Honestly, the guy is absolutely full of crap, but this is a solid point. The question is where the clicks AI summaries are absolutely killing are coming from.
I can’t imagine this will survive forever, considering that Google has already gone through the loop of getting nuked from orbit by the EU by summarizing news content once. Even if AI wasn’t involved in this at all, it’s of very dubious legality in… well, wherever Google News got swiftly shut down.
Hah. That’s the kind of weird I can get behind, but I definitely wouldn’t want it to be the default.
Also I’m not sure how I feel about the possibility of the watch dying and it getting stuck on giving you the wrong time. I guess it’s how old analogue watches worked, but there’s something to knowing when your watch is dead.
Flash memory is tiny, but it’s not replacing anything, it’s being added, which is a problem for cost and size. If you were going to take BT out then… sure, but that’s not what’s happening here.
Now, the conversation is different if you reframe it as “I just like this quirky dirt cheap watch with a USB port on it”. At that point I have nothing to say other than… sure, why not.
What I don’t like is the notion that USB C is either a better alternative or a candidate for standardization, which is how the post came across to me.
Oh, and I disagree about the always on screen, too. In all honestly, the two things that make smartwatches still less polished than traditional watches is a) battery life, and b) the fact that there is at best a second of lag when you try to check the time and at worst you need to shake your wrist to try to get your watch to realize it’s being looked at so it decides to wake up.
There’s no question that having a display of the time on at all times is better. It’s just not practical with the energy costs and battery storage. At one point I bought that Garmin watch that has a standard old digital watch screen on top of the modern display (speaking of weird). It was a neat idea, but it turns out that the battery life for it on normal use wasn’t much better than other watches and the dumb thing still had a backlight it turned on via motion detection, so it was just as laggy as a normal smartwatch.
I’d take a better iteration on that tech over a USB C charger any day, if we’re doing weird.
Hold on, so now you want to use USB C for data transfer? Which means you want to what? add more storage to the watch? That sure seems like a solution looking for a problem you’re only floating as a result of choosing USB as the charge port, which we probably shouldn’t do.
And that’s not just much less battery than on the Pixel at 420mAh, it’s even smaller than the CMF Watch 2, which reports 305mAh and is only seventy bucks (and if anything seems smaller than all of your examples). So yes, there is an impact on battery. And no, that’s not acceptable. Because again, ALL smartwatches need more battery than they currently have.
The point of the always on HR monitoring and screen isn’t that they exist, it’s that they are a massive battery drain. A smartwatch where you turn those off will last several times more than the same watch with them on, particularly on entry-level devices like ones you point at. And you would ideally wnat those on in a perfect smartwatch while still getting multi-day battery life. Right now we just don’t have that because you can’t work your way around physics.
Now, for an experiment? Sure, go nuts. Put a solar panel in there. A hand crank. Who cares, weird hardware is weird and weird is fun.
But to solve the problem with the ever-changing charger standards from the mainstream manufacturers weird won’t cut it. You need a solution that fits all cases with near-optimal performance. USB is just not it for this form factor, and if anything focusing on it distracts from the very real need to come to a proper standard in this space, which I find somewhat annoying.
That gives me no information. What’s the battery size? I’ve had multiple smartwatches and all their batteries could last a week or a day depending on usage, setup and features.
The point is USB C is noticeably larger than pogo pins for the sake of including a whole bunch of additional pins a smartwatch has zero use for. Larger means less room for other stuff. The ideal state for a smartwatch is having an always-on display and heart rate monitoring, among other things. All watches out there, even the most efficient ones, could use more battery and efficiency than they have. Because all smartwatches are coming up short from their desired usage and are working around their limited battery life.
The idea of making that worse for the sake of having a clearly unfit for purpose connector as opposed to standardizing a connector that actually does the job is really weird. There is no need to have a different charger on every watch, but there certainly isn’t a need to sacrifice any functionality or performance at all for the sake of USB C. And not all watches are the same size, so this would impact smaller watches more, which now is limiting what type of watches you can make if you make USB C a standard. And if it’s not a standard, then it’s not fixing the problem.
