I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
If price is not a concern I might recommend sticking to the laptop route. There is no noticeable performance gap on the Pro line with the fan (wife has an M2 Air and I definitely notice throttling in stuff like Lightroom)
I use a 14" M1 Max as my daily driver with an external monitor. I absolutely love the versatility. I run small video transcode jobs in Premiere/AME or render out things in After Effects daily and I never hear the fan or have any performance/heat issues of any kind. I am comparing this to my Win10 5950x/RTX 3080 desktop also at my desk and while that is definitely faster, I do not feel like my MBP is too far behind.
If cost is a factor I think the Mac Mini is the best bang for your buck. Especially if you still have access to a .edu (or just say you are in college) and knock an additional $100 off.
Have not hit this issue...yet. However, on my Xbox someone else's ActivisionID has inadvertently been tied to mine. Got in touch with the owner and when they go to unlink their account from my Xbox Live Activision's website just reloads. No errors, no codes or any confirmation or denial. Phone support is nonexistent, followed all other possible channels and cannot find or do anything.
I spent $70 for a game I can't play on my own account. I can't play with my friends, I can't level my own stuff, and there is nothing I can do. It's completely broken and I can't get a refund in any way. Anyone had success in disputing these purchases with their credit card companies?
While I see both sides, I don't agree with this strategy. In fact, I think the public should be more aware of just how damaging Google/YouTube is to the streaming ecosystem and if you really stretch this argument, the planet.
It is true - HEVC's original licensing structure was a nightmare, but it seems to have been resolved and we now have hardware decoders in nearly all modern consumer devices.
This is also becoming true of Dolby's formats. maybe I am biased or not as informed as I could be but they did the R&D, worked with some of the brightest (pun intended) in the industry and created a production-to-distribution pipeline. Of course there are fees, but vendors are on board and content creators know how to work with these standards.
Now here comes one of the largest companies in the world. HEVC? Nope - they don't want to pay anyone any fees so instead they're going to develop the VP9 codec. Should they use HLS or DASH? Nope, they are going to spin DASH off into our own proprietary HTTP deliverable and only deliver AVC HLS for compatibility reasons. Apple customers complain and after years they cave and support VP9 as a software decoder starting with iOS14. This means millions of users eat significant battery cycles just to watch anything, including HDR video.
Then we get to Chrome. HEVC? Nope. Dolby? Nope. HLS? Nope. The most popular browser in the world doesn't support any of the broadcast standards. It's their way or fallback to SDR and the less efficient AVC codec.
So now anyone else in the streaming industry trying to deliver the best streaming experience has to encode/transcode everything three times. AVC for compatibility (and spec) reasons, HEVC for set-top boxes and iOS, and VP9 for Google's ecosystem. If it wasn't for CMAF the world would also have to store all of this twice.
In the end, to save YouTube licensing and bandwidth costs, the rest of the industry has to consume 2-3x more compute to generate video and hundreds of millions of devices now consume an order of magnitude more power to software decode VP9.
If and when Project Caviar becomes reality, it'll be another fragmented HDR deliverable. Dolby isn't going away and Chrome won't support it, so the rest of the industry will have to add even more compute and storage to accommodate. In the name of 'open' and saving manufacturers a couple dollars, the rest of the industry is now fragmented and consumers are hurt the most.
YouTube weirdly admitted this fragmentation is becoming a problem. They can't keep up with compute and had to create custom hardware to solve. Of course, these chips are not available to anyone else and gives them a competitive edge:
https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-arg...
"In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.
I went to Buffalo Grove High School in this same district and graduated many years ago. At the time no IPTV systems or EPIC bell systems were in place. However, as soon as I walked in my freshman year I noticed the 'teacher' WiFi was only using MAC Address Filtering. One minute scan and a spoof later I was poking around to discover a whole lot was visible from this privileged network. “...From the results, we found various devices exposed on the district network. These included printers, IP phones... and even security cameras without any password authentication!” It was even worse back then. It was all exposed on wide open WiFi!
My senior prank was going to revolve around the printers. We were shocked to discover every printer not just in BG but across the entire district was accessible with no authentication of any kind. We cooked up ideas and were planning to print either porn or I has cheezburger/lolcat memes via telnet (I'm dating myself.)
Ultimately I got into other trouble before we could execute and figured this wasn’t worth not graduating over. I moved on and so happy to see a much better prank on this same network happen so many years later with almost no repercussions. Congratulations and great prank!