Basically everything Microsoft (deservedly) got shit for with the Xbox One, and which their reputation never recovered from, is bog-standard practice on consoles and plenty of games now.
I can't even remember what MS did or didn't do in that keynote. Are they really hurting in this gen? I think their success vs PS is all about (lack of) good platform exclusives along with how online gaming got more siloed and less communal. Halo 3 won them the north american market and it wouldn't have been the same without all chat and everyone still having a working mic at that point in the 360s life.
Xbox One was originally going to require frequent online check ins, I think daily or weekly, games on disc were going to tie themselves to your account and publishers could choose whether or not you could resell them at select retailers or share them with your friends, IIRC you could share a game one time with a friend. They also didn't focus on games when showing it off and it was priced $100 higher than PS4 despite being weaker because of the bundled Kinect nobody wanted.
They are not doing super amazing this gen. Reports have them selling 1/3rd the units of PlayStation 5, Game Pass has stalled, they apparently used a JIT manufacturing setup and so were much more affected by the component shortage, so a console that was $500 at launch is now $800.
Funnily enough, because they put in serials into Xbox One games for tracking they did recently launch a really cool disc to digital service that gives the best benefits of physical and digital.
I think I saw something a while back that said they don't want to because they built a bunch of proprietary framework stuff that they want to keep for themselves cause they still use it in Dia.
I'm still not sure what Arc offered that can't be solved if you know OS shortcuts which also work across all your apps.
If you do, and you regularly tile windows, you know that vertical tabs are terrible because if you have 2 browser windows and tile them side-by-side, suddenly 40% of your screen is wasted showing tabs on 2 windows.
I really don't want to learn an entirely different set of multitasking shortcuts just for my browser. I know how to multitask with my browser already, the same way I multitask with everything else, and none of the solutions seem more convenient.
It was a good browser with pleasant UI and interesting features that broke the status quo. The tiling problem can be solved by hiding the sidebar (and it also had versatile built-in tiling), and it's only a problem if you use tiling in the first place.
I don't know where you're coming from with the shortcut gripe, to be honest.
I think it's a good thing that people try to build something new and overthrow Chrome with its MANY flows.
Arc conceptually merges bookmarks and pinned tabs. Non-pinned tabs are cleared automatically, and you just move a tab above the line to keep it. It's so conducive to the way my brain works, it's not an exaggeration when I say it was a revelation when I first discovered it.
Most browsers try to port the vertical tabs or the split view and proudly say "look, we did it, you can now switch from Arc" but none get this tab concept right, except for Zen which regrettably uses Firefox/Gecko as its base.
and if you want examples of features that can't be solved with os shorctuts look at some of the replies in this thread, e.g. this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50199454
Larian hasn’t broken our hearts, yet. And they’ve made overtures that they will avoid doing so for at least another game or two. But eventually people will retire and then who knows.
I really think it’s going to depend on how big they get. Early BioWare very clearly had everyone committed to building games they were proud of; EA’s management equally clearly are just moving money around for things they don’t care about or believe will negatively impact them personally.
I think that pattern is widespread around the greater tech industry: antitrust enforcement, etc. would be great for having fewer cases where decisions which affect thousands of people are being made by executives who are really detached not just from consequences but simply awareness of what’s going on in each of the different segments of their business.
Larian is independent. That's the main difference. They might partner with a publisher for individual games but it's always going to be a pure investment deal, funding for a share of the profits with no creative control.
After BG3 they're financially secure, they know what happened to BioWare and have the power to avoid it. The only way I see them getting acquired is a series of flops and near bankruptcy.
They may bankrupt if Divinity will flop. BG3 and Divinity are very expensive games to make, they had to expand studio and hire a lot of people to produce them.
Yup. This is why indies sell out. You've got all these mouths to feed and all it takes is one flop to kill the whole operation. A large corporate parent provides cushion. Until it doesn't.
Damn, I have a buddy who works for them, he was working on the new Mass Effect. He just lost his mom very quickly a few months ago too.
He hosted a friend and I end of last year and gave us a tour of their offices in Vancouver. Hits close to home.
I had never played any Bioware games but after that trip it inspired me to finally get around to playing through the Dragon Age series, and I marathoned them all over the next few months. It wasn't hard to see the very steep decline in quality. Which is unfortunate cause they definitely had a lot of talent but were being sabotaged internally from executives jerking them around with trend chasing (for as bad as Veilguard was, it's surprising they cobbled something together that's at least somewhat cohesive when it was going back and forth between a single player and multiplayer game), as well as people being put in charge of major creative decisions that clearly had not earned that role.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
There's been a macOS update that allowed anyone to log in just by pressing enter and another one that showed the actual password when you pressed the password hint button.
Granted these were a long time ago but their marketing was just as strong back then.
This was around the time they were making fun of Windows (I'm a Mac, I'm a PC)
What’s funny is that it’s not the public or even the board that is demanding that Apple release whiz-bang moonshot software features every year. Users do want shiny new hardware, but besides necessary hardware drivers, 90% of users LOVE it when the core OS and the UI stays stable for years. So they can get used to it. Instead of reshuffling the UI of every app every 12 months like iOS has been doing for 10 years. And evolving the visuals in big and small ways constantly. Both of these are not fooling anyone into overestimating Apple’s innovativeness.
They're copying the auto industry when it came up with yearly models. FOMO drives sales. They've cultivated a customer base that is supremely susceptible to it.
I’m not so sure - 90% of commenters complain every time a new OS doesn’t have any new shiny useless features. (Look at all the comments saying the 18 Pro is an S release.)
People don't care about most new features. They'd be happy with a handful that are really impactful for them.
The problem is, everybody has a different notion of what those are.
In any case, I don't recognize the world people are talking about here. I ran the 27 betas all summer and upgraded to 27.0 on day one and it's been great. The betas were definitely betas, but quite good. 27.0 was (and 27.0.1 still is) excellent. I don't have a single issue I'm hoping the next point release will fix.
I remember 10.6.6 being the perfect version. At least, if you owned the 2010 MacPro. It was perfect as it was the last OS that was compatible with that hardware.
You can get Claude Pro for $20/month and if you hook it into a browser, I'm not sure what you'd be missing out on from those listed perks.
I mean I get the benefit of a prepackaged experience but not at 5x the cost.
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