Definitely better sound. But the SNES had a "Super PPU" chip that relieved all the burden of actually getting tiles to the screen and scrolling them. That made an enormous difference. And that was the sort of thing we were trying to compete with.

Gaming was still (and remains) a thing on home PCs, but there was a massive explosion in console gaming going on. We didn't have the hardware, the connections, or even the documentation to develop a game for the SNES, but the Apple IIgs had really amazing technical manuals available. (Probably the last product Apple ever made where this was the case, unless you count the Apple IIc+)

That's how I remember it. Coding an arcade-style game in Hi-Res or even Double-Hi-Res - graphics modes available on the 8-bit Apple II line - was much easier on the Apple IIgs. No doubt about it.

But if you wanted to create something that rivaled the Super Nintendo or even the 8-bit Nintendo, you had to use Super-Hi-Res, and then you had to worry about scrolling. That was where the frustration set in!

That is exactly what happened. Both my parents were high school teachers, and they got an Apple IIe for the home on a very helpful discount. The Apple IIgs seemed like the obvious upgrade path. But by the time I saved up enough money to pay for half of the cost of buying a used Apple IIgs from one of our family friends, it was 1991.

Me and my friends were all aware of the hardware that hit the market between 1986 and 1991, like the Amiga 500 for a start. We just couldn't convince our parents to help upgrade.

Well, since we're humble-bragging about really old-ass PCs, I personally got my start writing Level I basic on the TRS-80. But it appears that was a red herring, as instead you were trying to make a point about devices with chips in them being "general purpose" or not. That point was a bit muddled.

Old-ass PC or new smartphone, what matters is its intended use, as the designers saw it. E.g. a Nintendo Switch is not a "general purpose computing" device because it's not what Nintendo designed it to be. It is for gaming.

And clearly, the presence of an app store, or stores, is not a deciding factor in what makes a device suitable for "general computing". The Switch, and the Sony Playstation, the Xbox, the iWatch, the Samsung Galaxy Watch, the Samsung SmartTV, the iPod Classic, and the Amazon Fire TV Stick all have/had app stores, designed to deliver functionality from third parties that work within the specs of the design, and these are not "general computing" devices either.

(Unless you would argue that these things are indeed "general purpose", but I doubt you would.)

And yet you put the smartphone in this category, along with, I assume, the iPad and iPod Touch, the Galaxy Tab, a zillion other tablets, and probably the Kindle Fire, because these are... Insert hand-waving here... More versatile? Shading into the terrain of "general" in their purpose?

Not because they have app stores. Not because you _can_ install any software on them, whether the designers intended you to or not. But because, I assume, there is some use you can personally envision putting them to, that the modular software available for them does not cover. But surely that definition is absurd as well. I can personally envision the display on my microwave playing a game of pong against me using the number pad. And if there was a mechanism to alter the firmware, it could.

Why aren't you up in arms over what Nintendo is allowing people to do with their Switch?

Are they irrelevant because they are a "gaming console", and not to be taken seriously?

If so, then the "gaming console" aspect of phones is a red herring. If not, then why go after Apple specifically, when their rules are generally a lot more lax than Nintendo's?

Also, you talk of a secondary market for a game cabinets driven by a phone but based on MAME. That's not exactly a ..... market. MAME's entire reason for existence is to violate licensing restrictions using copyrighted ROMs. Odd stance to take, claiming to be on the side of software developers, while endorsing a product that straight-up defrauds them. ("No one cares" is a sword that cuts two ways.)

A company having as much "corporate" control (bit redundant, that word) as Apple does is, in absolute terms, perhaps a bad thing. But in your haste to tear down the slightly run-down looking mansion in the middle of the block, you are ignoring the condemned whorehouse just a few doors down, labeled "government control". If governments had their way, the phone you use would be back-doored to the point where some spook in a glass building 2000 miles away could listen to your conversations in real-time while you're in bed next to your partner. Use the smart strategy, and play the one power against the other.

Perspective how? I own a car that has more computers in it than your phone. Do you consider the lack of an app store, let alone alternate ones, for my car, to be "abusive to the customer", and me some kind of chump for not "realizing it?"

Or perhaps, you are engaging in an oversimplification in order to endorse a flawed but comforting policy.

Nintendo makes a console, and a software/hardware ecosystem to make development on it possible. Same with Sony, same with Microsoft. Then they offer this platform to developers, giving them exactly ONE WAY to distribute content. If the way they offer is not profitable, no one will pursue it. Neither large established companies, nor small ones.

Apple makes a smartphone, and applies the same rules as Nintendo, Sony, etc. But the thing is, the stakes are MUCH higher. People use their device to do banking, to make payments out in the world, to have countless extremely private conversations, to store passwords, to unlock their car, to find each other on a map, to get into their house, to document and discuss their family lives, et cetera. You don't do that on a Playstation or a Switch.

