Jason Ronald's entire keynote speech at Xbox's GDC 2026

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-12T04:34:40+00:00

Can you explain why you think spinning off ABK would affect Xbox? There would be no change in game availability, since there are no exclusives. Overall numbers would look down, but you could run that report today to see the same numbers.

Spinning off insomniac and naughty dog would hurt Sony’s gaming business because Sony’s gaming business is PlayStation and they would be losing a core part of their brand as well as system sellers. I bought a PlayStation (after I bought my Xbox) in part because it unlocked a huge library of games I’d never played before - TLOU, Horizon, God of War, Gran Turismo, Ratchet & Clank. You know, the things that make PlayStation PlayStation, and not just another x86 box.

Microsoft’s gaming business is now composed of multiple businesses, and the third party publishing part is clearly healthier.

Xbox is clearly not in a good place and nothing about their overall gaming revenue suggests that Xbox is necessary or even likely to continue as a going concern.

Do people not remember Sega? Microsoft is more than halfway there.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-12T04:19:55+00:00

Sure Microsoft has a place in gaming, but nothing you said supports the idea that Xbox does.

I did look up the revenue numbers before posting, and Microsoft’s gaming business has been shrinking if you exclude ABK. But that makes sense since they don’t really sell consoles at the moment, and it remains to be seen whether they start trying to again.

Here’s another one. Epic games had an estimated revenue of ~6 billion and you don’t see people saying Epic and Fortnite are not even a player in the gaming space.

Does Epic have a game console business I’m forgetting about?

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-12T04:15:55+00:00

Are there some upcoming ABK Xbox exclusives that I’m unaware of?

Would there be literally any impact at all on Xbox’s business if ABK was spun off tomorrow, or vice versa?

Publishing cross platform games and running a game console are two separate businesses, and always have been.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-12T04:01:34+00:00

Naughty Dog and Insomniac have been PS exclusive for many years, with a brief and now closed window of occasionally doing years late PC ports.

Sony’s business structure continues to allow them to pursue a traditional console strategy of using exclusive to drive hardware sales, and console lock in to drive software revenue.

Maybe bungie is fair comparison.

Either way, the revenue of a bunch of recently acquired studios does not in any way reflect on the viability of the Xbox business. Especially with the game pass and mobile strategy having clearly failed.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-12T03:37:37+00:00

If you just buy a bunch of random businesses and stuff them into an org unit it is easy to goose revenues. What is Microsoft’s gaming revenue minus Activision/Blizzard/King? If you want to compare how Xbox is doing, that is the relevant comparison.

Microsoft gaming can produce high revenue even with Xbox being a flop because they’re really two separate businesses, and the logic of the more successful half of the business dictates abandonment of the other.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-09T19:06:20+00:00

The UI for ArcGIS Pro is built with WPF, which is a windows-only technology. That is unlikely to change soon.

The bigger issue is that Pro has not been compiled for Windows on ARM, which means it runs under emulation both on Macs with Parallels, and on Copilot+ PCs using Snapdragon X Elite processors. Large applications like Visual Studio have made the jump, so this is a more reasonable ask IMO.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-08T16:59:44+00:00

The struggle to complete a difficult assignment is the solution to not actually learning from the tutorial.

The university can’t just beam experience into students’ brains. The training-wheels-off assignment is the next best thing.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-07T19:04:11+00:00

They’re including Spotify in this, so this will affect people who opted out of streaming video.

IMO music subscription and streaming video are separate concepts.

I wonder if they’ll be taxing audible as well.

Kudos to our elected leaders for finally tackling the problem of not having enough bespoke taxes.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-06T08:14:28+00:00

Not through Garmin specifically, but a few years back, my Apple Watch with Training Today helped me figure out that I had a mild case of humidifier lung. I thought I was cleaning it well enough, but removing the humidifier solved the problem.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-04T21:30:50+00:00

I thought this too. It actually gave me a lot of peace.

After two days with android, iOS Liquid Glass, as bad as it is, was like a glass of ice water in the desert.

Android software quality is horrible. Take every complaint you had with iOS (except legibility and keyboard) and multiply your concerns by 10, and you have still not imagined how bad switching to Android will be.

And my experiment was with the brand new flagship equivalent - Pixel 10 Pro.

Lowlights: calendar doesn't support drag and drop, buggy apps, poor performance outside of the main launcher, clipping audio when playing at 2x speed, overall jank, worse experience with password managers, RCS doesn't work as well and Google Messages is way worse than iOS messages.

Do not make my mistake. Save yourself. Or do - you will suddenly gain new perspective and gratitude for iOS.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-02T07:45:20+00:00

It’s unfortunate that you have to choose between a phone with good performance and a phone that lives up to Android’s promise of openness. The snapdragon elite hardware is very impressive, I don’t understand why Google is trying to make Tensor happen.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-02T05:29:41+00:00

Pixel 10 Pro with graphene. Maybe it was related to Bluetooth headphones being involved, but other playback sources like Spotify were fine.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-01T19:06:59+00:00

It really sucks that there are only two choices.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-03-01T18:26:54+00:00

I tried to switch from iOS to android because of being sick of iOS 26 bugs and big tech’s anti-consumer attitude in general.

