mpantone

Apple live events usually start at 1pm ET but not always.

That said when an event has a live component Apple typically sends the invitation email in advance to give people time to book travel. Since the pandemic Apple has leaned to giving two weeks notice. Prior to the pandemic it was typically one week.

We are already past the moment when Apple would normally would send out an e-mail for a hosted live event. In my opinion this points to a likely press release-only launch.

Tech media has been speculating on an October event for months and now with each passing day the likelihood of a live hosted event drops. If they intended on hosting an event with hands-on demo session after a launch video on Tuesday the 29th, the e-mail invitations would have gone out on the 15th.

Since iOS 18.1 and Sequoia 15.1 are slated to release on Monday the 28th it would make sense for Apple to close the Store early Tuesday morning, drop some press releases and reopen the Store with the newly announced products.

We have seen this before. The Google Cardboard-compatible Mattel View-Master VR Viewer in 2015:

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/mattel-view-master-virtual-reality-viewer-starter-pack

But Apple's version will be $499 and weigh 2 kilograms. The optional headstrap will be $49.

Of course, the View-Master unit had a number of shortcomings. The biggest was the fact that the it wasn't compatible with a wide variety of smartphone dimensions. The optics were fixed so were limited to a subset of viewers' eyes. There was no headstrap. Audio was terrible because it relied on the phone's built-in speakers.

Of course the View-Master headset lenses were crap but at $18 for the whole shebang, what can one expect? Also, it was just a mechanical smartphone holder, there were no electrical connections to the handset itself.

Some of these have been addressed by modern technologies (widespread adoption of wireless earbuds takes care of audio shortcomings).

But Apple should continue to file patents. Maybe something will work. As most of here know, most patents never see daylight as a shipping product/service.

There is a bunch of important information missing in this article.

First of all, Emergency SOS from mobile operators is required BY LAW in the USA. It has been. For a looooong time.

Second, Emergency SOS has been available for many, many years on dumbphones (a.k.a. featurephones) with dead or unregistered SIM cards. So even if you discontinue service on an old handset, the device can still be used for emergency 911 calls provided a SIM card is still installed. Many people kept an old device as a backup emergency handset for such purposes and undoubtedly some still do.

I have an iPhone XS with a dead SIM in the house that has Emergency SOS.

Third, eSIM only handsets like recent iPhones will exhibit this behavior if you don't register the device to a cellular provider. So if you buy an unlocked iPhone 16, don't pick a carrier or port your number during the setup, you will see SOS on your phone (provided you are in range of a cellular tower obviously). I have one of these sitting on my kitchen table.

At some point I will port my number from my iPhone 12 mini to my iPhone 16 and then the former will be an Emergency SOS device as well.

Fourth, it is important to stress that Emergency SOS functionality is not specific to iPhones (whether old or new). It is present on all types of phones including old feature phones and Android devices. There have been too many articles on AppleInsider in recent times that insinuate or imply that a particular situation is specific to Apple customers when it is not. Emergency SOS is available to feature phone users and Android handset users as well. All you need is a SIM card or eSIM.

jesusfreak said:

Apple needs to spend some more time fixing major bugs.

I am still having serious reliability problems with external SSDs on my Mac Minis.  

Basic stuff needs to flippin work.  

This is a great example of why I don't upgrade operating systems at launch; I haven't done so for years.

These days I wait almost 9 months to upgrade. That's right, I installed macOS Sonoma and iOS 17 in June, just a week before WWDC 2024. This is the best assurance that I will get a mature operating system with relatively few bugs.

Apple's software QA has gone into the toilet about 8 years ago. Remember last year Apple engineering took a one week breather to reduce their bug queue. That's a bad omen vis-a-vis software quality.

mattinoz said:

escargot said:

Does AI not realize how useless and flawed the data from CIRP is?  They are essentially two friends with a blog, who only survey 500 people to get their "data".  You don't need to be a statistics major to know that that sample size is far too small to be salient, even if they did sample it properly (which they don't).  

Their data is completely worthless, and shame on publications that report on their junk "data" without doing any due diligence.

I guess that answers my question… how did they account for institutional buyers buying crate loads of them for embedded uses and data centres. 

Simple they didn’t.

This is correct. The CIRP survey is worthless.

Exhibit A: in the early years of the Mac mini, it was heavily deployed in Las Vegas casinos in conjunction with cameras for video surveillance of gaming tables.

Exhibit B: also from the early days, the Mac mini was installed in colocation facilities as servers. Some of those companies still exist. Unless happened to interview one of those IT directors, those units would not be part of their dataset.

From the beginning the Mac mini was frequently marketed as a SOHO device, for printer serving, data storage, etc. Again it is unlikely CIPR's sample of interviewees properly captures this market.