That’s just pointing out upgrades carry a large price, not that the base model is at a loss.

Which is a super common strategy in pre built, especially in systems that can’t in theory take third party upgrades. Commonly a mobile platform will charge a hundred dollar premium for like 20 dollars worth of UFS storage. At least at some points PC vendors have done DIMM SPD lockouts to force customers to first party so they can charge a significant multiple of market rate for their parts.

I doubt anything in Apple’s lineup is sold at a loss. They might tolerate slimmer margins on entry, but I just don’t think they go negative.

I wouldn’t be sure the mini is a loss leader…

I think that was overstated. Sure there were some “fun” projects for fun or publicity.

However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.

Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as “weird” as the cell processor.

OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.

Probably true, but there is a chance they might convert some console gamers…

But not enough to bet on it with a loss leader probably.

I get the sentiment, but the steam machine will have an x64 processor…

The VR headset won’t, but the PC will…

Frankly, the Xbox One and the PS4 marked those vendors transition to ‘tiny prebuilts’, by the standards one might call this a ‘tiny prebuilt’.

One could fairly argue that Switch is “just a gaming tablet/phone”

There was no mention of motive, just of the consequences. Microsoft going the Apple/Google path was/is an existential business threat to a company like Valve. Microsoft’s coming up short on MS Store mitigated the risk, but still you have a platform that is geared toward Microsoft subscription revenue.

Just because those business concerns factor in, doesn’t detract from the positive ways that it has gone so far.

Pretty spot on, it was so worth it to remember, that Valve actually seemed to remember.

Their first go at it was “make a viable platform and the developers/publishers will make the effort to come over, and hardware partners will step up with offerings because of Valve’s brand strength and fear of the Microsoft Store screwing everything up”. That didn’t work, and Microsoft Store also didn’t pan out as far as Valve and others feared, but they have been kind of screwing up the platform particularly for games as they chase other things that would be subscription revenue instead of transactional revenue.

Valve learned they needed to work harder to bring the platform to the Windows games, so heavy investment in Proton. They learned that they had to take the hardware platform in their own hands because the OEMs aren’t committed until they see proof it can work for them. They learned that the best way to package their improved efforts was with a “hook” with mass-market appeal, enter the Steam Deck, recognizing the popularity of the Switch form factor and bringing it to the PC market at a time no one else was bothering.

So now they have a non-Android, non-Windows ecosystem that covers handheld, console/desk, and VR with a compelling library of thousands and thousands of games…

This is more thinking about material cost rather than relative value. If you save money on the passthrough and incur a few costs above the Quest 3 but nothing dramatic, then I’m just saying the pricing needs to be in the ballpark of Quest 3. Better value by making smarter choices that may not have a cost impact (e.g. using a maintstream high end SoC instead of a niche SoC, putting the battery at the back instead of making it front heavy).

Of course they may be hampered by different business needs. Meta affording to risk more money than Valve can risk might drive higher price point, but it would be unfortunate.

The SoC may be better, but I don’t know that it would be more expensive. Meta went with a more niche SoC and Valve selected a more mainstream, newer SoC. Better specs, but also larger volumes so cost wise I think Valve should be fine. Comfort certainly seems like it should be better, but I don’t know that I see more cost as a factor versus just making better decisions.

The wireless dongle certainly can be a thing in it’s favor, just thinking that on balance there’s some things that should contribute to BOM price and some that should save on BOM price and it should, roughly, be in the ballpark of Quest 3 when all is said and done, not 2x the cost.

Well even with your observation, it could well be losing share to Mac and Linux. The Windows users are more likely to jump ship, and Mac and Linux users tend to stick with the platform more, mainly because it’s not actively working to piss them off. Even if zero jump to Mac or Linux, the share could still shift.

The upside of ‘just a machine to run a browser’ is that it’s easier than ever to live with Linux desktop, since that nagging application or two that keeps you on Windows has likely moved to browser hosted anyway. Downside of course being that it’s much more likely that app extracts a monthly fee from you instead of ‘just buying it’.

Currently for work I’m all Linux, precisely because work was forced to buy Office365 anyway, and the web versions work almost as well as the desktop versions for my purposes (I did have to boot Windows because I had to work on a Presentation and the weird ass “master slide” needed to be edited, and for whatever reason that is not allowed on the web). VSCode natively supports linux (well ‘native’, it’s a browser app disguised as a desktop app), but I would generally prefer Kate anyway (except work is now tracking our Github Copilot usage, and so I have to let Copilot throw suggestions at me to discard in VSCode or else get punished for failing to meet stupid objectives).

“Agentic” is the buzzword to distinguish “LLM will tell you how to do it” versus “LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right”.

Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM ‘how-to’ would still be tedious to walk through yourself.

Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn’t do what I want, I’m no where near the point where I’d trust “Agentic” approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can’t do anything that can’t trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the “jail” placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I’m not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.

My career is supporting business Linux users, and to be honest I can see why people might be reluctant to take on the Linux users.

“Hey, we implemented a standard partition scheme that allocates almost all our space to /usr and /var, your installer using ‘/opt’ doesn’t give us room to work with” versus “Hey, your software went into /usr/local, but clearly the Linux filesystem standard is for such software to go into /opt”. Good news is that Linux is flexible and sometimes you can point out “you can bind mount /opt to whatever you want” but then some of them will counter “that sounds like too much of a hack, change it the way we want”. Now this example by itself is mostly simple enough, make this facet configurable. But rinse and repeat for just an insane amount of possible choices. Another group at my company supports Linux, but just as a whole virtual machine provided by the company, the user doesn’t get to pick the distribution or even access bash on the thing, because they hate the concept of trying to support linux users.

