This is how the "walled garden" effect evaporates.
 
Amazon makes an alarming amount of money doing advertising, promoting products etc. Sometimes to find the product I want, I need to search and then click through the link, as it simply won't show up in search due to paid placement of other products. Especially name brand stuff from 3M (Scotch tape), Sharpie markers, Rubbermaid etc
 
Amazon is already banning agentic shopping tools from their platform, for good reason, it cuts out their advertising revenue, their upsell revenue, and optimizing of selling items that are closest to the customer to save on shipping.
 
If you had a tool that would auto-cross shop for the lowest price of the highest quality items, and you don't have to browse their website to buy things, it destroys a lot of what differentiates online retailers. A lot of the lock-in is the checkout process. It is two mouse clicks for me to re-order printer paper on amazon, even though I could get it cheaper from officedepot.com but I don't want to maintain yet another account. With agentic shopping, amazon just becomes a set of faceless warehouses with free delivery.

I'm excited for that future, but I'm not holding my breath.
 
That said the steam deck has been a smashing success; I don't have a need for a handheld device but that steam cube is certainly something I'm thinking real hard about, as a companion device to my normal desktop. 95% of my "gaming" these days would easily run at 4K @ 60fps on that device

Countries outside the US and a handful of other high $/capita areas can still get Disney+ ad free, but at half the price or less of what we pay here. Everyone else "pirates" it by sharing passwords. If you don't have someone's password, then you get the free, ad-supported version. There are a lot of kids whose parents make ~$250-$400/month (that's per month, not day/week, common wage for a school teacher in Colombia, population 55 million, more than the state of NY or CA, so not an isolated situation).
 
Those parents are lucky to have a cell phone with internet connection; their kids are growing up on the ad-supported version of Disney+. Based on my experience, kids will watch nearly anything, instead of play with their own toys. Also most of those kids are watching Disney+ on their parent's phone in the back seat of a car, not on a 70" OLED with 9.1 surround sound in a 25x30' air conditioned living room.
 
TL;DR the average viewer is not an american adult

2GB is a lot when you're building 3x TV per minute and shipping them out by the literal boat-load. There are 8 billion people on this planet and more than half of them will buy a new TV in the next 10 years

If JFK was your cousin, odds are you'd probably look good too

Like most posters here I went to public school in the 80s/90s. I think I read ~a dozen books as part of regular instruction, starting in 7th or 8th grade, and then 9-12th grade we read one novel per semester. In a couple of instances we read plays instead of ovels, like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. The only two exceptions to this were Moby Dick, where we only read ~20 excerpts (it's a weird book to give to 15 year olds to study, doesn't follow traditional novel format) and then Fiddler on the Roof, because there wasn't room for it in the curriculum and there was only a single question about it on the state required annual assessment exam, which I guess they knew about in advance because they effectively told us the answer the day before.

not only remove a hardware component, but more importantly, remove the only moving part on a cell phone. without a sim card slot the phone can come truly hermetically sealed, it really is just a glass slab, nothing to break, no seam or hinge or slide to get grime and dirt in

I don't think anyone expected water exposed to the atmosphere in a waterfall like fashion to be re-added to the public water supply. I'm curious where you live that you haven't seen evaporative cooling in person. Maybe you live in Norway or Iceland. The water that doesn't evaporate is recycled, and when the resivor drops below level X, it adds more municipal water to the system. I hope this clears some things up for you about 100 year old cooling system design

Water consumption doesn't matter much (or at all) near these places:
 
1. Colombia river basin
2. Mississippi River
3. The entire east coast from Virgina, south to Florida
 
There's no incentive to conserve water in these areas, access to fresh water is limitless. half to three quarters of data centers are in areas with no problems with water access; the hysterics around water use is being weaponized, rather than rationalized. If you have a data center in California or Arizona, water is more of an issue, but they often use more efficient cooling loops there.

It sounds like they're permanently destroying water or something. Many datacenters line the colombia river, which is both an excellent hydroelectric and limitless water supply, and then the other big cluster is in the SE near Virgina and into the Carolinas, which are frequently flooding,
 
764.6 billion liters of water is about the same water usage as NYC uses in 200 days
 
764.6 billion liters of water is about 8 days worth of water used by California agriculture

Even Sam Altman can't save openAI with his Jedi Hype Master Skills when they keep falling futher and further behind. Google and Anthropic are presenting serious challenges and while OpenAI is still in the top 10, the rest of the pack is quickly catching up, whatever secret sauce they had before, it has been discovered and they have yet to find something uniquely defining that nobody else has. Raise after raise eventually isn't going to make much of a media splash and they'll lose their influence there, too. December isn't over yet, maybe they still have a compelling product up their sleeve, but this latest media blitz is a lot more subdued than last year's Dec blitz.

We might have cable tv, if that was the cheapest way to get internet in our house. I literally do not know, only one device is plugged into a coax cable in our entire house and that's the modem. I wouldn't even know where to look on my tv to see if they still come with coax connectors on the back, it hangs on the wall and there's a power plug, that's it.

Consoles have a 7 year life, the Xbox One came out in 2013; it should have seen a fully new hardware design in 2020. So they're 5 years overdue ("series" are hardware refreshes, not a true "next gen" redesign) Microsoft has never been able to turn around the story of the failed launch the product is likely dead at this point. Microsoft wanted to own the media landscape and at this point they've given up on that vision for 5+ years.

Car companies could sell midrange, mid-size cars, toyota sells these in pretty much every country on the planet, but they're nowhere as profitable as selling a $12,000 truck with a lift kit and leather interior for $55,000. Those vehicles exist but they've stopped selling them in the us because theyve found they can just exclusively sell high margin cars instead and maximize shareholder value

My roof gets ~150-250F for 8 hours a day direct UV exposure and we regularly go 9 months without rain here. There's no atmosphere to filter the UV and the ISS can reach 300F worst case so it's worse but not an order of magnitude worse. ISS has a true vacuum but i'm not sure if that helps or hurts above water's boiling point. Every winter before the rainy season comes I have to go on the roof and brush off the thick carpet of moss that has started forming in the shadiest parts. So clearly nature is working as intended.