Not sure whether this is a smile or a gripe, but I’ll put it here. We did something on Thursday that my daughter has wanted to do since we walked past it going to Indianapolis ComicCon last year- go to a restaurant called The Sugar Factory with crazy desserts. It cost $100 and the quality of the desserts was not anywhere near as good as they looked (I had an appletini that was very light on the tini unfortunately), but it was an interesting experience.
For cost reasons, especially since we have to bring the kid along, we restrict most of our restaurant dining to local diners, so this was our first time dealing with that.
Oooh, this is something I’ve been curious about. I have to ask: If you just have a DVD player in 2023, why? DVD is 26 years old, BluRay is 17 years old. UHD BluRay is 7 years old. I haven’t had a (just) DVD player in 15 years. I understand (at least intellectually) the people who are disc player free (I think they’re making a huge mistake and Disney+/Hulu and Discover-Warner are proving me right) but not people who never at least upgraded from DVD to BluRay (it’s a 6x resolution upgrade!). At this point you can get a serviceable CD/DVD/BD/UHD player for $75.
I realize I’m a freak in the opposite direction. I have an Oppo BluRay player and am waffling about upgrading my $250 LG UBK90 UHD player to a Panasonic DP-UB9000 or Pioneer Elite UDP-LX500, but they’re a little too pricey for me.
Haha. We’ve not eaten in a restaurant since the beginning of the pandemic, and even then we limited it because my daughter’s ADHD makes her so squirmy and loud that we pretty much always ended up paying and bolting as fast as we could. I only know about the QR menu trend because I am Extremely Online.
My daughter has ADHD as well, but she seems to do okay in restaurants. She loves going out to breakfast. The only thing she doesn’t like is waiting until my wife is done because she’s a slow eater.
Everything I watch I watch on my desktop computer, and that only plays standard DVD’s.
I don’t really care much about Blu-ray resolution. I’m not a cinephile, I just want to see the movie or TV show.
Disney used to package DVD and Blu-ray together. That was useful for movies I might want to watch with my parents, since they have a Blu-ray player… but then I could watch the DVD myself at home on my computer.
You can get an external Blu-ray player for a computer, and as I gradually switch over to my new PC I will probably do that.
The one complaint I have about owning Macs is that they got rid of the optical disc drive. They should really be letting you play BDs without an external drive.
Well, the over-arching complaint I have about Macs is that Apple tells their customers what they want instead of listening to what the customers actually want. Hey, you don’t really want a CD/DVD drive anymore, so we’ll just take that away. Hey, these new USB ports are better, we’ll just change them so you can’t plug any of your stuff in without an adapter. Just let us take care of everything, you poor ignorant morons, so you can just play with your toys.
Yes! 1000x yes! I hate USB A/B. USB-C can deliver far more power than USB A/B. It has a huge data bus that can carry 4K or 8K video, surround audio, and external drive data at the same time, plus ethernet. It can be plugged in either orientation. No more plugging it in 5 times until you get it right.
For decades Apple has been obsessed with thinness and computing-efficiency-per-watt. Optical drives are huge by comparison. But I long ago switched to using external drives because I found them more reliable in both playing and burning discs.
Edit: Totally ninja-d on the USB-C
USB-C is great. Plus it often has better (PD) charging and faster (Thunderbolt) throughput. With the old style USB connectors I often required more than two attempts to plug it in: Try once, fail. Flip it, fail again. Actually look closer to align the connector better with the slot and realize that the first time was the correct orientation.
Another reason they ditched optical drives is that DVDs reached the point where they can’t hold enough data to be useful as an OS install disc, but licensing BluRay was too expensive for the value Apple saw in having the drive vs USB install sticks, and if you’re going to put a BD drive in, people are going to expect you to license BluRay playback.
They definitely went too far on thin and simple, but my 2021 MBP 14" is a huge step back in the right direction, with 3 USB-C ports and an HDMI and SD card port making their return. (And the death of the touch strip in place of function keys. Apple does listen to user feedback!)
And no more butterfly keyboard. I bought my Touch Bar MBP as a refurb so it wasn’t eligible for keyboard replacement, so this '21 version is light years in the right direction.
I’ve done this as well, it was a lesson learned. The desserts are gorgeous to look at, but hugely expensive and more than any person can eat. The one we went to would sell you the glass jar you just ate from for an additional $8 or so, haha f*ck you, no. The whole experience was basically a page plucked from the Disney/amusement park dining playbook: ridiculously expensive thing that’s ultimately disappointing.
Well for starters, our teevee is 20-something years old. It is a CRT beast - as in not High-Def, so the increased resolution wouldn’t do a lot for us.
The plan (after BluRay won out over HDDVD) was that we’d upgrade to BluRay player when our current teevee died. But that think refuses to die, so we never got around to it.
As regular DVD has been getting harder to find, I have thought about actually upgrading, assuming I can find a BD player that doesn’t require HDMI, since our teevee is also so old it doesn’t have HDMI inputs on it.
I had one of those 200-ton Sony CRT boulders, and was very happy to finally dump it for recycling. There were a couple of problem screen spots, but it still worked. F that think.
