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.
Your post doesn't follow the typical template so it will be hard for things to parse. And for some reason all those links don't actually work, just ends up "Sorry we can't find that page."
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?
I think it is worth a try to do credit card chargeback. Call your credit card company and explain _high level_: "I bought a video game. I cannot register online. It is required to play. There is not support line to help me. I am stuck. This game does not work for me. I want to do a charge back."
I assume you bought from an online store. Also, try to find a support line. Provide this information (high level!) to your credit card company.
I once had my EA account hacked. I tried to find a way to contact support and get things sorted out. The EA website had a page to start the support process, but it just..... didn't work. The button that said "put me in the queue" caused and error and loaded a broken page. This was the case for MONTHS.
God, imagine if your business could ignore customers for months and still be stupidly successful.
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...
As someone who worked in streaming, I hope new opensource formats burn down the incestual cesspool of rentseeking codecs and bury them under tons of concrete.
You're literaly commenting here on an article where Dolby CEO gleefuly explains how he made profit by using streaming services to make users pay for their own patents and royalties. And we didn't even get to the DRM which lies deeply integrated into every part of those formats. Or insane complexity of HEVC and Dolby Vision profiles which somehow don't bother you at all.
So, AVC, HEVC, Dolby anything, DTS anything, burn the rentseekers to the ground. I'm sorry if you need to transcode an additional video format for that.
Most of the work on leading edge, state of the art Video Encoding are not done by universities or Researchers at all. And even if in the case universities were contributing, most of them are sponsored by certain business entities.
Exactly. Bandwidth Cost is still dropping with no end in sight. All while computation cost and storage cost reduction are flat. And Google are finally seeing problem with having Storage and encoding issues.
Now Google is in the Phone business they have to somehow support HEVC on their phone.
"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 an argument for the acquisition of YT by Google being net positive, but it doesn't answer the OP's question, which he specifically restricts to the "less tangible parts of the smaller company".
I think it does, otherwise OP's question is ill-posed. That is, if YouTube scaled independently from a scrappy startup to a $170billion behemoth, the changes in corporate governance and culture would have been equally as drastic as being acquired by Google.
Youtube, the product, maybe makes more money. However, Youtube, the community, was much better initially, which I suppose can be expected with most communities as they grow.
Bad actors creep in, which creates new rules, which negatively impacts the whole, which causes resentment, which causes more bad actors, which lead to more rules, and before you know it, review-girls don't seem so bad when your feed lands on terrorist-mickeymouse and the syringe babies.
Youtube only existed publicly for around a year before being acquired. I don't think it supported comments on videos. Whether or not YT's community was better early on (which like, I'm not even sure is true) is independent from whether its acquisition by Google affected that community, because YT was acquired basically before there was any chance for a community to develop.
I realize OP is talking more about the experience of the workers than the users, and I don't have an inside scoop here, but I'd put forward “Google acquiring Keyhole” as well. Google was in a unique position to allow anyone with a browser to view satellite photos from around the world, for free, and have the economics make sense for them.
I have a somewhat inside scoop from working with various early Keyhole employees, and my impression is that they were generally happy with the acquisition. At the very least, quite a few of them stuck around long past the golden handcuffs stage.
