In your example you described the phone that needed replacing as "Ancient".

When you get to "Ancient", it doesn't really matter whether its apple or android. It's out of support on either, and yes, app support starts to fall apart at that age too.

My brother in law just updated from a Galaxy S5 this year (10 years old).

Disagree. Perhaps it _should_ be a big factor, but it's really not.

People text, and snapchat, and tiktok, and watch youtube and play spotify, a mobile game, and take pictures, and maybe once in a while even make a phone call.

As long as that all just works, they don't really care, and will use the phone until they break it or it stops holding a charge.

Or if they're on some sort of subsidy-treadmill, they replace it every 2 years regardless.

Very very few people are 'oh noes, Samsung/Apple/HTC is no longer sending me annoying updates that make me reboot my phone... I need a new phone now!'

"and notes discussing ongoing projects."

It Depends what those notes say. And if they're in the North Korean dialect.

To an extent yes. There has been some utter crap. Another Life pops immediately to mind as something so unwatchably terrible that i watched just to see if it could get worse (spoiler: yes! wow... so much yes!)

But that isn't a netflix issue, that's just an issue. From Firefly to The Expanse to Babylon 5 sci-fi especially is hamstrung by its production.

But there's been plenty of good shows to watch too:

I quite liked Fall of the House of Usher recently for example.
Black Mirror, Maniac, Umbrella Academy were good.
I watched the The OA Season 1 and that was good (I skipped part 2 since i knew it was cancelled mid-arc.) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was brilliant - especially season 1.

"So, books have always been more my thing. I'm sticking with them."

Sure, I like books too.. but Game of Throne's is a mess that may never be finished and perhaps shouldn't be; and Wheel of Time never was. And even Asimov's foundation is actually better without books 4 and 5, nevermind the Benford books, and Dune ... likewise did not improve with more novels, and also fell off a cliff when other authors kept it going like a zombie corpse. Things that are 'good' always invite 'more' and the 'more' is almost never as good.

These days my favorite books to read are those that are not part of a series, or at most are a trilogy, and have a beginning middle and an end and above all: a point. They don't try to milk the setting or characters endlessly. With each successive book in the series getting longer and longer as less and less editorial control is exercised over an author seemingly paid by the word.

And Dark City came out the year before. And the 13th floor came out the same year but earlier. Both were 'fake worlds' movies, both were also more intelligent movies, imho. Both were box office failures.

But I'd say all 3 are pretty original movies. (Although 13th floor was loosely based on a book (Simulacrum-3; and had previously been made for TV in the 70s in Germany) -- but even so I'd say its an original movie.

Your argument that nothing is original because you can identify tropes is too dismissive. If you couldn't identify any tropes the movie would be just be random images and noise... and that's probably a trope too.

I don't overclock it.

I do like buying the K versions though; as they generally have all the features; are readily available when I'm doing builds, and the fact that intel is binning it as a K means that its not going to fall over if it gets a little warm on a workload.

Nothing wrong with a gen3 i7, but if you want to have a system running a modern nvme SSD, and video card etc you do actually need a newer motherboard with a current chipset (pci express version, m2 slots, current bluetooth revision, etc etc) and that isn't going to be compatible with your gen3 i7.

Now... does it need to be an i9? No. Certainly not. I could have spec'd an i5 and it would have been fine. But just like you are still running a gen3 i7 today, I fully expect this i9 based system to be perfectly serviceable for a lot of tasks 10 years from now too, and over buying the cpu a bit will likely give me a bit more headway. I've still got both an 6th and 8th gen i7 in active use in my home, and JUST recently finally retired my own i7-3700K based system.

It's a conversational construct that anticipates an unvoiced follow up to my initial question.

Me: Is this news?
Anticipated unvoiced question: What do you mean?
Me: I mean, is it news worthy, because of XYZ"

I mean... I built my i9 13900K series PC for xmas 2022. The 14900K has been out for 6 months now... who would be surprised that the earlier chips are being discoed?

I'm not being pedantic, not really.

"The point is that if someone bypasses the HW requirements and gets Windows 11 to install/run, MS may, and probably will at some point, disable that ability."

