cerebralhawks
@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Xbox ditching hardware and exclusive games "makes sense," former Microsoft exec and Blizzard boss says, as "only a moron would continue" making consoles as games go third party 1 day ago:
Apple announced the transition in 2005 but began using Intel chips in 2006, but still, PowerPC is best known as the chips that powered Macs for a little over a decade.
I’m not the person you responded to — I actually did not know that the Wii U used PowerPC. I did know that the Xbox 360 did and have made that argument.
It’s a big egregious to call it a Mac (though I do, mostly in jest), but, that is the connection.
Of note, the PowerPC chips were made by IBM (and Motorola according to the article I linked — I did not know that before). So, a former Apple competitor. And now (since mid-2020) Apple competes with Intel, which they switched to from PowerPC. So, bit of a tangent at this point, but these rivalries we have as users are partnerships that come and go in the business world.
- Comment on Does Coke Zero taste different in the UK vs. the USA? 2 days ago:
I have another reason for cutting out soda, but as far as artificial sweeteners go, one is the devil you know (sucrose/sugar) and the other is a bunch of maybes (sucralose). Maybe someday they discover something wrong with it and invent something better. Or humanity just turns on sugar like we’ve turned on tobacco/nicotine…
- Comment on Women’s urinals to be at more UK events after £1m funding boost 2 days ago:
Spoiler: long article with no mention of how they actually work.
Anyone know? It sounds cool. I imagine it’s like a man’s urinal except longer to reach between the thighs; she stands over it, pulls panties to one side, and it catches everything. But, that’s only a guess.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
I can think of two reasons the scene doesn’t use GOG when the GOG version is always available. One, the Steam version is likely to be updated more recently. Two, the pride of breaking a lock rather than going in the unlocked door.
Third, and this is just unfounded speculation, but since you have to trust the crack anyway and let it by your security software, maybe it’s doing something on the side? Scene don’t work for free. You’ll never really know until it slows you’re computer down, or does someone obvious.
On the other hand, technically Mac software is also DRM free as you can just copy the .app, but they do work stuff out so this can be defeated. But ideally Mac stuff is super simple. The .app is basically a container (like a zip file) that contains everything the application or game requires. It’s a fundamentally better system. Windows users souls be asking why they don’t get the same treatment. Portable apps and games have always existed but it’s not standard on Windows. And it’s a shame.
- Comment on If a girl asks you if you're big, are you supposed to lie or not? 4 days ago:
I would say I’ve never had any complaints. Then, depending on context I might add — but let’s be honest, probably not — “only one way to find out.”
- Comment on Does Coke Zero taste different in the UK vs. the USA? 4 days ago:
Yeah, I was confused by the wording of the question. Wasn’t trying to weasel around the comment as much as I was trying to make sense of it.
I read it again. You seem to think that Coke Zero in the US is made to taste like HFCS because that’s what the US puts in regular soda? Because that’s not the case. Sucralose doesn’t emulate the flavour of HFCS or cane sugar.
Here’s a Wikipedia article on it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose
As to whether it tastes different, I suppose it might. Coca-Cola prides itself on a “secret recipe” known only to a few, but like a few other products that claim the same, this is mostly marketing. The “secret” to Coca-Cola is that, in the US, the company has the exclusive right to import the coca plant and extract from it. This process can be used to make the narcotic cocaine, and in fact Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine. It doesn’t now, but it does still contain coca extract, which no other soda from another company can do. I do not know how the United Kingdom regulates the coca plant. If they don’t grant Coca-Cola the right to use it, they cannot make US Coca-Cola in the UK, and they probably can’t import the safe, cocaine-free extract from the US, either. It depends.
So, I think your question should have less to do with how the beverage is sweetened or if the UK lets them make it the same way the US does. I assume the UK is your country, since Coke is made in the US (was invented there, in/near Atlanta, Georgia) so it’s kind of the baseline.
