The next console wars will be the Switch 2 vs the horrible sinking feeling in your gut.
People seemingly forget that the Switch moved as many consoles as the PS4 and Xbox One combined. I don’t even mean people in online forums, because sure. I mean people in the games industry.
Honestly, the guy is absolutely full of crap, but this is a solid point. The question os where the clicks AI summaries are absolutely killing are coming from.
I can’t imagine this will survive forever, considering that Google has already gone through the loop of getting nuked from orbit by the EU by summarizing news content once. Even if AI wasn’t involved in this at all, it’s of very dubious legality in… well, wherever Google News got swiftly shut down.
Hah. That’s the kind of weird I can get behind, but I definitely wouldn’t want it to be the default.
Also I’m not sure how I feel about the possibility of the watch dying and it getting stuck on giving you the wrong time. I guess it’s how old analogue watches worked, but there’s something to knowing when your watch is dead.
Did that only kick in in March 2025? That seems like a rather sudden onset of Finnishness for a 55 year old guy.
Flash memory is tiny, but it’s not replacing anything, it’s being added, which is a problem for cost and size. If you were going to take BT out then… sure, but that’s not what’s happening here.
Now, the conversation is different if you reframe it as “I just like this quirky dirt cheap watch with a USB port on it”. At that point I have nothing to say other than… sure, why not.
What I don’t like is the notion that USB C is either a better alternative or a candidate for standardization, which is how the post came across to me.
Oh, and I disagree about the always on screen, too. In all honestly, the two things that make smartwatches still less polished than traditional watches is a) battery life, and b) the fact that there is at best a second of lag when you try to check the time and at worst you need to shake your wrist to try to get your watch to realize it’s being looked at so it decides to wake up.
There’s no question that having a display of the time on at all times is better. It’s just not practical with the energy costs and battery storage. At one point I bought that Garmin watch that has a standard old digital watch screen on top of the modern display (speaking of weird). It was a neat idea, but it turns out that the battery life for it on normal use wasn’t much better than other watches and the dumb thing still had a backlight it turned on via motion detection, so it was just as laggy as a normal smartwatch.
I’d take a better iteration on that tech over a USB C charger any day, if we’re doing weird.
Hold on, so now you want to use USB C for data transfer? Which means you want to what? add more storage to the watch? That sure seems like a solution looking for a problem you’re only floating as a result of choosing USB as the charge port, which we probably shouldn’t do.
And that’s not just much less battery than on the Pixel at 420mAh, it’s even smaller than the CMF Watch 2, which reports 305mAh and is only seventy bucks (and if anything seems smaller than all of your examples). So yes, there is an impact on battery. And no, that’s not acceptable. Because again, ALL smartwatches need more battery than they currently have.
The point of the always on HR monitoring and screen isn’t that they exist, it’s that they are a massive battery drain. A smartwatch where you turn those off will last several times more than the same watch with them on, particularly on entry-level devices like ones you point at. And you would ideally wnat those on in a perfect smartwatch while still getting multi-day battery life. Right now we just don’t have that because you can’t work your way around physics.
Now, for an experiment? Sure, go nuts. Put a solar panel in there. A hand crank. Who cares, weird hardware is weird and weird is fun.
But to solve the problem with the ever-changing charger standards from the mainstream manufacturers weird won’t cut it. You need a solution that fits all cases with near-optimal performance. USB is just not it for this form factor, and if anything focusing on it distracts from the very real need to come to a proper standard in this space, which I find somewhat annoying.
That gives me no information. What’s the battery size? I’ve had multiple smartwatches and all their batteries could last a week or a day depending on usage, setup and features.
The point is USB C is noticeably larger than pogo pins for the sake of including a whole bunch of additional pins a smartwatch has zero use for. Larger means less room for other stuff. The ideal state for a smartwatch is having an always-on display and heart rate monitoring, among other things. All watches out there, even the most efficient ones, could use more battery and efficiency than they have. Because all smartwatches are coming up short from their desired usage and are working around their limited battery life.
The idea of making that worse for the sake of having a clearly unfit for purpose connector as opposed to standardizing a connector that actually does the job is really weird. There is no need to have a different charger on every watch, but there certainly isn’t a need to sacrifice any functionality or performance at all for the sake of USB C. And not all watches are the same size, so this would impact smaller watches more, which now is limiting what type of watches you can make if you make USB C a standard. And if it’s not a standard, then it’s not fixing the problem.
And all that’s even before you begin to consider that watches are more comfortable to charge when they have a stand to do so, since they’re small, light and fiddly, so it’s entirely possible for a bulky USB C cable meant for fast charging to be heavier than them or stiff enough to actively move them around. There’s a reason watch chargers tend to come with very thin, flexible wires. All you need to fix this problem is a magnetic stand that can hold any watch. Half the USB C cables I own would knock over my watch stand if plugged into my watch or drag my watch across the table.
You can make a watch that charges via USB C and still works. That’s not an optimal solution, but you can. But it’s not a valid standard because you can’t very practically make all watches charge via USB C. Standards need to be standard.
You kind of are, it’s basically the same magnets+wireless combo Apple uses for their phones.
I don’t know if you could use the same charger for a phone. Probably not. But it’s a cross-company standard, so the idea would be to do the same for watches, if the standard doesn’t include a watch option already (I haven’t looked into it, frankly).
It’s not that it’s too large to exist, but it’s certainly large enough that it’ll make a dent in the battery space, and smartwatches are already battery-starved compared to dumb ones.
