It's interesting you mention upfront that you travel. Is that travel for work where you might be staying in corporate hotels?
I ask because when I have travelled for work, it's the corporate hotels that have often baked a Chromecast into their TV experience, even to the point of sorting out their wifi network so you're only able to cast to the screen in your room. Their splash screen offers "live TV" or the option to "stream from your phone".
They often don't shout about the fact that it's a chromecast doing the work, but the telltale standby screen that shows up when you're not casting something normally confirms it.
iOS18 will still be available for older devices right? From the looks of the preview, it’ll go back to phones from 2018 which is fairly standard for Apple. And I’d imagine older iOS versions will continue to receive security updates for several years after they’re dropped from the latest version.
What is it about this release that has lost your support? Specifically gating the Apple Intelligence stuff to the most modern hardware?
Same phone and same OS version down to the patch number. I’ve noticed UI hangs and stutter when changing the grades, and BNW in particular seems to cause the biggest issues. Not yet experienced a crash even if I flick between grades in quick succession.
I did also find manual focus produced odd green visual artefacts in the live view as you move the focus control.
With that said, it’s a nice UI, hopefully the bugs can be ironed out!
Similar to another reply, my M2 16GB MacBook happily runs Mistral 7B, and it will do a decent job of most requests.
I use it where I’m dealing with internal code or data for work where I need to know it’s all staying on-device.
I’ve had it roughly translate portions of code to another language (normally one I’m very familiar with so I can vet it), create mermaid syntax flow charts for code where I need to visualise a process for non-technical consumption, and compare two very similar job descriptions to understand where a candidate might be better for one role or another.
I have on occasion also asked it to condense a wordy email going out to senior staff but I find Mistral 7B is a bit all or nothing and will take my 5 paragraphs and shrink them to a couple of sentences with lose most meaning. Having to hand hold it through each paragraph and then rewrite in my own style is never much of a time saver.
Not the parent, but just a few things I’d guess would be Apple Watch specific:
- I’ve had employers that require a confirmation step from an app as a form of 2FA. If my phone isn’t awake, the notification comes to my watch and I can approve my login from my wrist
- If some action requires typing on my watch, I get a prompt on my iPhone to do the typing there instead of on the tiny watch keyboard. The characters I type via the phone appear in real time on the watch as if I were typing directly
- Dismissing and snoozing notifications syncs so I don’t have to dismiss and snooze notifications on multiple devices
- Similarly, if I set an alarm on my phone, the alarm will ring on my phone and, if I’m wearing it, vibrate my watch without further setup. Again, actions I perform to that alarm can all be performed on the watch or phone.
I’d guess these are all tiny, tiny quality of life features, but I’d be very surprised if other non-Apple watches have the ability to implement them.
To be fair, downtime is often posted for services popular among HN readers, I don’t think there’s malicious intent, it’s merely the acknowledgment of an incident.
The fact that the headline is USUALLY “GitHub was down” says a lot more than the individual post in isolation!
I understand your point and I can’t deny that Javascript continues to introduce weird, silent failures and quirks even today when everything is a bit more thought out than “the bad old days”.
But I think in the case of JSON.stringify it’s more about use case. 99% of the time, users of this method are taking some data and serialising it to a JSON compliant form to send to the server. JSON doesn’t support functions, or complex objects like a Date, so I tend to think it’s a reasonable default that functions disappear and Date’s are converted to an ISO standard. To insist that every single user runs a preparation step that strips out unserialisability data and chooses how to handle Date objects sounds laborious, error prone, and ripe for another npm dependency everyone suddenly normalises for every project.
Maybe a “strict mode” of some sort where you could have it throw on anything for cases where you need to guarantee everything is being sent?
OTOH, I have to concede that while this method has silent failures, they then implemented JSON.parse to throw at the slightest issue. So I have to admit there’s consistency even within the API.
I guess there's some good reason nobody ever did it, but what about throwing an UnhandledType kind of error and letting the catch() decide how to deal with the object in question?
