Asus ZenFone 8

And they will purchase their next phone sooner if the battery on their old phones die early.

Check which codecs your phone supports and buy a Bluetooth dongle that supports an HD audio codec. LDAC and APT-X HD are almost indistinguishable from an aux cable.

But yes, even those codecs max out at a pathetic 900kbs, and only have a few feet of range at that quality/speed.

It basically only protects against hardware failure. It’s not going to protect you from ransomware or even just accidentally clicking delete.

Capcom just started adding game breaking DRM to their archive of old single player Steam games because an exec got butthurt over a nude mod for Street Fighter. Now Steam Deck support is broken and my mods don’t work with games I purchased years ago. The pirated version is now better once again.

At almost the exact same time, Valve sent a DMCA notice to Portal64 because for some reason they care about people playing a homebrew port of a $2 15 year old game on 30 year old hardware.

I used to think Capcom and Valve were two of the last good ones. Turns out there aren’t any good ones…

They spent $350 million making Secret Invasion, which was a bad show in every way. They have no control over their costs, yet they squeeze everyone as hard as they can.

You can get USB micro to USB-C adaptors for about 1 to $2 each. That lets you use a single cable to charge both types of devices, which is the best of both worlds.

4G, 5G and now 6G are worthless if cell providers don’t provide enough bandwidth to the towers. The range also keeps decreasing as the generations increase, so now there are these big gaps that 3G used to cover.

In my area, 5G is slower than 4G and both have lower signal and slower speeds than 3G used to have. I need a dual SIM phone and to constantly switch my phone between AT&T and T-Mobile, and both are crap. I only use about 1GB in total too, and I’m lucky if I can pull more than 1 megabit on either service. I miss 3G speeds, coverage, and competition.

Worst of all, AT&T is forcing home users to switch to a 5G hotspot from DSL. It’s probably a big part of why the cell towers are always overloaded too. Imagine running your home internet on 1 megabit with constant drops…

A solution to this would be an extra expansion battery that you could buy or rent as an add-on only when needed.

The ocean?

Blizzard had pretty much only made amazing games before Activision bought them. Activision also made a lot of good games back then. People couldn’t see how the merger would fick it up back then, yet it still did.

I expect Bethesda to get infected with the worst that Activion-Blizzard has to offer more so than the opposite.

The house passed a ton of great bills in 2021-2022. There weren’t enough votes in the senate for any to become law though. We can blame the two openly corrupt Democrats for that, or we can blame the 50 corrupt Republicans.

Also the inflation reduction act did pass, and from the article:

“The program is more or less a direct result of funding provided by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, through which $15 million was earmarked for the purpose of exploring and implementing a simple, free, government-provided tax filing service.”

Blizzard would never have done that if Activision hadn’t been allowed to buy them. The new conglomerate will be worse than we anticipate in the same way Activion-Blizzard was.

There is no way that Gamepass is going to remain a good value once it’s past trying to get new members in the introduction phase. I would give it at most 2 years before the enshitification really takes hold. It could be merely months since they are trying to look good to regulators right now.

T-Mobile bought Mint. Verizon bought Tracphone, which owns Straight Talk. There aren’t many independent MVNOs left. And the ones that are are being deprioritized to the point where the service basically doesn’t work when the tower is busy.

T-Mobile shit down their 3g network in 2022. It sucks too because the speeds and coverage from 3g are much better than LTE or 5g.

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network-evolution

Yeah, they are built into Gboard and work even animated over MMS.

Apple is not going to change this unless legally forced to because it is quite possibly the biggest driver of iPhone sales.

A whopping 87% of American teens use an iPhone, and the green text from Android SMS is the biggest reason. At that age people will do almost anything to fit in and get a date, and the green text was chosen specifically to elicit an “eww” response. Most of those teens will likely will continue to use iPhones as adults because it’s what they know.

Microsoft’s CEO is from India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

If they launch a subscription that includes ad-free Win12, Office, OneDrive and GamePass for like $20 a month, a lot of people would actually be happy about the change. Especially if the base version of Win12 was free with ads.

Then once people are happy with how good the deal is, they start raising the price and removing things that were once included.