The basic iPhone 17 starts at $799

The 17e is only $599

If anything the iPhone is getting cheaper in real terms, not more expensive

THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.

And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.

Yeah a lot of QA teams weren't the best, but the solution isn't to get rid of them it's to hold them accountable and improve them. But that takes effort and costs money, easier to just cut them and shift more responsibilities onto devs. The results are predictable.

But many other projects, perhaps the majority, that is not their goal. By devs for devs, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

Pleasing customers is incredibly difficult and a never-ending treadmill. If it's not the goal then it's not a failure.

Side bonus, smaller wheels with taller sidewall tires are more comfortable, less prone to damage, and the tires are cheaper and easier to replace, too!

Fortunately I've had a few good managers and business partners in my career that recognize the value, but it's far from universal and I sometimes have a hard time communicating it myself in the face of the common move fast agile culture that is so prevalent in most of tech.

I get free checked bags through my preferred airline's credit card, but still almost never do it because it adds so much time and frustration. The number of times I've had to wait an additional hour+ at baggage claim is ridiculous. And I've had bags lost/misrouted a stupid percentage of the time considering how infrequently I check bags. Fortunately never lost for good, but getting your bags days after you arrive is not great.

Even airlines like Alaska that have their "20 minute guarantee" often exceed it but get away with it because to make a claim you have to wait in line at the understaffed baggage office, wasting even more time after late bags. Get real.

If airlines/airports want to incentivize checking bags they need to do more than just make it free, but make it fast and reliable, too.

When I did software consulting, I was basically a decent "modern" web dev brought into crusty old companies to bring some new perspective and approach. I'd help with some project direction and initial implementation and try to get a team up to speed to continue the work. I typically embedded as part of the team for a while and did plenty of hands-on design, coding, and troubleshooting work right alongside.

But this was just a small consulting shop, not one of the big "strategic" consultancies. Very different worlds.

Most notably, I published a little browser extension I created to scratch a personal itch. It got a little bit of attention and users, and then the feature requests started coming. Among a couple reasonable ideas were big demands like make it work on different platforms, make it integrate with other sites, or make it work entirely differently. And unhelpful bug reports that often didn't even make sense.

Not one of them ever contributed to the repo, and many of them were ungracious and demanding in nature. Fortunately nothing outright hostile, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth for daring to share a neat personal project as-is.

It's a shame the totally-not-a-SMAC-sequel Civ: Beyond Earth did not not do it justice.