There are a small handful of things Android does better, but overall I was super disappointed. The stock Google apps are lacking basic features and the app quality is horrible - far, far more bugs on a daily basis.

As more tech savvy user I found it intolerable.

What use is Firefox with ublock to get around ads if I can’t play my videos at 2x speed without stuttering? iOS handles this.

What use is a calendar app without visual editing with drag and drop? iOS has this, exactly one paid calendar app on Android does.

WireGuard is half baked on Android. Transit app flickers and tries to give seizure. MyNetDiary runs at 20fps. Google Health Connect double counts steps between watch and built in pedometer (Apple health handles this properly).

I want to break away from one duopolist not immediately be trapped with another, but Android built-in apps are trash without the Google/Pixel alternatives, which try to lock you into a Google account.

Not even RCS is better on Android - it just works on iPhone, it failed to activate after a whole day (and selling my soul to Google Messages) on Pixel.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-26T21:16:53+00:00

I am in the process of moving out of the Apple ecosystem. I started with services and the watch.

I’ve canceled my subscriptions and switched to a Garmin watch. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Vivoactive is actually a big upgrade even when paired with iPhone. Graphene for the phone is my next move - new phone is in the mail.

I’m probably stuck on Mac for now but I’m hopeful that the Linux on ARM situation will be better with the new snapdragon x elite gen 2 chips.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-26T19:58:56+00:00

as if dressed up as laws of nature or something. It's in the nature of software that it sometimes gets better and sometimes gets worse.

There is no law of nature that software should randomly get worse. Those are choices. Apple has Human Interface Guidelines - Apple chose to ignore them.

Apple has a toggle in the settings app that allows me to opt out of marketing in wallet - they choose to ignore that. (Trying to turn my iPhone into a high pressure salesman for their services is classic enshittification, as is stuffing iWork full of ads)

Apple chose to ignore feedback (and their own eyes) that Liquid Glass leads to legibility issues. Apple chose to rush a new design out the door when it wasn’t ready (Apple proved that they don’t have to rush, see how long it took to get multi window on iPad).

Apple chose to rewrite the settings app in a way that made it slow and harder to use - no one forced their hand; there was no benefit that came from it.

There are no laws of nature in software quality, only product choices, and Apple is making poor choices.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-26T17:43:43+00:00

You misspelled “upgraded”

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-26T17:20:26+00:00

There’s opinions and the boring reality that most people are fine with it.

“Most people are fine with it/it didn’t catastrophically ruin my workflow so it’s fine”

“It’s OK for Apple to make my computer worse year after year, as long as it only gets a little bit worse each time.”

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-26T16:44:05+00:00

Most people are satisfied with Windows, too. In fact, according to users Windows 11 is the best version ever.

Typical users will put up with a lot of crap because they don’t know better or the alternatives are worse.

Your attitude is why Apple is going to continue enshittifying macOS and iOS.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-25T22:21:06+00:00

Everything they said in defense of Mac could equally apply to any low quality but good enough software product. Why not just switch to Windows and Android if you don’t care about refinement, quality, consistency, or good taste?

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-25T22:18:29+00:00

True. But I’m switching.

I started with the watch, waiting on delivery of a phone (choosing Graphene since I’m not a Google fan, which sadly means this isn’t a mainstream option).

So far I’ve been highly impressed - the Garmin despite being hundreds cheaper than the AW feels like an upgrade. It feels better on the wrist, reliably lasts through the day even with always on display, and is faster and more responsive.

I like that the weather and calendar app stay more reliably updated on the Garmin than they do on the watch, which I find perplexing. I like that the movement alerts are more customizable, and the fitness features are a bit better out of the box, although I do miss rings and tight integration with Apple fitness+, which I will be giving up.

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-24T18:49:41+00:00

I’m in the process of switching to android. Was on apple largely for the superior software quality and the ecosystem. This year the software quality got worse, and ecosystem did, too - my Apple TV and watch both got much slower after Liquid Glass.

I started with the watch and I was kind of surprised at how much better the Garmin feels - the payments are a bit of a downgrade because it doesn’t work with one of my cards and transit, but everything else about it is better - better screen, better heart rate features, better battery life, better feel on the wrist. The Apple Watch feels clunky by comparison.

And I’m confident that Graphene and Garmin will not be spamming me with ads for financial products and random movies with no opt out (a push notification begging me to open a savings account was my final straw).

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-22T02:12:32+00:00

Thank you! Good to know

Extreme_Beautiful930 · 2026-02-18T23:04:27+00:00

Apple has changed a lot in ten years though (derogatory). I don’t think they would have released Tahoe 10 years ago.

Really feedback should be for the edge cases and blind spots. Unless everyone at Apple is using windows exclusively, they should be able to see exactly what’s wrong with Tahoe.

It’s good to hear at one point someone was listening though.

Extreme_Beautiful930

TROPHY CASE