitton (about 1.8 Metric fuckloads) of risk. In case you don't remember the last time the banks over-leveraged on risky customers, it was only 2008, there was a massive collapse we're still feeling the effects of.

I'm glad my country doesn't have anything of the sort. Experian are trying to "sell" their credit score system but no-one is buying. When you apply for credit here (I.E. home or car loan) your existing credit obligations including potential ones (like a credit card or phone contract) are listed as risks and detract from the amount you can borrow.

I think everyone is over thinking this. NVidia need to do something with that money they're drowning in and there's only so much that can be syphoned off to tax havens before everyone starts asking questions. If they kept it, they'd need to pay tax on it and we can't have that.

What's surprised me in the processor market is AMD making inroads in the laptop space that Intel owned for decades, even when AMD were dominating on the desktop and had very strong server offerings (the Athlon 64/Opteron days, for those who's memories stretch back that far). 15% of laptops are now AMD.

Upgrading budget laptops is how you save.

I have a cheap Asus gaming laptop for travel. It cost me £550 and most of that was for the RTX3050. I was able to pop the back off, add in another 8 GB of RAM, doubling the original and replace the 512 GB SSD with a faster 1TB for less than £100, the next model up that had the same amount of RAM was over £200 more expensive (but it did have a 3060 to be fair).

A lot of budget laptops are deliberately underspec'd to force people afraid to upgrade to buying a far more expensive laptop.

All of this is a moot point anyway, Apple have been hostile to upgrades and repairs for decades, they already spend extra to solder in the hard drives and ram modules. Also anyone who didn't predict that they'd be killing off the Mac line for phone based ones? Anyone still denying that? Mac OS being killed off is next.

All of the low-hanging fruit has been picked there, pun intended. Crops which are easy to machine cultivate are already produced with machine cultivation.

The first thing can't happen or they would have done it already, and the second thing is the opposite of their mission.

Just ship with all the 32 bit libraries already, so we can stop needing multiarch for Steam.

That's still 3 million people of the ext. 300 million laptops that get sold each year.

And I'm willing to bet a lot of people are like me who buy a lower spec'd model where I can upgrade the RAM and SSD on the cheap saving a hundred quid off the more expensive one.

However that's besides the point, Apple have been openly hostile to people who want to upgrade (and consumers in general) for years. Plenty of other manufacturers to choose from though.

As a side effect, they're going to become a huge vector for malware.

A fridge will last for a decade or more, they'll stop doing software updates after 7 years maximum, maybe even as low as 2. In fact some may never receive a software update.

They'll just put in defences they will put in place to prevent it.

"Your fridge will shut down in 20 hours unless we're able to reach the Enrichment server" which is also the advertising server.

What needs to happen is laws need to be passed making this shit illegal. There's a reason they're starting in the US, even before their government was more corrupt that all the other tin pot dictatorships put together, there were enough people who were irrationally afraid of competent governance that they'd willingly prevent laws against this kind of thing.

I can see no reason a fridge should ever need to be connected to the internet.

All that does is requires a beeper.

The idiots who leave it open are the kind that want these beepers removed because they find them annoying (erm... it's kind of the point, to get your attention). They're the same kind of people who openly invite being bombarded with ads because they think "they're not affected by them" which is evidenced by the amount of branded crap they don't need strewn around their dwelling.

I want my fridge to reliably keep things cold. Efficiently would be nice, doing so without releasing harmful chemicals would just be a bonus the way things are going.

Consumers don't get a choice.

They don't give a shit either. Try finding a non "smart" TV in the UK because you just want a TV that doesn't have a long boot time or requires network connectivity as you simply want to use it as a display unit for other devices.

People need to petition to make laws to make this kind of shit well and truly illegal. That is unlikely to happen in the US however as making this illegal is "government overreach" and being bombarded with advertisements is "freeze peach". Not likely to fly in the UK though. At least not yet, who knows what will happen after the 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement thanks to Fuhrer Farage.