I don't know how you'd know how you'd even measure "almost every person", but I would think a modular approach would be a good one, and addons fit that bill. It also solves the problem of giving the user choice in what they add. (I'm not sure I'd trust an ad-blocker built by somebody who's largely financed by a company who makes money advertising, for example)

I guess for me personally, I find perfection in software not "When you can't add anything more", but rather "When you can't take anything else away".

https://xkcd.com/2228/

to a certain extent I would look away and continue to pay the ever increasing prices, if they could somehow continue to keep deep AI integration as entirely optional within their products.

You're probably missing the point. Think of the advertising potential.

I've had prime for a while, and recently tried Luna with my nieces and nephews, since its included. My opinion of the platform isn't great.

For context we have a pretty reasonable internet connection (it's not glass, but we don't have issues with Console and PC gaming), and I did so on Amazon hardware, a Firestick and Luna controller. We tried Hogwarts, a Fallout game and a goat simulator game. Very little of it was what I would call reasonably playable. It left me questions about things like were we perhaps accessing it during peak times? Could neighbour's usage (e.g. streaming) be affecting our experience? is there a higher level tier you can pay for? (and we were getting an F2P experience)

I've no interest in the concept, I'd rather play games on my own hardware. But I've been looking at streaming games with a sort of curiosity because I've heard people say it's getting better. I think it's got a ways to go, and I sort of hope it turns into one of those things that never really catches on.

The problem isn't the physical disc, despite me personally liking physical copies of things I own, a physical disc itself doesn't guarantee anything. Many businesses, including Microsoft have proven this over the years with things like product activation and other DRM.

The bigger issue with Sony is their willingness to pull licenses on things the user already owns, or placing other arbitrary constraints on things (like needing to sign or check in frequently enough, or risk account deletion).

And Sony isn't even the worst actor here, has anybody been paying attention to Nintendo in recent years?

Anyway, I like the sentiment, and the thought "you code is yours". This is obviously true, but I don't see the physical media shift really being the problem here, especially when even if they did, the machine itself can be made to refuse to play it.

I can appreciate the whole gimmick, but it sounds like you're buying something modern and intentionally crippling it.

If we had a resurgence of early 2000s phones, like the Motorola Razr, borrowing only from todays tech like a modern USB-C charge port, a better camera, hopefully multi-day battery life and a modern cellular connectivity, I'd buy one. No android, no iOS, no apps, just a solid looking, feeling and functioning phone.

the hardest pill to swallow is, even if the phone I'm describing did exist, there probably isn't a place for it in this world. I probably only have 3 contacts that actually call my phone number any more, and two of them are parents.

There is probably a demographic of people like me, old enough to resent the direction of some tech, and still young enough to talk to their parents on the phone...

Hopefully it becomes a thing I never, ever have to deal with.
I happily have siri disabled on all my apple disabled to the extent that it can be.

eventually... theme park?

It's probably the comments with em dashes

Maybe you're right, I don't know. But one of the most frustrating things to hear, when coming from a position of morality, is "it was legal". There are plenty of things that are legal, but morally awful.

Morals are basically the best reason to be mad.

I rather like the idea of a straight forward transaction. I pay for what I want, and I get it. No strings, not agendas, no gatchas. Not even a subscription.

I think its precisely 35 years of browsers, and eventually paying in ways that aren't cash, is why this is such an appealing proposition.

It's funny, common tech. (phones, computers, laptops, wearables) has kind of hit a pinnacle for me.

The Neo is everything I wanted my ideated s10 to be like 15 years ago, or whenever that was.
Modern cell phones are marvels. Great battery life, fantastic cameras, dare I say, the internet in your pocket, basically anywhere...
I've got a super-computer in my home office, especially by the standards that got me into software, and back in the late 90s my computer was fast enough for me then.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only sane person, which is a good indicator I'm the crazy one I suppose.

For me a foldable phone was the Motorola razor, the one with physical buttons. And in my opinion it was a great phone.

Every now and again something comes along that I really wish would be a shorter lived trend, but it never goes away. Foldable screens are up there with "the notch (in the Mac world)" and "The Ribbon UI ( in windows)". I have this feeling it's not going away...

I guess it's better than another timeline where it instead came for people, hardwired them into the game, and harnessed them for electricity.

A snowbird is a Canadian, usually senior or retired person that migrates to Florida or some other warm place in the US during the cold months of the year. I think they say "snowbird" because many birds seasonally migrate to and from Canada, much in the same way.