conciselyverbose

The message was added later.

They didn't lower the performance of the device. They improved the performance for the devices affected. Without lowering the peak clocks the system thought it could handle, the device didn't do better. It hard crashed and shut the system off, presumably losing portions of whatever it was doing in the process.

I personally would prefer Apple (and everyone else) make slightly more detailed update descriptions available on a separate channel, but the main update notes should be just broad strokes IMO. Regardless, yes, the notification they eventually added was a good idea that added value. I just don't think portraying it as anything other than "something that didn't occur to them, because literally no one else did anything like it either" is responsible at all.

People still reference this nonsense and the suits that should have the attorneys involved disciplined for frivolous time wasting as "Apple is trying to force you to buy new phones" when their old devices consistently maintain their resale value far better than the rest of the field and the very obvious intent of this specific action was strictly beneficial to their customers. It would have been slightly more beneficial to do the "your battery doesn't work" message sooner, but you'd have ended up with just as much manufactured outrage if they were slightly too inclusive in who got that message.

I have not played it, but people rave about The Outer Wilds and it sounds like it fits your needs.

It's not at all my thing, but search the term "walking simulator" to find stuff like that.

Have you tried some of the games you're talking about on the "story" difficulty modes? Most have moved to calling it something like that instead of "easy", and I'm at the opposite extreme, but a lot of them are designed to let you experience the world and story without the pressures of combat.

If you have access to a switch, Mario Odyssey or Kirby and the Forgotten Land have some "combat" but you can skip a lot of it, and they're made to be beatable by kids. Other 3D platformers exist in similar veins as well.

They don't talk about low level details like that. Their whole pitch is abstracting away stuff you don't need to worry about. "We're lowering the peak clock 5% if your battery can't deliver for it" not seeing any explicit attention when it doesn't actually have any real world impact is really just not a big deal. The "power management" they included it as is exactly what it was .

The "your battery is basically dead" message they ended up adding does have value, but nobody else did that at the time either. They just crashed instead of marginally downclocking, and Apple's lawsuit here is the product of being the first to make efforts to actually solve the problem for their customers.

It's simple. Nothing that happens on my device is their data.

Any telemetry that isn't explicitly opt in with zero consequence for not doing so should be the kind of illegal that gets every asset your company owns seized immediately for non-compliance. All user data collection is spyware.

They were sued for keeping your device from crashing once the battery was obscenely degraded.

I watched until the Ekuale sack and that breakdown just made it impossible to take seriously. The back was still actively engaged with the edge defender until well after the guard is murdered and Ekuale is a free rusher right up the gut. That's an easy sack on 95% of veteran QBs.

Might someone like Brady just float the fuck out of it figuring either his back releases or it's a throwaway? I guess, though plays like that are what cost him a perfect season. And he sure as hell wasn't going to as a rookie, and most QBs will never get to a point where they can salvage that play.

Jokes aside, blocking might be his biggest role. He has the knowledge and tools for effective pass protection and while Rhamondre can also do it, it's the kind of wear we'd like to limit to an extent while he's taking the bulk of the touches.

Obviously Rhomondre will block if he plays on passing downs and Zeke will also run routes if he does pass blocking, but I think pass protection and short yardage are probably the intended role in whatever limited reps Zeke gets.

There are some games that get official Mac ports, and that's nice, but compatibility on the rest of your library doesn't just work out of the box.

Like I said, crossover is OK but when Mac's biggest strength is ease of use, fiddly manual configuration to make your library work isn't awesome.

You can use crossover and it isn't awful, but I think Mac is third for gaming at this point.

So it's definitely subjective.

But I definitely wouldn't swap it straight up for any of the rest.

The Deck is big and heavy compared to the field, but it uses the size for a couple of purposes:

1. It has full controller sized everything (this is without measuring; it feels extremely comparable to the Xbox controller, though), plus the touchpads that are IMO an absolute requirement for interacting with the OS at all. Using any joystick to move a mouse cursor is terrible, and you will have to interact with the OS. You can work around this by only managing stuff at home with a mouse and keyboard plugged in and launching everything through a controller friendly launcher, but it's a headache.

2. The Ally has the same 40WH battery the Steam Deck does (per a 30 second search), but if you go smaller you almost definitely have to go smaller. On a similar note, much of the rest of the space is cooling. If something is advertising comparable specs in a meaningfully smaller package, they're sacrificing one or the other. It's just physics. The Ally can kick up the power to higher top end performance, but it's at a higher power draw and you can get down to ~2 hours battery life on the deck. Again, the basic limitations of physics say that's going to make a dent in the already tight battery life constraints if you use the power. (Yes, having it while plugged in is still nice.)

3. The shape is really comfortable. It does take some awareness to avoid resting the weight on your elbows, but once you recognize that you can comfortably play long sessions (compared to the switch, but a lot of the slightly smaller ones have very comparable designs because they're the only way to make a real dent without shrinking the screen).

You can also install Windows without major issue if that's your preference, though if you don't play games that choose to block you out for anticheat you probably don't need to.

Ultimately, all of these devices have to make compromises. It's a handheld and there's only one real supplier for chips to make it with (unless you go the basically Android only ARM route). Steam chose an extremely balanced approach such that you don't really feel any of them. Others chose to push harder to one metric or another, but because of the bottom line constraints of the form factor, they had to sacrifice something else to do it. It's possible you prefer the other approaches better, and that's fine. Valve will be perfectly happy if enough good options become available that there's no need for a second deck. Their goal was to make handheld PC gaming a thing (and cut down their reliance on windows), and they were extremely successful at both.

The reviews are what they are because there are literally zero gaming outlets who respect the existence of sports games or cover them the way they cover anything else.

I play hundreds of games a year and have literally never once seen a player t pose on the field. It's not a thing that's a normal or frequent occurrence, and anyone who tells you it is isn't just incompetent. They're deliberately and maliciously lying to you, and in and of itself it's incontrovertible proof that their entire review is fraud.

There will always be bugs. It's the nature of a complex simulation with emergent gameplay.

But anyone telling you that they're increasing doesn't know what they're talking about. They're increasingly small edge cases as the simulation gets very obviously more advanced and complex every iteration. It's not minor and it's not subtle. If you play ten hours a year with a middle school football level of understanding the improvements are impossible to miss.

Any review from someone who doesn't watch football every week all season is the exact same quality of someone who's never played an FPS reviewing a tactical shooter. it has literally zero value in any possible context and it's an embarrassment to your organization to publish it.