I won't pretend to know how it would have gone either way. Had it actually not happened in the timeline that it did happen, it could have easily been different. The momentum, the media narratives, the quickness with which the Democrats united behind Harris, all of these things caught most everyone by surprise. I could see any of those things being wildly different had Biden chose to step down much earlier. We don't like to admit it, but irrational, unknowable elements like "vibe" and "timing" have always played a huge role in elections.

Yep, this game has been long in the works with the mac port, so unfortunately they haven't had the chance to use metal 3 and metalFX. Hopefully they will add at least FSR 2.0 in the future, because 1.0 is pretty bad. I also go back and forth between that gaming pc and an m1 max mbp, and the dlss implementation is a lot better. Still, I do use FSR on the mbp, but I turn on antialiasing to smooth things out.

I think we're pretty spoiled by the relative silence of these macbook pros. Try playing BG3 on pretty much any pc laptop, and you'll see. On my desktop with a RTX3080, I actually limit it to 60fps otherwise it'll sound like a jet engine. I have a Fractal Design North case with a beefy AIO also, and it's no slouch in the airflow department. The game just gets heavy, especially in certain areas with lots of NPCs.

That’s clearly not kitbashing, when you have a car completely backwards and don’t even bother to fix it. Why would the perspective be mostly correct yet be backwards? You’d have to pull from two sources that had a) the exact same art style, b) have the same perspective, yet c) have one of the cars be backward. And finally d) not give a shit about it to correct it.

It's a little strange that there are such drastic changes in culture and climate in such a small area of land, but I still like that they did it. It's of course completely a fantasy world so they can do whatever they want, and it's got 'video game scale.' But I think the cultural differentiation helps to make the world feel larger and the different areas feel more distinct.

Your generalizations about US consumers has no basis in reality. You really think people would buy these mass-market products if they weren't good? Just look at the consumer satisfaction surveys. I'm far from a Tesla fan, but for a long time, there weren't truly good competitors to Tesla EVs. iphones have always and continue to be some of the most highly rated phones on the market.

And what is wrong with voting with your wallet and choosing not to support the business of a terrible person? That's about the only power you have as a consumer, so people should exercise that power if they see fit.

Lots of iPhones cost way less than $1k, and there’s plenty of Android flagships that cost over $1k, and they’re all decent phones. Sure, go ahead and judge people for spending money on a device they use every day.

And what I said about the ‘default’ phone is true, and that’s for normal middle class families. Far from the elite. I’m just reporting the facts, it’s maybe people have a different frame of reference depending on where they live.

Do you live in the US? Maybe not, but iPhones have something like a 50% market share here, and in some regional cases a lot higher. For example, in southern California where I live, iPhones are easily in the majority of people's hands. The point is that this feeling is probably more a 'your problem' issue, and it's hard to make a case that people use these phones as a way to feel exclusive if the market share is so high. There may be some issues of exclusion amongst teenagers etc., but teenagers are going to teenager. I'm just talking about the US though. In some emerging markets there may be a case made for the iPhone to be seen as 'luxury,' but this hasn't been the case in the US for a while. iPhones are seen as an ordinary, almost default phone.

I mean, China’s a pretty big country.

Ok surely it's not VRAM. But my cpu is a 12700k, and while it's not the fastest anymore, you would think it's enough for this game. It's using some fairly standard DDR4 ram, though. Not the fastest nor the slowest. I do wonder if memory bandwidth speed has anything to do with it, but it's all speculation.

I play this primarily on my M1 Max mbp, even though I also sometimes play on my desktop. I have the same issue with a ps4 controller, so I connect it.

What’s interesting to note is that I have fewer hitches on the mbp than on my desktop with a 3080 10gb, and I’m not sure what’s the reason for that. My theory is either vram limits or the mbp memory bus hides a lot of that with its speed.

It's bizarre how they don't quite understand this, because cinematics are Blizzard's specialty. In order to do proper 24 fps (or even 30fps) that's film-like they need to simulate the same kind of motion blur. To my eye, the in-game cinematics don't use motion blur, or if they do, it's not similar enough to make it look like a standard 180 degree shutter.

I think I already did try turning vsync off but not 100% sure, and if I did, I didn't test it for that long.

I'm playing online. I haven't tried offline yet, but I'll test when I get the chance and report back. Seems really shoddy that it would run like that online when D4 is fine.

It doesn't look like Ray Davies to me. Very interesting show, it's kind of like Black Mirror if it was done in a more experimental pseudo-documentary format. It's about the "Video Age" lol.

Works great at 60fps on my M1 Max mbp, but a) you really have to use it on the Sonoma beta for the least problems. I made a Sonoma beta install on a separate SSD to not mess up my current install. And b) updates to Battle.net can break it, so you have to reinstall Battle.net if that's the case. Not a huge deal but that means going to terminal and inputting commands, etc. Not ideal. There are other programs that are supposed to 'smooth' out the install process, like Whiskey, but I haven't tried them.

I spend about 90% of my time in macOS because it's what I use for work, but like you I have a long history with PCs and still build and maintain them mostly for gaming and testing. Macs are overall a more polished and integrated experience, and it's the attention to detail I like the most (not that they're perfect of course).

Some examples upon many... Windows 11, which I use on my main gaming PC, STILL doesn't have a consistent dark mode. Basic windows like disk operation progress are white still. You still have to dig into control panel at times for certain things, even though they continue to add more things to settings. You still have to deal with drive letters. Installs now REQUIRE an MS account, even though the workaround still works. Overall it works fine, but there are a ton of things that bug me.

As for talking with people, well living in SoCal it's not a big deal because the overall market share for Macs is pretty high regionally. So everyone is familiar with them, and if I had to guess, 80% of the people I interact with are Mac users even though most also use PCs for certain things.