skywake

Don't bump your own threads.
 
Anyways, to answer your question I wouldn't bother about Amiibo rarity anymore. It was a thing near launch as people were going nuts about it. A lot of people made a point of scalping them and selling "complete collections" for inflated prices. But these days you can usually just walk into the shops and get the one you want. If the one you want is out of print you can find people offloading their collections for well under RRP fairly easily.

Don't bump your own threads.
 
Anyways, to answer your question I wouldn't bother about Amiibo rarity anymore. It was a thing near launch as people were going nuts about it. A lot of people made a point of scalping them and selling "complete collections" for inflated prices. But these days you can usually just walk into the shops and get the one you want. If the one you want is out of print you can find people offloading their collections for well under RRP fairly easily.

for the tl;dr
1. Gigabit Ethernet will not be a bottleneck for your Gigabit Internet
2. WiFi will be a bottleneck but to what degree depends on your gear/conditions
3. Most of the time you won't be able to saturate your 1Gbps internets anyways

for the tl;dr
1. Gigabit Ethernet will not be a bottleneck for your Gigabit Internet
2. WiFi will be a bottleneck but to what degree depends on your gear/conditions
3. Most of the time you won't be able to saturate your 1Gbps internets anyways

For a home environment if you're going to jump into Ubiquiti gear.....
 
These products are well suited to what you want to do:
- UAP-AC-Lite
- UAP-AC-Pro
 
These products are amazing but not worth the extra spend for home use:
- Anything AirMax, if you don't know you need it you don't need it
- UAP-AC-HD, only worth it for super dense deployments
 
These products cost more for virtually zero even theoretical benefit:
- UAP-AC-M (what CFstorm was directing you towards)
- UAP-AC-M-Pro
- Anything Amplifi
- UAP-AC-LR (it's not bad but if you want more than the Lite buy the Pro not the LR)

For a home environment if you're going to jump into Ubiquiti gear.....
 
These products are well suited to what you want to do:
- UAP-AC-Lite
- UAP-AC-Pro
 
These products are amazing but not worth the extra spend for home use:
- Anything AirMax, if you don't know you need it you don't need it
- UAP-AC-HD, only worth it for super dense deployments
 
These products cost more for virtually zero even theoretical benefit:
- UAP-AC-M (what CFstorm was directing you towards)
- UAP-AC-M-Pro
- Anything Amplifi
- UAP-AC-LR (it's not bad but if you want more than the Lite buy the Pro not the LR)

The issue wasn't that it was a weak piece of hardware so much. There have been plenty of underpowered consoles that have sold well. The problem with the Wii U was that it lacked any clear reason to be underpowered. The PS2 had a DVD player, the Wii was cheap and had motion controls, the Switch is portable. The Wii U had a portable component that wasn't really that portable and cost about as much as the other platforms.
 
I reckon what happened with the Wii U is that Nintendo got some research that said the majority of people who played portable systems played them at home. So they went all in on the idea of a semi-portable gaming machine with HD graphics. Before they could realistically make a proper portable machine that was powerful enough to do it. And consumers got a confused message about a home console that's portable as long as you play infront of the TV its connected to.

Why is mesh the flavor of the month all of a sudden? I know that it's being pushed heavily by Google, Ubiquiti and others but it really isn't the silver bullet you think it is. Mesh is essentially a set of intelligent range extenders and it's no better than a range extender for <4 nodes. Most houses can get full coverage with 2-3 nodes.
 
Really your best bet @RenaW would be to get something like the AC-Lite/AC-Pro/AC-LR from Ubiquiti but just one of them. Use it to replace the WiFi built into your router and place it high up on the wall above where your router lives. It will be miles better than what you have. If that doesn't cover your house well enough? Look at getting a second one. Ideally connected via Ethernet but if not try Powerline or, worst case, set it in isolated mode and have it behave as a repeater. The last option is only for if the other options aren't possible. Only get their Mesh AP if you like the idea of a outdoor rated AP and are willing to spend more for it....

