Why, of course they are!

Same as Sprint! And then when the deal is complete and all the promises made and contracts signed, they will start firing the highest paid/longest tenured employees at T-Mobile for cost savings while jacking up prices with new plans with the same features every 6 to 8 months and promotional phone pricing only for those new plans.

I should know. I was a store manager for 5 years. Before and after sprint merger.

T-Mobile was always a shit company with a bombastically marketed CEO that was all Packing Cracking et al. Reduce and replace is a scam. They lie and say they don’t have the device if you don’t buy accessories in store.

Wanna know how to get the phone?

Start picking out your accessories, have them grab your phone from the back, once they start the phone sale process, say you have changed your mind on your accessories. If they then say you can’t buy it, call the corporate 611 number and ask for a bill credit for deceptive practices and report the store. Then go and report to the FCC for bill stuffing.

Never use a third party store. They are even griftier.

“Uninstall”

Sure…

If you want blazing fast on an old machine, I always keep a flash drive with some good old slitaz. Can’t beat that all in ram configuration on the slitaz minimal windowed version. But that’s not really the question here. If the cinnamon variant is slow, xfce.

Coming from someone who nuked their grandmas computer and installed ChromeOS Flex on it since she can’t screw that up too badly and just needs a Facebook/search machine.

Tho, now I am wishing for a ChromeOS Flex version that is just Firefox since adblock will be dying on chrome with manifest v3.

I was suggesting mint for cinnamon since it would be relatively familiar to anyone using windows, at least in form. Decently managed software store.

Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin OS Lite, Peppermint OS.

I’ve never heard this word in my life and I somehow knew it was antisemitic?

Looking at you Thomas Kincade. Investments my ass.

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme…

Yes.

Not terribly difficult to cook up if you watch a couple YouTube videos.

It was only a Microsoft project the moment they bought Xamarin.

Shoulda built it in Julia.

The bear obviously. I need to ask him a few questions.

Cool. Take their search stuff, open source all the software, spin out an account service and 6 baby search engine companies.

Do the same with each of their massive properties.

I’m just worried for the content creators on patreon. Their choices are a significant reduction in income, jacking up prices and pricing out some of their patrons (thus reducing their income), or if patreon pulls from apple there’s a significant reduction in visibility and additional hurdles (thus reducing income).

So it seems that no matter the outcome, creators suffer the consequences of the Apple tax.

Fuck apple. Rotten to the core. Class action lawsuit in the very least.

Vote. We need House, Senate, and President to not be corporate fascists so that we can impeach at least 2 or 3 supreme court judges, replace them with rational human beings, reverse the overturning of Chevron Deference, and then let a stronger FTC gut these fucking companies.

Self dealing, competition buying, corporate fascists. The lot of them.

I’m not emotional, I just find the rage about this topic insane as they legit just changed the name of a product and gave it good iterative upgrades over the previous model by addressing their customer pain points. Especially when the casting feature is now highly integrated across most modern devices. It’s not like someone said they will never make a cheaper device than this one. And frankly, if one wants to point to enshittification of Google products, there are much better places to point than their hardware division.

Sorry if I appear emotional? I don’t feel emotional. I’m just responding in a way I feel is rational to the barrage of comments replying to me. If anything, there seems to be an emotional charge in the opposite direction. But I’m sure that’s just in my reading 20 of them directed at me. I’m genuinely excited about this product because it shows that Google cares about a product I like to the point where they want to make it better.

Deprecate the casting protocol? Sure Jan. The new device still supports casting.

And now I can install all those things without worrying about my internal storage filling to capacity!

The last casting only device (Chromecast Gen3) was originally released in 2018 (6 years ago). They stopped selling it in 2022. And it is still supported with updates. They supported the original with 10 years of updates. If all ya wanna do is cast, keep using it. I personally want more than a cast point.

I have a smart TV as well, but refuse to connect it directly to wifi. As I tried that when I bought it and it insta-bricked itself and had to go through the hassle of returning a delivered TV.

A custom ROM for this device would be interesting. I know that the Chromecast 4K can do a custom ROM, but only if it was running an older os version before you flash it, as the bootloader couldn’t be unlocked after.