Github’s Christina Warren (a former tech reporter and notable Friend of The Verge) takes a dive into Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, which is a translation layer that allows Windows DirectX 12 games to run near-natively on Apple silicon. Tom wrote it up when it was announced, but now people are using it — and there’s a ways to go, but the promise is there.
I usually get a few emails about every episode of Decoder — I really do read them all! — but the response to this week’s episode with Brenden Ballou on the influence of private equity companies on businesses of all kinds has been fascinating, since it connects a wonky financial idea to real experiences so many people have had at work. There’s a 300+ comments thread at Hacker News about it, even. And here I thought this would just be a wonky passion project of an episode!
This is why we started this website in 2011. This exact sentence, as tipped by reader Dave Lee. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em (meats).
That’s what Microsoft told local leaders in the run-up to the deal. No surprises there — it’s a data center, after all — but a far cry from the 13,000 LCD manufacturing jobs Foxconn promised way back when. There was also this tiny scrap of contrition from Racine County Executive Jonathan Delgrave:
“Do you wish Foxconn wouldn’t have made such big promises?” TMJ4 reporter Ben Jordan asked.
“Yes, I do, but in fairness to Foxconn, certainly a lot of dynamics have changed,” Delagrave responded.
The dynamic that changed was everyone realized Foxconn was always lying, of course. I suppose we’ll find out more in the next book.
‘Reddit has plugged its ears and refuses to listen to anybody but themselves. And I think there’s some very minor concessions that they can make to make people a lot happier.’
Author and federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou explains why private equity is buying everything from vet offices to tech conglomerates, how this system is broken, and what can be done to fix it.
Did you know SiriusXM was a merger of Sirius and XM, which were incompatible satellite radio services, and lots of cars out there with older Sirius receivers still can’t get the full lineup of stations? I got into it with CEO Jennifer Witz on Decoder last week, and mentioned that people have been asking for the popular Road Trip Radio station to be moved to the Sirius bands for years now.
Jennifer promised me she’d look into it, and just emailed me with an update: Road Trip Radio is moving to channel 105 for two weeks starting on June 30th as a “pop-up channel” for the summer. Just two weeks though — what do we have to do to make it permanent?
Marques shows the comparison clearly here and points out that Ready Player One is also a pretty dystopian story to lean on. I’ll go one farther: it’s a weird reference for a product Apple is trying to position as augmented reality, not VR. But in the end: it’s a headset, you know? This is the headset shot.
Apple’s new headset made the splashiest debut during WWDC 2023, so don’t miss Nilay Patel telling you (outside of podcasts, editorials, and comments) what it’s like to wear one before the Vision Pro is released early next year.
This video pulling back the curtain on the shark-infested waters of the creator ecosystem is so good, and so revealing. One thing I try not to take for granted here at The Verge is that we are built on decades of ethics policies and snooty journalism arguments about background policies and so on — most independent creators just get thrown into the deep end, and the machine preys on it.
