That would be great, except it seems that most companies are actively discouraging you from using their website, as it’s easier for them to list through Amazon. Recent experience was the product on the website was higher prices, slower shipping and a restocking fee if you need to return. Amazon? Next day, ‘free shipping’ and easy returns.

Not sure unless the place exists locally and you can go in store and actually buy something (that’s becoming rare as well), that there is a better way except to not buy anything in general.

I mean, Dell is the #3 in laptop sales and sells roughly 30 million laptops per year. So yeah, Framework is roughly 0% of market share. I know this is a very tech enthusiast heavy website, but there are certain realities that people should face. It’s like saying Nothing Phone is going to remotely compete with Apple. It’s not a fair or valid comparison in the first place. I think a more fair comparison for Framework (beyond what they are hoping to achieve) would be with a small system builder like System 76, XMG or the likes.

I have never seen a Framework in the wild, however I applaud their approach, but even when taking repair costs in consideration, Frameworks are more expensive than simply upgrading to a newer laptop and using the old laptop for some other purpose. I can’t imagine with the rampocalypse that they easily survive, but I hope they do, I wish other manufacturers would make repair a higher priority.

Depends on what you are talking about again, because in general Americans are able to afford more ‘stuff’ than they ever have.

Depends on how you take it, but wage growth has matched for core services and grown. Now if you are talking about education or housing costs, then no, they have went beyond wage growth. But electronics and energy? Wages have outpaces their costs and inflation quite a lot.

I mean, at least on the PC, I haven’t bought a physical game in 10+ years. I don’t even have a CD/DVD player. Digital has always been easier and no worries about damaging physical media.

Even at $100, it’s still cheaper than games of yesteryear. If you take an average PS1 game, most sold for $50 in 1996, so $110 today. Games themselves are cheaper than ever, and consoles still have major advantages of just hooking it into a TV, and it simply works.

Umm, I mean you just turn on your console and play the game. Even easier than popping in a CD/DVD and zero worries about scratching and having to rebuy the thing.

Yeah, I can’t think of the last time I bought a physical copy of a game. Hell, I haven’t had a PC in over a decade that could load a physical CD/DVD any longer.

I am not sure I agree with this. Many if not most here grew up, and were raised on social media. We saw the risks, saw the dangers and were warned, and instead of teaching the next generation about those things, we shoved iPads in front of them and said we were too busy to pay attention.

Same thing is happening with AI. A generation learning about it, being involved with it, and instead of recognizing the pit falls, they are offloading their brains to it so they can watch Netflix and order Doordash.

Society is cooked, and the signs have always been there but we ignored them and decided to yolo instead.

It’s super common. In my and many states they put ID verification to access naked pictures, so if Dems don’t vote for it, perfect materials to campaign against. The system is f’ed.

They just upped it to 17gb a month as well. Been pretty happy with them, even though I think T-Mobile bought them out.

Yep, they do charge you to switch between networks though, and charge you a fixed fee for each additional line on top of your service, so it works well if you have just one phone or device.

I have been ok with US Mobile, but they kind of get pricing when you add devices or need more data. Mint has been pretty solid for me though, and I have heard Visible is pretty awesome.

Mint works pretty darn well. It’s still using t-mobile towers, but is a whole lot cheaper.

Just depends on how and what you do with it. All this means is people will just hide their usage of AI. Used an LLM to come up with some lyrics? Just don’t disclose it. Sampled and mixed with AI, don’t disclose it. Hell all of the mastering tools now have AI jammed in there as well.

For me at least, I like owning my media, at least that way you don’t have to worry about it disappearing in the future.

That is the unfortunate thing, hosting your own media does take storage, but I still think overall it would be cheaper depending on the amount of storage and how much you are spending on Streaming services. A quick look says people are spending $100 or so on services each month. So $1,200 a year. You can easily build a 30tb array and the NAS for under that, even with today’s outrageous prices, as as you find more storage, expand upon it. 30tb is going to host a whole lot of media. Let’s say the average 30 minute TV show is 0.5 gb and a movie is 2gb, you can store something like 20,000 TV episodes and 10,000 movies. I think you’d be just fine, and that’s a payback of one year. And you can easily share that with your friends and family without paying additional fees.

I mean people still use MicroSlop everyday, so I don’t think there will ‘ever’ be a time.

Same, works great, it’s my media, no ads, no issues. And no I don’t have to pay some $750 for a ‘PlexPass’ either.