YouTube videos degrade in quality over time too, as they reencode from one codec du jour to the next.
Heck, even Google drive pulled that stunt where they stopped storing photos in original resolution.
Point being, none of these companies exist primarily to archive your content - they exist to monetise it.
If you want to safeguard your content in original quality, then you need to either put it on a cloud storage that you are PAYING for, or keep it on your own hardware (and with backups)
Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.
The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.
I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.
I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.
I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it's kinda bready.
In English too, the colloquial name for tardigrades is "water bears" :D
And so, the world lost absolutely nothing of value.
There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.
For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.
If that was in TNG, they'd have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that's how people with jobs get their jobs done.
TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.
L A M P
I agree with all of that, pretty much.
If Asus or whoever else dropped a "steam deck killer" I'm pretty sure Valve wouldn't even blink.
Valve didn't make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.
If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.
Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.
And it's not like they didn't have plenty of problems to solve.
Here's an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.
This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.
If you were a Sony fan, you'd be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It's just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.
Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn't stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.
I'd expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won't create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.
So on that basis I wouldn't personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.
All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the "latest model" - it's psychologically better from the consumer perspective.
There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)
An allegory, perhaps.
You'd be surprised.
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who use their Instagram or Facebook as basically the history of their social lives, where all their memories are, the local copies long gone.
It's a terrible idea, but I'm certain people are doing it.