On top of the compatibility issue mentioned in sibling comment, the existing behavior also matches the principle of keeping simple things simple without making complicated things impossible. If you want stringify with a check for unhandled elements, that's easily specified in a replacer (that does not really replace).
You might prefer some well established standard implementation over ad hoc roll your own, but that's a discussion about npm culture, not about stringify.
The problem I see with this is that whatever you’re sending this to must have knowledge of the meta information superjson produces, so at that point you’re investing in it as a wrapper library. The fact you can extend the types it serialises also complicates things and means the receiver needs further implementation specific knowledge.
I think in my original comment, I was imagining a world where JSON.serialize threw errors on unknown types and we needed a wrapper just get basic JSON out of it.
I thought it was a bit sketchy too and spoke to their support agent about it. It seems this site is run by a partner, SPOT or Service Parts or Tools. Their privacy policy lists servicepartsortools.com as a domain but visiting the domain shows a standard parked domain page. The domain is owned by CTDI[0] which does seem more legitimate. The response I got from the support agent after pressing the issue was:
"Apple has partnered with CTDI for the SSR store and the fulfillment of related parts and tools. CTDI will utilize its SPOT subsidiary, including SPOT customer service agents, in support of SSR store customers."
It makes sense that Apple would offload this to someone else, but I agree it's a rather jarring experience.
> "Apple has partnered with CTDI for the SSR store and the fulfillment of related parts and tools. CTDI will utilize its SPOT subsidiary, including SPOT customer service agents, in support of SSR store customers."
It is certainly still a decision to do that. I would guess that for a launch they actually cared about, especially a consumer-facing one, they either would demand to build the website themselves or demand that CTDI follow some design guides. I can't imagine Apple launching their credit card and saying, "okay, Goldman Sachs, you handle everything about branding. The product page for this credit card doesn't need to have Apple in the URL, and doesn't need to follow Apple branding rules" -- because Apple actually cares about getting the word out about the existence of their card, and they actually care about encouraging people to use it.
I don't necessarily think it's some kind of conspiracy to trick people (see TurboTax's shenanigans), but it does speak a lot to their priorities that they do not care about this site looking good or even official, and that they don't think it's important for it to be a recognizable URL or for it to be obvious that it's an official Apple service. None of those things were apparently important enough to get marketing/branding departments involved in the launch.
Kinda strange that Apple has not used the time-and-customers-tested (and with a nice website) ifixit.com for the task. I only hope that iFixit will not die as a result - it’s always nice to have an alternative.
It seems that iFixit will officially be selling replacement parts for Google's Pixel phones [0] and Valve's Steam Deck [1], so hopefully, they are not going anywhere.
ifixit is a somewhat political organization, they're pushing right to repair and grade products on repairability. I'd rather they stay independent from Apple.
I agree. At first I thought they would be uniquely positioned for this role, but it really does seem like they need to stay independent to stay objective. As a customer As a customer I appreciate that ifixit serves the customer's needs rather than Apple's agenda or overall bottom line, which might not have remained the case if they had some kind of partnership.
Independent is often used as a weasel word ie: independent franchises. So sure the could be an independent distributor or whatever but that’s not actually independent as they would have a financial connection.
Remaining objective is of course possible even with financial ties, but the suspicion is going to taint people’s perception.
If ifixit were to partner with a manufacturer (and especially one as large and influential as Apple), there might be a perception among consumers (whether true or not) that they were beholden to the manufacturer not to do anything that might hurt that manufacturer's revenue streams, like (for example) providing parts and information to extend the use of obsolete products or criticizing any of the manufacturer's design practices that might be hostile to repair.
On the flip side, it might be possible for a partnership to provide better first-party parts support and more complete sharing of information, but I'm just too jaded to believe it could happen that way.
No, trying to influence governments to create a legal right to repair is literally politics. Take a step back and look at all the negative connotations you've apparently attached to the word "political." The FSF and EFF are also political organizations.
Partnering with Apple who is against right to repair creates a situation where they might have to choose the money from Apple or their right to repair aspirations.