And these aren't technical people. If you do this all on a laptop you have at least a reasonable amount of technical knowledge, and you hopefully know how to use a firewall, and how to decide when someone is subjecting you to a phishing attack or trying to clickbait you into installing a trojan, and you're very parsimonious with giving out your password when you install new software or even copy files.

But people who use smartphones are generally not like that. They have enough trouble keeping up with what the device CAN do, and have barely any time left for understanding the HOW, and the dangers that come with it. In fact, I consider myself very technical indeed, having spent a lifetime learning constantly about hardware and software, and there are large realms of functionality inside the smartphone that I simply do not understand on a technical level. For example, just about everything having to do with antennas.

People trust this device to mediate and preserve their social, financial, private, and even political lives. Apple has led the charge directly into this state of affairs over the last decade-plus, by aggressively building privacy and security protections into their platform, including at the "app store" level. (At this point I pause here to remind everyone that the very idea of an "app store" as we understand it now was basically created by Apple, as they went along. Do you remember when software was sold ONLY in boxes on shelves, and then through countless random web portals later on, each one proprietary and owned by one company?) If there was no Apple in this space, those privacy protections would be swiss cheese, because they would be implemented to Google's standard, which means you accept being aggressively data-mined at every turn, and you accept the use of a hardware platform that supports this, and gives lip service to all other forms of security that could interfere with data-mining.

The target consumer base for the smartphone is not the same as for the PC. You on Slashdot may prefer caveat emptor, but then again, you're not unlocking your car door with your laptop, or whipping your laptop out to pay for lunch, or showing law enforcement your laptop when they pull you over and ask for ID. There are things so instrumental to your life that even you don't trust a laptop to cover them. For everyone else... Well, they're accepting a risk.

Personally, I think the idea that software makers are getting shafted by app store regulations is a bit shit. And for that I give you exhibit A: Apple sells you a device, for which you pay one price. You pay that money once, and then you use Apple's software services perpetually, for no additional money, for the entire lifetime of that device, including a run of OS updates to add new features and patch holes. Meanwhile, software developers are charging you A MONTHLY FEE just to have their software INSTALLED on that device. And they are getting away with this. You can call that "what the market will bear", but I call that a bloated piece-of-garbage market that is already too cozy for software makers.

Now I could say, the solution to that is, give me an "alternative" app store on this device that has a gray market, and re-packages ripped off and cracked applications. I mean, it will save me money. It will absolutely shaft small-time software developers, but from my point of view, there's no downside to installing the Cydia App Store 2.0 and then installing DuoLingo [Cracked By Mr Krak-Man of Blag Bag]. Hell, that's exactly what people did back in the early iPhone days, with all kinds of apps including proxy servers to get around the "no tethering" rule. And if this fancy cracked DuoLingo exploits some security hole to wake your phone up at 2:00am and tell your banking app to do a wire-transfer of your entire savings account to some account in Iran, well, too bad. You stepped out of the walled garden and right into a briar patch.

We could all clamor for that "solution", claiming that it's an argument on behalf of software developers that they should be free to deceive and exploit customers for their money without the meddling of a damned platform provider, but it would really be a monkey's paw. You can imagine a company like Facebook re-architecting their own app so that it is actually an app store, and trusting that everyone who wants to be on Facebook will just authenticate it without thinking, and from that point on Apple is not only cut out of the revenue stream for Facebook, but potentially the revenue stream for every other non-Apple app you use, as Facebook recruits them into their store with the promise of NO developer fees as long as they sign an exclusivity agreement and give Facebook dispensation to data-mine their users. And then hey, it's like the Flash Plugin scenario all over again: Apple has just lost control over its own ecosystem. They provide the R&D, the hardware, the support, the APIs, and... Whoops, Facebook is suddenly calling the shots about what can and can't be installed there, and turning their privacy protections into a joke. If you do the math on their userbase under the new regulations and it comes up to 11 million a month, well, IS THAT ACTUALLY A PROBLEM?

Be careful what you wish for. Remember, Apple is the only giant tech company that gives a tin shit about consumer privacy. And yeah, it's made of tin, but all the other giant tech companies are CONSUMER PRIVACY HOSTILE. If you're crusading on the side of Epic Games and Facebook you may not be keeping the right ....... company. Pun intended.

You remember that time Microsoft was almost split into several different companies, because they released on operating system that had a default web browser? And, you could install an alternative, but it took some extra steps?

Well, Microsoft wasn't split up.

Any AirTag that is still audible is not adequately hidden/secured to the bike.
That thing should be an unrecognizable lump of dried epoxy, spray-painted black underneath a fender.

The little sound played by the AirTag can be easily disabled, but in the case of tracking a bike, that's not even relevant, because if you've got more than a few brain cells applied to the problem, you've already purchased an item like the Pinhead airtag box to firmly secure the tag to the frame, or found some other way to attach the tag that muffles the song as a byproduct just because it's so over-done.