Its a terrible idea for a number of reasons, but as everybody else is saying, that doesn’t mean you give up on standardization.
I mean, we are for phones. Qi2 is finally becoming more widespread, and the Qi1/Magsafe spec is quietly more compatible than its official support suggests.
Why this doesn’t extend to watches and only partially to earbuds is a different question, but I at least the most likely devices to have wireless charging are getting there.
This is very dumb.
Now, if it was annoyed by magnetic pogo connectors not being standard we could talk. Wireless for watches, too.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t know if it should be a Valve thing anyway. For one thing, I am not comfortable with Valve owning all of PC gaming in the first place.
But from their perspective, it’s one thing to own compatibility in a system they don’t pay anything for and effectively can own and another to go do work for a bigger fish. If Apple wants big PC games to run on their hardware Apple can make it happen, presumably. I mean, Meta is keeping the VR market afloat single-handedly, and there’s a chance you could actually make money with this stuff on Mac.
I do think it makes more sense for them to do that if and when all their hardware is running the same OS, or at least the same software. They don’t seem to have made up their mind on whether that should be a thing, even though it’s very clear it should be a thing.
It’s genuinely more complicated than that, honestly. Apple did a great job of pretending these ARM devices were on par with desktop PC hardware when they… kind of aren’t, in absolute terms. I wonder how much of an incentive they have to keep doing this if the result is their top of the line five grand devices start to look like mid-range PCs and the bullshit way their naming conventions are designed starts getting exposed by widespread FPS counts on tentpole game releases. I genuinely don’t think Apple wants to have that conversation.
So if anything it seems weird to me that they are focusing on this. Honestly, getting triple-A releases ported to phones and tablets seems like a much safer bet. I guess it’s just hard to leave the laptop and desktop users entirely out of the loop for no good reason, but they have a lot of experience doing just that, so who knows.
It seems pretty obvious that unifying the software is the next step for them after unifying a lot of the hardware. what that means for gaming on their devices is anybody’s guess.
And of course I don’t particularly care because… I mean, macs.
I don’t think it’s particularly controversial these days to say that Linux gaming is way ahead of Mac gaming, so I’m not sure that part is suprising, beyond the notion that in other metrics the OS split for those is more like 15% to 5%.
I mean, the Mac side was celebrating this month that Cyberpunk finally runs natively on it, and it is borderline unplayable on most of the hardware out there, gets comparable to what? A 5060? on the very top end.
I read in that two missed opportunities: One, Mac gaming should get so much better. Two, somebody on the Linux side should really start taking non-gaming compatibility seriously.
When the product is the content or the features rather than the platform this chart is useless.
You don’t sit down and go “I’m going to stream video”, you go “I’m gonna watch Star Trek” or “Hey, there’s a new season of Severance”. It’s the same with chat and social media. It’s not “I’m going to instant message”, it’s “I’ll text mom”.
You use what you gotta use. You don’t decouple from US big tech by boycotting it, you decouple by having EU big tech (at which point you’ve fixed nothing) or by competing with them with a different standard, which is possible but very, very hard and way outside the typical thought processes and organization patterns of most of these alternatives.
See also: why Bluesky entirely replaced Mastodon as a Twitter alternative despite showing up a year late with no pre-existing working standard.
This chart is less “yay let’s make things better” and more “woof, things are dire”.
I think that amount of pawns is pretty much what you need to make it winnable. Maybe a few less if you take black’s pawns away. Pretty sure this one, as presented, is unwinnable, which… kind of undermines the point they’re trying to make.
I mean, cross-platform cloud save support isn’t about “a Windows clone” and has zero to do with Linux doing things differently.
Also, it is supported, just not by GoG. Which makes this excuse weirder, because presumably it’s blanket deflection for anything that doesn’t work until it works, at which point it becomes bragging rights. It’s a weird way to evaluate how both these things work.
And it IS absolutely reasonable to expect software you need or want to work as a requirement to switch over. It’s not the user’s fault that the software they need doesn’t work. If their needs aren’t supported they’re just going to use whatever supports what they need.
This is not true, to my knowledge. Heroic can download GOG cloud saves on Linux. Upload them, too. There may be edge cases for games using a launcher or their own cloud save system, and some games don’t support GOG cloud saves, but you can absolutely keep using existing GOG cloud saves on Linux through Heroic, which has at least some official endorsement from CDPR and GOG (they have an affiliate link that gets them some revenue if you buy games from GOG within the Heroic launcher with ad support turned on).
I get that it’s easy to miss this because GOG itself won’t advertise it, you just kinda… have to know to use Heroic for this and turn the cloud saves option on. But it works. I use it on a dual boot setup and I’ve been playing The Alters back and forth.
For the record, I agree on some of the pains of trying to daily drive Linux for some things. Which is why I dual boot instead in the first place. And I do agree the packaging situation on Linux is absolutely bonkers and only makes sense in that ecosystem for entirely self-referential reasons that don’t matter to users and shouldn’t be a thing.
I guess it kinda is. Some choices are a bit… peculiar.
I’ve just been using it for so long I have no concept of how it reads getting into it for the first time.
It can also be used as a bit of a behind-the-scenes engine in some emulation wrappers, which I guess sort of works around that issue, but hey, that’s definitely a valid concern. Retroarch makes sense if you emulate a ton of systems and want a consistent experience across the board, and it has some nice shared features across all cores, but all of that definitely comes with some complexity.
And whose fault is that?
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won’t let them go. Don’t see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I’m sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they’ve locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I’m just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.