I agree that would be cool, and probably a better user experience but I’d suspect apple has large amounts of loathing for a company that criticizes their products.
I find iFixit’s repairability reviews incredibly objective, often more generously short on outright criticism than I’d expect given both their opinion and business incentive.
Which is while Apple doesn't like them. If you care about sales, glowing reviews are always better than honest reviews. There are plenty of people willing to praise Apple and so there is no need to cater to objective reviewers.
Apple is one of, if not the, most reviewed company in the world.
For every new product there are thousands of reviews for which iFixit is just one. And almost all of those reviews are overwhelmingly objective and honest as you can see for the lacklustre reviews of the Studio Display.
If I were Apple I wouldn't waste any time on iFixit either since they have limited traffic and limited social reach.
iFixit with real QC approved Apple parts would be awesome. I had a bad experience with a laptop screen from iFixit, their support's options were to accept a partial refund or ship it internationally to them at my own expense. I cut my losses and took the cash. In the end I felt like I would have been no worse off rolling the dice on an eBay part.
Unless Apple expands the options tremendously, iFixit will be around for a while, since the only parts available currently are for a limited range of the newer iPhones.
I poked around to see whether Apple was mentioned at all. Interestingly, clicking quickly through the legal links at the bottom, Apple does at least put themselves forward as the provider of the warranty.
- Screen fades to black as it realises there's an external monitor
- Finally unlock, windows are all bunched up on the internal display
- Everything becomes unresponsive, maybe even another fade to black
- A minute after initially opening the lid, suddenly all the windows pop back into place
I have no idea if this is improved on M1 machines, but it's frustrating enough on my Intel 16" that I've just pushed all the auto-lock timeouts to excessively large durations.
IME, macOS (Monterey on M1 Pro) handles this better than Windows 10. Everything goes to the right places right away, whereas in Windows you'd have windows all over the place.
Windows 10 also, last time I checked, doesn't understand the concept of DPI properly. No idea if it's been fixed in 11.
That is, if you have for example a 27" 4K monitor next to a 27" 1080p monitor then the 1080p version is treated as though it's 25% of the size and the mouse gets "stuck" in the 4K monitor unless you're within the 50% of the screen that Windows thinks your 1080p monitor is adjacent to. This works sanely in macOS as it rightly treats each monitor as having the same size.
It's even more comical if you have a very high dpi laptop next to a 1080p or 1440p large desktop monitor.
That's odd; I never had any issues like these. Display ordering is always the same. I have two 27" 4K monitors: one connected directly to MBP's HDMI and the other through a USB-C hub (also HDMI). Connecting both always gives me the correct ordering, and it's instantaneous - it takes longer for the monitors to turn on than for macOS to distribute the windows, so when they're on, everything's in place.
I'm unsure this is true. I was certainly disappointed when I went for a Samsung S8 at launch and found it laggy and glitchy 12 months in, and unusable at 18 months. As a short term money saver, I bought a 2016 iPhone SE and was amazed to find it got 2 more years of updates before I finally decided to retire it.
Between lacking support and poor performance over and over in the Android ecosystem, it became a very easy decision to move over to the Apple lock-in unfortunately. Their phones generally stay out of my way and work snappily when I need them to.
It's a real shame to have had this experience, and to watch others around me have similar issues before jumping ship to Apple. I think the competition provided by the big Android vendors is important, but I just can't justify dropping money on a new device every 18 months.
I've been with Android since the beginning (though Apple everything else). But I'm just tired of needing a new phone every year just to get ok performance.
A few weeks back I got a free iPhone 6, and was amazed at its performance. When I compared it to my OnePlus 2 phone from a year later, it's night and day performance wise.
My next phone will be an iPhone, no question.
I ask because when I have travelled for work, it's the corporate hotels that have often baked a Chromecast into their TV experience, even to the point of sorting out their wifi network so you're only able to cast to the screen in your room. Their splash screen offers "live TV" or the option to "stream from your phone".
They often don't shout about the fact that it's a chromecast doing the work, but the telltale standby screen that shows up when you're not casting something normally confirms it.