Harry McCracken “making sense of the most confusing new iPhone lineup ever“:
As the iPhone lineup has expanded in recent years, Apple has let go of that minimalist clarity. It seems less like an accident than a willful decision, and—since nobody at the company is likely to acknowledge the shift as a change in strategy with pros and cons—it’s up to us to figure it out for ourselves. Why has Apple released three new iPhones that are kinda similar and kinda different in ways that require explanation?
Manton Reece explains how Micro.blog is serious about preventing abuse and harassment:
the platform was designed, from the beginning, to prevent abuse and harassment. Your microblog is your own, where you are free to write about whatever you want, but we protect the timeline, where you can @-reply others, through a variety of tools and curation. We have community guidelines that are enforced.
I don’t believe tools, curation, or community guidelines will ever be able to police the public park as well as the walls of a private garden.
I have been failing at social networks since the early 2000’s. I rode the MySpace wave in 2005. Joined and quit Facebook half a dozen times over the last decade. Paid $50 for a one year subscription to Apo.net. Since 2008, Twitter has been my water cooler of choice on the web; a place to procrastinate, meet new people, and share ideas. But over the last few years expectations of Twitter and my friend’s expectations of me have been coming up short.
I read this post on Daring Fireball last year and I wanted to comment on it: Charlie:
I simply hate people relying on brittle client-side javascript when there are other alternatives. In the same way as I wouldn’t rely on some unknown minicab firm as the sole way of getting me to the airport for a wedding flight, I don’t like relying on a non-guaranteed technology as the sole way of delivering a web app.
If like me, you follow Stephen Hackett’s 512 Pixels, then you know that every couple of months products from Apple’s past are added to the list of Vintage and Obsolete hardware no longer supported by the company. But what do these lists of legacy products mean, and how does an older Mac or ancient iPod make the lists?
Age Matters…
Vintage [Apple] products are those that have not been manufactured for more than 5 and less than 7 years ago.
During this year’s “Introducing Dark Mode” session at WWDC Apple gave us three reasons why they were including Dark Mode as a feature in Mac OS Mojave.
Dark interfaces are cool. Dark interfaces are not just inverted. Dark Mode is content-focused. As Stephen Hackett points out, reason No. 1 is hard to argue against; dark user interfaces are cool. (How far we have come from when the black on white interface of the original 1984 Macintosh was considered fashionable.
The system requirements for each new Macintosh operating system are rarely out-of-step with Apple’s marketing message. Mac OS Mojave is no exception. A big theme for this year’s WWDC keynote was improved performance through optimization, and as expected the Mac OS Mojave system requirements reflect upon that theme.
MacBook (Early 2015 or newer) MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer) Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer) iMac (Late 2012 or newer) iMac Pro (2017) Mac Pro models from late 2013 (plus mid 2010 and mid 2012 models with recommend Metal-capable GPU) At first glance the Mojave system requirements don’t appear to follow a specific trend.
Jason Snell on May 23, 2018:
Here’s a bit of numerology for you. Today marks 17 years, one month, and 29 days since Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001. That’s a strangely odd number—6,269 days—but it also happens to be the exact length of time between January 24, 1984 (the launch of the original Macintosh) and March 24, 2001.
In other words, today the Mac’s second operating system era, powered by Mac OS X (now macOS) has been in existence as long as the first era was.
This week we learned a new Mac Pro isn’t coming until 2019. Clearly this revelation is a Apple public relations move designed to reign-in expectations prior to this year’s WWDC. But what makes this announcement so absurd is the guises that it is being made in the name of transparency while omitting any details describing the upcoming machine.
“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community, so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product.
David Sparks:
Over the years, Apple Products have become increasingly less repairable. The latest teardown of the new iPad evidences this fact with photos of densely packed electronic components and copious amounts of glue. This led iFixit to give the new iPad a low repairability score.
I get that, but also don’t see it as big of a strike against the iPad as most people make it out to be.
My Ephemeral nature does not stop at blogging. I delete my old tweets automatically using a service called TweetDelete.
Protect your privacy by automatically deleting posts older than a specified age from your Twitter feed. This allows you to delete all your tweets all at once (up to 3,200 tweets), and helps make it easier to delete multiple tweets in one go.
According to the website most people use Tweet Delete to improve their privacy.
I am not a good writer. Words rarely flow for me. Compared to other people it takes me a lot longer to write a meaningful sentence. I spend far too much time editing when I should be writing. Combined with a touch of perfectionism, and you can understand why I am wary when it comes to publishing. I only want to show my best work.
One of the ways I have learned to get past these fears is by accepting the ephemeral; nothing lasts forever.
The Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE Cellular promises to free Apple Watch owners from the shackles of their iPhones. Allowing them to receive notifications, place calls, stream music, and ask Siri on the go while leaving their phone at home. But despite these freedoms the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE Cellular is still a prisoner. It cannot be used without first being paired to its owner’s iPhone.
This makes the $399+ Apple Watch with LTE Cellular a companion device.
September is a busy time of year. Summer vacations are ending. Back-to-school season has begun, Apple is putting the finishing touches on Mac OS High Sierra, and system administrators are getting their first glimpse of the new documentation.
Mac OS High Sierra brings several exciting features to the Macintosh platform, but for System Administrators who image and maintain hundreds of Macs there are a few important features you need to know about.
If two things are glued together using “industrial adhesive” they were not meant to be pulled apart. And if one of those two things is a MacBook Pro lithium-ion battery that releases “toxic smoke” when punctured, you should think twice before trying to save a buck.
iFixit, everyone’s favorite pull-it-apart online repair guide is at it again. This time with a “glue-busting battery kit” that comes with all of the tools you need to replace your MacBook Pro battery.
Only once in my life have I owned the undisputed best of anything. That was the original iPgone on June 29th, 2007; the first day it went on sale. Purchasing an 8 GB iPhone in 2007 bought me the best mobile phone money could buy. Android would not be released for another year. Windows Mobile required a stylus. The BlackBerry was a oversized pager. The iPhone was in a league of its own.
I skipped WWDC again this year. Apple’s emphasis on iOS over the last three years removed the sparkle I once felt as a Mac user Instead of flying to California, I watched the keynote with the CocoaHeads Boston crew in a lecture hall at MIT. Daniel Jalkut was there; he does not wear his Burger King crown in person.
Despite staying in Boston again this week, I saw Apple’s 2017 WWDC keynote from a new direction.
Steve Frank of Panic fame admits to having his company’s source code stolen:
Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised. One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer.
In a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a lot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that three day window, and my work Mac got pwned.
Yesterday Apple updated several of its Mac and iOS apps, making them available for free on Mac OS and iOS.
MacRumors has the story:
iMovie, Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and GarageBand for both Mac and iOS devices have been updated and are now listed in the App Store for free.
Previously, all of these apps were provided for free to customers who purchased a new Mac or iOS device, but now that purchase is not required to get the software.
Yesterday NVIDIA revealed they would be releasing Mac OS drivers for their Pascal microarchitecture GPUs. “This comes despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a Mac Pro that can officially accept a PCIe video card in almost half a decade.”
So why is NVIDIA releasing a Mac driver to a market that, officially speaking, is essentially dead? Ryan Smith writing for AnandTech explains:
Instead it’s the off-label use that makes this announcement interesting, and indeed gives NVIDIA any reason whatsoever to make a Pascal driver release.