thrang

Will have to keep an eye on this...

how many times a day will one accidentally knock the phone of this mount?

Well, this is would be an extremely small-windowed reason alone. Perhaps they are busy changing how the apps work in certain ways to be less offensive in this regard

I don't have mine yet (presumably Christmas morning!)

Curiously, the review description of the sound quality (being neutral, clean, clear, with no emphasis on high or low end, and great soundstage) is EXACTLY what an audiophile would want. This sounds like one is describing a quality of faithful and uncolored reproduction. This is how I would describe my Sennheiser HD800's.

Yet the opening sentence says "underwhelmed"

I guess I'll see in a few days...

Apple should never get into the social media business, even adhering to its strict privacy rules. There is too much involved in policing what users post to be worth it IMO

The fact that they retreated from this years ago (Ping) may have been initially viewed as a failure, but ultimately was the smartest decision they could have made, whether salient or not.

The built-in sharing tools and applications available (native and third party) seems to strike the right balance between encouraging private-bubble, self-maintained engagement without a requirement for public moderation or intervention. If you can't sufficiently communicate expressively with friends and family via phone, FaceTime, rich texting, sharing of Photos, Music, videos, and even your GarageBand creations (and more), you're perhaps caught up in the froth of "being someone" of elevated importance because you have a public place on the web. BFD.

The problem with this ultimate democratization of giving an equal voice to everyone is that not everyone deserves to be heard.  There is no barrier to entry, no minimum skill or intelligence required to blather on.  Every numbnutz in the world is able pontificate to the point where the signal to noise ratio has obliterated most things of importance. One might argue that the demise of traditional news, the blatant lack of objectivity not practices by most, is correlated to the rise of the massive disturbance of social media.

It's truly sad the amount of time some people spend endlessly perusing the artificial landscape of social media. While its original intentions are theoretically benevolent and even noble, the practical nature of it is largely the opposite.