It's really not all that likely at all. They just want to set a minimum for what they test and validate and support. They want bitlocker and microsoft account security, and passwordless/PIN logins and so the minimum supported spec ensures all the bits for that are there of a particular version. But what do they really care if you have win11 running on unsupported hardware? As long as you don't ask for support. They don't sell (that much) hardware. And they don't get anything but bad press for breaking things. (Also running a licensed copy on unsupported hardware is very different from running an unlicensed copy)

"And Linux vendors aren't going to actively try to stop you from running the OS on your system if you get it working. "

True enough. But passive neglect lets things get just as non-functional, and if you throw linux on a random windows PC... "works great" is often subject to caveats like 'something or other doesn't wake up properly from sleep', battery drains faster than it should, trackpad acceleration and touch features are janky, dolby-atmos sound is now "stereo", noise cancelling mic is now just a mic etc. It works, but it really isn't all that 'great'.

"That's not really the point. OP doesn't want to run the OS in an officially unsupported configuration"

Then OP isn't going to want to run an unsupported Windows 10 on the hardware he has now after October 2025 either.

If the priority is to run an officially supported configuration then your on the treadmill. Doesn't matter if the platform is Windows, Mac, RHEL, Ubuntu, or Android, or what.

"All my PCs are old, but they all do/will run Linux great"

Sure they will. But are they officially supported configurations?

Remember your own words: "OP doesn't to run the OS in an officially unsupported configuration".

Linux may run great on his hardware but no vendor is offering official support for that. And there's no guarantee that even if it works now that it will continue to do so. If those are terms you are ok with that's fine. But then throwing Windows 11 on the PC would be the same boat.

If you care about official support, Linux is still an option. There are plenty of Linux PCs out there with official support - from Steam Deck to System76 and even Dell. Your random Windows 10 PC though, sure it may work great with linux; it may work great with windows 11 too. But is it an officially supported configuration? Not so much... in either case.

" I have to pay more because of the fat slob in their pickup truck who's had three accidents in the past five years even though I've never had an accident in decades of driving. If there was any logic my insurance should be close to zero."

I don't think you understand 'insurance'.

An accident that causes a fatality costs on average 1.8M to settle for the insurance company (after legal, settlement, etc... all costs). There were 37000 fatal accidents last year. So it costs about 68 billion.

(And that's setting aside the nonfatal, and noninjury accidents for now, as total accidents is closer to 350 billion a year. But bear with me... just conside the portion of your insurance that covers fatal accidents...)

I know! We'll let good drivers who haven't killed anyone pay close to zero for that premium. And the 34000 drivers who will kill someone each year should pay 2 million dollars each!

We just need to figure out who they are ahead of time (because they probably won't renew their insurance if we charge them that much afterwards), and we need to hope they collectively have 68 billion dollars (hmm... that seems pretty unlikely too) Maybe this idea is stupid.

It's also not really insurance... its just charging people for the damage the cause, which doesn't work, because the people causing the damage don't have the money, and we dont know who they'll be. So... you know... "insurance". Where everyone pays more, and we rig it a bit so people who are known to be 'higher risk' pay more, especially if they are clearly making risky choices.

But clearly, you can't optimize it all the way so that people who don't have accidents pay near zero, and people who do pay for them... because that's not insurance.

No. I've never really heard of that happening.

I expect what happens is that if the finger print changes / no longer matches the hardware, it treats it like a new install, and goes and verifies the purchase with steam again, and generates new fingerprints from that.

"The US charges involve conspiracy to steal secret documents, and accessory to stealing secret documents."

An overriding principle is that is has to be illegal in both countries. If you conspire to commit murder, that's illegal in both the US and in the UK, so extradition is possible.

Is it actually even illegal in the UK to conspire to steal secret documents from the US? It's illegal to conspire to steal secret documents from the UK in the UK, but is it illegal to conspire to get them from anywhere else?

If I conspire to steal secret documents from Russia from the USA is that even slightly illegal in the USA? (Not that there's any extradition treaty active, but that's beside the point.) Is it even illegal in the the USA in the first place? It happens all the time, journos are doing it, the government is doing it, if I talk to a Russian airman i know and help them plan a defection and to bring document, and encourage them to do it -- is the us government going to charge me with something? What exactly?

And remember Assange never touched a computer that touched a US government computer. There was no remote hacking -- the extent of his conspiracy was to 'encourage' somone to do it. and, when given a hash, he ran it offline against some rainbow tables -- which is INSANELY weaksauce in terms of any sort hacking/computer fraud/abuse type claim -- so really all they have is 'conspiracy' aka... "helping to plan, and giving encouragement" to get secret docs from the US.

Which from the point of the view of the UK, isn't even illegal that I'm aware of.

its a big part of how they hit the target price. I mean it sucks, but if you want phone with all these features, and you don't want to pay for them... this is what you get.