Usually that affects businesses that either provide an online service, so their costs spike massively

It was reported they were spending half a million USD a month on server costs. A lot of the servers are player-hosted but there are also official servers hosted by PocketPair. Half a million won’t immediately crush them with their current sales numbers but it isn’t great either.

Honestly no idea why they even have official servers.

750ti and 1050ti were pretty well liked since they didn’t need external power (easy to toss into a cheap pre built) and were a reasonable price.

These days they aren’t even a reasonable price though.

I’ve seen comparisons of the 32GB vs 16GB GPD Win4 and there’s about a 10-15% uplift in performance at the same TDP in a lot of games with the 32GB model.

So it can give an increase in performance, or at the least let you run at a slightly lower TDP for the same performance and a bit better battery life.

Of course this was the 6800U, hard to say if the effects are similar for Intel’s chipset or not.

Conveniently I work in this space, but note the following is primarily my own personal opinion.

Primarily there’s a few reasons I prefer Android Auto over native Android on the car:

1. Ever had a phone that’s a few years old slow down in you? Now imagine you buy a car for $60k, and three years down the line the (already sluggish to begin with) Android interface is bogged down by updates and is barely usable. Imagine Spotify drops support for that version of Android Automotive. Android Auto puts all the infotainment into something the customer controls, and something external to the car so you are not dependent upon the OEM to do their own due diligence to ensure functionality and compatibility. If my phone slows down from age/wear/increased software demands, I go buy a new $400 phone. If my car’s infotainment slows down I…buy a new car? (Looking at you GM)

2. Like I said it moves the infotainment to something in the customer’s (and Google/Apple’s) hand. OEMs do not want this. Auto makers want you locked into their proprietary Android skins for two reasons. First, making it more difficult to leave their specific company’s ecosystem. They (will) build in their own apps that you’ll start putting all your settings and private info on. Things like remembering a driver’s preferred seating and mirror arrangement and auto-adjusting, so when your spouse buys a car you go “Oh well if we both have brand X, it’ll be easier to drive each other’s cars.” Etc. Second, they want all of your data. Legitimately the industry is on fire right now figuring out how much consumer data we can scrape and use/sell with these systems. The Android Automotive stack in a car is 300% sending data back to the OEM of literally anything they are legally allowed to collect. Probably more, too. Plug in Android Auto from my phone and yeah they’re still spying on me, but they don’t have my Spotify login info or my specific apps used, they just have what the vehicle can directly measure (still a terrifying amount).

In your specific case with a third party head unit…go ham and use the stock interface if you want. Personally I’d still use Android Auto, to top off my phone and to access my local music library (I don’t stream music), but a third party has a lot less interest in spying on you or locking you in the same way an OEM does.

Also out of curiosity, what head unit did you get? I’ve got a 2012 Cruze I’ve considered installing one of those on but I can almost never find anything that seems actually trustworthy.

I’ve heard that, but once I tried to refund a game at 3 hours and got nothing but an automated response (denial) everytime I requested a refund.

In this specific case it was actually a game I played 2 hours of during a free weekend approximately 4 years before buying it, played one hour after buying it to see if it had gotten better, decided it hadn’t and refunded it. But Steam counts free weekend playtime towards the refund window…

If there’s any actual way to ensure a human reviews it, that’d be neat. 100% it was automatically denied by some code just checking my playtime and seeing it was past two hours.

No doubt the “next-gen update” is just an excuse to slip in paid mods like they just did with Skyrim

They did some minor hardware revisions and “Slim” models, but yeah they were never intended as a “Pro” model with increased performance/graphics. Definitely not a “tradition” by this point

Unless you’re talking about a one-off by a single hobbyist, the aftermarket Deck screen is still LCD, it’s just a higher res and more color accurate. Valve very specifically said the new OLED screen will not be able to just be dropped into the original Deck. Someone might get it to fit but it’d be a lot more involved than just a simple screen replacement.

“Holo House” is the farming and fishing minigame. I believe you unlock it once you beat stage 1, it shows up in the main menu as “???” until unlocked.

Not surprised but got a source on those password claims?

Teens will feel like outcasts if they get an Android phone while their friends still use iMessage because of the green bubbles.

So I’ve heard this sentiment a lot, and at one point it certainly was true, but are teens still texting these days at all? I swear almost everyone moved to instant messaging over Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc.

Technically you can drop bandages for other players regardless of your class, but actually coordinating that in most cases wouldn’t be worth it.