Metroid is a secondary or tertiary IP, and the Metroid Prime subseries has always had more smoke online than its sale figures would ever suggest, with only the original on Gamecube selling north of 2 million, and it was a pack-in title.
That’s what a pack-in title is. I had one of those GameCubes, and I ended up trading in the packed-in Metroid Prime to EB Games for like $5 in store credit cuz I didn’t like the game.
I would say pack-in title would refer to a bundle that was active for a substantial time, like Wii Sports on the Wii. The Metroid Prime bundle was just active during the release of the game, 3 years after it launched.
They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles.
So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.
Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around.
Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.
Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out.
I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.
> and especially the football vs. soccer thing with the world cup right now
My favorite thing about this is that the term “soccer” originated in British English in the late 19th Century as an abbreviation for association football, yet we get blamed for what’s actually a useful term of distinction given the presence of a much more popular (domestically) football code.[1]
My second favorite thing is that apart from receiving the blame from the people we ought to be crediting for the term, is that even outside of America in other primarily English-speaking countries, “soccer” is the prevailing term for association football in Ireland, Australia[2], Canada & New Zealand[2]. Even in Puerto Rican Spanish and Canadian French. Despite this, America specifically gets blamed. This is easily one of the best century long psy-ops the world has ever seen. Even if we were actually alone in this though (and we’re not), as long as we keep calling it soccer, the prevailing English word is soccer, and the English language doesn’t owe any deference to another Indo-European language.
Sorry to the parent for the tangent. This is just an endless source of amusement to me how riled up soccer fans get about this difference in terminology.
[2] This is made complicated in Australia & New Zealand by the fact that the local governing bodies for soccer changed their official names and the way they refer to the sport to “football” around 20 years ago, but that didn’t overnight change the way people referred to soccer. Australia also has multiple sport codes that people colloquially call “football” and which “football” people mean is highly regional.
And rugby is actually "Rugby Football," as I learned from the local Medway Rugby Football Club.
There's association football (soccer), rugby football, gridiron football (American and Canadian), Aussie rules football, and probably others either in certain niches or in the past. I've been calling the NFL and CFL "gridiron" exclusively for a few years to avoid any confusion.
No. Platforms are better when the owners of them continue to invest directly in & improve the user experience. Turning them into white label runtimes for apps is something only nerds & bureaucrats with visions of grandeur dream of.
It’s a swipe at Apple since Apple’s M.O. is to lock in long term memory contracts at guaranteed prices for a couple of years. Contracts Micron has been happy to sign before, so yeah, Micron’s still full of shit.
Finding additional ways to waste more of people’s time on the web isn’t a good solution to anything. Doing so in a privacy invading way from a company that has a vested interest in collecting as much data as possible, exhausting all utility from it and butters its bread in an industry which specifically is built around disrespecting the time of other people is just never going to fly.
Like seriously, if I have to turn on a camera to get through a recaptcha then the website doing it can fuck right the hell off with extreme prejudice. My web browser is not allowed to access my cameras for any reason, no exceptions.
I’ll add onto this the PA system & noise from the trains themselves. BART isn’t exactly a quiet train system, and MUNI is far too comfortable blasting announcements & propaganda through its PA system telling you not to commit crimes.
Those speakers by the way are an ADA requirement, and the only information that should be coming out of them are the stop announcements & any comms from the driver that may be necessary. Anything else in four different languages is not required, including the track telling you not to stand too close to the doors on the bus.
Not enough to have stopped the iPhone 17 Pro line from being a runaway success that even Apple—famously excellent at projecting demand and already invested in selling as many as possible given its the flagship model line of their flagship product line—completely underestimated the demand at launch.
I’d love to know how much “plenty” in the parent’s perspective stacks up against just this one individual model line and whether it is at all distinguishable from noise.
Surprising amount of hostility to what was a speculative anecdotal observation. I'd be surprised if many people under the age of 17 would be buying a $2000+ phone anyway, but given tough economic situations, decreasing opportunity, and decreasing stability, the likelihood seems low that significantly increased prices for effectively the same (boring) product would be absorbed by anyone other than the richest or older established crowd. Whether it holds true at global level, or in your social circle, I don't know.
> Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media, and I wonder if it's just older addicted richer millenials that'll keep buying at even more than the already idiotic prices.
You don’t sell as many iPhones as Apple does if your market is only as narrow as “older addicted richer millennials” and your most expensive products in your flagship lines don’t fly off the shelves if they’re not already at some level of affordability. Under today’s prices, and this is due to change per Tim Cook’s comments of course, but under today’s prices the iPhone Pro line starts at $1099 and $1199 for the Pro & Pro Max line specifically, which you can get down by trading in an older phone, looking for a deal (prices in the channel are often discounted by $100 or so below Apple’s list price) and can be financed through either the carrier or Apple.
Now you can get that price up to $1999 if you specifically go for the Pro Max 2TB option, but the existence of a 2TB option doesn’t mean that’s the default option for most people. You can also get that price as low as $599 if you forego the flagship models entirely, and again, that’s Apple’s list prices, not necessarily prices in the channel.
I think your frugality is great, and if there’s some young people behaving more frugally, that’s also great. I haven’t upgraded my phone in about 5 years and don’t anticipate doing so this year either, but your remarks don’t read like they were sourced from real observations of either the American or the International markets, and in fact read like an eye-rolling generalization about millennials. Such as this:
> the likelihood seems low that significantly increased prices for effectively the same (boring) product would be absorbed by anyone other than the richest or older established crowd
1) we don’t know what Apple’s prices are going up to yet. They haven’t announced any actual price increases, so we also don’t know how significant the price increase will be. Naturally we should expect sales to be hurt by any price increase, but it’s a bit premature to overstate their significance.
2) their most recent iPhones were not so boring that they didn’t fly off the shelves at a pace Apple couldn’t anticipate because they sold well above expectations, and that is specifically the flagship models. Now it often follows that the following year’s model is more “boring” by comparison, but the view you take their new products is not borne by market evidence.
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