tl;dw A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan. They lie about their terms and their PC specs. They advertise no contracts but absolutely have contracts, and the terms are awful.
A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan
Literally a lower monthly payment, lower total paid and you end up owning a computer if you finance your computer with a predatory payday loan than with this rental program (per GN’s math)
Edit: at $259/mo that’s already $3108/year or 2-3x the cost of a good midrange DIY PC. Also at an incredible 36% interest rate because this hypothetical individual purchased a $3000 computer on a credit card and only pays a bit more than the minimum towards it, that’s only $177/mo on a 24 month loan. Or if you just got a $1500 computer (a pretty dang good computer!) on a 12% APR personal loan (pretty common from banks) you only pay $133/mo for 12 month, own the computer and only pay a total of $1600
The only way to make this rental program look at all good is if you are literally using the computer to make money but have very littlemoney upfront for a decent enough computer to do the same job (basically the “rent it for 1 month and win a fortnite tournament” fantasy one paid promoter suggested) except, oh look, you can buy a laptop from Dell for $520 or less than two months rental cost if you really don’t have the budget and then use that to make your money to fuel your future baller PC purchase. And I can assure you, that business laptop can run Fortnite if that’s your concern, because Fortnite will run on any potato PC if you turn the prettiness down enough.
Edit 2: Also I just found a similar laptop in 1 minute on ebay for $255 to further kill that “spend your allowance to rent a computer for a month to win a fortnite tournament” fantasy
I glanced at their site earlier (but after posting this comment) and it starts at $59/mo for a budget system with a 10th gen i5 and an RTX3050 so probably a $500ish PC when DIYed. And they have about a half dozen tiers above that up to the top $259/mo which is probably a $3000 PC if the parts were current. It’s still a bad deal no matter how you slice it though
And they are using paid influencers to promote said debt trap to those that don’t know any better, particularly children.
Probably the most insidious part of this to me. Seeing those clips of “influencers” pushing the idea of convincing your parents to get you a rental PC. Disgusting.
I mean, I could see if they tried to make this rent-to-own over 2-3 years. At half the price they’re offering.
But renting… where you’re paying over the entirety of the price in a single year, is fucking insane.
If renting, and updating it every 2 years, then for like 1/4th of the price then sure. I could see it being promoted how they are. Rent out older stock for 50% retail to at least get some value out of it while allowing people to pay ~$30 a month for a decent computer. (and then you could “upgrade” the lower tier with this to end up recouping 75% of retail over 4 years.)
But who the fuck is paying 10% of the cost a month to borrow an okay computer, even ignoring the full month cancelation fee, and ridiculous contract. (which is… ignoring a LOT.)
It is sad to see NZXT lowered to this as I used to have a decent view of them. They make some nice cases. CAM kinda lowered that view a bit, but I was in the beta for that and got a free water cooler out of it so I could overlook that (it’s improved a lot since beta, though it gathering data is still not great it’s less horrible than it was.). And pushing their own not as great products for the prebuilts still seemed okay for prebuilts for those scared to build on their own. But this is just… too much to overlook. Wild.
Well shit, wish they’d posted it before black Friday. It was only an AIO.
Edit: Cancelled. It was the wrong size, anyway. Sad I’m not gonna have a small LCD on the right one, though. NZXT was by far the cheapest in that respect.
If you live somewhere with consumer rights, by law you can return it no questions asked within 14 days of receipt (actual length of time may vary, UK is 14 days)
So is Australia, and these contracts will end them in court here real quick with potentially two Government departments: ACCC and ASIC. Feel sorry for Americans.
Oh I made that decision when they tried to replace the screws on my recalled rizer cable instead of replacing the whole unit on a $500 pc case. Get fucked nzxt
I can’t overstate how nice it is having a tiny little Linux gaming PC in your backpack. It can run the majority of games I throw at it, from Cyberpunk 2077 to Stardew Valley. I replaced SteamOS with Bazzite, which is a little better IMO. And for the games I can’t get good performance with, it’s seamless to stream them from my Linux gaming rig. It also obviously works great for ROMs, and while some Switch games are glitchy, most run very well. You don’t have to limit yourself to games on Steam either, since it’s pretty easy these days to run any Windows, MacOS, or Android apps or games on Linux, and Heroic gives you 1-click installs for GOG and Epic game stores.
Battery life is around two and a half hours for a game like Cyberpunk 2077, and as much as 7-8 for something like Stardew Valley.
You could install that, yes. But keep in mind that distros made for the Deck include the game mode for the Deck, as well as Steam Input, which is one of the greatest things Valve has made, allowing you to make complex macros and rebind every part of the Deck, from the buttons to the trackpads or even the gyro, in almost any way you want. Without those things, the Deck is just a PC with a very small screen. Steam Input is what makes many games, even ones that were never meant to be played with a controller, viable on the Deck.
No, game mode is a specific mode made for the Steam Deck and other portables. I believe people have also gotten it to work on the ROG Ally. It replaces the desktop entirely while active, and only Steam games, and games that are added as a shortcut to Steam can be launched. It is not something that is launched from Steam like Big Picture mode, and while it is active, there is no desktop, and no other way to interact with the Deck. Using the desktop normally requires exiting game mode entirely.
