As a professional myself, I can say with 100% experience (currently using a 8GB mac pro) that 8GB is NOT enough and I get memory warnings about once every week that causes me to have to shut down a bunch of programs and slow open them back up as needed. But at the same time, I also think given that the 8gb mac pros are only using standard M(x) silicon I think the better answer would be to just not sell standard silicon as “pro” machines.

And if you look at the pricing between an air and a pro (15" vs 14", both 512 mem, both M3 8/10/8 silicon) the price difference is only $100. The machines are very close in capability; so really the 14" mac pro is little more than a rebranded air. This difference was harder to tell pre Apple silicon as it was easier to have different CPU/GPU/etc between the air and pro to give more of an actual difference. Of course if they did do that then the “base” level price for a “pro” would be $1,999 and not look near as nice as the current $1,599.

Ultimately with the advent of apple silicon apple really should just have a single macbook line and let the silicon be the actual air/pro/etc dividing factor. But I’m sure people would have plenty to complain about if they did that and apple themselves put themselves in this position by starting the whole “pro” vs “pleb” marketing in the first place.

The real crime that apple should be held for is the base level of storage their devices have across all of their devices (Phones, computers, iPads).

As far as I can tell there is no mail essentials plan that costs $9.55 (talking USD/EUR/CHF which is all I can see). The absolute worst case scenario is $7.99/month per month (Business being $12.99). Furthermore, considering you are on the essentials plan it would seem like you’d save way more money using the individual plan (or family plan unless you have a large number of employees/users?). I suppose it’s possible you are on some grandfathered plan that is more expensive because you have more custom domains (I seem to maybe remember that being possible back in the day?). But then I think that also would have applied to the individual plan, so again I’m not quite sure why you are on a business plan when all of your comments seem to imply you’re an individual?

And honestly the crux of the issue is you made poor-faith arguments from the very start. You called them a money grubbing company and tried to pass yourself off as a regular user who’s paying all this money and then having to get charged more. When in fact, for 99% of users your situation isn’t applicable at all; and in fact you are on a weird, old, business plan (to which you’d probably save money switching to a new business regular plan [for $12.99 - $9.99] which supports up to 10 custom email domains + all premium proton services).

And looking into proton pass, it seems like the majority of the cost is because of the email alias service that comes with it. Bitwarden doesn’t in fact provide that (though they do support integration of it) and a quick look at other providers that only provide custom emails it shows similar monthly fees (still less than proton pass to be fair).

So to me, it seems like a bit of unwarranted slander and lies (though I suppose, again, you could be on an old grandfathered plan; but it still doesn’t explain how the “next step up” is $15) because of some beef you have against them.

Looking at their website I still can’t figure out what plan you are on while still needing to pay for proton pass. The only plan I see that matches your $120/year (USD, I’m from the US) comment and matches your “more than 3 custom email domains” is the proton business tier which is $13-10/month depending on the number of months you purchase in advance. And in all cases you once again get access to all other proton apps and their premium services for free. Sounds like maybe you’re on some legacy plan and would benefit (probably save money?) by going onto one of their new pricing structures? Not sure because I got upgraded to an unlimited plan for free back in the day (since i started when they only offered email) and so I’m still grandfathered in to a better price than is currently possible that includes everything.

It’s unfortunate their android app seems to be 2nd class to their iOS offerings; sadly that’s fairly commonplace, especially with small teams on tight budgets. I imagine that’s also why their proton pass pricing is so expensive.

But once again, I don’t see a need to slander and lie about a company that by all accounts is trying to actually do something about the privacy nightmare that the internet has become.

Can’t say I share your sentiment. I’ve been quite happy with their rate of progress over the years and the applications they offer. I’ve been using them since they only offered mail and haven’t ever had any issues. I’d rather them take their time to do things right then try to release new things at a frantic pass. While they might not have all the bells and whistles, for the average user I think they provide more than enough value.

Also, your pricing is just completely wrong and off base. Pass by itself is $5/month ONLY if you pay per month. If you pay for 1 year worth it’s $4 a month and $3 month if you pay for 2 years. And that’s only if you for some reason only want to pay for proton pass.

Likewise, if you’re paying $120 year for protonmail then you’re most likely on the proton unlimited bundle for $10 per month paying for 1 years worth at a time. In that case you already have access to proton pass (and in fact all of their proton apps and premium features), so I’m not sure why you think you need to pay again for proton pass.

