It’s heavily used everywhere else in the world, the US is well-known to lag behind on payment technology. It’s like travelling back in time when you go there.

I pay with my phone literally everywhere in Canada, haven’t opened my wallet in months. I was in the US last year and they didn’t have mobile payment terminals at restaurants so you always had to pay for sit down service at a counter, always wanted me to sign for tap, kept calling it Apple Pay instead of tap or contactless, had places that would only swipe a physical card which isn’t even allowed in other countries anymore, it’s crazy.

Walmart takes tap in Canada, they were one of the last holdouts. The “individual app for each service” thing is very American, even American companies abroad don’t do it because they’ll lose business. It’s the same thing with cash transfers. There are 100 different private ways to send money in the US. PayPal, CashApp, Facebook Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo, etc.

None of those exist in Canada because we just have Interac e-transfers. Hard to compete with free & automatic support by every bank account in the country. Other countries have similar systems. The US has Zelle but as far as I know that was implemented way later and doesn’t have the mindshare.

I think it’s because the market changed around them. When the 3DS launched they were one of the only companies providing decent BC. Now, everyone does it and people expect games to actually play better on the new devices.

Still a surprise that Nintendo got the message, but with the dozen first party games that got free patches it was clear this was a new era for them. I’m playing Pokemon Violet right now after beating Scarlet a few years ago and it’s like a whole new game on Switch 2, all the performance issues are just gone.

It’s funny because you don’t even have to go that far to find examples of really poor space usage.

Final Fantasy VII has the entire game on each disc. Only the cutscenes are different between each disc, that’s why the natural breakpoint for the game after the party splits up was shifted, because the ending video was too big and required a disc by itself.

The second a developer doesn’t have to worry about something, they don’t. Give them 2TB NVMe, 5090, i9-14900k and 32GB of RAM, and suddenly that will all be at max utilization. But this isn’t a modern thing, it’s just one of many “necessity is the mother of invention” examples.

Another great example: Every modern desktop app and most mobile apps that just package & run an entire web browser for every single app. There is zero benefit to the user experience or resource utilization to use these sorts of tools, the only reason to do so is to allow code reuse & simplify development.

It’s not needed. The only alliance that could topple them is BQ+PC and the Bloc has already committed to giving the Liberals minimum 1 year to enact their agenda.

No need to align right out of the gate and give the NDP bargaining power, they’ll do it when they have to.

Yay time for my favourite meme.

It’s only “outrageously” priced compared to its predecessor, and only if you don’t think about it too much. Considering under the hood it’s basically a phone or tablet, it’s very fairly priced considering the specs.

The Switch 1 is basically a tablet from 2017 being sold for $300. It never received a price drop despite it using 8 year old technology, it actually received a price increase with the OLED model. An iPad 5th Gen from 2017 sells for $50 on eBay, for comparison purposes. Not like for like as that has a way higher res screen and less RAM, but it’s fairly close.

As it’s a new chip with an expected 10 year lifespan, it’s likely on 3nm process which means it has to fight for manufacturing time with TSMC because they’re the only ones who can fab that sort of chip.

All that, plus the expectation that they will be absorbing some tariff costs for now means it will likely never see a price drop, and honestly doesn’t seem that bad in terms of pricing. It’s the cheapest console on the market with the exception of the very underpowered and useless Series S, and it’s competitively priced in terms of the tech under the hood.

So if it will be the cheapest console of its generation, is already cheaper than its ancient competition, is cheaper than a mid range GPU by itself, and is cheaper or comparably priced with similarly specced devices, then how is it so overpriced?

The only argument I’ve heard yet has been “consoles are sold at a loss because the games are expensive” but that hasn’t been true for the industry since the PS4 era, and it’s literally never been true for Nintendo consoles, they always make a profit right out of the gate. So I honestly don’t get it.

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I guess that would be the case if you bought it, beat it and sold it, but most people in that scenario would already own it and then they would just buy the upgrade pack. This $90 option is only for people who don’t own the game in any form yet.

The idea that any significant contingent of people would not own it in any form, then suddenly want to play it on Switch 2 but would balk at the asking price seems unlikely, certainly not enough to cut the price in half.

If they wanted a cheaper option they could always just buy a used Switch copy and then just buy the upgrade pack. I would prefer cheaper Nintendo games too but the reality is this won’t cost them that many sales.

