I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.
I've been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you've hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.
Paying American Megatrends even a couple cents per board, is a cost that doesn't result in a valuable product differentiator. Has anyone ever said "I'd buy that PC but the UEFI sucks?"
Tweakers would love an open UEFI to build tools for ever more insane chipset register tweaks. Conversely, manufacturers would love the ability to theme everything with uniform branding and consistent experiences for large fleet deployment. I could even see kiosk designs that booted into a captive app right from ROM, no discs or network required. (You could get a PC that booted to DOS from ROM in the late '80s, surely we can top that today.
The more I look at modern UIs, which seem to have decided the best way to use the metric crapload of screen space a modern PC has is with gratuitious whitespace, the more I like 1990s UIs.
Here's a full GUI vector graphics/word processor/productivity app suite with clean Motif-esque decor and solid multitasking...
and it runs on a 512k machine with a 5MHz CPU.
The C64 predecessor was impressive too, but straddles the other side of toy/professional IMO.
I resent wireless because I feel like we got led astray by the aesthetics crowd. It was never good-- contested bandwidth, poor penetration, paper-mache security, but it was so much more attractive than cables asunder that we're throwing moonshot resources at it to try to make it good enough.
Meanwhile, consumer wired has stagnated. You can finally get 2.5GbE on a lot of new mainboards, but there are few affordable home router/AP devices, especially with multiple 2.5G ports. the local home centres still primarily stock spools of Cat5E, and even new-build developments treat networking as a low-priority line item, probably well below cable TV jacks, if they mention it at all.
If we had put the same emphasis on wired, there'd be 10/40Gb fibre NICs in commodity systems, and the Home Despot would sell all-inclusive fibre and Cat6A or 8 retrofit box kits.
I wonder if we'll see a lot of special purpose models-- we start with a vast model and gradually cut it out to fit on smaller hardware but only do one thing well.
Or if we'll just end up collapsing them into more recognizable code.
Fundamentally, I'm not sure Qualcomm is the brand I'd trust to lead the world off of x86.
I understand nobody actually likes Qualcomm products in the cellular space, but they're stuck with them due to patent minefields. That's not really a great vibe to bring in when trying to compete against known-quantity x86 vendors.
I figured we'd see homogenous CPUs-- either in the same socket or as an addon module, so you can cast off some stuff to ARM or RISC-V but keep big x86 for games and heavy closed-source software, then flip to RISC-V main with x86 addon cards, and finally emulation.
Sort of thinking about a Pinetab-V, but even the flaky, doesn't suspend right 20% of the time, wigi was weird on every OS except OpenBSD, Ryzen 2700U it would replace demolishes it. The Lichee Console looked neat with the EEE PC sizing and Trackpoint, but it's way pricier.
This seems to be a difference between US and UK English.
"Chicken Burger" is a reasonably cromulent expression in the UK, but it would always be a "Chicken Sandwich" on the other side of the Atlantic.
Also, "Turkey Burger" has some currency, although that might have just been an extensive marketing campaign trying to convince Americans to swap ground beef for ground turkey.
The West seems to define "democracy" in a very specific form: there MUST be multiple competing political parties and power MUST, at least in theory (compare Singapore, Mexico, etc) regularly transfer between them as the result of elections.
This is something Western states have been able to pull off, but it's actually sort of peripheral to the theoretical INTENT of democracy-- that the government serves the masses. Good governance is pretty much a by-product of the fear of being voted out of office.
You can, and often do, have the all-sacred elections and peaceful transfer of power and still have a government which isn't acting in service of its electorate. Sure, you can pick red corporate stooge or blue corporate stooge, but the Overton window is still a narrow slit that represents no real threat to the rich, and factionalism and winner-take-all elections sabotage any actual forward motion.
Meanwhile, the single-party state, unencumbered by having to tear itself apart in battles for the throne every four years, can focus on consensus and actual needs. Good governance can come from a sense of civic duty, or even a smartly weaponized corruption (if everyone thrives, my cut of graft grows with it!)
I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.
I've been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you've hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.