It's ridiculous the current business model has been allowed to exist as long as it has, with these platforms taking all the profit while passing off all the risk and liability.
As a customer, when you buy something from Amazon then as far as you are concerned your relationship is with Amazon, not with 'cooltechshop99' or whatever the vendor may be.
Pretty funny, though I'm sure barely anyone would have been doing this other than to make meme photos for social media.
They'll be stopping it for the same reason most Pizza Huts in the US stopped doing it - profit. Not in the sense that people abusing the salad bar costs money - that's just a convenient excuse - but simply because it takes a lot to keep a salad bar well stocked and fresh, and they did the maths and figured they can make more if all they sell is pizza.
This increasing trend is extremely annoying - and worrying.
Several times here in the UK I've been trying to reach out to companies I have relationships with (e.g. my phone provider) only to find they want me to DM them on Twitter or Instagram.
There's no fucking way I'm using some proprietary service to have a convo with my phone company, especially when A) I don't even have an account on the service and don't want one and B) the convo will contain info about my phone account and personal info, and no way should I be sharing that over such a channel.
As far as I'm concerned it should be straight up ILLEGAL for companies to offer official contact on big tech platforms, when they have no control over how data in the chat is later used.
If they want to offer online chat, it should be through a third party who does that as their primary business model as a paid service, and can give explicit contractual guarantees on data storage and ownership.
The switch has a lot of similarities with phone hardware, but in a different form factor.
Almost all phones work like this, in that they are mobile-first devices which are designed to depend on the battery.
A major reason for this design choice is power stability.
The switch (just like a phone) can charge off any USB power supply, even really low power ones. The power coming in might be enough to slowly charge, but not enough to keep up when you do the most demanding tasks, like playing a graphically intensive game.
For that reason, the switch requires some charge in the battery, so that if the power draw spikes too much for the charger then the battery takes up the slack and things keep working nicely, rather than unexpected crashing or other oddities.
In the end, demanding the battery has at least a little charge to run is basically a safety feature to ensure that you have a good experience, and the switch does not die in unexpected ways.
Amazon applies a discount of $0.51 cents to bring it under the $35 amount for free shipping.
Someone buys it for/that $34.99 but Amazon still pays the original seller based on the seller's original listed price.
And so Amazon subsidised it, but still came out net benefit because the amount of the subsidy was less than shipping cost, or less than the price of some other item the customer now had to put in their basket to get over the free shipping threshold again.
I already gave the whole damn week to my job. If I sleep all weekend just so I'm rested and ready for Monday, then I'm basically giving them my whole weekend, too!
There are still times where it's convenient. I have some display cases with integrated lighting and the inline switches are incoveniently between the case and the wall so its super handy to turn it on and off at the plug.
Being able to turn things off at the plug also reduces standby/phantom power when things are in sleep, which for some devices adds up more energy usage than you'd think.
Sometimes when people go on holiday for two weeks they like to disconnect the electrical items in their house for safety. With switched sockets you can just turn them off instead.
I'm sure I could live just fine without switched sockets, but it's convenient they are there.
I mean, the root cause here, if you look at the bigger picture, is that EVERYTHING is getting more expensive and EVERYONE is getting poorer.
Nobody would expect supermarket prices in a pub, it's obviously going to be more, and that's expected. It's not that people don't want to go out, it's that they can't afford to go out the amount they'd like, because the working class is broke.
I do agree that swapping the VAT around would be fair, because booze is only a component of a supermarket's business while it's a mainstay of a pub's business, but that's not the main reason people aren't going out anymore. People are drinking less and less even at home, too, especially younger generations.
The food is one thing but the drinks are all good, and great prices. They have guest ales from local-area breweries too, rather than only having nationally available stuff.
The cause of enshittification is essentially the shareholder pressure for endless and exponential growth that comes from public ownership.
Valve is a privately held company, and as long as it remains that way it doesn't have those perverse incentives.
Gabe will never allow Valve to go public as long as he is in control, but after he is gone who knows.