While I agree the proton pass pricing (even at 2 years) is high compared to similar companies, getting the proton unlimited subscription OTOH is (IMO) great value for money: the mail, password, & vpn are all great. The drive seems pretty good and useful but isn’t something I normally use anyways, and the calendar is the weakest of their offerings (and also something I normally don’t use anyways).

edit: I should also note, you don’t have to pay for any of their services. You could get by just using the free versions of everything if you didn’t need the extra bells and whistles offered for paying customers.

There’s a certain (understandable) mindset that if the service you are using has some form of “gate” to it that prevents the information from being easily scrapped on the web that there are certain privacy expectations. Discord for instance requires you to make an account, find a server, and then either join or be invited to the server. So there is an expectation that what you post (even within private messages) to only be for the people that have “access”.

But the reality is (and has been proven many times now) that so long as a company has access to your data and can read/understand the data, they will sell that data to whoever wants to pay them for it (most often advertisers). This is true across websites, apps, and even operating systems.

Privacy is hard, and there aren’t a lot of apps/sites/OSes that truly support it. Thankfully though, as people have started to take it more seriously more companies have started providing options to support the demand (my personal favorites are Signal and Proton).

I honestly can’t tell if that’s a passive-aggressive swipe at me or not; but just in case it was: stats mean very little w/o context. I believe the quote was “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”. I simply pointed out a few errors with the foundation of these “statistics”. I didn’t need to quote my own statistics because, as I was pointing out, this is a completely apples to oranges comparison. The AV companies want at the same time to preach about how many miles they go w/o accident while comparing themselves to an average they know doesn’t match their own circumstances. Basically they are taking their best case scenario and comparing it against average/worst case scenario stats.

I’d give more weight to the stats if they where completely transparent, worked with a neutral 3rd party, and gave them access to all their video/data/etc to generate (at the very least) proper stats relative to their environment. Sure, I’ll way easier believe waymo/cruises’ numbers over those by tesla; but I still take it with a grain of salt. Because again, they have a HUGE incentive to tweak their numbers to put themselves in the very best light.

Sure mile for mile they are less likely. But when they happen they are generally more serious as higher speeds are involved, and if Tesla has shown anything it’s a much more complicated process for autonomous vehicles to navigate and deal with edge cases (like vehicles on the side of the road, emergency or otherwise). Much harder (and dangerous) to just slam on the brakes and put on your hazards on a highway than a side street if the car gets confused.

This is just such a bad take, and it’s so disappointing to see it parroted all over the web. So many things are just completely inaccurate about these “statistics”, and it’s probably why it “seems” so many are against autonomous vehicles.

1. These are self-reported statistics coming from the very company(s) that have extremely vested interests in making themselves look good.
2. These statistics are for vehicles that are currently being used in an extremely small (and geo-fenced) location(s) picked for their ability to be the easiest to navigate while being able to say “hey we totally work in a big city with lots of people”.

• These cars don’t even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.
• These cars drive so defensively they literally shut down so as to avoid causing any accidents (hey, who cares if we block traffic and cause jams because we get to juice our numbers).

3. They always use total human driven miles which are a complete oranges to apples comparison: Their miles aren’t being driven

• In bad weather
• On dangerous, windy, old, unpaved, or otherwise poor road conditions
• In rural areas where there are deer/etc that wander into the road and cause accidents

4. They also don’t adjust or take any median numbers as I’m not interested in them driving better than the “average” driver when that includes DUIs, crashes caused by neglect or improper maintenance, reckless drivers, elderly drivers, or the fast and furious types crashing their vehicle on some hill climb driving course.
5. And that’s all just off the top of my head.

So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”. And that’s just the statistics, to say nothing about the legality that will come up. Especially given just how adverse companies seem to be to admit fault for anything.

We get it, you’re a huge xbox fan and you’re disappointed it doesn’t have a release date. But let’s be clear here: this is 100% on Microsoft. Larian has made it clear they aren’t happy with the level of quality of the game on the S (believe specifically for split-screen) and they are holding out on a release date until solutions can be found. That is 100% their right, and you better believe if they released with a shitty performing S version there would be tons of articles, tweets, threads, etc moaning and calling them out on it (instead of the universal praise it is currently receiving). If Microsoft really wants the game on their console sooner they have options: They can help Larian get the S version running properly by providing developers/knowledge/tools/etc, or they could allow for games to have exceptions for certain game features on X vs S.

