realitymonster

Will do.

Just give me FF4 and FF6, you cowards.

You must not have seen my other post. I agree that the screen was probably planned and that the flat-sided design was either a plant or a design that is for the future (or possibly never). The thing that I find unbelievable is that they’re trying to pass off last year’s SoC as something new.

Apple is great at making things. But they rely on 3rd parties to actually fab virtually everything. The rumours that I find believable are that the new designs for internals weren’t working out, so the lead time on just producing MORE of last year’s SoC is minimal.

I think the external design conspiracies are bunk, as I’ve said in other posts. But it’s REALLY unlike Apple to ship a watch with no new internals or sensors at all. Even a speed bump would’ve been nice, and it’s nothing that we see here. It’s unusually unambitious.

That said, maybe it’s a ‘tok’ year, and we’ll see more advancements next year.

I agree that the bigger screen was a planned upgrade. I don’t think it makes any sense at all that they somehow whipped that off at the last moment. I know that the lead times on these designs are on the order of months and years. How would you source a whole new batch of screens at the last second?

My version of the fallback plan is this larger case, but with older internals. They managed to improve the charging coil, but that’s not a lot. When their suppliers couldn’t get good yields on a new SoC, Apple had the old Series 6 version waiting, and they just filled the rest of the case with more battery.

Most of the things that they tried to pass off as new this year was WatchOS functionality. Again, I feel like it’s weirdly un-Apple to have this modest an upgrade, but it’s NOT un-Apple to have a set of contingency plans, especially when supply chains are massively disrupted. The fact that they’re getting a new Watch out this year is a minor miracle, honestly.

That would be interesting but I don’t think it would make sense to release a new design for the downmarket watch, even IF the new design is ugly as hell.

No, almost certainly not. They’ll keep selling the i9 iMacs until the next M-series SoC comes out and then they’ll transition, but until all the supply constraints and chip manufacturing problems are solved, they’re keeping the Intel iMacs around so they don’t have a gap in the line.

I want a 27"+ iMac as well, and I’m expecting them to refresh it soon—hopefully before the end of the year, like they promised.

I disagree—I think Apple always has a backup plan. If what you’re saying is that the flat-sided design wasn’t intended for this year, I probably agree with that. We’ll never know, but I’m not even convinced that the design will ever be released.

The reason why I think this year’s upgrade was a fallback is based mostly on reports that yields of a newer design were poor, and that the Series 7 uses exactly the same SoC as the Series 6. I think Apple’s plans for the Series 7 were more ambitious—possibly more sensors, almost certainly a new SoC. It’s very unlike them to release an update THIS minor and try to pass it off as big.

But do I think that they had the flat-sided design ready to ship and then bailed at the last minute? No, I think those theories are mostly bunk.

Multiple timers are a part of WatchOS 8, so my Series 6 does them to.

The worst part isn’t just that the phone can’t do them, it’s that the phone DOES do them FOR the watch. Like, if you turn your phone off and try to set a Siri timer on your watch, it will tell you that Siri isn’t available. That means it’s sending the data to the phone for processing, and the phone is telling your watch "here’s the command to execute". So the phone is literally doing all the work, your watch is just displaying the results, and it remains impossible for your phone to display those results.

But EVEN WORSE, if you’re too close to your phone, it’ll snatch Siri focus away from your Watch, so when you ask for a 6 minute tea timer, you don’t get it, because the timer is on your phone, not your Watch. What a mess.

It seems really clear to me that this was an unintended minor upgrade. They were planning to make a new watch and/or a new design, but supply constraints and the pandemic messed things up, so they fell back to a minor refresh.

I mean, I tried to treat them as well as I could, but I spent a lot of time at the gym or on a bike, and that meant the cables were weather-beaten. I also wore my earbuds out when it was -25C and I was walking through the snow. Sure, most of the cable was inside a jacket, but there was always some exposed to the weather. I tried cheap ones, expensive ones, sport ones, audiophile ones—all of them failed in the cable. The Shures had the best, thickest cables and I loved them, but then some water got in one during a ride when a storm took me by surprise, and that was the end of that. (To be fair, waterproofing of both wired and wireless earbuds these days is much better.)

Wireless ones just have way fewer points of failure for me—and for most people, I think. Like, it’s all well and good to tell people to take care of their stuff, but they don’t. I tried, but my lifestyle simply wasn’t a good match. I think other than the battery recycling issue, in practice, wired earbuds aren’t much more likely to survive an average person’s life. A little more careless than you and a little less active than me still probably isn’t gonna do any favours to standard earbuds.

All I’m getting at is that battery issues in the parent to my post are probably less relevant to the longevity of earbuds than we make them out to be.

Where. Is. My. Big. iMac.

