Yah, I remember paying like $10-15 mid 1990s for a single CD album. And we liked it! Easily spent a few hundred bucks a year on music.

I swear if these stupid music labels just switched to 5 cents a song, no DRM, own it forever, global distribution, bill you once a month to manage transaction fees – they’d make more money than god.

Indeed! I introduced my kids to this through the example of our in-house Plex server, and it worked really well.

First they “get it” because Plex works like the streaming services they’re used to and they think “oh neat mom can do that too.”

Then they like it more because I show them how its streaming we can control ourselves - streaming home movies and pics really impresses this upon them.

And then they see that there’s no magic to where the content comes from – it’s a digital file on Plex just as it is on Netflix.

Voila. Free thinkers for life.

shady websites

There are no innocents here. There’ s a case to be made that nothing is more shady for consumers than the mass data harvesting, profiling, brokering and content shaping that flows from using Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or TikTok

shittiest possible quality

You’re doing it wrong

In the background as the deal gets worse and there is no alternative offering a good deal with a good consumer experience then piracy rises. It always does. Companies will always complain piracy hurts them and the artists but all they have to do is be more reasonable.

100% this

Yah, and before that SoundJam, an indy app which Apple bought and re-skinned into iTunes.

At the time it was all wonderful and intuitive. Drag and drop everything, beautifully curated collections, simple and dependable, and sitting right there on your hard drive / iPod so you always had everything.

Now it’s all a sewer of bullshit, annoying and alienating to use, it makes music a miserable experience. They wonder why people don’t want to pay for it. And use the law to beat us over the head until we submit to our own misery.

We really gotta update consumer laws for the digital age so there’s a reasonable balance between corporations and consumers again.

$US330 for the top 8700G APU with12 RDNA 3 compute units (compare to 32 RDNA 3 CUs in the Radeon RX7600). And it only draws 88W at peak load and can be passively cooled (or overclocked).

$US230 for the 8600G with 8 RDNA 3 CUs. Falls about 10-15% short of 8700G performance in games, but a much bigger spread in CPU (Tom’s Hardware benchmarks) so I’m pretty meh on that one.

Given the higher costs for AM5 boards and DDR5 RAM, you could spend about the same or $100-200 more than an 8700G build you could combine a cheaper CPU and better GPU and get way more bang for your buck. But I see the 8700G being an solid option for gamers on a budget, or parents wanting to build younger kids their first cheap-but-effective PC.

I also see this as a lazy mans solution to building small form factor mini-ITX Home Theatre PCs that run silent and don’t need a separate GPU to receive 4K live streams. I’m exactly in this boat right now where I literally don’t wanna fiddle with cramming a GPU into some tiny box, but also don’t want some piece of crap iGPU in case I use the HTPC for some light gaming from time to time.