You get downvoted because people here tend to dislike Apple (which is fine), but that’s actually what happened.

The iPad (and eventually Android tablets) basically ate up the market share of Netbooks very quickly. Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as a Netbook alternative as a device class between a smartphone and a (full-sized) notebook/desktop.

https://www.cnet.com/science/apples-ipad-nabs-netbook-market-share/

The PS5 was released more than 4 years ago.

The PS4 Slim was released 3 years after the original model and sold for $100/100,-€ less than the original.

The PS3 Slim released ~3 years after the original model and was significantly cheaper (to be fair, it also had a lot of features removed).

The PS5 saw a Slim model release with no price cut at all, and now they’re planning to actually increase the price of over 4 year old tech that is almost certainly a lot cheaper to produce than 4 years ago, especially the Slim model that saw a reduction in cooler size, lower-powered PSU and other cost-reduction measures.

Gaming is becoming less and less accessible and more and more of a luxury.

Not the best example as Cyberpunk 2077 will get an official macOS release soon (and it works via translation layers right now as well), but yeah Linux is obviously miles ahead of macOS in terms of game compatibility.

I don’t think any sane person buys a Mac specifically for gaming. Aside from game compatibility, you’d need to spend a lot of money on an M4 Max or M3 Ultra to get graphics performance in the realm of “mid-tier” dedicated GeForce/Radeon GPUs.

But if you buy a specced out Mac Studio with 512 GB of RAM and whatnot for machine learning and it happens to be decent at playing (compatible) games, heh, why not?

So…

• You can just add a member to your “family” of your Apple ID
• Child accounts created this way can make purchases using the payment method of your Apple ID, but every single transaction requires confirmation by you, so you can deny anything you don’t want your child to purchase
• Non-child accounts added to your family can make purchases with your shared payment method without your confirmation. I assume Apple does this so you only add people you trust instead of random people you just want to share purchases and subscriptions with
• No matter who initiated a purchase in an Apple family (you, a child or your partner for example), you get an invoice to your email stating exactly what was purchased, by whom it was purchased, when and how much it cost

But no, you apparently created a “regular” Apple ID for your child, added your payment method to it and after THREE MONTHS you noticed that 8k are gone. Then you run to the press and complain that this was even possible and wonder why neither Apple nor your bank marked any transactions as a fraud.

YOU authorized your child to use your payment method freely. There is no fraud (except for you). There were multiple ways to notice what’s going on (bank account, invoices from Apple) before your child spent 8k. You should show more interest in what your child is doing, especially on the internet. That’s bad patenting.

I hope you don’t get any more money back, you deserve every bit of it.

What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.