elijahg

rob53 said:

What people need to realize is that the majority of a country's population generally wants to be friendly to other countries. It's the politicians and government along with the fringe that ruin everything. I don't have any issues with Russians, in fact I ran into a Russian student who was doing post grad work in the US. She was nice. Putin is the face of Russia but I really don't think he's the embodiment of Russian citizens. 

Pressure on citizens via things like blocking exports to a country is supposed to put pressure on the political classes. Of course if the political classes couldn't give a shit then it doesn't really work as well, until there is an uprising like the Arab Spring. (Though that wasn't due to sanctions, obviously)

entropys said:

maybe the APP1 ANC downgrades was to make the ANC in the APP2 twice as better? How do they measure that anyway?

The cynic would agree, and Apple has done similar before (removed the mic array on the iMacs for a few years, replacing it with just one, and then re-added them with fanfare on the 2020 model). Someone did a professional in-depth comparison for several of the FW versions, though I can't find the site now. 

The Airpods Pro 1's ANC used to be better, but Apple reduced its effectiveness a fair bit. This was seemingly due ANC damaging the driver somehow, and causing rattling. APP 1 also shuts off the ANC if it encounters something that's apparently louder than the ANC can deal with, which is kinda annoying. That's a recent regression, never used to do that.

Instead of saying it's "inevitable", AI should be informing those who think this kind of surveillance is ok "because of the children" that it is in fact not, ok. Kowtowing to Apple's line of "we won't add more hashes because we said we won't" which means absolutely nothing is disappointing. I know it's an Apple fan site, but there is no need to suck up to Apple on everything - especially since Apple has historically been privacy focussed and this blows it completely out of the water.

AppleInsider said:

Apple marketed [3D touch] as a shortcut and easier way for people to be able to get to what they wanted to do more simply and intuitively. It also allowed new gestures, such as peak-and-pop, and new features, such as Live Photos, to be introduced. 

3D Touch was a widely used and versatile feature that was implemented across the whole operating system. The departure of the feature was not mourned upon, but many people would like to see it back.

3D touch was anything but intuitive. You had zero idea what was force-touchable without being told by the OS or otherwise, it was inconsistently implemented across the UI and most apps didn't support it. Peek and pop seemed pretty pointless, it was no faster to press hard than to tap and then off-screen swipe to go back.

Force touch was handy on the lockscreen for the torch/camera, made it much harder to accidentally activate either. The only other place I ever used it was on the keyboard. It was so handy to press hard and use the keyboard as a trackpad, and even better was that you could force touch again to begin a selection, accurately move the cursor and let go. So much better than the frustrating fudge that are the two little dots you drag around. I did just discover that whilst in trackpad mode you can actually tap the keyboard with another finger to start a selection, which is so much better than the selection handles. 

Not going all-in doesn't help either, with half the devices missing it developers don't bother with it at all, much like the Macbook touch bar.

AppleInsider said:

3D Touch was a widely used and versatile feature that was implemented across the whole operating system. The departure of the feature was not mourned upon, but many people would like to see it back.

Was it? I know people with Force touch supporting phones and they have no idea it is a thing, they've never intentionally used it. OTOH It was pretty well implemented on the watch, as you knew everything had a "settings" menu by force touching, though Apple abandoned it presumably because people had no idea it existed. Much like on the phone. I'd like to see it on the Watch more than phone.