It's a defence mechanism against account hijacking if someone has access to your phone number, linked to your account. Went through the same procedure to recover an account I haven't been using for a few years.
1,872 karma · joined September 26, 2020
Most likely stolen cards. Stolen credit cards are used to purchase gift cards which are then resold to unsuspecting buyers. Think of it as stolen money laundering.
The real barrier is DX games.
Current MS' approach is to not do exclusives and sell all their games on every platform available except Apple's
Case in point: recently, some Russian mobile service providers started blocking registration SMS for popular messengers, Signal included.
In earlier years there were also cases of mobile number spoofing in the country, where the control over the number was given to law enforcement who then use it as second factor authentication to break into different accounts.
That's how easy it is. The word "secure" and "mobile phone number" are the opposites of each other.
Some people might disagree that it isn’t a form of censorship, but it fits the bill: blocking access to information on the sole discretion of 3rd party pursuing its own interests.
Select files in Finder, option + double click on them, and you have many photo files accessible in a single Preview window.
On the other hand in the US Apple's App Store was not found to be a monopoly in the first place. Different cases about abusing dominating position also didn't go far.
What Valve offers is just one more PC configuration
Skipping unnecessary operation during frame rendering is always better for games.
First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.
Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.
Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.
Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.
Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.
So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
And I guess people who downvoted my counterpoint thought that it means that all services on the planet have very well functioning browser version, judging by their comments. Some don't, some do. But no one of them "requires" excessive access a native app can provide.
Some may want to have it, for some browser version is simply not a priority. But nobody needs to have additional info for those services to function.