MBCook

It’s no slouch but it’s also no PS5 or Series X.

Streaming would be ideal but Apple fights that because they don’t get a crazy cut. They could do easily be THE streaming box but prices and dumb rules kill it.

I love my Apple TV but the price was already crazy.

Yeah. Obvious MS the company is not in any danger and everything will be fine.

Xbox the division has been losing money and each generation has a smaller and smaller share of the install base. They’re arguably close to irrelevancy at this point. Knowing Microsoft, they won’t give up, but it might actually be smart to stop trying and not have another Xbox generation.

Those highly valuable PS5 exploits for spying on foreign leaders?

Makes sense. In their position it would be stupid not to.

That was my sense. It takes time to figure out how to use a bug as an exploit.

So normally if the community found this stuff I guess they’d work together to make a jailbreak. Maybe they already were working on that with bug X but hadn’t told anyone.

The JoeClaudeUser posts publicly “Hey everyone I found bug X over here! I’m awesome!”.

Now it can’t be used because Sony will fix it. If they had already been using it behind closed doors all that work is flushed.

I didn’t see it here, but I do believe that’s it!

Which makes sense. Exclusives is basically the best reason for buying a PlayStation, so if they stick them all on PC, that’s not gonna help them much.

As you’ve said, Microsoft is basically toast. They’ve been sinking for multiple generations.

Yep! Some more details, many of which kill it:

The Apple TV chip is currently quite old. It would be fine for much indie stuff or streaming but pales against a modern phone/iPad.

Have to buy games from the App Store meaning limited selection. Few bother because no one plays games on Apple TV. And since it’s the same as the iPhone app it’s often optimized for that even if the Apple TV was more powerful.

The other big Apple sin is Apple tried a push but (at the time, later changed) demanded games worked with the Apple TV remote only. At least for Apple Arcade. They “had to” because they’ve never sold a gamepad. Only 3rd party ones which weren’t very good.

So you have to buy games from Apple that are either super simplistic (to work well on phone) or advanced but old (RE VII), play on an old chip, on a TV while it was probably designed for a phone, and pay $70+ to Nintendo/Sony/MS to buy a good quality game pad.

Surprise. It never went anywhere.

There was a rumor that they’re going to try again with a first-party controller. If they’re smart they will just white label one from a good company. And they should absolutely push cloud gaming with PS/MS. Steam Link is a good idea.

A new Apple TH is rumored any day now (and has been for a long time) but between the high original cost, the insane cost increases due to RAM/storage, and the price of buying a controller, it just doesn’t seem worth it. Buy a Series S or Switch 1/2 and be happier.

I saw a post from someone who worked in the scene recently, seems they were someone famous. I don’t follow things so I’m not sure. Basically they were giving up because new people to the scene were just discovering things with AI and then immediately disclosing them to the world, allowing Sony to patch them before they really got used.

It sounded like things may have changed.

Hybrids were a great solution 30 years ago. So many companies dragged their feet for so long they’re only putting them in everything now that the writing is on the wall it’s much too late.

Pathetic.

I haven’t myself. I don’t know his name. So in many ways, I’m a more normal person. I’m aware they keep claiming that AI will kill everyone, but that’s about as much as I know. I didn’t even know if the CEO was claiming it or just underlings.

It wasn’t until I saw comments here that I found out they weren’t making up the gollum thing and he apparently talks to himself a bit like that.

Yeah it wasn’t great. Other parts of this week’s Weekend Update were better like the Meta AI character having the same dead eyes as Zuck or Tucker Carlson discussing movies. That wasn’t great but had some fun in pure ridiculousness.

Either way the fact this is even a sketch says a lot about where we are. They clearly think enough people know about this discussion, and him specifically, to be able to pull this off. If you made an SNL sketch about other people HN talks about the audience would just be totally confused and lost.

He has earned the very dubious honor of joining Elizabeth Holmes and Zuckerberg as “weirdo tech people to make fun of”.

“My precious” would have been too on the nose for the Gollum part for me.

Claudisms could be fun but probably too obscure for the target audience.

Seems like a gollum thing to me.

Yeah, but it meant they didn’t have to pay credit card fees. And isn’t that what’s really the most important thing here? Lol.

