Six0Four (via Hacker News):
Ordered 2 Macbooks for $2500 from Apple (Canada). Paid for their same day delivery service which they use Uber for and it says delivered but it wasn’t. Driver stole them or he delivered to the wrong person that stole them. If he actually delivered to the wrong address, I live in a high rise that does have cameras but only in the lobby which means once the Uber driver got on the elevator who’s to say he didn’t get the wrong unit and it’s his word against mine.
I contacted Apple and they said they would reach out to Uber and get back to me. 12 hours later I got an email from Apple saying:
“We have completed our review with the carrier regarding your shipment and have determined that we are unable to provide a replacement or process a refund.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Picked up the phone and called them and what they didnt tell me in the email was that I should file a police report (which ive done). They said do the police report and the police will reach out to Apple. Problem is I talked to the police and they said they dont reach out to anyone, Apple reaches out to them once I give Apple the police report number. Apple also said they came to that decision because Uber says the item shows as delivered.
[…]
Spoke with Apple Retail Executive Relations. They’re not changing their decision. I get nothing back. Case closed.
I’ve never used the courier service, but I assume that Apple probably makes you opt out of requiring a signature on delivery, thereby waiving some of your rights. I make it a point not to opt out when ordering a Mac via normal shipping, but in practice I don’t know how much that helps. Sometimes the driver “helpfully” leaves the package without getting a signature. And when I do sign, these days it’s with one of those horrible styluses so it doesn’t really look like my actual signature, anyway.
netsharc:
Trillion dollar company uses exploitative company’s (Uber) labor, leaves customer with the bill when poorly vetted and paid labor steals the goods. Customer is afraid to issue chargeback because they might get kicked out of the digital feudal state…
miki123211:
It’s wild to me that the credit card companies (and the law in general) actually allow this.
The chargeback procedure was created exactly for situations like this, and designed to be maximally friendly to customers at the expense of vendors. One would think that “you cannot exact revenge on customers when a transaction goes wrong” would be credit card rules 101.
Previously:
Apple Canada Mac Payments Shipping Shopping Uber
Kevin Purdy (Hacker News):
Sega has put dozens of its Master System, Genesis, Saturn, and other console titles onto modern game stores over the years. But, like that Dreamcast controller stashed in your childhood garage, they’re about to disappear—and getting them back will cost you a nostalgia tax.
Those who have purchased any of the more than 60 games listed by Sega from Steam, Xbox, Nintendo’s Switch store, and the PlayStation store will still have them after 11:59 pm Pacific time on Dec. 26. But after that, for reasons that Sega does not make explicit, they will be “delisted and unavailable.”
Dustin Bailey:
[The] delistings are notable for a few reasons, including the fact that these are some of the only legally purchasable classic game ROMs you’ll find anywhere on the internet.
[…]
But the real reason to buy these games is that once you install them, you can just browse to that install filter and find a ROM file to use any way you like - no encrypted files to datamine or DRM to bypass. Just raw ROM files that you’ve legally purchased. That means you can drop those ROMs into your emulator of choice and play them however you want, totally legally.
[…]
We know Sega has big plans for old IP with revivals of plenty of classic games in the works, and it’s possible the company is planning some sort of new classic collection that would replace this one in the near future.
Kyle Barr:
Books fall apart. VHS tapes eventually degrade. DVDs will scratch and die, but our society has done a much better job at preserving movies and literature than we have with gaming. Part of that is how games are tied to their original format and individual consoles. Video game preservationists have cited emulation as one of the few ways our society has been able to preserve the art form. That’s important because a Video Game History Foundation study found that 87% of games from before 2010 are not commercially available anywhere.
[…]
The fact that emulators have to exist points to an existential failure of the games industry to preserve its most beloved titles. Emulator developers spend years creating and perfecting their software. Some emulators are slightly janky to use, but others, like Delta, Dolphin, or PS1 emulator Gamma, make the process of playing relatively seamless. The community is strong and growing all the time. As much as the license holders say they’re trying to expand the classics market, they’ve obviously failed to meet demand.
Previously:
Emulator Game Sega Steam Sunset Windows Windows 11
Craig Grannell:
I vividly remember getting a wonderful surprise on the sole WWDC I was flown out to, on attending a developer session on accessibility and seeing someone on stage proudly noting that slide transitions in menus had been added to Reduce Motion.
[…]
But what I find disappointing is that, all these years after that Guardian piece broke, vestibular accessibility remains reactive rather than proactive. Nothing illustrates that better than Apple breaking Reduce Motion in Safari of all apps. When Reduce Motion is on, the zooms in the tab view should be replaced by crossfades. They were for a long time. But that went away in iOS 18. I dutifully mentioned this to Apple. It looks like this might be fixed in iOS 18.2. But the problem should never have come back in the first place – and it wouldn’t have if there was even the most rudimentary of testing by someone with Reduce Motion active.
Previously:
Accessibility Android iOS iOS 18 iPhone Safari
Howard Oakley:
When macOS loads two of those E cores with low QoS threads, it sets them to run at a low frequency to make the most of their energy efficiency. When it loads two E cores with threads that were intended to be run on P cores, as they have a high QoS, it runs the E cluster up to high frequency, so they perform better.
[…]
If full load at maximum frequency is 100% of their capability, then at low QoS they were really running at 27%, not the 100% given by Activity Monitor, and that largely accounts for the difference in time that those threads took to complete their floating point calculations.
[…]
What Activity Monitor actually shows as % CPU or “percentage of CPU capability that’s being used” is what’s better known as active residency of each core, that’s the percentage of processor cycles that aren’t idle, but actively processing threads owned by a given process. But it doesn’t take into account the frequency or clock speed of the core at that time, nor the difference in core throughput between P and E cores.
Previously:
Activity Monitor Apple M3 Pro Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Processors
