linkman

Apple needs concentrate on the basics of navigation and fix the major problems before adding little stuff like indoor airport directions. I've had too many times where driving with Siri barking totally wrong info at me is worse than almost aimlessly driving around hoping I'll find my destination. I took a horrifically confusing circle around the south side of San Antonio -- get on I-10, get off and do a U followed by getting back on I-10 followed by an immediate offramp then another U then it tells me again to get off and do a third U -- all while I was at least 3 miles from my destination. That wasn't the only troublesome incident. More than once I've searched AM for a local establishment (that's been there for decades) only to get results for a place named the same that's over 1000 miles away -- and Google maps showed the closer one.

The term crappy for these cable boxes is 100% spot-on. My previous box, some pretty small Cisco thing, existed only to convert a coax scrambled connection to HDMI, change the channel, mute, and burn a lot of electricity. The entire top was a vented grill and used as much electricity when off as when it was on. I think turning it off using the remote only muted the video/audio output and turned the LED from green to red.

My neighbor went through the nightmare of the CableCard with his DVR. He literally had a tech from the cable company at his house every 2-3 weeks for several hours each time it stopped working. He gave up on it after more than a year of fighting it.

foregoneconclusion said:

It's funny how stunned people act when the government makes even small demands of the corporate world during a time of record profits and endless rounds of stock buybacks.

Do you think this new proposal is the only tax that companies pay in that area?

Can someone comment on their experience with testing an iPhone with a marginal battery and turning off the throttling? I'd suspect that in real world use anyone that tries disabling throttling turns it back on very quickly.

Samsung has had more than one ad that makes fun of the notch. But I find it interesting that all of these phones have (or will have) notches: LG G7, iPhone X, Essential Phone, OnePlus 6, Huawei P20 and P20 Pro, Asus ZenFone 5. Perhaps manufacturers find that people actually like having the extra screen space from it? It'll be great when Samsung adds it to their phones.

ascii said:

I like the idea of revamping an 130 year old manufacturing process, very cool! But I was kind of hoping Jony Ive would get sick of aluminium soon, I mean how many generations of Alu products have we seen now? The Microsoft Surface are made of plastic and yet somehow they look fresher than the Macbook Pro. Everything goes in cycles, even design tastes.

Aluminum has much better heat dissipation than plastic. The Surface has serious issues with thermal regulation. Ever wonder how they can get the MacBook to work without fans? Metal chassis and body.

The small sample size of Surface Pros I have at work has had a tremendously high failure rate. Two of the three have died within 18 months of first use. #3 is merely a replacement for #1. #2 died last week and hasn't been replaced yet. The two remaining users of them (everyone else has abandoned them in favor of Dell laptops) have frequent shutdowns. Consumer Reports indicates they don't do well: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/8/10/16125294/microsoft-surface-consumer-reports-hardware-freezing-shutdowns-problems