- Comment on Does Coke Zero taste different in the UK vs. the USA? 5 days ago:
Coke Zero is sweetened with sucralose, not HFCS or cane sugar. It’s a diabetic friendly alternative. It might taste closer to Coke made with cane sugar, but I’m not sure. I don’t drink soda anymore, but I do drink Gatorade Zero.
I recommend sucralose sweetened beverages over HFCS and cane sugar ones.
- Comment on Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it 5 days ago:
I don’t hate Windows, but it seems like every day Microsoft gives me reasons to be thankful I’m a Mac user.
Either go all in with Microsoft’s crap, pay for Microsoft 365, and enjoy the ride — or learn Linux. It’s easy, you can run it off a portable SSD. You don’t have to trash your Windows installation. You can do it virtually risk free. I recommend Ubuntu for new users, but Linux Mint is another good choice and it resembles Windows more, so it will be more familiar to you. Linux has never been better. It’s not just a free alternative to Windows; it is very much its own thing. Or, if you aren’t a gamer, and you need new hardware anyway… I’d grab a Mac mini. They’re $500 and they do everything you need. Gaming not so much (though we did just get Cyberpunk this year).
- Comment on Are there video media (e.g TV shows, Movies, anime, video games, youtube videos, etc...) with a majority of the dialogue in an fictional language? 1 week ago:
You covered all kinds of media but music, but Enya sings in a made-up language, but not exclusively. Just five songs are in Loxian, a language her songwriter made up for her after she did the song from Lord of the Rings (with some lyrics in Elvish or whatever the Tolkien language is). So she wanted a language that would suit her style and her songwriter made one for her.
The cool thing is, they wrote this whole sci-fi backstory for it about how the Irish go to space, to the moon, and they jump to a faraway galaxy. Also, Enya only sings the water dialect of Loxian — they have a dialect for each of the four natural elements.
The Enya songs in Loxian are:
- Less Than a Pearl
- The River Sings
- Water Shows the Hidden Heart
- The Forge of the Angels
- The Loxian Gate
The first three are on the album Amarantine; the last two are on Dark Sky Island. IMO Loxian Gate is the best of the lot, followed by The River Sings. If you listen on Apple Music or something that, you can watch the lyrics go by as she sings them, but it will not translate them. There are translations online, though.
- Comment on We are not reading old public domain books because it's not profitable 1 week ago:
Not only do “they” say Count of Monte Cristo is good (whoever “they” are), it’s one of the most adapted books out there.
It’s been made into a bunch of movies. My favorite is still the 2002 version, but the French just put one out this year or last.
The ABC soap opera/thriller Revenge is based on it. And it’s so good.
There’s an anime series set in the far future that is also based on it. The art style will take some getting used to, but the story is solid. It’s a closer adaptation than Revenge is, just being a shift from past to future.
I don’t think there’s been a bad adaptation of it. Maybe there has, I’m sure they can’t all be winners, but it’s pretty good… when someone disagrees about which Count of Monte Cristo movie is better, they’re rarely wrong. A lot of them have good points.
- Comment on (Spoiler Thread) Your top 10 video game protagonist deaths 1 week ago:
The first three, so much.
Also, I’m gesturing wildly and vaguely at the whole Life is Strange series. The one death in the first one I’m thinking of is just part of it. I feel like the whole thing is heart wrenchingly sad.
Oh yeah. Johnny Silverhand. And in case you missed it, most of his memories are false. Morgan Blackhand did most of what Johnny is known for. And a couple of his friends sold him out. He wasn’t really killed per se, his mind was trapped in a digital hell and then he woke up in a crazy chick’s head who wanted him out and that’s basically the game. You play the chick. Johnny starts out as the bad guy but by the end you’re rolling to die for him. Because he’s basically Keanu Reeves.
- Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | Official Trailer | Paramount+ (NYCC 2025) 1 week ago:
Looks good, but too soon to tell. They threw a lot of good stuff at us quickly, but what holds it all together?
