russw

neilm said:

sweetheart777 said:

Every Apple device, excluding AirPods can have its battery replaced for a reasonable service fee.

Really?

Because we recently paid $520 to have the dangerously swollen battery in my 3-year-old MBP replaced. You must have an unusual definition of 'reasonable.'

On the plus side, Apple turned the job around in less than 3 days door-to-door — FedExed out on Monday afternoon; received by Apple, repaired and shipped back on Tuesday; delivered to my office Wednesday morning! — which was outstanding.

Back to Apple's new battery management software, this is a good development. Lithium batteries don't really like living in either the uppermost or lowermost reaches of their charge range, but that's impractical to manage manually.

Sounds like yours was a battery failure that damaged other components so the repair was more extensive. You could argue Apple should have treated it as a standard battery replacement but that is a different story. A normal battery replacement that most people would have to get is < $200 (per the link @chabig posted above).

Good stuff, this could be a game changer.

I'm interested in two use cases for photographers who travel and want to minimize size/weight but still want to backup and edit their images.

1) Can I copy the contents of a SD card to a SSD drive using the iPad. This would be using Files, I assume, but maybe someone will come up with an app to make this better/smart so incremental copies will work as well. I'm using a RaspberryPi to do this right now- just uses rsync to sync files. 

2) Did you test to see if Lightroom can work directly off attached storage (SSD drive, in my case)? Not just to edit a single image, more to do a quick select of images then edit.

Russ

I also use AutoSleep (works great) and battery life is a non-issue. At night, I set the watch to "Theatre Mode" so the watch face doesn't go on as I move around while sleeping or trying to get to sleep. That likely saves some battery. In the morning, I pop it on the charger (left by side of bed) and by the time I'm ready to leave for the morning it is fully charged. This worked on my older series 3 AW as well. It's easier to simply make that part of my morning routine so even if the battery lasted some number of days, I'd probably charge it daily.

Once you have more HomeKit automation, the HomePod becomes more useful to turn on and off devices or enable scenes. Hey Siri, set scene dining (or just say hey Siri, dinning) to setup a set of lights in our home. Sure, you could do that with your iPhone but when you're scrambling around in the kitchen it's a lot easier to just talk. Not saying it's worth the expense but it's a nice extravagance. I'd like a smaller HomePod that cost 1/2 as much so I could add to a few more areas in our home. It's nice they started high end but they are expensive.

bonobob said:

Quote:  The biggest new feature is Bokeh and Depth Control, which allows you to adjust the background blur and depth after taking photos. This feature alone is going to convince a lot of people to upgrade, simply because it makes photos look noticeably better. 

The iPhone X is capable of doing both of these features. The only question is whether iOS 12 Photos app will allow it on the X.  The third party Focos app can adjust both depth of field and plane of focus on a portrait mode photo on an iPhone X.

The answer appears to be no, they won't add "bokeh" adjust in photos at least not yet. There is also an app called Slør that's been out almost since the X came out. Works really well and allows you to move the focus point around in addition to changing depth of field.

This seems like a marketing money grab from Apple. Pretty disappointing and I'm an Apple fanboy for sure. I've only skipped one other iPhone (the 7) for the last 10+ years but will be skipping the Xs as well, I think.