We should reiterate that this warning is to OEMs only, not end users or corporations.

Who is buying a new 10th Gen. or older machine at this point?

This has nothing to do with steam (as much as you can separate the two). Even through Lutris it Proton work. Even plain wine was janky but technically worked.

Windows 10 has had more or less all of the same spyware backported to it.

People said the same shit with windows 10 vs 7/8. I swear every other update is the same cope over and over again.

Steam does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your games will. I spent like an entire day getting comfortable and customizing some distro to finally fit my liking, only to later on realize that proton just doesn’t fucking work for shit on it.

They just don’t make that big of a difference.

The 40 series was basically the exact opposite of this. The lower down the stack the worse the per generation gains got. With the lower end cards sometimes seeing regressions because of the lack of memory bandwidth/capacity.

I detested civ 6 on launch. I bought the dlc when it was cheap but idk if I’ll ever like that game. Hopefully 7 is good, but I’m definitely gonna wait until I read all of the reviews.

Thugs like double jump

Every time I’m out in the hood or in a sketchy area of town I’m constantly seeing these MFers running around double jumping.

Only if it’s a game I’m going to play regardless. I pre ordered FH4 and FH5 and I easily have 2k+ hours in both of those games.

One of the pinned posts is

Samsung Unpacked January 2025 megathread

They probably didn’t want the spam of people posting 700 different articles all saying the exact same thing.

I think trying to make the game run on the measly 8 gigs of ram, 1.8ghz cpu, and a GPU that’s worse than a Radeon 7790 would just make an awful experience. The minimum specs for 1080p all low settings is a CPU and GPU that are over twice as fast.

ban algorithms that have the specific intent of maximizing user time spent on the app.

That just means make the app shitty. You can optimize for engagement without just trying to make users angry. Making users angry at each other is just an extremely effective way to boost engagement.

Algorithm isn’t just whether or not it shows you the content. It is the sorting. Well plus the show it or not.

Real docks (not some overgrown hub), eGPUs, random high end accessories. You can do so much more with pcie over USB 4 than plain USB 3.X. And I use that stuff all the time. Ever since I got my first taste of what Thunderbolt can do I never wanted to go back.

PCIe tunneling.

I really don’t want Gabe to be replaced by a “profit all the things” CEO

Like with their black market loot crate casinos?

Make the software work on ARM so people can do their day to day tasks, then the games will come.

Mac OS has had a decent push for games on their Apple Silicon Macs recently. With how powerful the iGPU is even a lowly MacBook air can run modern games. It’s just getting more and more developers to pay attention to anything outside of Windows (aka nothing has changed in the last 20 years). Proton is the only reason the steam deck is as good as it is. A lot of native Linux ports just straight up suck and the proton version runs better.

USB 4

The primary reason why I don’t currently own a Steam Deck.

I’m honestly surprised he didn’t do it yet.

while retaining the dual USB 4 ports.

Now I’m interested. I’d probably own a steam deck by now if I could plug it into a “real” dock and get dual high res displays and/or an eGPU.

World of Warcraft

It’s also the first game I played in 2025. I just left it running.

Power (heat) modern (especially high end) CPUs and GPUs can see some impressive reductions in power with not too much of a hit to performance.

My 4090 underclocked basically as far as it will go draws about 200 watts under normal loads, 250-300 under pretty extreme loads. But the performance penalty is only like 15%

Normally when you want to save power in a desktop device you just throw a laptop CPU or GPU in there because those are tuned for better performance per watt…. Or just not an Intel CPU because AMD is so much better in that regard.

High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics

Not only that, but mid range cards just haven’t really moved that much in terms of performance. The ultra high end used to be a terrible value only for people who want the best and didn’t care about money. Now it almost makes sense from a performance per dollar standpoint to go ultra high end. At launch the 4090 was almost twice the performance of the 4080, but only cost about 1.5x. And somehow the value gets worse the lower end you go.

Meanwhile mid-high end cards like the 4060 and 7600 (which used to be some of the best values) are barely outperforming their predecessors.

I wonder if I need a separate burner for each suspicious app.

That’s going pretty far overboard. Just use an app like island to forcibly isolate and stop the app from running when you don’t want it.

This is a pretty good answer. https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/241281/how-exactly-do-apps-not-running-in-the-background-receive-notifications

Modern Tom’s hardware

actually trying

Not possible.

or rely on Windows update to give you reasonably recent drivers.

Windows update: I see you just installed this driver from 3 weeks ago, let me just revert to a driver from 2021 for ya.

Up until Android 14 I think. Android 13 for sure does not support it.

Unless an ADB trick counts https://tasker.joaoapps.com/userguide/en/help/ah_secure_setting_grant.html

They changed it the other day where airplane mode doesn’t require root. That one’s nice for me.

Never mind that shortcuts on iOS has been able to do that simple task from its inception.

Just like gsync died

(true) gsync isn’t dead, it’s only in the highest end of monitors which is basically where it’s always been. It only “died” because it requires an expensive module vs adaptive sync being built into basically every modern display controller so it’s basically free.

I thought they still made games for the non series X/S/One but apparently they stopped in 2023.

Well either way I felt the same way about the original one. I got mine in 2018 and I’ve played less than 100 hours of games on it, and never actually bought any games for it (I got it second hand with about 6 games).

In general I think AAA games just aren’t worthwhile, let alone AAA exclusives. There’s a lot of great indie games, but that requires going through the sludge of indie games.

Then they still get your money and it’s at the higher cut.

Why would MS care if you already have a PC? The console sale itself doesn’t really make them money, it’s the games. And if you’re still buying their games on PC they still get their (albeit lower) cut.

Is it really enshitification if it was like this from essentially the start?

Outside of like literally the very first few android phones when there wasn’t even apps for the platform, they came bundled with all sorts of shit. I remember my HTC from 2010 drove me insane with the junkware bundled in, and that was about 2 years post Android’s first phone. We’re at like more or less steady state shitification. (varies by phone/brand)

Only 500 hours? I’ve put years of my life into world of warcraft.

Like, we can obviously still follow news and whatnot

I stopped following the news first, then largely lost interest in new games after that. After TotalBiscuit passed I haven’t seen a single thing about video game news or reviews. If there’s something I’m interested in I might skim through a review, but that’s the most I do.

…I completely forgot that was even a thing. It came out and nobody really cared. Only the 770/750 got love, and the a380 saw some appreciation for being the quicksync addon card.

Well regardless it’s the same MSRP as the A770 post price drop, and still outperforms it.

Most of the demand is for Windows. So if your choice is to spend resources (money) where demand is, or hope that you can possibly create demand where there isn’t any currently.

Original MSRP of the A770 was $330 so that is a big improvement. I assume intel is sticking with a reasonable launch MSRP to set expectations right.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-arc-a750-a770-full-pricing-revealed

It would be incredibly stupid for Intel to abandon the dGPU market after spending all this money on it. As long as Battlemage turns out alright (basically it’s only goal) I doubt it will go away.

They cut the die size nearly in half so they’re no longer blowing a fuck ton of money on a $200 GPU. As long as utilization of the silicon goes up it should be fine.

Blu rays still make up most of physical sales

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KACt6YhOyY

Cars have an expected lifespan of like 20 years, operating systems don’t.

Windows 7 came out with very early support for efi boot which took explicit effort to get to work. At this point most OEM machines out there don’t even support the legacy booting mode. That is ancient by tech standards.