If anything, Larian have gone above and beyond what most other larger AAA companies put out: Cross-play, cross-save, DRM free, and a huge open-world full of enough options and branching paths to put basically every other RPG to shame. It’s clear they want to deliver a great game that has everything possible they can put in it to please their customers. And part of that is not putting out a crappy version of the game. If you don’t like it, maybe take it up with Microsoft; or wait patiently and see if they can’t optimize and get things figured out once they game releases on the other platforms and they can spend more time focusing on the xbox platform.

From what I remember when I lived in Japan vegetables weren’t a problem as much as fruit was. They were either seasonal, expensive, or both. Also the fattier, red meats could be difficult to find (things like pure ground beef was uncommon and was commonly found as a beef/pork hybrid).

And yes, I would imagine public transportation (or just having to walk/ride a bike) is a huge boon to overall health levels.

I’d imagine it’s easier being the bad guy to a bunch of american browser companies rather then to all your local ISPs.

Thanks, that’s interesting to read about. While I’m not a web developer, there would seem to be two very large differences between them.

1. The Apple tokens were designed for a single purpose, reducing (or eliminating) CAPCHAs, with mobile devices especially in mind. It also is not a replacement, but rather an enhancement of an existing web standard.

2. It’s Apple, a company that makes their money by selling you things you actually want. Rather than Google, a company that gives you (or other companies) things (for free or discounted) so they can make money off of you.

It is especially obvious when Google has the literal first bullet-point in their “why we are developing this” as…

This trust is the backbone of the open internet, critical for the safety of user data and for the sustainability of the website’s business.

Followed by

These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots.

So yeah, Google can kindly go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.

Any chance you have a link or source for this? I usually keep up on tech news but don’t remember anything of this nature.

I think you are vastly minimizing the “plug and play” aspect of consoles and that the common person has a machine that can run games with a “minimal setup”. While PC gaming has plenty of benefits: I think you’re downplaying how much time, money, and energy you have to waste to PC game.

Steps to play on a console: 1) Turn on the system, 2a) Maybe if you’re unlucky and a new patch comes out the same day you want to resume playing you have to patch the game, 2b) Play game (possibly even resume playing where you left off so you’re literally instantly back into the game). Time-to-play: Maybe 20 seconds? (granted a little longer on last-gen, but also this gen you can be back in a game literally within 5 seconds).

Steps to play on a pc: 1) Turn on pc, 2) Turn on (or launch) steam/egs/gog/etc, 3) hope game was updated, 4) hope drivers are updated, 5a) launch game, 5b) maybe sign into another 3rd party launcher, 6) load fully into the game, 7) play game. Time-to-play: 1-5 minutes depending on if the computer is fully off or just in sleep. Possibly much, much longer.

But WAIT, maybe the game isn’t running great so you have to alt+tab out and make sure you didn’t leave something running in the background, or your 100+ tabs in chrome/ff/etc are hogging all the ram and needs to be closed; maybe new drivers came out that you need to download/install to get the game running right, maybe the new drivers made the game worse and you have to revert them. Maybe the controller you wanted to play the game on disconnected or otherwise malfunctioned and now you have to restart the game the get it to pick up the controller. Maybe the DRM on the game has hitched up and you’re locked out of the game. Maybe you get a windows update that closes the game for you so it can helpfully install whatever new updates are available for you. etc etc.

minecraft also a large number of things going for it.

1. It was(is) a single game
2. It was already multiplatform, and only the most suicidal company would take a game that was multiplatform and make it exclusive. Not including the backlash as players lost access to a game they paid for, but there would also be untold number of refunds that would need to be done, lawsuits (most likely) to handle, etc.
3. It already had a very large (and most importantly) young userbase that they could monetize on dozens of platforms.
4. If you followed the proceedings of everything that is going on you’ll have read that they actually wanted to make the new minecraft legends xbox exclusive. While the emails didn’t say what ended up making them change their mind, I would imagine being in a certain legal fight might have played a large role in it.
5. Exceptions happen, but I imagine that exception would be the appropriate word rather than norm. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

I doubt any company would want to give their competitor 20-30% of their profits, so in my mind it isn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when they start locking all their franchises off from PS. What will be most interesting to me will be how will they do it. Will they just drop franchises so they don’t have to face the backlash for turning a franchise into an exclusive? Will they just make up a new “franchise” with a new name but similar gameplay? Will they just slowly one by one exclusive them off to try and reduce blowback? Do it all at once to get it out of the way?

This generation has already been mostly played out and I don’t see large changes making a large difference, but once the next generation comes around in another 3-5 years I imagine they will want to be in a place where they can leverage all these franchises to get people excited to buy their new box over their competitors. And you do that with exclusives.