Anyone else here in the post-PC era?

I don't see how anything of the sort has been assumed. Game devs have to sell games, which means they have to gear their efforts towards producing games that sell. Releasing a game that nobody has the hardware to run, yet, doesn't make them any money. Who would buy that game? "Oh, I'm sure going to enjoy playing this game two years from now when I pick up a vid card that supports DX11."That makes no sense. PC game devs design to the system they can expect their install base to be using, because who else is going to buy the game? You misapprehend the argument, I think. I'm not saying that DIII won't run on top-notch hardware when it comes out. But it's likely that it won't take full advantage of the features of that hardware when it comes out, because Blizz is designing DIII for the hardware that most people will own when it comes out. And the design decisions that they'll make in that regard are already made; were made several years ago in fact. They made a guess back then about what people would eventually run DIII on, but if it turns out that they were wrong it's far too late to go back and guess again.That's partly why WoW has so much lower hardware requirements than other MMO's, partly it's a conscious decision based on getting as broad a user base as possible, but it's also a consequence of Blizzard's much, much longer dev cycle. Yeah, that's pretty stupid. Consoles and PC's usually have the same games. The most popular game on the PC is Farmville. How do you explain the enduring popularity of World of Warcraft? I'm not saying it's for children, but a lot of children play it. What's "more adult" about the PC? The constant upgrade treadmill? If it's not one walled garden, it's another. Who cares? No, it's called "Cydia." Remember when I mentioned that?

That's cool, we just had a thread on that. You should pop over and drop in your specs.I was on the PC treadmill once, too, and it's total bullshit. You wouldn't believe the cash I dropped once to play Mass Effect on my PC, and then imagine my dismay when the PC port of Mass Effect was so buggy I couldn't even keep it running. I dropped 250 on an Xbox 360 and I've not looked back. Plays Netflix, too (they're all doing that these days, I know.) Yeah, that's true. They started in the DIY market, back in the days of the Apple I, but the intent probably always was to move computers to a place where you didn't have to be DIY to use them. Me neither. I think all platforms have strengths and weaknesses, and that they should be compared on that basis instead of on AE's stupid basis of "PC's are for adults, you lamer."

We should start an EvC steam group.I'm "crashfrog", natch.

Lemme see what I have on my account... TF2, Left 4 Dead (the first one), Borderlands, some old shit. I'm not especially good at any of these.

I play on Live, too! Username "crashfrog." (Seriously.)

Hi, it's called "Xbox Live Marketplace." Or PS Network or something. And a lot more money, too. Why does any of that make them "better"? Is it more adult to waste your time and money?

LOL! Says the guy who's telling me all about video games. Yeah, just keep telling yourself how "adult" you are. In point of fact, nothing makes the Mercedes better. Luxury cars are a scam for man-children who don't know the difference between price and quality.

Yeah, I think that's true. If MMO's are your thing then yeah, you've got to be on PC. But you can ease off on the upgrade treadmill because of their generally lower requirements. It's the guys who want to run Crysis or want Assassins Creed to look like it does on the consoles who are dropping tons of cash. They have to. What a waste.

iOS devices aren't Macs. Remember when we were talking about that? Why would it have any of those things? It's a program you use with your fingers.

It depends what you mean by "toy." People are getting useful work done on these devices, in part because sometimes work is more useful when you don't have to do it chained to your desk. I mean, let's look at your family gathering again - what did you pull out to answer the question?Oh, that's right - nothing at all, because your PC, which you could have used to answer the question, was back at your house instead of with you. It was literally useless to you because of a trick of geography - it was somewhere you weren't.I know we're talking about "post-PC", but in fact we're not really talking about phones and tablets that are exactly the same as PC's. We're talking about devices that are a lot more useful than a PC at home when I'm at the store (that is, useless.) My iPhone isn't as capable as my PC, not by a long shot. But when I'm waiting at the bus stop, my iPhone can come out and be used. My PC can't, because it's not there.None of this is meant as a defense of Apple devices in particular - as an aside, though, the criticism that Apple products are too hard to use is just bizarre - but as a defense of limited mobile devices in general. Of course you have to use an iPad with your fingers - if you're sitting at a bus stop, what are you going to use a mouse on? If you're sitting on a beach, where are you going to put the keyboard? Think it through.Also, just curious, since your post doesn't say: what kind of phone did you get? (And, like, on what planet did you live that Win XP Search ever did anything useful?)

