shrug

Almost all video game retailers in Canada are American, so I was going to buy it direct from Nintendo anyways to cut them out and those preorders have always been set for May 8th.

Other speculation is just that it will cause US scalpers to try to snag all the Canadian preorders through reshipping services or crossing the border. So ostensibly they are doing it to protect our stock.

Makes sense to me, but who knows.

In Canada it’s $629CAD, in Ontario with 13% sales tax that comes to about $710CAD, which is about $9CAD higher than 450EUR.

In the US, $450USD comes to $639CAD, which means the pre-tax CAD price is actually CHEAPER than the USD price. On top of all of that, they just announced preorders are paused in the US due to tariffs.

I actually think Canada is getting off pretty good here. If you can get your hands on 2, I suspect the Canadian model will be doing gang busters on eBay for all the Americans looking for one, so that’s a nice bonus too.

Also, the Wii was a fad. Nintendo and others wildly overestimated how many people would come back and buy another console after buying a Wii. Turns out most of them were rotting in closets. The Wii U could have improved on the Wii in every possible way and it wouldn’t have done well.

This isn’t the case for the Switch. I don’t think the Switch 2 will do Switch numbers, those were very artificially boosted by the pandemic & the novelty of the form factor. However, I doubt Nintendo will have any trouble moving units.

Most people get their oil changed at a shop, and drive through a car wash. I wouldn’t really consider those additional skills.

It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch tech enthusiasts are. How much does your average person know about their car? That’s how little they know about their computer.

They might not know what an OS even is, or how to identify where “Windows” ends and applications begin. They do what they bought it for, and if that doesn’t work, they take it to someone who knows how to get it working again. They know how to charge it, and to plug in a headset or USB key or something. If that functionality doesn’t work automatically or they encounter any issue, it might as well have exploded in their hands.

There are people who have been using Windows for 30 years that know literally nothing about it. Putting a “years of experience” metric on it is hilarious. It’s like assuming that if someone has been driving for 50 years that they know anything about cars besides how to drive it and where to put the gas.

Looks awesome! 7 boards too, which I think ties for most ever?

Not a lot. Simpler signup flow and ecosystem, more twitter-like timeline and features, better discoverability and some communities that aren’t on Mastodon. FOSS diehards can mince about it all they want and blame idiot users, but the simple fact is people who don’t live and breathe technology still have lots to offer a social network, and Mastodon continues to alienate them in design and in community. Lemmy does too.

I like Mastodon and Lemmy, a lot. I prefer them to the alternatives. But I just signed up for BlueSky and I’m enjoying it a lot even routed through the Mastodon bridge, simply because there are more diverse communities there, whereas my Mastodon feed is 90% tech and dev people despite spending hours and hours hunting for people I used to follow on Twitter. Getting big App.net flashbacks.