Why does it have to have one job? Your TV also had one job, play broadcasted content. Did you expect to buy a difference device to play media from a cassette? Phones had one job, make calls. Did you refuse a smartphone for the same reason?

The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.

That depends, do you often find yourself drinking in the toilet? On the flip side I do find many people who take their smart phones or tablets into the kitchen, take notes, write shopping lists, read recipes while cooking. If only there were a convenient place we could simply put a screen...

Bonus point is it's not a hygiene nightmare (yes you absolutely shouldn't put a margarita mixer on a toilet, for health reasons, not because I disagree with your desire to have a convenient cocktail while doing a poop).

Because isolated networks are largely a thing of the past? You talk about the home console as if the general consumer wouldn't prefer to use their phone. The thing is as soon as something then is on the phone you expect it to work away from you home network (assuming you're not one of those people who actually don't even bother jumping on the wifi in their house and just use 5G even when at home like many many people do).

Help me by proof reading the marketing for your product:

"Our product is just like the competitors, except more limited and less versatile, and unable to traverse outside of the home wifi."

Does this sound facetious? If it does I suggest you find some products that are local network only and read their reviews. You'll very frequently see your killer feature listed as a "Con" rather an a "Pro" in the eyes of most people.

Cool. You've just described literally ever piece of consumer electronics on the market currently. What do you propose the consumer do? I guess I shouldn't expect my car to work? My TV? Games console? My home security camera? Lightbulbs?

I should expect none of this to work for me?

What a truly absurd comment. No we should very much expect them to work the way we expect them to, and then rally together to hold vendors accountable when they don't.

Your view is defeatist and doesn't help anyone.

Users usually don't, developers do. If a user wants to play a game what choice do they have other than be at the whim of NVIDIA's horrendous quality control for drivers, and a developer's mandate that their product ships with tool that runs a kernel level driver all in the name of making sure you're not a cheater?

Yeah Mac doesn't have that problem because developers don't offer that software for that platform.

There's a big difference between pushing a PC hard doing general stuff, and pushing a PC hard gaming. The latter is a true clusterfuck of cludges and workarounds, often with kernel level dumbfuckery in the name of beating cheaters and pirates all while using shoddy rushed out drivers that are poorly tested for one of the most complex subsystems in the OS (graphics).

It's orders of magnitude easier to crash a system with a game than it is with literally any other workload. That's not to say that Windows is reliable. It's objectively not, but the OP does have a big point. I can say with confidence that 100% of the crashes I've had on my PC have been due to gaming and the occasional really poorly written AI load (still GPU driver related).

How would you know? You didn't ask the GP what their needs are from an interface. You're taking a very typical software engineer approach of jumping to an answer while forgetting to ask the question. I have no doubt you find several Linux DEs superior to windows, but that's you in your application. You can't tell someone else something is superior for them without asking them what they expect from a UI.

I notice your UID is pretty low, so you're probably from the old guard of IT. Which is fitting, because Linux (while today offers a wide variety of UIs) was very much the greatest example of this problem in the 90s and early 00s where UIs were very much defined by the needs and wants of power users who declared them superior to all alternatives, and that is precisely one of the greatest setbacks Linux suffered.

I take it you learned everything you learned about AI from the media in the past 2 years? Facial recognition is very much AI. In fact it was one of the early widely used examples of a trained model for the purpose of similarity matching. The entire foundation of facial recognition is AI, always has been, even if you think AI is generating stupid pictures and complaining to ChatGPT that it can't do math.

The point being that we shouldn't give people the option. It should be mandatory, and when they find their unchipped pets at an animal shelter they should be fined, or required to pay to pick them up at least.

That sounds so difficult compared to simply chipping your pet like an actual responsible and caring human being.

What do you mean "or". Are you suggesting there are backwards countries that don't make it mandatory to chip your pets?

This is just an example of overcoming Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Slashdot isn't sure if you saw or didn't see the previous article so it posts dupes.

Define the "need". A screen is just a screen. It enables functionality that isn't possible without a screen. The question you need to ask is if you value that functionality or not. Dismissing it because of the device type is sort of the definition of being a luddite.

Just telling people to not buy something with a screen is not only not going to influence them, it's going to make them dismiss you as just another old man yelling at clouds.

Also you're entire point is treating the symptom not the disease. Do you gleefully accept ads for devices which do need screens? If so what is wrong with you. If not, why aren't you rallying against ads instead of against screens?

It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

Errr no, they very much do make technology. Quite a bit of it actually. Lots of what is marketed under Dolby Vision and Dolby Audio was developed by themselves and they spend a quarter of a billion dollar every year on R&D. Heck even the noise cancelling ability in video conferencing software along with music detection was largely developed by Dolby.

Just because you don't see their products on the shelves at Best Buy doesn't mean they don't make those either. They produce reference monitors for colour grading Dolby Vision content, they have an entire line of cinema audio speakers, and they make the rest of the cinema audio stack as well as a first party product, including multichannel amplifiers and audio pre-processors for Atmos content - a codec they also developed from the ground up.

The fact they sit on a bunch of related patents is just the nature of any R&D development.