Two questions I have: Is Federation HQ a starship saucer section now? WTF was that? And did they just put River Tam from Firefly in Star Trek? Because it kind of looks like they did. Might not be Summer Glau, but that girl definitely had River Tam energy.
Will definitely give this a chance — I’ve been saying they should make a Starfleet Academy series for decades. Now we’re getting one.
- Comment on Microsoft just changed where your Word documents live — here’s why it matters 1 week ago:
Honestly, even as a privacy guy, this makes sense. SkyDrive was unique in giving people 30GB, plus 5GB if you turned on photo upload (even if you turned it right back off). So even without paying, my OneDrive is still 35GB. That’s plenty for documents.
What Windows 10+ does with backing stuff up to OneDrive and sharing it across builds is smart, if not the best execution. I kind of have that between my Macs and iPhone with Safari bookmarks and passwords.
I would be asking how safe OneDrive is and if it had any major breaches, if I were a Windows user. I’m actually using iWork and iCloud though, and I trust that a little more, but OneDrive doesn’t seem that problematic to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about Microsoft, but OneDrive doesn’t earn any ire from me. Should it? (Probably not since I’m a Mac user and it’s all abstract anyway.)
- Comment on The story of X-Copy on the Amiga - Spillhistorie.no 1 week ago:
The Amiga was certainly a unique computer. I remember this program, or one much like it. Played a lot of games on my A1000 back in the day.
- Comment on Day 451 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
0451 was a door code in the first level. It’s become iconic since then.
The first game is pretty dated. Most people didn’t like the graphics. I did, but I’m weird. I still think Unreal Engine 1 is beautiful. Just… jagged. The remaster will not be much better. The remaster is just important because we’ll be able to play DX1 on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. I can play the original PC version on my Mac, but I’m hoping for a native Mac port since it’s Aspyr and that’s what they were doing before, but to be fair, they were doing Mac ports of Xbox 360 games when both Mac and Xbox 360 used IBM PowerPC chips (in other words, half the work was done for them already since they had the same CPU architecture). But that’s true again since the Mac has the same ARM64 CPU architecture as the Switch and Switch 2, so in theory anything that can run on the Switch can also run on the Mac (and, point of fact, Switch emulators generally work better on Macs because they only have to emulate the code, not the chipset).
- Comment on Day 451 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
Day 451 and the screenshot isn’t entering 0451 in Deus Ex? Now I feel old. Oh well, the remaster is coming, some younger gamers will probably play it.
- Comment on People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads 1 week ago:
Even without having other Apple products. The only real benefit I see with the Apple TV — I do have other Apple products — is I can AirPlay to it. But, it isn’t very stable for whatever reason. The connection will just drop. So I AirPlay to the TV itself instead, and that works, though sometimes the audio doesn’t, so I just route it back to the MacBook, which has very good speakers, and it’s fine. Or I grab my Thunderbolt to HDMI and plug in directly, turn the TV into a monitor — but, this bypasses the Apple TV (but, so does AirPlaying to the TV itself). Oh, and I can use my phone or watch as a remote. All in all it’s perfectly fine if you don’t have any other Apple stuff.
The one thing it’s really lacking is some Dolby codec that people need to play Blu-ray rips. People in communities like Plex and Jellyfin complain about that. But those are like 50GB+ per movie, I don’t have that kind of storage to even come close to caring about that issue. It can still play 4K content, just not with that one codec.
In fact, it’s probably one of the best Apple devices out there, just because the competition is so much worse. I’d also say the same thing about the iPad, and the MacBook. You can make a case for a gaming PC, but for a laptop that isn’t gonna game because battery is an issue, you’re going for efficiency, it’s really hard to beat the MacBook. As for the iPad, it’s hard to tell which Android tablets are good and which ones aren’t — or which ones will never get updated. And iPad got a lot of love this year, it’s basically a desktop OS now (it’s like macOS lite at this point). No, you still can’t install whatever you want — need an actual computer for that.