Extra challenge, supporting an open source project with the Linux community. “I rewrote your database backend to force all reads to be aligned at 16k boundaries because I made a RAID of 4k disks and think 16k alignment would work really well with my storage setup, but ended up cramming up to 16k of garbage into some results and I’m going to complain about the data corruption and you won’t know about my modification until we screen share and you try to trace and see some seeks that don’t make sense”.

A $1k would break it in this market… The specs suggest a little lower end generally than Quest 3 hardware wise, or in the ballpark (comparable display and optics, lower quality cameras). The only notable improvement is including eye tracking, which is nice, but not $1k nice…

$500 should be a good target, some tradeoffs with Quest 3 (worse ‘AR’, better eye tracking and PC connectivity).

They did at least do: https://www.meta.com/experiences/sid-meiers-civilization-vii-vr/5781689118524197/?srsltid=AfmBOoqbqaOcZk-uwva84T4NpmPU5A6M8h1LPhsJc2EkCyD5ujrcFI_m

No idea if it is vaguely any good or not…

People’s laziness?

Well yes, that is a huge one. I know people who when faced with Google’s credible password suggestion say “hell no, I could never remember that”, then proceed to use a leet-speak thinking computers can’t guess those because of years of ‘use a special character to make your password secure’. People at work giving their password to someone else to take care of someething because everything else is a pain and the stakes are low to them. People being told their bank is using a new authentication provider and so they log dutifully into the cited ‘auth provider’, because this is the sort of thing that (generally not banks) do to people.

to an extent

Exactly, it mitigates, but still a gap. If they phish for your bank credential, you give them your real bank password. It’s unique, great, but the only thing the attacker wanted was the bank password anyway. If they phish a TOTP, then they have to make sure they use it within a minute, but it can be used.

actually destroys any additional security added by 2fa

From the user perspective that knows they are using machine generated passwords, yes, that setup is redundant. However from the service provider perspective, that has no way of enforcing good password hygiene, then at least gives the service provider control over generating the secret. Sure a ‘we pick the password for the user’ would get to the same end, but no one accepts that.

But this proves that if you are fanatical about MFA, then TOTP doesn’t guarantee it anyway, since the secret can be stuffed into a password manager. Passkey has an ecosystem more affirmatively trying to enforce those MFA principles, even if it is, ultimately, generally in the power of the user to overcome them if they were so empowered (you can restrict to certain vendor keys, but that’s not practical for most scenarios).

My perspective is that MFA is overblown and mostly fixes some specific weaknesses: -“Thing you know” largely sucks as a factor, if I human can know it, then a machine can guess it, and on the service provider there’s so much risk that such a factor can be guessed at a faster rate than you want, despite mitigations. Especially since you generally let a human select the factor in the first place. It helps mitigate the risk of a lost/stolen badge on a door by also requiring a paired code in terms of physical security, but that’s a context where the building operator can reasonably audit attempts at the secret, which is generally not the case for online services as well. So broadly speaking, the additional factor is just trying to mitigate the crappy nature of “thing you know” -“Thing you have” used to be easier to lose track of or get cloned. A magstripe badge gets run through a skimmer, and that gets replicated. A single-purpose security card gets lost and you don’t think about it because you don’t need it for anything else. The “thing you have” nowadays is likely to lock itself and require local unlocking, essentially being the ‘second factor’ enforced client side. Generally Passkey implementations require just that, locally managed ‘second factor’.

So broadly ‘2fa is important’ is mostly ‘passwords are bad’ and to the extent it is important, Passkeys are more likely to enforce it than other approaches anyway.

Password managers are a workaround, and broadly speaking the general system is still weak because password managers have relatively low adoption and plenty of people are walking around with poorly managed credentials. Also doesn’t do anything to mitigate a phishing attack, should the user get fooled they will leak a password they care about.

2FA is broad, but I’m wagering you specifically mean TOTP, numbers that change based on a shared secret. Problems there are: -Transcribing the code is a pain -Password managers mitigate that, but the most commonly ‘default’ password managers (e.g. built into the browser) do nothing for them -Still susceptible to phishing, albeit on a shorter time scale

Pub/priv key based tech is the right approach, but passkey does wrap it up with some obnoxious stuff.

Passkeys are a technology that were surpassed 10 years before their introduction

Question is by what? I could see an argument that it is an overcomplication of some ill-defined application of x509 certificates or ssh user keys, but roughly they all are comparable fundamental technologies.

The biggest gripe to me is that they are too fussy about when they are allowed and how they are stored rather than leaving it up to the user. You want to use a passkey to a site that you manually trusted? Tough, not allowed. You want to use against an IP address, even if that IP address has a valid certificate? Tough, not allowed.

For there to be any kind of real “civil war” there would need to be a very clear distinction between sides and goals alongside states declaring

That’s how the US Civil War happened, but frequently a national Civil War does not have such clear boundaries and sides. See Syria for a very messy conflict where about the only thing defining one ‘side’ was ‘not Assad’ and very little agreement other than that.

Civil war would be the worst possible outcome to be sure, but a messy situation can just as easily feed a civil war.

Again, they should have called the police with juriscidtion if that were the case. They should have, at most, detained him on scene until cops show up.

So far I’ve seen:

• They pulled into a car and then violently arrested the driver because “she rammed their vehicle” despite footage clearly showing they drove into hers. They didn’t want to get in trouble for causing an accident so they just made stuff up.
• Even in the sandwich “attack” they asserted that the sandwich contents covered their vest, but footage showed it stayed in the wrapper the whole time.

They clearly are cultivating a culture of make stuff up to blame the people they get mad at. They have zero credibility.