I already have the M1 Mac Mini, and it’s great. But it was always supposed to be a computer to hold me over until the new iMacs, and I want a 27" ARM iMac now, please. Before the end of the year, like you promised. Even if it means that I can only preorder it on Dec. 31st, I’d like to at least hear that it’s coming.

Far more capable than what? The iPhone SoC? The old Fairphone SoC? The SoC in the old iPhones that other people are talking about? Your comment is ambiguous as hell.

I replaced wired earbuds all the time because the cables break. If you use them with any regularity at all, they get tangled, snag on things, and break in cold weather. They don’t have a battery to recycle, it’s true, but anything less than Shure earbuds with replaceable cables are gonna have to be trashed in a year or two in my own experience. All of my wireless earbuds lasted longer than my wired ones—even longer than the sports earbuds that were supposed to be more durable.

https://www.theverge.com/22716194/fairphone-4-review

I mean, whatever makes you sleep better at night, man. I keep saying that Fairphone has made tradeoffs that people think might be worth it, but most people don’t, and it is certainly the case that the Steamdeck is packed tight because most people want a high performing portable console before they want the most repairable portable console. You may find my argument for the best phone falls flat, but if you’re trying to make a good game console without first party support (i.e., not a Switch) you need to make it powerful, and the ergonomics are pretty important. Maybe you CAN make a great modular phone and the Fairphone is it, but I am significantly less convinced of that when it comes to the Steamdeck. They’ve packed everything in tight because that’s how they got a good product out the door. If they’d sacrificed power and portability for modularity, it would likely be a much worse product.

They want you to subscribe, but listen to other stuff. I don’t subscribe (I use Apple Music) so they’re thinking that if I really wanted to keep listening to Heavyweight, maybe I’d be inclined to download Spotify and decide that I like it so much that I’d switch. That’s a stupid plan, IMO, but I’m sure that’s their rationale.
But
1. I get Apple Music as part of my Apple One subscription, so I’m not going to ALSO get Spotify
2. I wouldn’t listen to podcasts in Spotify anyway; literally everyone I’ve read today says it’s terrible at podcasts, and my dedicated option is better.

So I don’t know why they think this is a winning plan. As you say, people listening to podcasts helps their bottom line either way, since they don’t have to pay for a stream. This is more likely to just make fewer people listen to the show, since even Spotify subscribers don’t seem jazzed about this news.

It’s not actually the cost; I pay for a few podcasts and get a private URL. Sometimes that’s worth it.

The problem is the friction of switching back and forth between players. I’m not a Spotify subscriber, but even if I were, I wouldn’t listen to my podcasts there. I have a podcast app that I pay for (Overcast) and I appreciate those dedicated features.

I’m sure they ran the numbers and decided that losing listeners like me was worth it, but I will absolutely not be upending my podcast life just to follow one show. (If that sounds dramatic, I listen to hours and hours of podcasts every day, mostly while I’m riding or working out. I listen to more podcasts than music, by far.)

YOU try to design a powerful system that is both at once compact and also easily user serviceable.

This is what I said. The Fairphone does not meet those criteria. It is bigger than it needs to be in deference to serviceability. It’s not even the most powerful Android phone, let alone the most powerful phone. It is a series of tradeoffs all the way down. I haven’t moved the goalposts one bit; it’s simply not the thing you claim it is. It is a device that sacrifices everything for modularity. They will never have the most powerful SoC, the best sensors, the most compact design and certainly never the most integrated and optimized software.

Moreover, the Steam Deck has completely different ergonomic demands, so making it larger very well could compromise how good it feels in the hand.

Not just a serviceable system, the top of the line serviceable system. The Fairphone makes a bunch of tradeoffs for that serviceability, and one of them is that it is not and will never be the top of the line. That’s fine, but don’t come and tell me that it is somehow comparable.

This is a perfectly valid use case. Even when I worked in an office, I was very rarely away from power. I’m not the kind of person that spends a lot of time in airports or what have you. The phone only needs to last a few hours away from power at a time, and I don’t want to carry around a larger, heavier phone to get battery life that doesn’t matter to me.

It’s a perfectly acceptable tradeoff. And in any case, this year it gets close to the same battery life as the full-sized iPhone 12 from last year, and there weren’t many people complaining about the runtime on that.

Yeah, phones that run for days on a single charge would be great, but while we still have to trade size for other things, the mini is an excellent compromise.

YOU try to design a powerful system that is both at once compact and also easily user serviceable. The reality is that compact devices are, in general, harder to work with. More stuff has to be crammed inside and the tolerances are tighter. Not all of us want to haul around an un-ergonomic brick with a tonne of empty space in it just so that 1% of people that want to mess around inside can have an easy go of it.