Fun fact I learned about while writing this: During the 2007 holiday shopping season, retailers sharply discounted HD-DVD players and turned them into doorbusters, which made them fly off the shelves—only for the format to get discontinued in February of 2008 […]

Yes, there’s a bit of irony in the fact that Cat Stevens frequently played “Peace Train” on an Ovation. But on the other hand, the guy who developed the guitar was a genuine innovator.

Hey, at least you’re not in a canoe with Northrop Grumman branding […]

@cmdr_nova Kind of hard to argue against it when it’s one of your user base’s main requests.

@g Affinity already runs great in WINE. Why would they need to make a non-existing web version when their Windows code already works so well?

To be clear there would likely be some work to it but Affinity is one of the better-running pro apps that can run on WINE.

Yes, there’s a bit of irony in the fact that Cat Stevens frequently played “Peace Train” on an Ovation. But on the other hand, the guy who developed the guitar was a genuine innovator.

Hey, at least you’re not in a canoe with Northrop Grumman branding […]

@svavar Any modern CPU can decode HEVC. But HEVC hardware support is much more efficient because it doesn’t bottleneck performance.

@svavar The key line is “software”—even if you buy something, you’re buying a solution that is CPU bound. So even if it decodes, it tanks your performance.

@svavar Presumably they hit a switch at the hardware level—took out a tiny transistor, perhaps. If you read the spec sheets for these devices (linked in the piece) they say straight up that it’s disabled.

There is a deeper issue which is worth pointing out—we should all be relying less on licensed codecs—but we do not live in that world and this is screwing people over now.

But it sucks even for those business consumers, because business consumers use Zoom, and watch and edit videos too. Basically, you should probably avoid buying anything from Dell or HP until they fix this.

To be clear: This does not affect consumer laptops, but business laptops are often purchased downstream by consumers, with HP and Dell two of the most popular options. This effectively forces you to buy what are often lower quality laptops with worse upgradeability if you want to have decent video.

The structure of this story buries the lead, but the story is plain: Rather than spend four extra cents per unit on computers that cost more than $1,000, Dell and HP think it’s more cost effective to disable a feature that people rely on in modern laptops.

@greatquux I just got it!