Marvin

iadlib said:

It's gorgeous! But I guarantee Steve would be mortified LOL

If it was for living in maybe but some of these purchases are most likely just investments and for events. A 24-room house would be difficult to maintain for someone living there alone. She owns at least 2 properties in San Francisco, 1 in Florida and 4 in Malibu. She will live in one of them most of the year and the others will be empty for 11 or more months of the year. Housing is being treated more and more like the stock market where people just build up a portfolio of empty homes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2023/08/26/when-10-homes-isnt-enough-which-billionaires-own-the-most-properties-larry-ellison-jeff-bezos-oprah-winfrey/

Sometimes it's to enjoy the luxury of a main home in a vacation home and will only be occupied for a small amount of time.

They can have higher priced tiers that include a movie bundle.

$9.99/month base package
$14.99/month, base + older movie package
$19.99/month, base + (tokens worth 5 iTunes movie rentals or 10 TV show rentals) + movie package of older movies
$29.99/month, base + (tokens worth 15 iTunes movie rentals or 30 TV shows) + movie package of older movies

Dune:Part 2 is available for standalone rent but while on the $19.99/month package, it would just use one of the rentals. The main thing is it shows up as ready to watch as soon as the app opens instead of seeing The Morning Show all the time.

Popular TV series like Friends and The Office would just show up as watchable like on other streaming services and they can wrap ownership into the model. Friends seasons can be bought for around $14.99/season of roughly 24 episodes per season ($0.62/episode). If someone watches an entire season and enough tokens are used to meet the purchase price, they just add it to the account permanently.

tht said:

I think my basic requirements for a folding display device is that the surface has to feel glass like and there isn’t any creases when unfolded. 

Seen enough of these folding phones where the plastic surface feels sucky or sticky and there are always creases easily visible. 

They have OLED tiles now that look pretty seamless:



There can be two tiles like that on each side like a door hinge and when it opens, the edges of the tiles meet. The cylinder would be hidden inside and the display edge would be flush with the cylinder edge:


It could be done with more flexible glass where the cylinder is. If it folds outwards, that will crease less than folding inwards.

9secondkox2 said:

Apple can sell 14 billion dollars of flappy bird all you want. But that’s baby stuff. 

Apple isn’t actually “serious” until they go after BRAND NEW AAA games and score them at launch. Not months or years later when the market is tired of them. 

A. Triple A exclusive or three (timed or not) would be massive. 

It would be good for them to have exclusive AAA games but they take a lot of time to make and aren't guaranteed hits. The industry is moving away from platform exclusives because a single platform doesn't make back the development budget where 5m copies at $60 is often break-even:

https://twistedvoxel.com/marvels-spider-man-2-sales-break-even-colossal-budget/

GTA 5 was made in 2013. GTA 6 was announced in 2022 while already in development and due in 2025. The GTA franchise has had just 2 main game releases since the original iPhone. Baldur's Gate 3 took 6 years. If they started a AAA production today, it wouldn't ship until 2028-2030.

A GTA 6 leak said the company had allocated $2b for it. 1000 employees x $50k x 6 years = $300m, marketing $200m, probably online services for >50m players, it's easily over $500m:

https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/gta-6-budget/

There are some types of game that are faster to make like Call of Duty games have a shorter cycle as they are mainly multiplayer. Fighting games like Street Fighter have little content in them. Racing games can be done quicker and expanded over time.

The best kind of games for companies like Apple are replayable ones like Minecraft, Roblox, The Sims. I doubt they'd want violent games in the portfolio.

If they had 'evergreen' games like Forza Horizon, Mario Kart, The Sims, Stardew Valley, Football Manager, Smash Brothers, those would get regular players:

https://steamcharts.com/app/1222670#All
https://steamcharts.com/app/413150#All

They can commission studios to build games for them instead of buying the studios. They can scale up faster that way, they'd just have timed deliverables to justify funding and if a studio doesn't deliver, they can pass the work onto another studio.

It's not easy finding good independent studios to buy because the big game companies keep buying them up and some want to stay independent because being owned by Apple means being owned by Apple's shareholders. A lot of studios have been burned by shareholder driven companies before and gone through crunch periods, mass layoffs etc.

I think commissioning exclusive games could work for them so that the studios maintain independence. They probably want to avoid using Unreal Engine too or they have to pay Epic a fee.

foregoneconclusion said:

saarek said: Yep, and if you believe a Mac with 8GB of Ram will perform just as well as one with 16GB of Ram I have a barely used bridge to sell you in Egypt, going super cheap!

This person said they were able to play Elden Ring (which requires 12GB RAM minimum on Windows 10) through Crossover with an 8GB M2 Air laptop. As they point out, not every game works like that (Cyberpunk 2077 is also a 12GB min game and is not really playable). But it's certainly interesting that 8GB unified is able to run a 12GB DDR minimum game.

Desktops use the SSD when they run out of memory so the games still run but it causes performance bottlenecks that show in some games. The following video shows the issue, especially towards the end around 4:30:



Apple doesn't necessarily need to make the entry model 16GB but people who intend to use them for gaming should get the memory upgrade. It would be nice if the baseline increased a bit since RAM costs <$5/GB. Moving to 12GB at the same price wouldn't be much to expect, this costs Apple <$20.

appleinsideruser said:

Marvin said:

AppleInsider said:

He stayed on the line with emergency services for an hour and updated them as to his approximate location. A rescue helicopter was dispatched, located Shearman, and winched him into the craft to take him back to the beach.

It's good that the battery in the Ultra can last this long and support an hour on a cellular call. It would be useful to have an easier way of sharing ad-hoc location with people. This would benefit taxi services too. Possibly a What Three Words integration:

https://what3words.com/

Then the location can be shared by text or reading the words on a call or the watch could emit a sound (like an audio QR code) that could be heard on the call and translated into a location. In the case of a riptide, sending a couple of locations would let the emergency support see which direction he was moving in.

Unless you’ve turned it off, I thought calls to emergency services share your GPS location?

It says on the support page at the bottom it depends on country and region if it can send location to the emergency services:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108374

Not a great way to find out that you're in an unsupported region in the middle of an emergency.