And all that’s even before you begin to consider that watches are more comfortable to charge when they have a stand to do so, since they’re small, light and fiddly, so it’s entirely possible for a bulky USB C cable meant for fast charging to be heavier than them or stiff enough to actively move them around. There’s a reason watch chargers tend to come with very thin, flexible wires. All you need to fix this problem is a magnetic stand that can hold any watch. Half the USB C cables I own would knock over my watch stand if plugged into my watch or drag my watch across the table.
You can make a watch that charges via USB C and still works. That’s not an optimal solution, but you can. But it’s not a valid standard because you can’t very practically make all watches charge via USB C. Standards need to be standard.
You kind of are, it’s basically the same magnets+wireless combo Apple uses for their phones.
I don’t know if you could use the same charger for a phone. Probably not. But it’s a cross-company standard, so the idea would be to do the same for watches, if the standard doesn’t include a watch option already (I haven’t looked into it, frankly).
It’s not that it’s too large to exist, but it’s certainly large enough that it’ll make a dent in the battery space, and smartwatches are already battery-starved compared to dumb ones.
Its a terrible idea for a number of reasons, but as everybody else is saying, that doesn’t mean you give up on standardization.
I mean, we are for phones. Qi2 is finally becoming more widespread, and the Qi1/Magsafe spec is quietly more compatible than its official support suggests.
Why this doesn’t extend to watches and only partially to earbuds is a different question, but I at least the most likely devices to have wireless charging are getting there.
This is very dumb.
Now, if it was annoyed by magnetic pogo connectors not being standard we could talk. Wireless for watches, too.
When the product is the content or the features rather than the platform this chart is useless.
You don’t sit down and go “I’m going to stream video”, you go “I’m gonna watch Star Trek” or “Hey, there’s a new season of Severance”. It’s the same with chat and social media. It’s not “I’m going to instant message”, it’s “I’ll text mom”.
You use what you gotta use. You don’t decouple from US big tech by boycotting it, you decouple by having EU big tech (at which point you’ve fixed nothing) or by competing with them with a different standard, which is possible but very, very hard and way outside the typical thought processes and organization patterns of most of these alternatives.
See also: why Bluesky entirely replaced Mastodon as a Twitter alternative despite showing up a year late with no pre-existing working standard.
This chart is less “yay let’s make things better” and more “woof, things are dire”.
It’s actually much cheaper to buy MKW bundled with the console than standalone. There is really no good reason to buy one without the other unless you’re extremely not into Mario Kart, and in that case there wasn’t a reason to get the Switch 2 until Bananza came out (after the period being reported here).
Clearly the price was less of an issue than people were guessing on the Internet. Which makes sense. The Switch 2 is still cheaper than a Steam Deck OLED, a PS5 Pro or a mid to low range smartphone. People like to compare straight sticker prices, but it’s been quite a ride for hardware prices since Covid.
Yeah, PS2 is standalone business still. And in its defense, PCSX2 is super user friendly as a standalone package and supports most of the shared stuff you’d want from Retroarch anyway.
I guess it kinda is. Some choices are a bit… peculiar.
I’ve just been using it for so long I have no concept of how it reads getting into it for the first time.
It can also be used as a bit of a behind-the-scenes engine in some emulation wrappers, which I guess sort of works around that issue, but hey, that’s definitely a valid concern. Retroarch makes sense if you emulate a ton of systems and want a consistent experience across the board, and it has some nice shared features across all cores, but all of that definitely comes with some complexity.
It’s one of them, and it’s fine, but it’s not what I’ve been using. I’ve been bouncing between PCSX and Beetle and they’re both just fine. I mean, at this point PSX games run on anything.