I’d be happy with DRM-free video purchases, but they don’t exist like they do for video games, and even video games aren’t available DRM-free across the board.
It’s not necessarily cheap or convenient, but building a physical collection of Blu-Rays (or DVDs if quality isn’t priority) is something that can’t be taken away.
Add on a compatible Blu-Ray drive to your computer and you can even rip the digital files yourself. It’s taken me a few years, but now I never have to worry if my favorite movie is available when I want to show a friend. It also makes them easy to loan.
I’d very much prefer to not even have them take up shelf space, but it’s the only way that exists to actually own a copy of a movie or TV show. I have ripped a number of them, but if someone made the GOG for movies, I’d move all of my purchases over there.
Unskippable ads, required downloaded updates, region restrictions…
Nah, I’m downloading that fucking car, I’m done giving movie studios chances to be reasonable.
They were good for a bit, but they are a slave to stock value and their finance bros will take every opportunity to squeeze you for revenue, ruining every experience.
Fun thing, even a DVD or Blu-ray is technically licensed by them, and they claim they have the right to revoke it whenever they want. In the case of Blu-ray they have tried to do this via “updates” to the Blu-ray players
I remember complaining on Amazon about the price of digital books when they were still relatively new. They wanted me to pay the same price for a digital book as a physical book. Back then, Amazon still had pretty decent customer service and wrote me back saying that the price for the book wasn’t for literal pages but for the work in making the book, etc. etc.
I told them I understood that but I don’t get the same rights with the digital book as I did with the physical, namely the right to sell the book.
Books, board games, etc. any physical media is technically a license, yes. BUT the copyright holder cannot bar you from doing whatever you want with the physical copy, within the limits of copyright law. Those same rights simply do not exist with your digital copies and, in fact, is often codified within your terms of service that you don’t fucking own anything and they can pull your license at any time.
DVD is next to impossible to revoke while Blu-ray is not. But you can’t revoke Blu-ray licenses to specific people but to regions. I haven’t heard of this happening but if it did, you could, in theory, still play your Blu-ray disks on players that aren’t connected to the internet to receive those updates. That said, I’m like 80% sure that Blu-ray keys have been leaked and you can rip them like DVDs today.
I’m not saying they would or they wouldn’t, but if they would, and I’m not saying they would, they would distribute the keys to the Blu-ray players online so other people could use their rightfully purchased discs in any way they pleased on their own hardware.
I’m not saying you you should or shouldn’t, but if you did, I’ve heard it’s possible to access a backup of the original even if you don’t have an original disc.
I am not saying you can or you can’t, but if you could, and I’m not saying you can, download basically any ebook or audiobook you want from “mouse torrent site”. It’s a private tracker, so you do have to apply for membership, but it’s the best place on the net for books.
I grab audiobooks from there, then pipe them straight from qBittorrent into an Audiobookshelf server so me, my family, and my friends can stream them to any device.
Sony owns Blu Ray tech but not DVD. DVD was industry consortium to prevent a repeat of the VHS and betamax war. Only lasted a generation unfortunately.
Thankfully modders have made good progress of coming closer to emulating servers for it so people can play it offline.
Bad part is Ubisoft actually removed The Crew from some people’s Ubisoft account. Steam versions were safe ironically to be able to download the game to make use of it when Crew community made fix is out.
Is it stealing though? Theft, as it is legally defined, requires depriving the original owner of the thing you are stealing. Stealing a car for example, means the owner cannot drive the car since you have it.
If you could take someone else’s car, but they still have access to their car as if it was never taken, is that really stealing?
You speak of copyright infringement. Some people call it IP theft but in reality it has nothing to do with stealing in the traditional sense of the word (such as stealing a bicycle). You can’t actually steal something that’s still there after you “take it.”
I’m going to keep this short. It takes a long time for society to “catch up” Facebook, twitter, the shitshows of algorithmic social media. It’s like watching a snail race but, that doesn’t make it right is what people are saying. When you go to the store and buy an apple they expect that apple to be theres except this is digital purchases and even in the terms it says that it can be modified by the corporation at any moment. Shit it’s been 112 years and climate change was only recognized as a real problem by the public in the last 30 years.
I know it’s like the people who get mad at me when they get hit with my chainsaw and it’s like “look wrong or right I’ve been out here swinging these chainsaws while wearing a blindfold for 24 years you need to get used to it”
Do we need to wake up to that? Or do we need to say that’s bullshit? Which one sounds better? Maybe companies need to wake up to the fact that they shouldn’t be able to do anything they want. Why can’t we wake up to that reality?
Maybe one day enough younger people will be in elected that understand computers aren’t magic. There’s no fundamental difference between selling a DVD and a digital movie, from a legal perspective.
Ironically, from what I can see, the younger generation understands even less about computers. It’s like everything is so simple to use (smartphones, consoles, tablet) that they no longer need to understand the technology behind it.
youtu.be
Aktywne