roundaboutnow

cpsro said:

The end of DEI means promotion of incompetent white guys--like Hegseth and RFKjr.  More competent women and minorities are the losers. So... no thanks, little man!

Reminds me of that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon circulating on social recently. Text below (not sure if actually penned by Bill Watterson, but really hits the mark):

"DEI initiatives were not put in place to ensure lower qualified minorities could get hired instead of more highly qualified white people. It was put in place to ensure lower qualified white people were not hired instead of more highly qualified minorities."

I'm using my 1st gen iPad Air (MD786LL/A) as a second Mac display using the Yam Display app. There is a free version, but I paid $7 or $8 to get the full version. The iPad is connected to a 13" i5 MBP via USB. You need to install a free Mac version of Yam on the Mac. Unlike Sidecar, you can use finger touch on the iPad to interact with macOS (although I don't do this very often).

Speaking of Sidecar, I later got a refurb 2018 11" iPad Pro, and use Sidecar to connect it (also via USB) to the same MBP, at the same time as the Yam iPad.

So now I have a compact triple display set up on my small home office desk. The MBP and iPads are on separate stands. The iPad stands I got are a bit low, so the bottom edge of the iPads are a little lower than the bottom edge of the MBP display, but it works. The very high DPI of the iPads helps compensate for their small size.

Nice to see all the love for the mini iPhones here. Two of the phones on my account are 13 minis, and those family members don't want a larger phone...

I get that the minis only represented a small percentage of total sales, but didn't Apple sell millions of them? Not every phone needs to be in the top 10 does it? Obviously, you can't lose money on every sale, but I wonder how many units need to be sold to recoup development, tooling, and distribution costs. Seems to me that if you could sell millions of anything, that's still good business. 

I have seen on a few occasions a charging cable being made available to passengers in a Uber or Lyft car. I think I used one once a few years ago, but when I first heard about these hacking cables, never again will I plug into a cable in a ride-share or in public phone charging facilities. 

Also, the article and some of the comments here suggest that the price will deter some people, but as the article states, "it's a tool for professionals." Well, there are enough of these "professionals" out there that put card skimming devices on ATM and gas pumps or who use key fob relay devices to break into your car. To them, less than a couple hundred bucks is no big deal. So while it's probably true that most of us don't need to be overly concerned, especially as long as we're being diligent, there's still plenty to be concerned about. The fact that some "low level scammers" would be deterred is no comfort.

About a year ago I bought the TP-Link XE75 Pro AXE5400 Tri-Band Wi-Fi 6E 3-pack from Best Buy. Normally $399 which is a decent price for a Tri-Band 3-pack, but was on sale for $349. Best Buy offers a 15% discount if you bring in an old modem or router for recycling, so I got another ~$52 off. The sales person did not know about the recycling deal, so I had to show him the web page. I just checked and the recycling discount page is still there, so here it is for anyone else interested:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/networking-recycling-offer/pcmcat1497300657381.c?id=pcmcat1497300657381

Even though not Wi-Fi 7, it made a big difference in my house in terms of both coverage and speed. I'm still pretty happy with it.

I don't think Tim Cook is "caving" to the president-elect. Cook seems to be the most deft among the tech leaders in dealing with him. That's being smart, and dare I say it, even manipulative. (Which I will also say is probably not too hard to do, even toward such a stable genius).

16K does have potential application in the Pro AV realm to address large direct view LED displays or tiled/blended arrays of smaller displays. Of course, we would need a source capable of delivering a 16K signal, which would feed some sort of processor that also must be capable of accepting 16K to split/distribute the signal to the entire display array. (Right now, media servers capable of multiple 4K outputs exist for these applications, so I would say 16K is not urgent).

Still not a fan of the HDMI connector though.

I made this suggestion as an "open letter" to 3rd party manufacturers in the initial 12" MB post, but it really belongs in this thread...

 

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I'm not crazy about needing dongles for I/O, but I do understand that a lot of personal-use types don't really need them.

 

For travel/business use, where connection to projectors/USB/wired ethernet is relatively common, I think there is an opportunity for some manufacturer to do a mobile integrated multi-I/O dock+power adapter here. Even the separate power adapter and multiple display dongles I carry for my 13" MBP takes a fair amount of space. Seems to me a unit somewhat bigger than a typical power adapter that does all these things would not be a big deal to always carry with you. (And hopefully it could be +/- $100).

 

So, how about it, 3rd party people? Kanex? Belkin? Sonnet? Anybody?

 

PS: maybe you could do a "mag-safe" style magnetic connector on the AC side like my deep fryer does:

Soli said:

nolamacguy said:

ah yes, lets shit on this....just because.

nonsense. Messages is also my most-used app, and i think it looks awesome and tons of fun. even my 74 yo dad likes to send iMessages with emoji, and we're going to have a lot of fun sending effects and whatnot.

iOS is doing pretty well on security -- so well that the FBI tried to force them to handle over their keys. so i feel pretty confident in Apple's ability to keep on doing a good job. 

I don't see the "just because" when people are giving very specific reasons why they don't like these enhancements; just as you at giving reasons why you like the enhancements.

Personally, I'm glad they did something, but it's not
of the markup and visual appeal for better and easier communication that I wanted. I hope I can disable most of these features are I'm not for pizzazz in my text bubbles. 

There is a certain amount of "me-too-ism" going on with the expanded iMessage visuals, but I am OK with it. When you look at what WeChat and Skype are doing with stickers, along with the Bitmoji keyboard, you can see that people are having fun with them. I find even business colleagues (albeit only those I am on familiar terms) make use of these. Obviously, you don't need to send them yourself. I'm not sure if you can refuse them from others though, but if you could, you might not "get" what the message is--and may have to explain why not.