My ex said length was more important than thickness...

On the serious side, at somepoint making things thinner just makes them weaker, with not real benefit to the user.

My biggest complaint about the Neo is it doesn't have a Thunderbolt port. The Mac Airbook I bought my daughter did, and it was on sale for about the same price as a Neo just before Christmas. My favorite Mac feature is the fingerprint reader for quick login.

If Democrats gain control of both the House and Senate, doesn't that give them a huge mandate to repeal the big beautiful boondoggle?

Microsoft still owns billions of dollars worth of prime Redmond real estate. I suspect in a few years they will go the Tektronix route, and only manage to post a profit every year by selling off and/or leasing out that real estate. I was just working for XBox, it's full of old-timers eyeing the exit. I'd cash out the stock options while they can still get good money for them if I were them.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

LOL, bro. Since Reagan sacrificed Oliver North, I have not seen an example of the top taking responsibility for ANYTHING. Oliver North was the blindfold being lifted from my eyes about being on top and responsibility.

Be happy they are doing anything at all. They just don't care. There will be no penalties, no admonishments, no head rolling. If there is any action to be taken, it will happen when it happens. The people who are affected just do not matter at all, so nobody cares about this breach despite being the third major breach in my lifetime concerning my service.

Ummm, there is a much more fundamental problem than the trust of allies: There's no regaining the trust of America's citizens. The government has left its own citizens behind!

Mind share. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to gather mind share... unless you are "lucky" and find/create a group that is interesting by default.

I guess that depends on your perspective. If you are in the business of collecting money, times have probably never been better in the entire history of the world. If you are a country that expects to stay solvent, then this is one of the worst times in the history of the world.

Essentially, what they are saying is true... from their perspective.

Dude, I can absolutely promise you that prices are as low as they will ever be for the rest of your life. Enjoy. :)

Yeah, because Apple is famous for their heat management! I once had to develop a Mac printer driver for our product on a Mac that kept overheating and shutting itself off... that was the Mac where everything was built into the monitor, with no fans, 'cause who needs fans, right?

They probably need another trillion dollars and this time they'll do it right!

No accountability, no consequences for failure.