OctoMonkey
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What to do before you trade in your old iPhone for an iPhone 16
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End of an era: Apple's SuperDrive has finally sold out after 16 years
dewme said:I haven’t picked up a CD, DVD, or Blue Ray disc in 5-6 years. Like others have said the SuperDrive doesn’t play well with non-Apple devices. I still have a Samsung alternative that seems to work okay with other platforms. It’s sitting in a drawer, snuggled right up next to my SuperDrive. Tech ballast.
I have found some drives seem to work better on some discs, so having a choice of drives from different manufacturers is quite beneficial.
To each their own. -
You don't have to flip this Magic Mouse hack over to charge
dewme said:OctoMonkey said:dewme said:Yet again a clever proof of concept. He’s basically created a “magic shoe” for the Magic Mouse that allows the mouse to be used while charging. It works. But it’s pretty obvious from the implementation why Apple never chose to go down this path. It’s design and aesthetics are okay from a mouse-in-a-shoe perspective, but Apple (at least with Jony Ive at the helm of the design team) would never have allowed this to be labeled as an Apple product. It’s too large, bulky, and reminiscent of mouse designs you can get from many other vendors for $29.99.
Whether you liked Jony’s approach or not, he always stuck to his guns and saw that his vision for a product met his design and aesthetic goals. Anything that deviated too far from what he envisioned was seen as a failure. One can argue that what comes across as a single-minded and arguably narrow focus on the primary functionality, like using the device and how it feels in the hand, led to functional compromises when it came to ancillary functionality, like charging the device. The Magic Mouse is imo pleasant and efficient to use, but yeah, there is no getting over the clunky recharging scenario. The rationale must have been something like “you obviously only recharge the device while you’re not using it.” This makes perfect sense only until it doesn’t.
His design philosophy of form over function is the reason I don't care for his designs in general. He was a good (not great) product designer when kept reined in, but a disaster when let loose.
One thing I still wonder about is why more wireless mouse and trackball designers have not gone after using an inductive charging mechanism. Perhaps it has something to do with the need to periodically park the mouse exactly on top of a charging coil built into the desk, desk pad, or a mouse pad. Perhaps as far-field wireless power transfer technology becomes more mature and widely available it can be used in conjunction with precision UWB localization to allow all of the wireless devices sitting on your desk, or even all wirelessly charged devices in a room, to be charged simply because they are within line-of-sight proximity to the charging station or broadcast beacon. Seems doable in the not too distant future. -
iPhone 16 to use graphene heat sink to solve overheating issues
Wesley Hilliard said:bigcountry said:So... what good does this do when most iPhone owners have their phone in a case that has very poor thermal conductivity?
I suspect the ideal solution would be the screen. It has a large surface area and there is rarely anything more than an ultra-thin screen protector and when in use is usually exposed to air. Perhaps DOW (or whoever Apple uses) can develop a super tough glass screen which also has high thermal conductivity. -
iMac 24-inch M3 review: A clear sign that Intel Mac support is ending soon
iqatedo said:OctoMonkey said:brianjo said:Since they are committed to the stupid power brick, it would have made sense to add a couple USB or thunderbolt ports there as well, tidying up the desk workspace.Hell, even better would be to move all of the brains into the brick and calling it a Mac Mini, thus making the display just a display, allowing you to upgrade the machine by replacing the brick instead of the whole machine...