Calamander

anonymouse said:

Where have all the decent iPhone (Pro) colors gone? And my wife is always complaining that they don't have colors for "girls". Does Apple have some ridiculous idea that "Pro" iPhones have to be boring?

Basically, yes. Apple has decreed that in 2023 and now extending into 2024 there shall only be very boring, bland colors on the phones. 

The 15 (non pro) was the most boring bad looking color lineup since the iPhone 3G (it came in black). 

15 pro had titanium which was also extremely boring but it was new and it looked good in poster size marketing pictures where they show the brush strokes (which you can't see on real devices since they're too tiny.... but thanks to the marketing images, you could kind of imagine your bland, grey brick, which kinda looks like concrete, was actually a sexy brush stroke metal. I guess you could also see it with a loupe. 

I bought it anyway because I needed a new phone but ... yeah. I'd rather have a cool looking phone. Making up for it with the case. 

Samsung followed suit and so now everyone's phones have bland toned down boring colors. 

ranson said:

Situations like this, along with what went on in China during their mass Covid protests, are precisely why Apple needs to give up on its quest to prohibit sideloading. If an app is not being used to harm others, let the people install it.

Finally a sensible comment. 

The game dynamics of Apple's app store right now is the worst of all worlds - any government in the world can force Apple into removing apps from the app store, and regimes from China, to Russia, to the USA have all been using that to get apps banned that their people wanted to use. 

In the USA that is unconstitutional, but it happens anyway - TikTok for example. One can debate the merits of that ban but the same can be said for China banning Google and Facebook - there is no difference. Normal people are worse off for it.. 

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs on a basic humanitarian principle - to empower humans to be more creative, to have more information, to be free. Steve jobs initially said that the App store controls were in place to protect people's "freedom from porn" - while that was an OK idea at the time, he did not foresee that Apple would then in the future have to kowtow to any government anywhere in the world. 

We all need to leave the EU - the UK did it right, they left. 

Germany needs to leave also, it's currently paying for all these southern countries

The southern countries need to leave as they've been made unaffordable thanks to the Euro. When they can go back to their weak currencies both residents and tourists will be able to afford life again. 

The rest should also leave - the EU is a dictatorship of bureaucrats - a bureaucracy that continuously seeks to increase its own importance by issuing more and more regulations, each regulation gives the EU more power and the countries less, and the citizens even less. 

I love that Apple needs to open its app store - but I don't love that it's done by a EU mandate. 

The deeper implication of these power-grab laws haven't even been understood yet. It's always sold as something good for the people, and against the big bad corporations, but in reality it's the big bad EU showing the corporations who's really boss. It's all about power. 

charlesn said:

This and other cases like it are why I stopped auto updating my Apple products when the latest releases drop. I now always wait a couple of weeks, at least, to see if it's "safe" to do so.  It's really inexcusable for the dot 4 version of an OS to be breaking stuff and having this level of bugginess. 

I am with you but OS updates usually contain security fixes; and lately, security fixes on Mac are often for bugs that bad actors are already exploiting in the wild. 

Which is why I frantically update the moment a new release is available. 

tenthousandthings said:

I see they now offer a 16GB version among the standard configurations they keep in stock, instead of having to order it. That wasn’t possible when we walked into the store and bought an M2 Air back when it first came out. We got the 8GB (which has been fine for what it is used for), but I remember thinking Apple had left money on the table, as we would have gotten the 16GB if we could have walked out of the store with it right then and there.

Same here. Bought a rose gold M1 with basic config for the GF for the simple reason that online ordering didn't work with her visa card (which works for pretty much anything else... weird). So we were unable to get our hands on a 16GB / 512 option - we just couldn't buy it. All good in the end since she's barely used the laptop at all anyway. But Apple left some cash on the table there for sure. 

Another mistake Apple made was to discontinue Rose Gold - I know a lot of girls with rose gold laptops and they all absolutely love the color. Starlight is not quite the same, appeal-wise. Also the new MacBook Air is a lot fatter, visually - it pretty much looks like a MBP. I can't understand for the life of me what got into them to make it look like that. We all know the volume is same or less than the M1 wedge shape MBA, so this is all just visuals - but the large feet under the laptop make it appear fat when it's on the table. A strange decision - ultrabooks from Huawei and Samsung look smaller (and may actually be smaller).