I, too, find it rather strange to build such a thing as a laptop rather than into a larger housing, given how extremely dependent the "large AI model" use-case is on being able to run at full power for extended periods of time.

You seem to be very confused about the meanings of "offline" and "single-player", which are not quite the same.

That is certainly not a viable option for me.

That is not the reality I have experienced so far: I got "codes" for 3 different game downloads in the past (gifted from well-meaning friends), none of the 3 (single-player-)titles even start without contacting remote servers upon every single invocation.

Should this happen to be different for GTA 6 - good - but I will need to see this work in the real world before I believe such to be true.

Makes much more sense than the original article now. I mean why would Rockstar sign an "exclusive" deal with the pitiful rest of what once was a console business? And Microslop certainly would not want to pay the enormous amounts of money such a deal would require from them to convince Rockstar, given that they cut costs everywhere around their ex-console-business.

It would have been more believable if a company like NVidia hat signed such a deal to promote their "streaming" service.

That tweet you refer to is three months old, and very outdated, as Rockstar has meanwhile stated they will not sell Xbox or PS5 discs. And that means Xbox will not even start GTA VI offline, even if the single-player game as such could possibly run offline, because there is no disc to "authenticate your ownership" to the Xbox, so it will attempt to reach some remote server to look at your "account".

I bought GTA V ages ago when it was new, and played through its single-player mission, which I really liked. I never spent a thought on playing "GTA V online", and am not interested in any "online-only" games. "GTA VI" would have been an obvious buy for me, had they not decided to go "online only", which immediately reduced my interest in this game to zero.

Funny for me to think that some people may even be willing to pay-per-use for this games, aka "streaming games". Also funny how clear of an indication this is, once more, that Microslop abandoned the console market... otherwise they would not try to market a pay-per-use game stream under the "Xbox" brand name.

BTW: Not Rockstar related, but yet another gaming story telling me that avoiding "online gaming" like the plague was the right decision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ("Ark Survival" players getting cheated on by the vendor.)

What?!? In my experience, the "western" models are way more censored than the ones from China out of the box, and of course any sane person would want to use abliterated versions of either, anyway.
I have experienced Claude Opus refusing to debug my own source code "because security!", I have experienced Ideogram 4 refusing to render Pizza because of "alignment filters", all while even the non-abliterated versions of Qwen or DeepSeek did no such thing.
I had no problems discussing what happened at Tianamen Square with all "offline" versions of chinese models.

This is the first time I saw "Stratego" mentioned for 40 years or so... never knew this game received attention among those aged above 12 or so. I can vaguely remember playing it a few times in childhood... are there specific countries where this is popular among adults?

The numbers are pretty clear: Xbox is relatively irrelevant to Microslop's bottom line, both in terms of revenue and in terms of profit. And that is reason enough for a corporation to abandon "that thing that dilutes our profit margins".

... or what one would say knowing that there are no bidders offering any substantial amount of money for that dead brand name, anyway.

... and that they are just clearing out their remaining stock at excessive prices for the die-hard fan-boys :-)

... to arrest those writing mean comments on the Internet, which appears to be the priority of the UK police.

You don't need to go all-ancient with "paper and pencil" solutions, which have privacy issues of their own (not being easily encrypted etc.), just do not use "cloud services", but keep and process your data exclusively on local hardware you own and control.

I think we can honestly admit that Trump is superior to Hegseth. Possibly that would have been difficult to believe a year ago, but that is Hegseth's main achievement in office.