I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
If price is not a concern I might recommend sticking to the laptop route. There is no noticeable performance gap on the Pro line with the fan (wife has an M2 Air and I definitely notice throttling in stuff like Lightroom)
I use a 14" M1 Max as my daily driver with an external monitor. I absolutely love the versatility. I run small video transcode jobs in Premiere/AME or render out things in After Effects daily and I never hear the fan or have any performance/heat issues of any kind. I am comparing this to my Win10 5950x/RTX 3080 desktop also at my desk and while that is definitely faster, I do not feel like my MBP is too far behind.
If cost is a factor I think the Mac Mini is the best bang for your buck. Especially if you still have access to a .edu (or just say you are in college) and knock an additional $100 off.
Have not hit this issue...yet. However, on my Xbox someone else's ActivisionID has inadvertently been tied to mine. Got in touch with the owner and when they go to unlink their account from my Xbox Live Activision's website just reloads. No errors, no codes or any confirmation or denial. Phone support is nonexistent, followed all other possible channels and cannot find or do anything.
I spent $70 for a game I can't play on my own account. I can't play with my friends, I can't level my own stuff, and there is nothing I can do. It's completely broken and I can't get a refund in any way. Anyone had success in disputing these purchases with their credit card companies?
While I see both sides, I don't agree with this strategy. In fact, I think the public should be more aware of just how damaging Google/YouTube is to the streaming ecosystem and if you really stretch this argument, the planet.
It is true - HEVC's original licensing structure was a nightmare, but it seems to have been resolved and we now have hardware decoders in nearly all modern consumer devices.
This is also becoming true of Dolby's formats. maybe I am biased or not as informed as I could be but they did the R&D, worked with some of the brightest (pun intended) in the industry and created a production-to-distribution pipeline. Of course there are fees, but vendors are on board and content creators know how to work with these standards.
Now here comes one of the largest companies in the world. HEVC? Nope - they don't want to pay anyone any fees so instead they're going to develop the VP9 codec. Should they use HLS or DASH? Nope, they are going to spin DASH off into our own proprietary HTTP deliverable and only deliver AVC HLS for compatibility reasons. Apple customers complain and after years they cave and support VP9 as a software decoder starting with iOS14. This means millions of users eat significant battery cycles just to watch anything, including HDR video.
Then we get to Chrome. HEVC? Nope. Dolby? Nope. HLS? Nope. The most popular browser in the world doesn't support any of the broadcast standards. It's their way or fallback to SDR and the less efficient AVC codec.
So now anyone else in the streaming industry trying to deliver the best streaming experience has to encode/transcode everything three times. AVC for compatibility (and spec) reasons, HEVC for set-top boxes and iOS, and VP9 for Google's ecosystem. If it wasn't for CMAF the world would also have to store all of this twice.
In the end, to save YouTube licensing and bandwidth costs, the rest of the industry has to consume 2-3x more compute to generate video and hundreds of millions of devices now consume an order of magnitude more power to software decode VP9.
If and when Project Caviar becomes reality, it'll be another fragmented HDR deliverable. Dolby isn't going away and Chrome won't support it, so the rest of the industry will have to add even more compute and storage to accommodate. In the name of 'open' and saving manufacturers a couple dollars, the rest of the industry is now fragmented and consumers are hurt the most.
YouTube weirdly admitted this fragmentation is becoming a problem. They can't keep up with compute and had to create custom hardware to solve. Of course, these chips are not available to anyone else and gives them a competitive edge:
https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-arg...
"In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.
That's a great point and something I was very okay with because I could still navigate 1pass to the necessary fields. Google broke the automatic user/pw/login flow years ago but being able to still manually right-click on the necessary account for each stage of the login was easy. This is no longer possible. The blank suggestions they shove underneath every available field breaks my ability to click something that the browser itself might have stored and never has what I need. I am back to copying and pasting from the app itself.
Chrome for work, Firefox for personal. Both macOS and Windows 10. I am in contact with 1pass on Twitter, followed their recommendation to turn off the legacy extensions Desktop App Required and it is still broken.
To both your points - a great example is right here on HN. If I right click and go to 1pass, I no longer can open any mini window. I instead am given the option of Lock, Save Login, Help, or Hide on this page. Completely breaks my 5+ years of muscle memory to right click on a field and find what I need.
Now if I open the browser extension in the top right, my Favorites are not my favorites...they're the favorites of my team and one of my shared vaults. My Suggestions tab is empty. And even better, when I search "ycombinator" or "hacker" or "hn" nothing comes up. "No results found in All Vaults" and if I click search everywhere I get "No results found"
Now when I go over to the Desktop app, I search any one of the above and I immediately find my credentials for HN. It's stupid simple just like it used to be in the browser.
I have used 1pass for years. I think I bought my lifetime license sometime in 2014? I loved it and even advocated for our 2000+ company to adopt it back in 2018.
I would say in the past 2-3 years it has slowly become an absolute nightmare. I do not recommend it to anyone anymore. They have somehow screwed up the very basic functionality of filling in passwords on any browser I try. They continue to shift features around, break existing workflows, and even the basic tasks I rely on dozens of times a day seems to change with any significant release.
1Password got famous for building a great core product. It managed my logins I stored myself and autofilled them wherever I needed. It was clean and simple. Now they are so focused on growth and Product features like this that they have completely lost their way. As of this week I can no longer right click on a webpage and work with 1pass to find something. If the webpage attached to the original 'save login' prompt is not the one you are on - the auto popup underneath the login field has nothing to show and I cannot manually find and enter it. I have to go to the Desktop app, search, find, and copy. My team regularly wastes minutes on this each day.
Our company reevaluates platforms every couple years, in the next 12-24 months I will strongly advocate we find an alternative.
In playing with an M1 Pro 14" this weekend I noticed all HDR content I viewed was encoded in AV1. YouTube seems to have drawn a line between SDR and HDR with this codec. AV1 is amazing but still relatively early in its development and takes a ton of raw power for decode as M1* does not have a native decoder.
I almost guarantee this is the root of the issue. My friend doesn't have iStat Menus so I couldn't see the full resource picture but curious if the GPU is involved or its a pure CPU decode and the issue lays somewhere within that.
I have always suspected this and curious what TikTok is reading. For example, if I put my phone down and the video showing continues to loop, does TikTok's algo ignore my 'time watching' because it is aware my phone is on a surface vs in my hand.
I went to Buffalo Grove High School in this same district and graduated many years ago. At the time no IPTV systems or EPIC bell systems were in place. However, as soon as I walked in my freshman year I noticed the 'teacher' WiFi was only using MAC Address Filtering. One minute scan and a spoof later I was poking around to discover a whole lot was visible from this privileged network. “...From the results, we found various devices exposed on the district network. These included printers, IP phones... and even security cameras without any password authentication!” It was even worse back then. It was all exposed on wide open WiFi!
My senior prank was going to revolve around the printers. We were shocked to discover every printer not just in BG but across the entire district was accessible with no authentication of any kind. We cooked up ideas and were planning to print either porn or I has cheezburger/lolcat memes via telnet (I'm dating myself.)
Ultimately I got into other trouble before we could execute and figured this wasn’t worth not graduating over. I moved on and so happy to see a much better prank on this same network happen so many years later with almost no repercussions. Congratulations and great prank!