You can set two access points with same SSID, encryption and password and the devices will connect to either one just fine.

To be blunt, there isn't technically any difference between the WiFi from a router and the WiFi from an access point. It really is much simpler than all of the marketing buzz words make it out to be. You have a single radio with an associated SSID/PW which is one BSS. Clients will tend not to move from one BSS to another because re-authorising and possibly obtaining a new IP is a (time) expensive process. You can however also have an ESS where there are multiple radios with the same SSID/PW on the same network. Clients will more happily move from one AP to another if they are within the same ESS because they know they can use the same key and the same IP. That's just how it works.
 
Now the reason why people are disagreeing with me here I think is pretty simple. I'm not wrong because the above is exactly how things should work. The issue is that consumer WiFi is garbage. Usually when people setup a second AP in this way they're doing it to be a quick and cheap solution. Often because they're not happy with how their current setup is performing. Which usually means they're grabbing an old router they don't use anymore and pairing it with their current router they're not happy with. When you throw two pieces of garbage together why is it a surprise that it doesn't work well.
 
Speaking from my own experience? I had a setup that used a Netgear N600 router/AP combo unit and a DLink AC1200 AP for quite a while. It worked fine and clients happily roamed between APs. For almost a year. Happy with the setup I got a second slightly different SKU DLink AC1200 because I wanted AC wireless throughout the house. Again, it worked fine and clients happily roamed between APs. For a few months. Then the first APs died, partially, which was a pain to diagnose. At that point I replaced the faulty AP with a Ubiquiti AC Lite and it worked perfectly again for a good year or more combined with the DLink AP. The only reason I have two AC Lites now is because I wanted all my WiFi usage to be captured in the statistics.
 
Do I recommend Ubiquiti? Yes. 100%. They're great and I've had far less issues with them than the consumer grade WiFi you usually get. But be an informed consumer and don't buy into all of the hype. Zero Handoff is not something you're going to use and mesh generally isn't something that home users should get excited about. Ubiquiti's APs are good because they work well and faults are regularly patched. The ability for clients to roam happily between them isn't something unique to a full Ubiquiti setup. If you can run Ethernet through your house and have a couple of AC Pros at either end do it because that'll be a fantastic setup. But if you're on a budget and happy with your current router? Buy a single AC Pro, there's a fair chance it'll behave nicely with your router.
 
Not all mesh solutions use multiple radios and some range extenders use multiple radios. It's a reason why these mesh branded solutions are better than the range extenders people often buy. But it's not technically a difference as a result of it being mesh. For example Sonos uses a mesh network for its wireless speakers. It makes sense for them because audio is super low bandwidth and in the case of multi-room audio each node is probably a speaker which also needs the data. Each speaker only has a 2.4Ghz radio. Plug a cable into the speaker at the end of the run and you'll get <10Mbps. So as I think I said earlier, mesh has its uses but for home WiFi? Mesh is no different to a range extender.
 
My understanding is that those are standards for moving between different BSS. The idea is that the client can be given a list of WLANs on the same network and can obtain the key for a different SSID/PW from a server while remaining connected. If you are within the same ESS you already have the right key. And in any case Ubiquiti hasn't implemented 802.11k/r yet so if you're having good luck with roaming on Ubiquiti it's as simple as it all being on the same ESS.
 
Also you don't need to have a controller running 24/7 for Ubiquiti's gear. You need it for some of the more advanced features like the guest portal. If they were to implement some of those roaming standards you mentioned you'd probably need the controller running. Zero-Handoff needed the controller to work. But if you are doing a basic setup they work fine without the controller.

I think those are three entirely separate questions.....
 
