The purpose of a factory is not to provide jobs.
It's intended to made widgets that can then be sold at a profit.
It's not a social welfare program.
Those three statements are policy choices, not objective facts. Capitalists like to present them as inevitable, but of course they are not; they are only presented as such because it's in capitalists' interest for people to see them that way.
Adjusted for inflation, the 2TB model is a bit cheaper than a Panasonic 3DO or a Neo Geo was at launch.
Additional context: at the time of their release, both the Neo Geo and the 3DO were considered to be unaffordable, except by the very rich.
the complete lack of any Anti-Trust regulation preventing anyone from making RAM and storage except the existing players
I don't think it's monopoly issues holding anyone back, so much as the fact that setting up a viable fab for RAM or storage takes billions of dollars and a number of years, and everyone is expecting the AI bubble to burst before then anyway.
e.g. why invest $$$ to build a new manufacturing facility, when by the time it comes online be competing with auctioned-off near-new equipment from all the belly-up data centers that didn't make it?
The real problem with C is that it doesn't have any built-in support for strings. Everyone is forced to fake it with char-arrays, which aren't quite the same thing and require very careful handling. The problem with that is, everyone has their off days, and so everyone who does string-handling in C eventually ends up shipping string-related bugs that introduce security problems.
The solution doesn't involve guillotining trillionaires who make computers and charge what the market will bear, it involves guillotining trillionaires who own AI companies.
Rather than guillotining anyone, the solution ought to be regulating the growth-rate of data centers so that they don't eat the economy. There's no reason to allow them to grow "as fast as possible" when it's not even clear how useful they'll be long-term. Unregulated capitalism leads to violent boom/bust cycles which cause economic pain.
Every computer manufacturer would love to have margins like Apples', and would raise their prices in a heartbeat to get them, if they could. You can call that corporate greed if you want, but it's also standard capitalism.
The more pertinent question to ask is: why is Apple able to command a premium, without losing sales, while other computer manufacturers cannot do the same?
The standard Slashdot answer will be "because Mac purchasers are idiots", but I don't think that is the reason. I think it's because Apple is able to sufficiently differentiate its products from those of its competition, such that customers don't make their purchasing decisions based on a dollars-per-megabyte analysis. If Macs were sold with Windows and featured a consumer-gaming video card (like most every other PC in the world), it would be different, but Apple is the only (legal) source for a MacOS-running computer, and its one of the few providers of a unified-memory architecture for local AI execution. Until it gets some direct competitors, that gives it the ability to name its price.
That parts gonna happen anyway.
and quite another to spend more money on it.
And that's the core of the issue.
If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.
If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.
As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.
A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.
I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.
When it's codified into the highest law of the land and doesn't work, and suggestions to do so voluntarily can't work to the point of being laughable, what options do we have left?
There's always Nancy Reagan's catchphrase: Just Say No.
Any particular game is expendable. You won't miss out on anything. Games don't even have the network effects and lockin that you get with other types of software; it's a part of the economy where Just Saying No is easiest of all.
Don't like the quality? Don't spend your money. They have no power over us except what we give them. Stop being so selflessly altruistic when it comes to actively supporting your own abuse.
It's so damn easy, and there's already hundreds of years worth of hassle-free game-playing available to spend the few remaining seconds of your life on.
An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