As far as I know, the current Google Pay is identical to Apple Pay: it’s just EMV tap-to-pay. So it would be the same protections. Samsung pay too.

It was kind of neat that Samsung had that thing for a short while that would somehow trick the magstripe reader in a POS terminal by blasting magnetic fields at it to think that you had swiped your card.

I think there was a different one before that that was not, but I’m also pretty sure that’s long gone. And I think it was more like Apple Pay on the web, where it was really for paying in a non-card environment. But I’m not an android person, so I’m not sure.

There are two forms of wireless. The first was “magstripe emulation” and it’s exactly what you think it is. The card would hand over the exact data on the magstripe.

It’s also exactly as secure as you think: it’s not.

That hasn’t been used for a long time, and I don’t even think people accept it anymore. May not have for years. At least for credit cards. It’s quite possible that’s still how door access cards or maybe gym membership cards work. I don’t really know.

Everything now and for many, many many years, has been EMV over NFC. And you’re right on that one it is essentially identical to sticking your card in the EMV reader.

The credit cards, I believe, have pledged to eliminate magnetic stripes. Although given how long it takes us to do anything for all I know that will be by 2060. They are also planning to extend credit cards past 16 digits, which may also require the magstripe to go away.

I know it was in Europe FAR before the US too. I’m speaking from a very US centric perspective as that’s all I personally experienced.

No one wanted to put on EMV terminals because they didn’t want to pay the upgrade cost. Even if they bought them because they were the only thing, they wouldn’t turn any of the EMV stuff on. You still did everything like 1995. It was the liability shift that finally forced people to start. And that coincided well with Apple Pay. Which obviously was planned by Apple.

I also remember people hating it and trying to avoid it because it was so slow early on.

On the other hand, a lot of places that supported tap to pay didn’t even know. Lots of times when I started using Apple Pay I got confusion from the person checking me out. “What did you do, how did you pay” or “I didn’t know you could do that”. Multiple times retailers I used it at stopped taking it later. I assume they found out people were using it and freaked out because they didn’t know it was on.

There are still lots of retailers where the signs don’t say you can use it, or even the screens on the terminals, but it works fine. It’s still kind of mess but it generally works almost everywhere.

I can stop shopping at places that decide to make it hard for me. It’s easier than ever to find someone else willing to sell me the same thing.

Especially since no one sells unique stuff anymore, it’s mostly the same discount crap from China. So it’s not like I can’t get it elsewhere.

If the banks win and other stuff is allowed on the iPhone, that’s fine.

I have no intention of using it. I have a feeling it’ll be crap. That’s how this stuff usually is. And I’m absolutely not going to use a different app for each card.

So I wonder if this will end up being a Pyrrhic victory.

Retailers may get less than using their own app, but I agree I don’t really see how it affects the processors or the banks.

However Apple is providing something in all this. Apple Pay requires biometrics which (in theory) should help lower fraud costs for everyone. So it’s not like they’re just rent seeking for nothing.

I don’t know how it went for everyone else, but I don’t remember tapped pay getting popular until after Apple Pay and Apple pushing it. I know that coincided with when EMV terminals really started to get popular because the credit card companies were forcing it. But I honestly wonder if they helped push it to the mainstream, even for people just using tap cards.

0% because it’s a service that’s so obviously should be provided by the government is better.

Yeah. But this is the US. This is all we’ve got. Having the central bank do it would be communism, and that’s bad. I learned about it from Saturday morning cartoons.

Inserting and tapping is just as safe.

Swiping is where the risk is.

All EMV transactions (including Apple Pay in a tap to pay scenario) don’t give the retailer the full card number.

Remember CurrenC? The thing a bunch of them tried to make that failed horribly during test with no consumers liking it? If I remember a description it involved using an app where you had to scan a QR code, and then the point of sale terminal had to scan a QR code on your phone or something like that.

It was all so hilariously badly designed compared to tap and pay.

What makes you think if one ARM manufacturer gets popular ‘clones’ won’t pop-up again?

The Qualcomm models were faster. I’m not sure if they were better in low signal conditions.

The Intel models were worse, but they weren’t bad as far as I know.

What do you know. Apple’s “never run to the media it never helps anything” rule works just as well with GitHub.

I wasn’t thinking hardware, more software. But either way the closer a competitor is the harder they’ll run, even if still on top.