I have now tried Virtual Reality and it is amazing

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RandyT:

--- Quote from: fallacy on December 03, 2024, 05:30:05 pm ---They always offer bigger storage options but for the next one up is usually $100 if not more bare minimum. Especially apples, they have always pulled that carp. You want 64 instead of 32 that will be $150 more. You want 512? Well…afraid we are going to need your first born.

--- End quote ---

To be fair, cell phones use NAND storage and in the early days, that stuff was expensive. I also expect that less people bought the higher dollar models, so any extra manufacturing costs to provide them needed to amortized over a fewer number of purchasers. But I'm sure cell phone makers add their own "luxury tax", because those people can afford it and they can't upgrade it themselves.

I compare it to VRAM on a GPU. There are basically only 2 classes of hardware on a GPU which have value. The GPU processor and the VRAM. An increase in either of those costs bigly.

fallacy:
Linus made a video on this price gouging pratice before.

RandyT:
Just watched it. He goes into very good reasons as to why the memory is soldered, but then disregards those same reasons where storage is concerned. While you may not need super fast storage for storing photos of your kid's birthday party, if you want to do anything which requires data of the amount larger than your RAM (minus the operating system and ton of background processes running), then you need to be able to access it as fast as you are using it out of RAM. And while he says you can just stick in a PCIE NVME, you aren't going to do that on a small device and they come in many different speeds. Will the consumer buy the cheapest one and get something so slow that it results in a poor reflection on the company/product or a call to support? Probably. Fortunately, where the PS5 is concerned, most console players are tech kids who do their research, and even if they aren't, Sony has code in place to test the speed of add-on storage and warns you if it isn't "up to spec".

The video also focuses heavily on Apple. Apple computers are designed for users, not enthusiasts. I'd garner a guess that 90%+ of Apple users wouldn't dream of popping open their own hardware to try to upgrade it. It's also easy for him to just say "Increase the base system specs and don't make as much profit for shareholders", but Apple consumers pay the asking price, so they would be stupid to do so. Just putting out a video like this changes nothing. Only consumers can effect this kind of change.

And then there is the multiple tier product offerings. Again, it's easy to say offer more (and charge more), but Apple doesn't operate only in the West and many of our local brethren also don't have deep pockets. They would rather you buy the tier you can afford than buy something else. But producing and stocking of those different tiers is a costly endeavor. As I stated, though, if you are buying Apple and need the capabilities of the higher tiers, you are probably already part of the "cult" (<= used in the kindest way possible) and can afford it. Of course they will be happy to take more of the money you have already demonstrated that you don't care about. :)

That's not to say that Apple doesn't have some interesting technology. One of the things some models do very well, again thanks to things like unified system memory (soldered onto device) is AI applications. AI needs fast access to massive datasets, which is why they are typically relegated to VRAM and processed locally to the GPU. I.e. that data travels over the much slower PCIE bus only once when it is loaded onto the GPU and iterated over 1000's of times by the GPU's processor. With unified memory, there's no distinction between System RAM or graphics RAM. It's all very fast, with a large bus width, so the main processor has similar access to it as the GPU does to VRAM. Now the processors aren't as fast as the GPU for those kinds of tasks, but running local LLM's on a laptop is actually a thing with those, and with fairly acceptable speed.

This has gone a bit into wonky territory, but the technical details are important for certain tasks. It's very superficial to just yell "Greed!" and there is an element of that. It's just not as big a factor as most probably think.

RandyT:
Back to the VR Topic:

Because the latest version of PinballFX has been re-coded in Unreal Engine 4, ALL 100+ tables are supposedly perfectly playable in VR with UEVR! About 30 of which are some of the most popular Williams tables.

fallacy:
I actually have pinball FX2 on steam last played Oct 7 2019, should see if I can get it running again. I think I did try to play it with the HP Reverb G2 though mixed reality software and I could not get it to work.

I picked up Miracle pool for the quest because it was 40% off back friday. I played the mixed reality version where the pool table sits in your room. It is pretty impressive, it would be nice to hold an actual stick and have an actual table to put your hands on but the way the way the balls interact on the table, the amount of power you hit the Q ball, weather you hit the Q ball higher or lower is all 100% accurate to real life.

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