I wasn't a consumer of those devices, nor do I expect to become a consumer of those devices.

That said, I do take some umbrage at the increases in costs for devices I DO care about, but Amazon isn't the producer of any of those.

I don't find the rpi 5 and equivalents to be particularly attractive at current price points. I have a few around that do things like my media server, pihole, Homeassistant, etc and that's pretty much it. For only a little bit more, you can get a decently configured AMD Ryzen sff box and call it a day.

Not ultra-portable, but more useful for things that I need to get done.

Personally, Walmart finally caved for two reasons:

1) They were starting to lose customers who want to use contactless payments, especially now with new and renewed credit cards or debits cards with the Visa or Mastercard labeling now all offering the ability to pay by "tapping" on a terminal. Walmart's recent earnings report supports this view.

2) Walmart was watching with interest how other contactless payment holdouts like WinCo Foods (western USA supermarket chain), H-E-B Grocery Company (mostly Texas supermarket chain) and Home Depot (national hardware superstore chain) started to implement contactless payments in the last 18 months. Since it appears the switchover had little effect on the bottom line, that's why Walmart was finally convinced to upgrade their payment terminals to include contactless payment support.

Go fuck yourselves.

Entry for players, that is. If they can get a console into some shmoe's hands at a lower price point and then continue to gouge that mark on game subscription prices over time, that's what they're after.

Nothing to see here. Business as usual.

We took our family to Orlando to both Disneyworld and Universal Studios. It was extremely crowded, very expensive, and if you wanted to get in more than a couple of major attraction rides, you pretty much HAD to purchase the "jump the line" pass for another few hundred bucks per ticket holder. We took our elementary school aged kids and it was $4-5k for a few days for park tickets and food (not including travel and hotel expenses). Everything was egregiously expensive and the waiting around, even with the "cut the line" passes, were still fairly long.

I can't imagine how most people out there can afford the expense once you layer in the travel costs. I can only assume that many people are borrowing money to make it work. When we got home the kids said they had fun, but they didn't want to return. Whew....

Screen sharing is turned off by default. At least it is on the M5 Macbook air that I just bought my wife (she's a Mac addict....don't ask...hehe). I just checked.

That's complete bullshit. I have been using it as my daily driver for years as have a number of people I know who aren't particularly technical. Unless your jam is just computer gaming or you have an application that you MUST use that only runs on Windows, Linux will do pretty much anything Windows can without the licensing merry-go-round.

Or just ask for the hardware to be delivered without ANY operating system and spend the 5 minutes to pop in a USB thumb drive and install whatever you'd like.

Or buy a Mac.

Or build your own system from scratch.

Or.....

There's plenty of choices out there.

I agree. The person had better get explicit permission from everyone present and be prepared to remove the wearable or prepare for the consequences.

and then the noise blows over and they'll allow the free-for-all to continue again. Nothing good is going to come from having pervasive surveillance of people just going about their daily lives in their car. They've taken an inch, then a foot....the mile isn't far off. Y'all metric using folks can convert to your favourite units.

Jetson Orin is roughly 4 year old tech that's EOL now. I'm not sure how newsworthy this is. It's a graphics chip for mobile applications, not really an AI chip.

Nothing to see here....

This is at least the 2nd time they've done a retreat in China.

There has never been a level playing field there for foreign companies.

I guess I'm atypical then. I tend to get a "flagship" phone when I need one and then I keep it until support dries up. Rinse. Repeat.

I've owned both iphones and pixel phones. Usually I find the prices to be comparable. What is NOT comparable is after sales support. If you buy a brand spanking new device soon after it comes out, you'll likely get a few more years of software support with the Apple device. For the Pixel, you can probably pave over the OS and run Lineage OS on it after Google support expires, but it's on you to do all the work to get it there and if you brick it you're on your own.