- Comment on People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads 1 week ago:
Isn’t there a saying about this? “Leopards ate my face” or something like that?
It’s like TVs… Google TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Fire TV… it’s all ads, all the way down. Apple TV though? Just a grid of apps. Certain apps on the dock (the top shelf as it’s called) could display ads because they’re allowed to display content in the top half, but I haven’t seen it done. Video apps typically just show what’s up next in your queue and maybe something suggested. But you can control what goes on the dock.
Can’t block ads on it and YouTube is fundamentally broken for it (despite there being no ad blocker between the app and the service). I’m looking into getting a gently used M1 Mac Mini for my TV, and wiring one of those Bluetooth keyboard/mouse things up to it. That way I can just run Firefox with uBlock Origin and call it a day.
Fuck all these “smart” devices. Can’t win with any of them. Meanwhile you can get a Raspberry Pi and be running Linux on your TV. That might introduce some challenges, but hey, you got Plex (/Jellyfin/whatever) anyway.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
On a Windows machine, the GOG version of Fallout 3 works right out of the box in Windows 10. Not sure about 11, but no reason to believe it would be different.
The issue was, Fallout 3 had DRM that was shut down ages ago. Games for Windows Live. Xbox Live for Windows. Bethesda refused to remove the DRM and it was actually illegal to do so in the US. GOG had it without DRM first. Like a decade later Bethesda officially removed it from the Steam version.
There’s like one other thing you have to do and it has to do with memory and I’m not sure how necessary it is, but again, the GOG version does it automatically.
But screw Windows and its bullshit. I can run the GOG version of Fallout 4 on my Mac, albeit with a few hacks. I have to disable gore because something about the gore animation fucks up the translation layer. There are a couple others but the biggest change is, no gore. I mean the exploding heads. I think it still has blood. It’s not censored. Anyway, the flying eyeballs were a bit much, it got old quick. So no issues there. I’ve also run Deus Ex, but that’s Unreal Engine 1 and not really relevant. Haven’t tried running Fallout 3 yet.
- Comment on Great games you would recommend from before 1990? 1 week ago:
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, LucasArts, 1988. It’s a computer game though. It was never on the NES.
Deus Ex (2000) was popular for mashing together tabloid stories to make a story, but Zak did it first. And it was way cornier. You play a tabloid reporter who is sent to Seattle to investigate a two-headed squirrel when he learns of an alien invasion (whose leader is an Elvis impersonator). The game is awesome and IIRC you almost can’t lose at it, at least not now. The game came with DRM in the form of codes written in black on maroon and it was hard to read; when the game asked for a code, if you got it wrong, you were sent to jail for copyright theft. The first time they’d let you out, but the second time ended the game. The one on GOG does not ask for codes. They took that out. You can also die in Egypt to the Sphinx. You can run out of air on Mars. You can soft lock the game on Mars (to avoid this, make sure each of the co-eds on Mars takes an extra tram token with her if she rides the tram, the token dispenser at the other end is broken).
Also, Zak can typically be had for about a buck on GOG sales.
Uninvited, ICOM Simulations, 1986. Another computer game, but this was ported to the NES, along with its more popular cousin, Shadowgate (also an 80s game, from 1987). Short if you know how to beat it. I think they both can be ran in like 20-30 minutes? Zak can be speed ran in about an hour and a half if you’re good, and if you’re lucky in the mazes, but I’m not sure what the records actually are. These games are long in how they took you ages to figure stuff out before the Internet was a thing.
