The shift toward all digital has been happening for a long time, and happening on Xbox even faster than the other consoles. Most people don't use the disc drive at all anymore. Most stores don't carry Xbox discs.

This is about getting the last holdouts to move on. Stick your discs into your older console you're still hanging on to, get the license, and then you can move on to the new console.

As to the drive compatibility, it's about the copy protection. The discs are all encrypted, and the decryption keys are stored in a region standard drives can't read.

Most Xbox Series systems don't have disc drives.

Later Xbox One models don't have the disc drive.

Until recently, all the rumors for the next Xbox suggested it wouldn't have a disc drive.

One of their biggest selling points on Xbox is they've got way better backwards compatibility than Nintendo or Sony. The #1 factor in what console people buy now is what their last console was. They all have at least one generation of backward compatibility, so everyone buys the same one they had before.

The point of this is to tie your existing disc games to your account so you won't hesitate to buy a new Xbox that doesn't have a disc drive.

And most people aren't going to send $16 to $20 a month to 5 different streamers. Most people are smarter than that.

Peacock offers deals for $20/year pretty often. Paramount offers $30/year - or no ads for a little more.

HBO usually offers a year for $3/month around black friday.

I'm good with waiting for the deals. I've usually got all the major services and I'm still paying way less than I was for cable.

The licensing issues you're talking about are with movies, and happen on all digital stores that sell movies. Movie studios are difficult to work with on licensing.

When games are delisted on any of the consoles, you still have the ability to download them if you've purchased them.

Games started installing to hard drives once consoles started including them.

PS4/XB1 started requiring all games to be installed. PS3/X360 had optional installs as not all 360s had hard drives, but the games ran better if you installed.

No matter how you set the time zones, you're going to end up with a significant number of people unhappy with them. How far north/south you are in the time zone, and how far east/west you are influences how you experience it.

At the very least, if you're near a boundary, you're going to have a very different experience than someone just on the other side of it. There's no way to avoid that.

The people complaining are the ones that ended up with the current boundaries not working well for them.

The Netherlands fits within 1 time zone. The 50 US states have 6 time zones. It's a lot harder to make everyone happy over here.

What difference does it make?

PS4 and PS5 games have to be installed to run. And then you download updates. Bigger games often require you download part of the game. The disc is just a license check that saves you part of the download.

PS3 was the last console to play games off the disc, and even then, installing was optional and improved the experience. But even then, some of the bigger games had mandatory installs.

All of that boils down to PCs are an open platform with an infinite number of possible hardware combinations, but the Xbox is a fixed implementation with only a few variations.

The Xbox has always been a Windows box running DirectX. You just have standard hardware and a different UI, and the user can't muck with the OS.

My desktop has 64 GB of DDR5 RAM.

When I hit the power button, some motherboard lights and the fans turn on. And then nothing.

It takes a good minute for the RAM test to run. Nothing displays on the screen until it finishes. And that's the fast test. If the computer was unplugged before turning it on, it does a longer RAM test.

It takes long enough that I legit thought my parts were defective when I first built the PC. I tried turning it off and on and checking components a bunch of times. Finally I gave up and assumed something was defective. Left it alone and started talking to my friend about what to do. We were shocked when it finally booted as we were talking.

So yeah, modern DDR5 based PCs take long enough to boot that a lot of people will assume it's broken before anything shows up on screen.

The rule of thumb in baseball is that if you take an MRI of a pitcher's shoulder, you'll find something wrong.

This is why they don't jump to surgery right away and generally just try to rehab if at all possible. It's got to get really bad before you even think of fixing it.

We're also really bad a fixing shoulders. The odds of you coming back at full strength are a lot lower than with most surgeries.

So yeah, none of this is really news. Everyone's shoulder is a little messed up, and its usually not worth trying to fix it.

It's worth noting that there are plenty of ways to run Linux virtual machines/containers under MacOS (Parallels, Fusion, QEMU/UTM, Ubuntu Multipass, Docker, Orbstack,...) which largely avoid the hardware support problems of trying to run Linux on bare, Apple Silicon, metal & let you run most of the major Linux distros (which have Arm64 versions) and container systems.

Plus, MacOS is Unix so it's a relatively easy port for Linux software: A large proportion of the major open source Unix/Linux projects can be installed using Macports or Homebrew - even if there aren't fully-Mac-ified ready built packages. (TFA does mention this as one of the reasons for not bothering with Linux on Mac)

Reality is that there's no justification for buying a new or recent Mac unless you want to run MacOS - or if you really, really want ARM and are frustrated by the lack of any ARM hardware to fill the gap between Rapberry Pi-a-likes and expensive industrial server stuff.

Asahi Linux is a very ambitious project to produce a "bare metal" Linux for Apple Silicon - but it will be a constant battle to keep reverse-engineering Apple's hardware changes with each generation of M-series processors. However, even if they're always 5 years behind Apple, that's still going to be good news: In a couple of years, Apple will probably start dropping support for M1 processors - if Asahi can get solid support for M1/M2 by then, all those cast-off M1/M2 Minis could make nice little better-than-a-Pi mini servers (even if they have to use HDMI displays...)

Others have pointed out the ethical reasons we don't do what you're asking.

The tests we currently do are "is this more effective than what we had before?"

It's literally the opposite of the scenario you're describing. We know that the starting point isn't perfect. We're taking some steps to improve it and then testing to ensure that it really is better than the previous one. And then we repeat.

We're starting with a flawed but usable cabinet, and making it a little bit better with each iteration.

He bought the site, drastically changed it, and most of the users left.

Who would you blame?

The old Twitter is dead. Almost everyone left. If you're still there, it's because you want to see what Elon posts, or your job requires it.

The big issue is social media as a whole is dying. No one uses Facebook anymore. Everyone left Twitter when Elon took over. There's nothing inherently wrong with Mastodon or Blue Sky. People are just tired of social media and don't want to start over.

It's just one last desperate try to revive the glory days of social media, hoping that people will be more fond of it if you bring back the branding they liked.

I don't expect Netflix pricing to stay the same.

But the main reason this is happening is there are too many streaming services for them all to be viable. This isn't a merger of equals. HBO Max isn't sustainable right now. Not enough people are willing to pay their asking price to keep it going.

You merge the services, cut your operating costs, and raise Netflix prices a little.

And maybe we see Netflix take advantage of Warner's distribution systems and get more Netflix content in theaters and on DVD/Bluray.