There are a lot of things wrong with the "pay as you go" model, and you don't really want to pay this way. "Oh no I paid to access Sister Wives 2 - Polygamist Boogaloo, Season 3 and it sucked!". Having an all you can eat model is cheaper for heavy media users, and encourages all users to sample content they wouldn't normally taste. If you are using bittorrent and NNTP (which wow I didn't even know there were still NNTP servers running... I used to live on usenet, until it basically died) - I infer that you already "know" what you want and just head to those locations to download it, because one doesn't channel surf those sources. I do agree that I would like to be able to _exclude_ groups of content from my subscription - God forbid I ever watch a sports game, sports documentary, or anything with "sports" in the metadata - but I certainly don't want to go to a PAYG model.

Freshly mowed astroturf, at that. The fact is, Netflix was better - infinitely better - when it was the de jure monopolist in the streaming video market, because you could actually find what you wanted inside a single subscription. Everybody over a certain age remembers being able to find first-tier content on Netflix back when the studios considered streaming to be a rounding error. These days, practically everything on Netflix is Temu content (sorry we don't have Superman, would you like to watch our exclusive movie Reallygoodman in the original Indonesian?), and by and large I'm including Netflix exclusive productions there, too. Netflix are not creative gods, and they don't create an infinite stream of awesome content. Their industrial content plant spews out an ocean of catalog filler slop in which floats a small number of top-grade productions like, say, Black Mirror - like chunks of meat floating, few and far between, in a tureen of cheap gruel made by a Dickensian orphanage.

Any move that leads to debalkanization of streaming platforms is likely a net good to the consumer. Anyone who pays for several streaming subscriptions knows this to be true.

But even FTTH isn't even really fiber to your computer. It's fiber to the ONT, then ONT to 1000baseT to your router/WAP. And most people are making heavy use of wireless, so they don't even get the full benefit of (say) a 1Gbps uplink.

Unless you're talking live realtime events like sports or news, the idea of linear TV is pretty much dead. Even the cable STB OSes blur the line between realtime streaming and on-demand. If you search for Paw Patrol, you'll find both "it's playing on this channel right now" and "here's the 271 episodes you can stream for free, which by the way doesn't include the specific episode your kid is clamoring to watch".

The enshittification of, well, practically everything has reached a point where I treat the announcement of "new games from ${BEHEMOTH}" as simply an announcement that a new spew of "engagement driving" advertisement applets is forcing its way onto my screen under the guise of "you may like...". I completely ignore Netflix games - it's not what I subscribe for. I put this roughly on the same level as the autoplay previews that now bombard you on Netflix (yes I know that's been the case for a while, but as an old man I can shake my fist at the cloud for as long as I like).

Really? Really?? STB user interfaces are widely regarded as the worst in the business. They can afford to be, because the STBs are almost always provided by the cableco and are your only option. They are slow and buggy (just like the majority of smart TV platforms). I also challenge the assertion that anyone really needs a universal content search/browse engine, because most people view their own favorite items/channels and don't venture outside much. On the occasion that a visitor comes over and wants to see something not in the favorites, it's almost always a journey of "yes! contentX is available!! ... for a trial subscription on Ploom, or for $3.99 per episode on Skunkr, or with ads AND a mandatory email signup on Gizzrd" and so forth into endless "streaming platform you don't care about" spam.

"Horrible low res" = 1280x800 which seems fine for watching media to me. Actually some of these Digiland devices have an ultra weird processor that appears either to be a QA-binned version of a different SoC, or custom made for the application. But the one in question has a relatively normal CPU. Lies about specs? Shanzai products? Say it ain't so! Anyway - all of what you say is completely, objectively true, but it doesn't negate what I said - and that's why I said this was an unpopular opinion. I maintain that for the use cases specified, you can surely pay more to get a "better" Android tablet but IMHO the big price delta is not justified by a proportionate increase in pleasure of usage. If you need to do gaming or productivity or something higher end, then yes you will get what you pay for if you buy a better Android tablet - but IMHO if you're doing these things again the cost/benefit favors getting an iPad, and I'm not an Apple fanboi by any means. My life is also split between Microsoft, Google and Apple cloud services, which is a galloping pain in the rear.

If you want a cheap, more or less disposable tablet for the use cases you mentioned, IMHO (well, more like in my experience of testing out lots of tablets) you are best off choosing from the middle of the low-end shanzai tablets on Amazon for the sub-$100 mark. For maybe $75 you can get a 10.1" tablet that has a decent screen, decent enough processor (for what you're asking), and a recent enough Android build - with no proprietary nonsense - that it will run modern software nicely for at least a year, which is all I expect a $75 tablet to last. You can spend hundreds more on a name brand and I believe your overall utility will not be significantly improved. My daily driver (for netflix/youtube/very occasional email and web) is https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fdp%2FB0FH... and it is just fine for these tasks. I also have various Samsung tablets, and sure they're "better" but a) they're loaded with cruft, b) sure they have more software updates, but still nothing like iPad OS update lifespans, c) the cost of that "betterness" is just not justified.

I grew up in Australia. Australia went from pounds/shillings/pence to dollars and cents in 1966 (Valentine's Day, specifically https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... - my mother told me about this song and sang it to me). Australia retired its 1c and 2c coins in 1990~92 (it's a bit fuzzy). When I left Australia in 1999, in tidying up I found a box of pennies and ha'pennies from the pre-decimal era and a bigger box of 1c and 2c coins. These things stick around forever and will never be rare.

Heh. And now I want to read Sinister Barrier again. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... - "Swift death awaits the first cow that leads a revolt against milking"

Now they need to start making minilabs again. And they need to get active to strike down environmental laws in some states that make minilabs impossible to operate. One of the reasons I love film is that when you have the negative, you literally have in your hands a fragment of energy that touched the subject and was captured in the emulsion. For people who believe in such things, there is thus a direct spiritual link between a physical photograph and its original subject.

Since it's explicitly using a different size of LCD and an "iPhone processor" - no it won't be just a repackaged old-gen Macbook Air, it is its own thing. Expect it to be iCloud-centric. But if it runs regular MacOS I think an 8GB/128GB config is more than enough for many many many many many people - myself included. That's certainly all I need on the road.

Tolerance for this sort of thing does vary widely, even within the US. I guess it might be more normalized here though. We have nothing, for instance, resembling Law 25 in QC, or even PIPEDA (weak sauce though it is).

Can people not understand the concept of an example? Thereâ(TM)s no place in the USA that represents the entire country. Thatâ(TM)s how diversity works. Iâ(TM)ve also encountered these scanners in NYC, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland (OR), and probably elsewhere. Pick one of those cities and call it representative of America, if you like. Itâ(TM)s beside the point.

It depends where you are, and where you go out. If you are in Utah for instance you're much more likely to encounter them because all establishments that serve alcohol are required to check ID at the door (or at least, they were). Bouncer apps make this easier.