Hack, 1984, high school students. Not to be confused with the .hack PS2 games (the anime they’re based on which later became Sword Art Online). No, this was a top-down D&D type game and one of the first roguelikes (Rogue being the original). I never actually played Rogue though. And Hack was later rebranded to NetHack (though, it’s not about hacking online) and you can play it on just about anything. Android and iOS ports exist. I don’t think it’s on consoles though. But it’s a free game, anyone can play it right now. There’s probably even a way to play it in your browser. For the longest time, I’ve said a modern port was impossible. Diablo was kind of based around the same idea (delving through randomly generated dungeons) but Diablo didn’t do half the shit Hack did. Didn’t do a quarter of the things. Noita is a more modern (Windows only IIRC) roguelike, but it’s completely different in form. Still pretty varied in what all you can do. You’ll be able to beat the main boss and complete the game after playing for a couple weeks and learning the game, but that is not the main goal of the game. I don’t think anybody’s figured that out yet. People are still figuring stuff out. There are still mysteries yet to be solved. To the best of my knowledge, Noita has not been “beaten” yet. As in… by anyone. Anyone who can prove it, anyway. Maybe the developers have done so. And maybe some idiot savant out there has, but hasn’t publicised it yet. Anyway, Hack can be beat — you delve down 35+ levels, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (that’s Rodney backwards, but I don’t know who that is if anyone), which only spawns past a certain level — and then escape with it. I think I did it once? Got the Amulet half a dozen times or more (but not a full dozen) and died many times taking it back up.
- Comment on Can Mac apps be emulated and run on Windows? 1 week ago:
No, but there’s next to nothing on Mac that isn’t on Windows, or has some equivalent on Windows.
I run Macs. I don’t like Windows. I’ve used Windows for years, and still use it at work. For 99% of my usage, there’s nothing that stops me from using the other platform. It’s just a preference. In fact, there are free apps on Windows that cost money on macOS. And I’ve paid for some of them.
- Comment on What's your greatest "gaming high" you've been chasing ever since? Please take care not to spoil anything, if you are going to be story-specific. 1 week ago:
Hearing that we were missing half the game in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
This one IS a bit of a spoiler… but not much. For one, everyone knows it. Two, the game came out in the 1990s. That’s why everyone knows it. So anyway.
So you play this game. It’s like a Super NES game, but it’s on the PlayStation. It has CD quality music and voice acting (actually pretty shitty voice acting, but, I mean, it’s CD quality audio). Actually, let’s qualify that with a 45 second video. Aside from Dracula’s final line in the exchange, the lines are poorly read from a poorly written script and it shows. And yet, it’s still awesome.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tV33Ewf_hw
Anyway, it’s a fairly long game as far as Super NES games go. You go through the entire castle, you eventually confront the bad guy (who isn’t Dracula — he’s dead, and has been dead, you kill some other guy) and the credits roll. You won. Fine game. However, shortly after the game came out — it didn’t really take that long, but we weren’t all on the Internet then, so it took longer to get to some people — that if you did a few very specific things, you would instead see this ball above the last boss. Attack that instead, and the last boss is revealed to be a puppet, and he lets you pass… into the inverted castle. It’s the whole ass castle, but it’s upside down and has harder monsters. And take a wild guess who you fight at the end?
Its Game Boy Advance sequel, Aria of Sorrow, attempted a similar thing. Beat the last boss and you win, but do it with three souls equipped and… well, I’m actually not gonna spoil that. A cool thing happens. And you can go to this final area, it’s not a long area. If you win, you win the game harder… but if you lose in that final battle, you get this awesome cut scene that calls back to the video I posted above. So while they reused the gimmick, they did it in the best possible way.
None of the Castlevania games have captured that magic since. Bloodstained, the spinoff by the creator of Symphony of the Night, kind of does a similar thing in a couple spots, and it does have the false final boss, but I think it’s more clearly called out and I think you’re meant to know it’s not the end of the game. And I feel like it’s not a win if you take it, the game kinda laughs at you. Another game that poked fun at this was Shadow Complex, the shameless ripoff of Super Metroid on Xbox 360/Live Arcade. (Great game though!) After losing your girlfriend to paramilitary thugs in the Pacific Northwest and exploring a bit of their compound, you eventually get back to your car (Jeep?) and you have the option to leave. Credits roll and you pop an achievement called “Plenty of Fish in the Sea.” They knew you’d try it and rewarded you for doing so, but it’s clearly not the real ending (it’s too soon).
