People now view those styles as kind of garish. Between that and the difficulty of making it work and look good at a variety of DPIs, it just wasn't going to stick around.

I admit, I like things to have some more color and texture. Simple black and white boxes are a bit soul crushing. But I see why they disappeared.

It's the maintenance. The long term, slow burn, uninteresting work that must be done continually. Someone needs to be behind it for the long haul or it will never get adopted and used widely.

Right now, at least, LLMs are not great at that. They're great for quickly creating smaller projects. They get less good the older and larger those projects get.

Reminds me of this. I found their video that had a breakdown of some of what they needed to do to make a game fit on NES really fascinating!

Tracking link for shipment? Thank you!

Random email about how to 'best use' my purchase (advertise other products) - instant spam flag.

This has worked quite well, though occasionally the filter gets it wrong.

Most people do the following:

* Take it to Apple * Apple says it will cost $X * Customer says 'yes' and gets it repaired OR customer says 'no' (and proceeds to buy a new one)

That's what the vast, vast, vast majority of customers do.

However, it's not planned obsolescence either. It's just math. Building things to be repairable costs more money and time. There is very little incentive to do so, because most customers simply do not care. Thus, Apple does not bother. Nothing conspiratorial about it.

Now if we can just get some decent Nvidia drivers......

Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away.

Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it.

But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?