1. Before the Wii U and 3DS they didn't update their games at all. The Wii only had 512MB of storage and the DS had none. So patches weren't really a thing at all for any games on those platforms. With the 3DS and Wii U? They do patch their games and the system itself fairly regularly. Both to fix security holes but also to squash bugs, re-balance games and sometimes content updates. For example Splatoon on the Wii U regularly got new weapons, maps gear and game modes.
 
2. The Wii U eventually suffered the same fate as has just about every console that failed to sell. When Nintendo's hardware sells? They keep supporting it with games. When they don't they release something new and move on. Every company does the same thing. Though with the Switch I think its fair to say that it currently looks like more of a Wii than Wii U in terms of sales.
 
3. Well at least the Switch doesn't have proprietary memory cards. If its any comfort if you burn a lot of money getting microSD cards on your Switch at least you can still use them in your phone/tablet/camera/dashcam if the Switch does bomb.

VR

There actually is a laptop with built-in AD. Its the Acer TravelMate and if you look you can see that's what they are using  
 
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3117803/computers/acer-travelmate-802-11ad-notebook-an-industry-first-you-might-never-need-or-use.html

The issue wasn't that it was a weak piece of hardware so much. There have been plenty of underpowered consoles that have sold well. The problem with the Wii U was that it lacked any clear reason to be underpowered. The PS2 had a DVD player, the Wii was cheap and had motion controls, the Switch is portable. The Wii U had a portable component that wasn't really that portable and cost about as much as the other platforms.
 
I reckon what happened with the Wii U is that Nintendo got some research that said the majority of people who played portable systems played them at home. So they went all in on the idea of a semi-portable gaming machine with HD graphics. Before they could realistically make a proper portable machine that was powerful enough to do it. And consumers got a confused message about a home console that's portable as long as you play infront of the TV its connected to.

The pricing of mobile data is a bit of a chicken and the egg sort of scenario. The pricing is high because the capacity is low which reduces the usage which improves the speeds. But you can do a guesstimate for capacity based on a bit of simple maths. From my understanding typical 4G tower has about a 5KM radius with something like 2Gbps of total capacity. So lets for arguments sake say that 5G pushes the capacity upto 10Gbps and they use a tower that covers a 500m radius.
 
If you assume the houses in the area covered are typical quarter acre blocks and there's a bit of extra space used for roads/parks ect? It works out that a 500m radius should approximately cover around 500houses. Which means that at full capacity that tower is pushing 20Mbps per house. Which isn't bad considering that people won't be hammering the tower all at once but in terms of total theoretical capacity it not better than FTTN and it's barely better than ADSL. That's with what I'd wager are fairly friendly estimates of what "5G" is actually capable of and the sort of tower densities that NIMBYs would tolerate.
 
That's the issue and to a degree that's what's happening. They are deploying more nodes, a lot more nodes. They're also actually replacing some of the existing copper in some cases. And in some areas they're actually doing FTTP despite the area being planned for FTTN because of the amount of copper they would have had to replace. All of which together has meant that the deployment of FTTN is taking about as long as the FTTP plan was going to.

But still, what we are getting is technically the second best plan for broadband infrastructure the country has had. Government or otherwise. And there were plenty of ideas floating around from the party that is now implementing it before they got hold of the keys. Including a plan to do the whole thing with LTE.....

That doesn't mean its a viable upgrade path from xDSL. Just because it's technically possible doesn't mean it's commercially viable. As I said, there's a point where the tower density would be so high in suburbia that the NIMBYs would get vocal. Easy to get away with that sort of thing in the middle of a city, much harder in the suburbs. You also forget that South Korea has fantastic 4G AND fantastic fixed line infrastructure. 

But you are right about one thing. We're actually ranked pretty damn high in terms of mobile speeds because of factors like those you've outlined. I'm looking at a graph now and South Korea has an average 4G speed of ~46Mbps, we're at ~32Mbps, Japan is ~22Mbps and the US is 14Mbps. If you dropped more data on our mobile network by rapidly reducing the cost of mobile data that would soon change. The bigger issue here is that we're ranked 51st in the OECD in terms of total average internet speeds. On that measure South Korea is again well up the list with ~26Mbps, Japan is ~19Mbps, US ~17Mbps.... we're ~10Mbps....

