spheric

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spheric
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  • Comparing the redesigned 11-inch iPad Pro versus 2017's 10.5-inch model

    sphericspheric
    As a musician, I find the loss of the mini jack an inconvenience. 

    As a professional, my job has always been to work around the inherent limitations of my tools. 

    As a professional musician, I can tell you that the loss of the mini jack is not that big a deal. Really, it isn’t. 

    If I were tempted to record via the mini jack, I’d just as soon use the built-in microphones. On the iPhone Xs, they sound surprisingly good. Anything more than that, and a cheap class-compliant USB interface is the way to go. 

    Example of the built-in mics: 
    https://youtu.be/M1am7LidMm8
    (shameless self-promotion included)
    Rayz2016

  • Samsung's 'Infinity Flex Display' demo shows future of foldable smartphones

    sphericspheric
    mac_128 said:
    dewme said:
    Rollup screen concepts have been floating around for well over a decade. LG demo'd a 65" version at CES 2018 in January. 

    It's very silly to assess a company's innovation prowess based on prototypes, proof of concept demos, and even patent disclosures. Innovation is more than invention and ideas. Innovation is all about actually delivering things that are valuable and transformative to people and societies. Inventions and ideas that do not deliver value are not innovative, they are simply nice ideas. Apple is an innovation machine but they are not alone.  One of the unsung heroes of Apple's innovation machine (and there are many others) is their industrial engineering teams. These are the folks that figure out how amazing designs and ideas can actually be built effectively, efficiently, and at scale. Most everything that Apple does seems to require massive scale. When Tim Cook & Co. get up on stage in September to show off the latest and greatest iPhones we simply assume that tens of millions of these new beauties are going to available to purchase within a few days or weeks. Making all that happen requires a tremendous amount of innovation at many levels and across many disciplines, none of which get explicitly mentioned during the keynote, and the industrial engineering teams are among the unmentioned.

    Science fiction very often provides stimulation that tickles the imagination of inventors. Who would have imagined the 2018 iPad Pro 12.9" showing up in a 1968 movie, but what do you know, there she be.


    Well said.

    And now we know why Apple is moving to FaceID from TouchID.  FaceID is spacesuit friendly, fingerprint readers are not.
    Exactly!

    Except, unlike some strawman arguments being made around here about how transparent screens shown on TV, which look cool but aren't practical; 2001 showed the devices being used in a pragmatic way that demonstrated their effectiveness.  It's the execution of a particular use, in a particular production (which also happens to look cool on screen), that proves the effectiveness of a device in a pragmatic way. 
    Note that that poster depicts a scene that never happened in the movie. 

    The only use of those tablets in the movie was in scenes where they were lying flat on tabletops (and they could use rear projection for the images). 



    (I still think it’s hilarious that Samsung cited Kubrick’s film as “prior art” in their design patent defense.)
    tmaySoli

  • Apple updates iWork, iMovie for iOS & Mac, GarageBand for iOS

    sphericspheric
    lkrupp said:
    So macOS has disabled all Facebook sharing but iOS continues to allow it. WHY?
    That's a misrepresentation of what's happening. 

    On macOS, Apple was providing the Facebook integration and have successively removed it from the OS and now from their apps. 

    On iOS, the Facebook App provides the upload functionality into the Sharing menu. 

    On my iPhone, where I do not have the Facebook app installed, there is no option to share directly to Facebook from iMovie. 
    lollivern2itivguyfastasleepchasmRayz2016watto_cobradysamoria

  • Looking for PDF app to annotate construction plans

    sphericspheric
    Apple's own Files app can do that. I use it routinely to annotate PDF sheet music files. 

    You can directly access various apps and things like DropBox from within the app, as well as iCloud Drive, of course. 

    Only snag I've seen is that (at least in previous OS versions) changes aren't synced until you close the document. I've lost data once or twice when I switched apps with a document still open and then did enough with the other apps that Files was kicked out of RAM. The document was virtually blank when I relaunched the app.
    aplnub

  • Apple & other tech giants may face EU universal minimum tax rate in the future

    sphericspheric
    So.... here in the US we decided that we had to reduce the corporate tax rate (further reducing the effective tax rate) such that many major corporations pay little to no corporate income tax...

    ...while at the same time the EU is considering a minimum corporate tax rate.

    What's wrong with this picture?
    What's wrong with it is what's missing from it. 

    Apple paid an effective ZERO POINT SEVEN (0.7) percent taxes on their income here in Europe, where they make about 30% of their profit, IIRC. 

    While there effective worldwide tax rate was at 26%. 

    What's wrong with this picture?
    muthuk_vanalingamGeorgeBMac