### Issue 1931 - Wednesday 13th September, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- New iPhones & Apple Watches
- Unity to stick developers with an extra fee every time a customer installs and re-installs their game
- Thunderbolt 5 is a thing, 120GBps of bandwidth & 240W of power
- One book I shouldn't hate read, one book I should love read
- Cheap Return to Monkey Island for PS5, Nintendo eShop gift cards, Half-Life & Portal bundles, Nokia G60, Pixel 7 Pro, Xbox Series S

## The News

### New iPhones & Apple Watches

Unless you've been living under a rock the last 24 hours, there's new iPhones (now with USB-C!) and Apple Watches. MacRumours has a good summary of what went down early this morning. I'm not gonna waste time comparing the new iPhones and Watches to the old ones, Apple's website does a good job of that. Apple did indeed hobble the iPhone 15 with USB 2.0 speed USB-C data transfer, but the iPhone Pro gets USB 3.0. Apple even promotes the USB-C port on the iPhone Pro as being able to directly connect to a Mac so ProRAW photos and ProRes videos are ingested directly, bypassing the iPhone's internal storage. A new Action Button on the iPhone 15 Pro is pretty nice too. Bad news for iPhone mini fans, it's dead. The Series 9 Apple Watch got a major spec bump, so if you've been hanging to upgrade your wrist computer, now's the time.

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### Unity to stick developers with an extra fee every time a customer installs and re-installs their game

Game developers are extremely pissed off with pricing changes to Unity, one of the leading game engines used in thousands of titles. The most contentious is the "Unity Runtime Fee", charging developers 1c to 20c every time a game is installed on a device, extra to the actual cost of licensing Unity for commercial use, after the game reaches a certain revenue and install threshold. If you re-install a game after getting a new iPhone, or a new gaming PC, or a fancy Steam Deck, each time you install it the developer has to pay Unity a fee - on top of the platform (i.e: App Store, Steam, Epic, etc.) fees too. Dunno how Unity plans to measuring the installs, but they told 404 Media they'll "use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources".

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### Thunderbolt 5 is a thing, 120GBps of bandwidth & 240W of power

Intel announced Thunderbolt 5. It's the same USB-C connector you know and love from Thunderbolt 4, but with 120 Gbps of bandwidth and 240W power delivery while maintaining backwards compatibility with TB3 and 4 and USB 4. Intel reckons TB4 and TB5 will co-exist for a while as TB5 is a "premium" interface. It has a cool feature called Bandwidth Boost that allows for uneven speeds for sending and receiving data. Instead of being 80/80, speeds can be tweaked to 120/40, which makes sense for stuff like high resolution/framerate displays. Dr. Ian Cutress has a blog post for anyone after a deeper dive. It's amazing how they keep on managing to squeeze more data though a copper wire. Apple could chuck TB5 into the A18 or A19 SoC in a future iPhone and let us run macOS on it. That would rule.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### One book I shouldn't hate read, one book I should love read

There's two interesting books coming up that some of you might wanna read. First is Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. Corey Newton has some excerpts from it regarding Elon's Twitter shemozzle and The Guardian has a couple too. I kinda want to hate read this, but as Marius told me on The Sizzle's Slack channel, life is too short for that and to love read something instead, so I think I'll spend that precious reading time with Cory Doctorow's new book, The Internet Con: How To Seize The Means of Computation. It spends a light 173-pages outlining a "simple, well-crafted vision of a more civil, civic-minded online life — peppered with selected sad tales of the human cost of Big Tech greed". By the way, there's a book thread on the Sizzle's forums if you're after more recommendations for things to read.

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## Bargains

- Return to Monkey Island - $18.57 on the PlayStation store
- 20% off Nintendo eShop gift cards at Coles next week (Sept 20th)
- Half-Life Complete Bundle or Portal Bundle - $5.35/$2.18 on Steam
- Nokia G60 5G dual SIM smartphone - $298 from Amazon
- Google Pixel 7 Pro 5G 128GB - $887 from Officeworks
- Xbox Series S 512GB Console - $445.90 from The Gamesmen
- Trade in any old shitty phone and get $300 off a Google Pixel at JB Hi-Fi plus whatever the phone you're trading in is worth

## Image Of The Day

1984 A-Z, Susan Kare. This print incorporates Macintosh bitmap icons from 1984 to illustrate the alphabet. It also documents that the dog glyph from the Cairo font (used for the letter D) is in fact not a cow. (The Henry Ford)

## The End

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