After two months on shelves:
PS4: 5.1mill
Wii: 4mill
DS: 3.5mill
XBOne: 3.3mill
PSP: 2.7mill
3DS: 2.6mill
Wii U: 2.4mill
360: 1.8mill
PS3: 1.6mill
 
Switch: 5.5mill
 
Artificially limiting supply? I'm not convinced

After two months on shelves:
PS4: 5.1mill
Wii: 4mill
DS: 3.5mill
XBOne: 3.3mill
PSP: 2.7mill
3DS: 2.6mill
Wii U: 2.4mill
360: 1.8mill
PS3: 1.6mill
 
Switch: 5.5mill
 
Artificially limiting supply? I'm not convinced

93°C to 73°C isn't a 25% improvement, it's actually only about a 6% improvement since you should be using degrees Kelvin.
A 25% temperature drop from 93°C would land you at 1.5°C.

If you're really stuck and don't want to reward scalpers you can always import it. The stock issues are definitely not universal and the Switch is region free. Same deal with games and accessories.

Displays, Networking stuff, storage, toys and interesting gadgets

Wow, what an ill-informed dumpster fire of responses. I guess that's what I should expect but still. Honestly I've seen threads on here about the Wii U at the point where it was basically DoA that were more positive.
 
Anyways, the Switch itself? It's a decent piece of hardware. Ignoring the software library just for a second (because that story will change over time) it's a unique product on the market. Nothing does what it does better. Period. If Square Enix does another Tomb Raider game and it comes to the Switch? The Switch will be the only platform that'll let you swap between a portable device and your TV seamlessly. Yes the PC version will be able to run at 4K and yes the XBOne/PS4 versions will do HDR if you have the right gear. But if you have a PC and XBOne then in terms of the hardware itself the Switch will offer you something different. You probably can't play PC games in bed or XBOne games on a plane. Is it better? Well it depends on what you want. But it is a different way to play games.
 
The whine you hear about hardware faults? I'm fairly confident that's just noise. There was one issue with the first batch which has since been addressed. JoyCon would desync more easily than they should have been. Nintendo has been offering replacements and resolved the issue in the second batch. And for the 10% of the time I use mine on the TV I'm playing with the Pro Controller anyways. The other stuff seems to mostly be the usual sorts of manufacturing faults but blown well out of proportion because that's what the internet likes to do. It's anecdotal but I for one haven't had any issues with mine and I haven't seen anyone talk about any issues with theirs either. Just people who don't have one talking about how they've heard stories about how people are having issues.
 
Lastly, software. Games. Games are why you'd buy any console. Frankly if there aren't games you're interested in its not worth it. As it stands the Switch is only a couple of months old, not even that. The only game worth getting it for right now is Zelda. Mario Kart 8 comes out this week. If neither of those interest you at all don't buy it now. Wait until there are a few games you want to get already out on the thing. And that's probably the best advice for the system right now. Is it worth it? Probably not until more games are out.... unless you are a Nintendo fan and had to play the definitive version of the new Zelda on the day it came out

Wow, what an ill-informed dumpster fire of responses. I guess that's what I should expect but still. Honestly I've seen threads on here about the Wii U at the point where it was basically DoA that were more positive.
 
Anyways, the Switch itself? It's a decent piece of hardware. Ignoring the software library just for a second (because that story will change over time) it's a unique product on the market. Nothing does what it does better. Period. If Square Enix does another Tomb Raider game and it comes to the Switch? The Switch will be the only platform that'll let you swap between a portable device and your TV seamlessly. Yes the PC version will be able to run at 4K and yes the XBOne/PS4 versions will do HDR if you have the right gear. But if you have a PC and XBOne then in terms of the hardware itself the Switch will offer you something different. You probably can't play PC games in bed or XBOne games on a plane. Is it better? Well it depends on what you want. But it is a different way to play games.
 
