What I don’t understand, and maybe somebody can explain. If this is the case, why wouldn’t there be torrents of every paper whose authors would be genuinely delighted to share?

Not being skeptical here. I’m really curious.

And maybe there are, and they’re just not well advertised for understandable reasons?

I know a guy who used to run one of these businesses. He pivoted to something else because of the expenses, and hardware wasn’t the biggest. The monthly license fees for games are outrageous when you want to provide them to the public. Which means you have to constantly bet on which game’s demand will outweigh its cost on a monthly basis.

Before COVID, his place was very busy. I went many times and it was a lot of fun. His business was profitable, but because of the cost of games still not super successful.

I agree that the expense of paying someone to run the spot would quickly outpace the cost of hardware, but in his case he was running the whole thing himself. Even with nobody to pay for their time, his margins were never great.

Then COVID came along. That really killed it. No one wants to wear a VR headset that was just worn by a sweaty stranger minutes earlier during a pandemic.

A single remote that turns on my PC and TV

I’ve been using a MacBook for my work for years now (not voluntarily). I’ve always had a Windows desktop as my main machine. Your experience is completely different from mine. I’ve found that it’s easy to use the MacBook, so long as I want to do things the way Apple dictates. With Windows, I can discover and tweak my own processes to work the way I want to. With Apple I feel entirely boxed in.

All that being said, I think the whole discussion can get ridiculous. It shouldn’t bother anyone one way or the other which product someone prefers, and most of the time, it sounds like a Pepsi vs Coke argument to me.