MBW 756: That Damn Dung Beetle

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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~01:19:00 - Apple’s whole childishly sordid fiasco of Apple TV together with their nascent content efforts in the era of the repugnant Planet of the Apps insisting the product be The One Living Room Thing is so absurdly wrong-headed and it’s excruciating to hear their misframings still being mirrored by punditry on the subject: clearly Apple REQUIRES a AAA console as a services company. The sooner they admit this to themselves the better (broadband, in the USA at any rate, won’t let them get away with a Stadia-style play for quite some time). Is this “the Apple TV”? Who cares, but they’d better get their act together because it’s a collossal undertaking that needs to last for many many decades, and yet after literally a decade and a half they’re still stuck navel-gazing about whether or not they should let some middling commodity-ware eclipse the hair-on-fire urgency of countering the corrosive cultural and social deterioration being instituted by the inferno of excrement that serves as their excuse for App Store entertainment through 3rd parties, with Arcade as a drop in a bucket that vaporizes before it even hits the bottom of the bucket let alone gets thrown at the fire. Make the stupid “TV” piece a hot-mateable pogo-pin add-on to the console that can also stand alone with supported TVs, end of story on this ludicrous phantom tug-of-war! Make an iPad-level “lite”, even, for the ultra-accessible version of gaming Arcade caters to that you seem obsessed with allowing to block your prospects for any viable long-term, serious—grown-up [deliberately mirrored smarmy mockery]—interactive entertainment strategy!

Might I add that the fact that what could easily prove to be the final full solo game from artists of the caliber of Sakaguchi and Uematsu is a mid-budget project that could be mistaken at first blush for the output of Square-Enix’s boutique spin-off Toyko RPG Factory studio is IMO an unforgivable travesty that should accrue universally to Apple’s everlasting shame in the annals of interactive entertainment history as the company is practically drowning in an ocean of money. Put your money where your mouth is and underwrite experiences that are meaningful to and for users as human beings rather than just individuals who happen to own Apple hardware and who allow Apple access to intimate aspects of their personal lives, at a caliber of experience that says—pun, perhaps, intended—that you mean business!

01:43:00 - Mac mini yes for an independent screen, but paired TO AN iPAD AS THE PRIMARY SCREEN via PHYSICAL CONTACTS (not wireless). There is no defensible justification IMO for gating access to the Mac platform for iPad owners behind a superfluous screen! To insist that iPad only ever be SideCar is IMO nothing short of obscene. This is no longer a case of DisplayPort ruffling Apple’s feathers of playing 2nd fiddle: you make both devices!!!

~01:59:00 - I’ve found a couple great nature docs, @Leo, on “Criosity Stream” as Rene calls it (tee-hee): “The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World”, and “Red Panda: World’s Cutest Animal” (I promise it’s good despite the eye-roll of a cloying title). Curiosity Stream is maybe old-hat a bit by now, but in case you hadn’t caught them. Alex’s vision of 120Hz 8K UHDR is tantalizing but I’m left to wonder if there’ll still be anything worth filming by the time it arrives, the way the biosphere is unravelling!

02:03:40 - Rene nailed it: “Digital goods provided infinite abundance and zero marginal cost for replication, and now we’ve figured out a way to create both scarcity and value for these things at the expense of massive compute and electrical power,” an admirably trenchant damning of the execrable, wanton late-capitalist speculative profligacy Andy identified moments prior.

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I’m having some FOMO for that pizza oven :pizza:

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I assume Apple are well aware of the struggle they face with TV+ retention, as they’ve extended the free trial twice now.

It’s interesting, we have Netflix (family want it), Disney ('cos Star Wars), Prime Video (comes with Prime) and Apple TV+ (free trial still) and I’ve watched more shows on Apple TV+, even though the catalogue is tiny compared to the others.

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As soon as Leo started talking about how he was looking forward to a more powerful Mac Mini that he could just pair with his screen of choice; as soon as I saw the rightness of this vision-- I realized there is no freaking way that Apple is updating the Mac Mini this year (or maybe even next year). I think Apple would much rather customers spend $$$ for a more powerful iMac. The Mac Mini was an easy, inexpensive, low-stakes way for Apple to get Mac fans and developers on board, and to get the press excited about the M1 and the possibilities for Apple Silicon. But Apple have shown over the last decade that they see the iMac as the center of desktop computing. They’re not going to rev that Mini again and risk having it cannibalize any iMac sales.

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Right, I know. It’s so stupid. You can only use iPad with a Mac by having an extra screen either 3rd-party or a whole-ass iMac (or other, even pricier, Mac, of course >:-P )! You’d think they’d rather cut-out 3rd party monitors since they supposedly care so much about screen quality and “enriching the lives” of users LUL but no, your iPad screen is useless to you as a portal to the Mac platform until and unless you’ve bought another screen, quite possibly with another computer in-tow.