The whine you hear about hardware faults? I'm fairly confident that's just noise. There was one issue with the first batch which has since been addressed. JoyCon would desync more easily than they should have been. Nintendo has been offering replacements and resolved the issue in the second batch. And for the 10% of the time I use mine on the TV I'm playing with the Pro Controller anyways. The other stuff seems to mostly be the usual sorts of manufacturing faults but blown well out of proportion because that's what the internet likes to do. It's anecdotal but I for one haven't had any issues with mine and I haven't seen anyone talk about any issues with theirs either. Just people who don't have one talking about how they've heard stories about how people are having issues.
 
Lastly, software. Games. Games are why you'd buy any console. Frankly if there aren't games you're interested in its not worth it. As it stands the Switch is only a couple of months old, not even that. The only game worth getting it for right now is Zelda. Mario Kart 8 comes out this week. If neither of those interest you at all don't buy it now. Wait until there are a few games you want to get already out on the thing. And that's probably the best advice for the system right now. Is it worth it? Probably not until more games are out.... unless you are a Nintendo fan and had to play the definitive version of the new Zelda on the day it came out

To simplify it a bit if you've got copper running from some point in the chain into your property you're probably using some variation of DSL. Some providers will call stuff like VDSL with short loops "fibre" to differentiate it from ADSL but it's still effectively DSL. If you have a cable service or "HFC" you're using probably using some variation of DOCSIS. I wouldn't call these services "copper" because that just confuses people who think you're talking about DSL.
 
And that leaves Fibre. If you have a full fibre service running right into your house? It's probably using some variation of PON. There are multiple variations of it but essentially the idea is that there are no powered cabinets in the street. It is a Passive Optical Network. Now the speed it runs at and how bandwidth is split up changes what variation you're call it. But whatever it is, it's likely some kind of Passive Optical Network.

Wow, what an ill-informed dumpster fire of responses. I guess that's what I should expect but still. Honestly I've seen threads on here about the Wii U at the point where it was basically DoA that were more positive.
 
Anyways, the Switch itself? It's a decent piece of hardware. Ignoring the software library just for a second (because that story will change over time) it's a unique product on the market. Nothing does what it does better. Period. If Square Enix does another Tomb Raider game and it comes to the Switch? The Switch will be the only platform that'll let you swap between a portable device and your TV seamlessly. Yes the PC version will be able to run at 4K and yes the XBOne/PS4 versions will do HDR if you have the right gear. But if you have a PC and XBOne then in terms of the hardware itself the Switch will offer you something different. You probably can't play PC games in bed or XBOne games on a plane. Is it better? Well it depends on what you want. But it is a different way to play games.
 
The whine you hear about hardware faults? I'm fairly confident that's just noise. There was one issue with the first batch which has since been addressed. JoyCon would desync more easily than they should have been. Nintendo has been offering replacements and resolved the issue in the second batch. And for the 10% of the time I use mine on the TV I'm playing with the Pro Controller anyways. The other stuff seems to mostly be the usual sorts of manufacturing faults but blown well out of proportion because that's what the internet likes to do. It's anecdotal but I for one haven't had any issues with mine and I haven't seen anyone talk about any issues with theirs either. Just people who don't have one talking about how they've heard stories about how people are having issues.
 
Lastly, software. Games. Games are why you'd buy any console. Frankly if there aren't games you're interested in its not worth it. As it stands the Switch is only a couple of months old, not even that. The only game worth getting it for right now is Zelda. Mario Kart 8 comes out this week. If neither of those interest you at all don't buy it now. Wait until there are a few games you want to get already out on the thing. And that's probably the best advice for the system right now. Is it worth it? Probably not until more games are out.... unless you are a Nintendo fan and had to play the definitive version of the new Zelda on the day it came out