Exactly! What sort of logic are they even trying to apply there? Basically saying “We put a lot of time into our tech demo, and it came out better than expected, so we’re going to charge for it!”

That’s just crazy.

The whole principle is that the intro experience is supposed to be free. It exists to get people pumped about the cool new thing they just bought and excited to play with it.

I guess Nintendo decided that - since you already bought the console - they don’t especially care if you are pumped or not. They already got your money.

Yes, which is a big part of why, despite allowing transfers, it still sucks.

Me neither. It’s basically a download game but with physical DRM in the form of a cartridge. The age of genuine physical game ownership is toast.

Nintendo’s site says the cartridge must always be inserted in order to play the game, and so it is the cartridge that controls the game license.

On that basis it seems likely you could sell/give the cartridge to someone else, after which they can play it and you no longer can - they’d just also have to download it first.

This is mostly the fault of what people search for.

90% of your average buyers don’t go on shopping sites and search “20W USB-C PD Charger” they go on and search “Samsung S22 charger” or whatever they’ve got.

Sellers are incentivised to design the listings around that, or they simply won’t get the clicks.

Yes it matters. Loads of manufacturers are doing soldered wifi on some of their models. Delll, HP, they are all at it.

And even if your wifi wasn’t soldered, wouldn’t it be better to know you were buying a machine where it would just work out the box rather than needing replacement?

There plenty of other things to consider too, though, especially for laptops.

WiFi chipset, trackpad hardware, webcam, all can lead to a sad time with the wrong manufacturers and driver support

Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

To play the role of the annoying five year old, “And why is that bad?”

Sus timing, though it’s certainly just branding.

The whole “My-” prefix for “My Documents” and “My Computer” and all that is something that was around since the 90s, and really served to emphasise the “Personal” in “Personal Computer” at a time when PCs were coming into the home for the first time.

Nowadays that branding is really unnecessary and feels pretty antiquated too, especially in an era where most stuff for most people is online, and the emphasis is more on connected seamless stuff rather than a cute little folder to put your things in.

I’m trying to swear less. Or rather, to swear only where a swear is warranted.

My Dad has a habit of interjecting constant cuss words into everything he says, like “I was at the fucking supermarket right and then I’m just trying to find a fucking tin of beans…” and it’s just so unnecessary, to the point where the swears mean nothing because they are just peppered everywhere. I have to keep reminding him, “Dad, please tone it down a little”

And that’s an easy habit to get into but its exactly what I don’t want to be doing - swearing just as punctuation.

If a situation calls for a swear then I will swear quite happily, “Ouch, my fucking toe!!” and I’ll use the proper word. There’s no need to find childish swear-alternatives.

But I don’t want to sound like I can’t even stop it.