They really wouldn’t. They would have to triple or quadruple sales to take that sort of a hit. As it stands it’s one of the best selling games of all time already, basically everyone interested in it already owns it.

Financially, they made the right decision. As annoying as it is from the consumer side.

Article is 10 days old, which in Trump tariff terms is like a year. Just noting for anyone who thinks this is relevant to the current situation.

We lost that in the PS4 era, seems weird to mourn it now.

Except that was about internet connectivity and this is about price. Telling people to go with the old console because they can’t due to a bullshit restriction is crazy, saying it about price is pretty fair. If you can’t afford a current gen console, then the last gen would be the best option. At $450USD it will still be the cheapest console on the market other than the Switch 1.

I’m honestly shocked people are so up in arms about the price. Doesn’t really seem like Nintendo is gouging here, a comparable phone or tablet with the same specs comes in around the same price or higher. It has pretty much every feature people were asking for at about a $100USD premium over the existing Switch.

Raising standard game prices, charging for the tutorial app, and charging for next gen upgrades, that I get the pushback on.

I doubt it. Why wouldn’t it just be a modified Pro controller like every other classic controller they’ve released. My guess is they are just managing expectations that it won’t be automatically usable with every game and mapped correctly.

I doubt I’ll ever connect this to my Switch 2, it’s going to be a replacement for the aging used WaveBirds that are hooked up to my Wii. With BlueRetro as the receiver, my guess is they’ll work day 1 or shortly after. For that, they’re awesome options.

shrug

Almost all video game retailers in Canada are American, so I was going to buy it direct from Nintendo anyways to cut them out and those preorders have always been set for May 8th.

Other speculation is just that it will cause US scalpers to try to snag all the Canadian preorders through reshipping services or crossing the border. So ostensibly they are doing it to protect our stock.

Makes sense to me, but who knows.

In Canada it’s $629CAD, in Ontario with 13% sales tax that comes to about $710CAD, which is about $9CAD higher than 450EUR.

In the US, $450USD comes to $639CAD, which means the pre-tax CAD price is actually CHEAPER than the USD price. On top of all of that, they just announced preorders are paused in the US due to tariffs.

I actually think Canada is getting off pretty good here. If you can get your hands on 2, I suspect the Canadian model will be doing gang busters on eBay for all the Americans looking for one, so that’s a nice bonus too.

Bought a goose.

That’s actually the main reason most left, Lemmy has never seen a bigger increase in MAU before or after the death of 3rd party apps.

Not to say the other stuff isn’t important, but for me Reddit WAS Apollo. Without it, it didn’t even feel like the same service. Enough people felt the same about their preferred apps that they left en masse in 2023.

So many column inches and yet all the American articles dodge the real issue. Tariffs are bad and threatening the economy has made them a lot of enemies, but that isn’t why Canadians suddenly did a heel turn on our election and are united across provincial, social and political borders in opposition to the US.

It’s because Trump repeatedly threatened our sovereignty, belittled our government and insulted us. We can take jokes on the chin, nobody cares being called maple syrup drinking hosers that live in America’s hat and only care “aboot” hockey.

We care that our existence as a country has been threatened, repeatedly and specifically. It’s hilarious reading American articles deliberately ignore this, when it’s all the Canadian media can talk about.

When your biggest ally can’t even commit to not using military force to invade you or annex you, you fight back. When foreign oligarchs think they can put their finger on the scale in your election, you fight back.

People are fucking pissed & united, in a way I’ve never seen before in this country and if they think we’re just going to lie down they have another thing coming. Put that in a goddamn article.

Yep, all the pain and no gain. Already cancelled my Walmart Delivery Pass and swapped to PC Express. Now I’m locked in for a year. That’s a year of groceries Walmart lost over this.

Personally I’ll be operating like this until the threats are gone, not just delayed, and even years into the future I’ll be much more cognizant of where my goods are coming from.

Bought a bunch of BBC Planet Earth 4K BluRays direct from them because the only other reasonably priced option was Amazon and I’m avoiding them if possible.

BluRays using technology from Japan, pressed in China, containing a documentary series from the UK, purchased in Canada in CAD direct from the UK distributor.

Should be fine, right? Shipped from the US. Such nonsense.