- Comment on Why doesn't anybody get notified about warrants for their arrest? 1 week ago:
In a vacuum, that is a fact; however, for most of the things people get warrants out on them for, they know what they did. If they don’t know it was wrong/a crime, I would say that’s more on them than on the system.
You can get warrants for unpaid moving violations. For stuff like that, I think notification by mail would be more efficient. Like “you haven’t paid this so now there is a warrant out for your arrest,” just to inform the person. Yes, going against the reason for not notifying, they may still commit several more moving violations (like speeding) before being caught, but tons of people do this, sometimes right in front of cops, and a lot of cops look the other way. Now if someone has done something violent, left a victim, no, you wouldn’t want to notify them because of the chance that they’d either go do more harm to the victim (and now the police/the system is liable) or they will do more crime that will result in more victims, and again, liability.
- Comment on ParanoidAndroid was the perfect name for a privacy focused android custom rom 1 week ago:
Yes, all of that. I forgot about Xposed, the name and what it was. It’s been years since I was involved with any of that (strictly as a user).
- Comment on Can a person who is a convicted felon/ rapist even get nominated for the Nobel Peace Price? Extra points if you can ELI5 that. 1 week ago:
I lost what little faith I had in the Nobel Peace Prize when Obama won it — and I liked Barack Obama, I voted for him both times, but I didn’t think “up and coming politician”/“first Black president” really qualified him, and the general feeling around the time was “well we hope he does good for peace in the world.” So… you give him a prize that is probably better suited to someone else, hoping he does what you want in the future?
Regarding Trump being a felon, I’m more concerned that we don’t let felons vote, but we’ll let a felon be president. Make that make sense.
- Comment on Why doesn't anybody get notified about warrants for their arrest? 1 week ago:
- Because if there’s a warrant out for your arrest, you’ve deliberately done something, so you know you’re being looked into. It’s not a lottery. They don’t just issue warrants to random people who have no idea whatsoever that a warrant could be issued for their arrest. A warrant is just a court order to bring you in to face charges. Those charges are based on criminal law. You don’t get warrants for speeding or blowing a red light or a stop sign or, since we’re on the computer, downloading music or movies. You do get notified via the mail (or email) for those kinds of things.
Anyway, a warrant has to be served, and you can’t be charged for evading arrest if they can’t find you. It’s once the warrant has been served — which legally has to be done in person — that if you flee, you are guilty of another crime. Once you are notified, you would typically be arrested right then and there. Depending on the nature of the crime, they may not even restrain you, if you’re willing to get in the back of the car and come quietly. The violent arrests you see are either because of the violent nature of the crime or the criminal (yes, or the cop). But they aren’t the norm.
- Comment on Mary Wiseman’s Tilly Will Be In ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,’ But Not As Much As Expected 2 weeks ago:
Who?
Oh… you mean Captain Killy!
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 2 weeks ago:
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You got me there. I can probably get a gently used iPhone from a generation or two back and maybe get down to $300, but I dunno about $200. You’re 100% right on that one, and more to the point, mid-range Android isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. One of the biggest secrets in mobile is that performance has plateaued.
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You can only block ads OS-wide on Android if you’re rooted. AdAway (and I suppose others like it) edit the HOSTS file which trumps DNS. DNS is what iPhone users use, and what unrooted Android users use. The problem with DNS isn’t that it doesn’t work — it does — it’s that bad actors can tunnel around it. So Google, great example, the app I mean, has its own DNS. They have various reasons but what it boils down to is “we can tunnel around your ad blocker.” They definitely do this on iOS. They probably do it on Android. But editing HOSTS can beat that. And no, I don’t get ads on YouTube, either — but I do not use the app. You can, if you’re on Android and you’re rooted and you have a good HOSTS file. I can block YouTube ads with Safari and uBlock Origin (yeah, we got it now) but it’s just DNS. I will concede that the best way to browse on a phone is Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin. Us iPhone users wish we had that. We don’t. But we can get close. Really, the only ads I see are in the App Store. It’s become a cesspool of shit.