E.g. slathering black two-part epoxy all over the AirTag (who cares if this makes it single-use, this is your f#*(@ bike we're talking about here and the AirTag costs 20 bucks, it's worth it) and then shoving it just inside the handlebar tube, beneath the grips. Yeah the range is obviously crippled by that example but it just needs to reach a few feet to the nearest device. And then, you take a second AirTag and glue that sucker somewhere else, because a thief who finds one and chips it out is VERY likely to assume that the threat is now neutralized.

Don't know it. Tactics like this are already in regular use where I live, and the resulting encounters have already bitten a chunk out of the theft rate.

Yeah, that guy's only problem was in his agitated attitude. I've already used airtags to HELP airline staff locate my own oversize luggage, one time after it got mislaid on the wrong side of the Atlantic, another time when it was sent to the wrong country, and yet another time when thee staff at one major terminal couldn't prove to the staff at the other major terminal that my item was still in their possession.

It's all about attitude. I'm polite, patient, and upbeat, but I'm dogged. When you're trying to locate a piece of gear that's worth 15 grand in parts alone and _NO_ONE_ knows for sure which COUNTRY it's in, an AirTag changes everything.

That's what they've been doing. It's not their problem if Beeper can't keep up with their API.

This is pretty comparable to a company selling counterfeit FedEx shipping labels and then complaining about "monopoly" and "freedom of choice" when FedEx learns how to exclude the counterfeits. Boasting that this is a service "people want" is a pretty shady red herring.

Yeah I dunno. I'm sure people got sick of holding a big bakelite phone up to the side of their head to hear a tinny voice on the other end, before all these fancy wireless headset gizmos and beam-forming speakers and high-data-rate digital encoding protocols came around.

But they still did it. For hours. For days. Especially when teenagers got ahold of them. And it was obviously, clearly, socializing. And it was not in any way an attempt to obscure a persona, it was to project one, as much as one could, that is just as true a projection as a woman putting on a fine dress in order to look good while out dancing.

You must acknowledge that you are deliberately misconstruing human behavior when you claim that these actions are neither social nor attempts to project one's personality.

So it was tinny voices on the end of an uncomfortable device that got sweaty and heavy after a while. So what? That was just an obvious call to arms to make the technology better. Which it got, all the way to the point where people are having entire conversations using a tiny earpiece that weighs less than a quarter. And there is absolutely no doubt that AR technology will improve the same way. Zero doubt. I mean, it's already been improving for the last 30 years or so, since the atrocious convention hall tech demo kiosks I encountered back in the early 90's. What makes you think it's gonna stop right here forever in 2023?

When the thing shrinks to about the size of a well-ventilated pair of "old person" sunglasses (you know the kind), people are gonna be carrying them around just like they carry a phone. Most people who already use tablets to get their work done will switch to AR glasses and a portable keyboard, and many people who used to need a laptop to make their living will do the same. Just the fact that you now have a screen the size of your entire field of view - even if it's overall lower resolution - will make it the default preference for these people. And so, all the "social" interaction they would do for work, and during work, will shift to this device, and it will be just as good and most likely a whole lot better.

Do you remember when the telephone was basically just a business-only instrument? No, because none of us was alive then. It was one of many technologies that transitioned from the business fabric to the social one as it got more refined and widely deployed. AR is going to make the same transition. You think the laptop is the pinnacle of ergonomics? HELL no. Of utility? No, there's always a push to make it lighter and smaller, except the screen pushes in the other direction. Examined this way, an AR headset is actually a sensible evolution away from the dead-end of the laptop. No one actually wants their work to be confined to a tiny rectangle; it's just the cost of working digitally. Given a viable replacement that frees their work from the tyranny of the rectangular container, everyone will switch to it.

And yes I've worn a fursuit. Yes it's uncomfortable. Even Apple's weirdly stappy padded design, is not a fursuit. The thing is way lighter, and WAY more ventilated, than any fursuit built well enough to have proper animal ears. And when it's in use and you're projecting a digital version of yourself, the image is edited to give the appearance that the device isn't even on your head. If you're looking for a costume to obscure how you look, Apple's AR thingamajig is not your solution. I mean, gee, it's as if they were trying to move in the exact opposite direction and make the device NOT act as an intermediary between you and the person you're talking to. Perhaps they've already been thinking for a long while about exactly the sort of "fake persona" canard you're pitching, and decided against it, because it was problematic before Facebook tried it and Facebook has made it oodles more problematic.

Go ahead and piss on this first iteration device. It's mainly proof-of-concept and meant to get developers and businesses working on the idea, and it's priced to reflect that. But don't be surprised when the second version comes out and it's a third lighter, and so on, and you start seeing people wearing them out in the world having animated conversations with people you can't see - just like you already see with phone users - and regardless of how you personally define "social".