old tech guy

Great point and that reminds me: Remember when people were up in arms when the iPhone 6 had a teeny, tiny camera bump, when all previous iPhones had the camera flush with the rest of the body? Imagine how hamstrung smartphone cameras would be today if Apple listened to them and kept it small enough to avoid any bump?

Today, we have all manner of protruding lenses in different forms. They’re not thin, minimal, and aesthetically pleasing (at least not to the obsessive minimalist), but their performance more than justifies it and it’s just become the ‘thing’, whereas thinness was the ‘thing’ a few years ago.

I wonder what ‘the thing’ will be 5 years from now…

My two cents, and may be an elephant in the room: I bill the 2016’ish time period as the ‘Jonny Ive’ era of minimalism at all costs. The thinness and ‘uncluttered’-ness of devices was priority number 1 at Apple across all of its devices, whether it came to making the thinnest phone possible (at the expense of battery) or having only a single type of port (USB-C) or the thinnest possible keyboard (butterfly keys) to be more aesthetically pleasing, form came before function.

In the years since Ive’s departure, iPhones have become thicker (with better battery life), scissor-style keyboards have returned, and Macbooks now have a variety of different port types.

Slowly but surely, Apple is undoing the ‘form at all costs’ decisions that have been the biggest disadvantages of their products.

That’s….not really true anymore.

I can ask Siri to play music on YouTube Music, and navigate to a destination using Google Maps or Waze.

In fact, it’s recently surfaced results from YouTube Music by default since it detects that I use it more than Apple Music.

Major cloud providers like Azure have tools available that absorb/block incoming DDoS attacks, so that the flood of packets never hit the website servers.

Little bit of reading if you’re interested: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ddos-protection/ddos-protection-overview

That’s great for you. I don’t know a single person in the United States that I ever communicate with who uses WhatsApp. Not a single one.

Yes, we know that everyone except the US uses WhatApp, we are VERY VERY aware of that, as non-US people like to remind us every chance they get. We know.

That said, that is of absolutely zero use to US residents if no one in their circles uses it. In the US, it’s iMessage and SMS, period. That’s not going to change.

I’ve been surprised so far with how good the battery life is on my 13 Pro Max. I’ve previously had Android phones that were considered ‘battery kings’, and the 13 Pro Max far out paces them. The different is substantial.

Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?

Anecdotal, but my mother in law had to get her Pixel 2 XL replaced under warranty because the screen burn in was VERY bad. Then again, the Pixel 2 XL’s were panned due to their overall low quality LG displays.