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I don’t sail on my phone. I’ve tried, a few things don’t work. I have computers for that. I have a good/decent emulator that works good. As far as movies, music, shows, audiobooks, I have a Plex server and my iPhone has no problem accessing that. I bet you could use an Android phone as a Plex server though. Not that I’d want to. But you probably could. Maybe. Like with root? I dunno. But anything on my iPhone (not counting Plex stuff), I can get on your Android phone. And vice-versa. I mean, not to use your Android phone as an example, that’s kinda hostile, I mean if I have an iPhone in one hand and an Android phone in the other, I got no problem getting stuff from one to the other. Either way. Best if they’re on the same WiFi, but I can make one a hotspot in a pinch.
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- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 2 weeks ago:
Actually, the first phone to do a lot of things was actually an Android — good and bad! The first fingerprint reader, I think may have been the Motorola Bionic? But it was like an electric razor, it had these things you roll your finger across. It was weird. Not like what we have now. Likewise, I’m pretty sure an Android phone was the first one to pull the headphone jack. It was just because Apple did it right when they brought out the AirPods that people cried foul (rightly so). Memory card? Apple never supported them (they’re too slow), and Android phones famously didn’t support them… I think the Nexus phones? Pixel too. I don’t think any Google-branded phone had a memory card slot.
More expensive does include the foldables, and you can’t say they don’t count because they exist. I wouldn’t count the diamond-crusted Android phones, those are super limited edition. But anyone can go buy a fold or a flip, so they have to be considered. Right now the top iPhone costs $2000 in the US. It’s a 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max. Android gets higher, albeit with folds, but it does get higher, and the performance isn’t any better.
As far as Samsung specifically: the chip in the Galaxy S25 is faster than the one in the iPhone 16 Pro/Max, but it also loses more power when it throttles for getting too hot. That really only means anything in high-end gaming, though. For day-to-day usage the Samsung will clock higher. It’s only going to get 3-4 years of support though, if that, and they still sell your private information. You can’t even use Samsung Health without agreeing to let them sell your private medical data (whatever you put in it). So no, it can’t do everything an iPhone can do. It can’t keep your medical information private, which is enshrined in law in many countries, but if you agree to let them sell it, that goes out the window. Why would you give that up when you don’t have to?
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 2 weeks ago:
What about it is better? Honest question, from someone who uses both.
So yeah, on Android you can do a little more with home screen customisation. It used to be a lot more — I can’t believe it took Apple how many years to figure out how to place an icon to the right of or below an open space? It’s closer now, they both steal from each other, but you can do a lot more. My Android phone is partly a cosplay prop: it’s a real-life NookPhone, from Animal Crossing. My icons are huge, they’re the ones from the game, but they open real apps, and they’re in a 3x3 grid. Definitely can’t do that on iOS. But I don’t need that on my daily driver. And many people say — and I’m inclined to agree — that when an app is on both, it’s better on iOS due to fewer hardware configurations to support.
Also, we have Delta, the emulator that backs everything up to, ironically, Google Drive. So I can show you this app on my iPhone. I can also AirDrop you any game I have. Long press, share, AirDrop, find your iPhone, you open it with the same app, you got it now. Super easy. But I can also uninstall the app, it removes all the files and whatnot. I can go into Files, double check all my games are gone. Saves, all of it. Then I reinstall it. Nothing… but as soon as I sign into Google Drive, it re-downloads everything. I just wish the emulator ran on the Mac, too — I’d have cross-device sync. Also, the emulator is Nintendo only, no PlayStation, no Sega, nothing like that.
And then the privacy issue. I think it’s wild so few people care about their private information being sold. Then again, Facebook, TikTok, and others are huge. So I might be the outlier caring about that. But I still do.