You really think an iPad can't tell you the distance between two cities? (Hint: it's called "Maps." It was probably right there on the home screen. The name should have indicated that it had something to do with geography and maybe directions and distances. Why did you think you needed to use Google Earth?) Couldn't it maybe be that you couldn't figure it out, because it's not exactly like a PC? Yes.Why do they have to be exactly like PC's to replace a PC? Sorry, I hate touchpads and find them so generally unusable that I tend to forget that laptops have them. And, of course, desktop PC's don't have them at all. So, yeah - no touchpad. Control-click, but Macs have two-button mice. Have for ages. Your "brand new studio Mac" did, too. Double-clicking on folder icons opens folders, same as any other computer. Quicktime plays AVI and has for decades. Except that you don't seem to know anything about computers except how to use them in very specific, very circumscribed ways. The issue you have seems to be that if it doesn't work exactly the same way it works in a specific version of Windows XP, you can't learn any new way to do it. That's the problem you're having with Vista/Win7, that's the problem you seem to have with Macs - you learned to do things one specific way, and if that way doesn't work, you have no idea what to do.It's something you see a lot in the way senior citizens use computers. They don't understand the conceptual basis of what they're doing, they only understand it as a list of concrete actions. They don't understand "check your email, write a letter, upload to YouTube", they only understand "double-click the envelope, press the Start menu, bwa-bwa You-what?" iPhone and iPad does that too. And "play around with it" never occurred to you? Again, that's something that you see in technology users of a certain age - they're convinced that any deviation from a specific, circumscribed set of routines will "break it", so they're just not capable of exploratory learning. Anybody who's had the experience of having to fix their relatives' computers knows what I'm talking about.That's the reason your criticism is so bizarre. That's the reason your iPod didn't come with a full instruction manual - you're supposed to fuck around with it for a few minutes, make mistakes, discover serendipitously. ("Oh, it does that too! Awesome!") Anybody younger than about 45, at this point, is completely comfortable with this process, because it works better than reading the manual. You remember more because you worked for it, and because you got the "reward" from independent discovery. Apple products really are verifiably easier to use - there's all kinds of videos of pre-verbal infants, for instance, using iPads with a great degree of proficiency - it's just that it's not any easier for you because of the flawed way in which you approach technology. Dead-on serious. Never in my life has Search in Windows done anything useful. If I want to search my computer for a file, I have to install Google desktop. Of course, they're not making that any more. (Fuck!)

No, but you know what is childish?Having a big chip on your shoulder about being an adult. If you were really an adult, you'd play what you want. And you wouldn't be so threatened by people who do different things than you. So you don't have an argument that I'm wrong. Got it.

I do that all the time. I didn't even have to jailbreak - the first time I plugged my iPhone in, it showed up as a removable storage device. I can drag and drop stuff right off of it.Now that I'm jailbroken, I don't even have to plug it in; I can SSH and SFTP into it and grab whatever I want, peruse the entire filetree, and so on.

You certainly wouldn't want to copy music that way, but why would you? You don't put songs on an iOS device, you put playlists on. Eh, I'm not convinced. Until I changed the root password, anybody could have gotten in and taken full control of my phone, downloaded all of my pictures, even turned the mic on and used it to spy on me. These are computers with full sense capabilities that we're carrying around at all times of the day and that are never more than a few feet from us, even during the most intimate and personal moments of our lives.I think a fair degree of out-of-the-box restriction is appropriate. Aren't we at Day Two of the ScarJo Age, due to hackers grabbing nudie pics off her phone remotely?

No, I'm reading your posts. Nobody's fooled by your childish posturing.