I don’t know, the PSX is old and well understood enough now that in my head it’s in the bundle of “just do Retroarch” systems along with all the 8 and 16 bit stuff.
I don’t even remember what core I usually run for it. They’re all at least serviceable to great.
It’s not the first weird rant I hear coming out of this project, which I don’t follow otherwise, so it definitely seems like it’s a thing.
I’m not sure I buy your motivations, but hey, I can oblige regardless. What, top three small things from Windows I’d like on Linux and the other way around? Windows to Linux first?
Hibernation and states across boots. I know people hate Windows power management on laptops, but at least on my last couple of desktops it’s been surprisingly robust. I can come back overnight to the same setup I left open, even if an update ran in the middle. Same windows, tabs, open documents… It even survives booting into Linux and then coming back just fine. KDE is taking some steps in this direction, but they’re a ways away. I hope they progress quickly on it.
Scaling and multimonitor. It’s way better than it used to be, but there are still a ton of minor annoyances on Linux. KDE in particular has some issues with icon scaling on vertical taskbars, which you’d think would be easy to fix but have been there for a while now. Other pieces of software still struggle with consistent text and headers, too, especially on multimonitor setups with different fractional scaling. Say what you will about Windows’ look and feel (and I will in a sec), the compositing is super robust and flexible.
Mounts! Network mounts in particular and Samba mounts specifically. You just click on them, authenticate and you can mount them as either a folder or a drive right from the context menu. On Linux, Dolphin will give you access to them the same way within itself, but they won’t be mounted to the fs in a predictable way, so it’s fine for copy/pasting stuff but it’s not good if you want to use them as local folders. And Windows will remember those mounts across sessions, authentication included. On Linux you need to edit fstab manually and keep a plaintext copy of your SMB password. It’s just so smooth on Windows.
So… Linux to Windows next?
Just the snappy window movement, man. Linux feels so much lighter than Windows for no good reason. I also really like both Gnome’s more Mac-like desktop and KDE’s default “hold shift to tile” window snapping. Windows used to be the gold standard for window management without going full tiling but I’d say I prefer KDE now.
Vertical taskbars/no taskbars. I don’t understand why Windows decided to force the taskbar to the bottom. It’s just absurd for ultrawide screens and inconvenient for tablets and touchscreens, or for screens with burn-in issues. I’d argue KDE overcorrects. You don’t need to have a dozen different docks per desktop, but it’s definitely better than zero options. And the top bar is great for touch and more reliable than sliding from the bottom edge to pop up a hidden taskbar on Windows.
Remote desktop everywhere. Gnome in particular has fantastic out-of-the-box support. Windows’ version of this is actually very good, too, but the server is paywalled to the Pro license, which is hard to justify. And hey, I get it, they’re trying to monetize their OS but that’s actually worse, so…
Now, that was a tangent, but if more people want to share their top 3’s I’ll read them. What the hell.
Not how it’s worked with the rest of these features, for the record. I did get click-to-do, which is activated by default (but does nothing unless you trigger it manually). That’s just an entry in their increasingly large wall of “stuff you don’t want switches” in the Settings.
It’s immensely wasteful in terms of dev time, but at the same time, hey, kudos for having all this stuff centralized in the one list, unwieldy as it’s getting (at least there’s a search in there).
I wish we could talk like adults about these things over here, because there’s a ton of interesting nuance to how Windows 11 actually works, rather than the parody version that everybody loves to dunk on. There are some actually good features and choices I’d like to see make the jump to Linux and vice versa, even discounting things like hardware or software support. But nobody ever wants to have that conversation, it’s all just the dopamine hit chase from rooting for the home team (and/or being contrarian about it).
I seem to remember the feature was opt-in, right?
I’d check, but this hasn’t made it to my Copilot+ PC, despite all the fuss.
I was about to pull the trigger on the VII, but it’s currently sold out with no end in sight other than importers. The price is what kept me back from updating to it, but clearly it didn’t stop enough people to keep it in stock.