lowededwookie

Google Maps is still rubbish here in New Zealand. To help you understand this statement a little more I'm a postie and often we find mail for addresses we're not too sure about. In most cases I can find these addresses in both systems but I find far more in Apple Maps than Google Maps.

For example there's a street here in town called Totarahoe. This is a brand spanking new street and for a good few months this did not show up in anything other than the local council's mapping system. However this street now shows up in Apple Maps but has only just shown up in Google Maps since the update last week. That's at least three months behind Apple Maps.

The only thing I hold Google Maps in high regard for is the plot numbers which for a postie is a great advantage and something I wish was in Apple Maps. That being said though I'm finding using a mix of Apple Maps and the local council maps to be far superior and so Google Maps is just an app taking space on my iPhone now.

Oh crap, it's Spark. Ever since Vodafone sold up they've been pretty useless on getting the good stuff in.

Spark is out AT&T. It's an ex-government state-owned asset which got privatised and in doing so sent New Zealand backwards by 30 years. NZ went from having the best telecommunications system in the world due to test contracts with telco manufacturers to being so far behind that when Bell South came in they looked pathetic. When Vodafone purchased Bell South then cellular really began to develop in NZ and Telecom found themselves haemorrhaging customers.

Dealing with Telecom was so bad they've changed their name twice from Telecom to XT to what is now Spark but the service and reliability are still pretty pathetic.

I guess eSIM is a good move for them. It might have many side effects like flowing down to their resellers which would be a good move but that'll be years down the line I suspect.

Hopefully this will enable dual-SIM iPhones to be sold here. I really need a dual-SIM phone for work and play.

lorin schultz said:

lowededwookie said:
[...] I can edit video on an iPhone just as easily as using iMovie on the Mac

"Easily," yes. Accurately, no. Fine adjustments are difficult using a finger on a small screen. One's choices are endless re-zoom operations or accepting edits that are "in the ballpark."

The fact that a task is possible on a phone or tablet does not mean it's automatically equivalent to a laptop or desktop in terms of ease-of-use, speed, workflow (particularly within a facility where one's work is part of a chain), or any other productivity measure. iPads have opened up a new form of computing that is better than a laptop for some things. That's awesome in itself. It doesn't mean that it's better than -- or even equivalent to -- previously existing input and interaction methods for some kinds of work.

Besides, even putting all that aside, the iPad Pro's marketing includes using the keyboard stand and an external monitor. Both make touch a less effective control method than using a mouse.

I disagree for the simple reason that the pen is mightier than the sword/mouse. Ever tried drawing with a mouse? Ever tried to be precise with a trackpad? All they are good for is moving stuff around but you can do that with a touchscreen and get immense precision using the Pencil.

Just because you’ve done something all the time doesn’t make it the best option. In fact if you’re serious about video editing and precision on a Mac you’d use a jog control not a mouse or at the very least a trackball such as Logitech’s MX Ergo which I’ve used back when it was the TrackMan. It is far superior to a mouse or trackpad.

While my complaint is largely semantic I completely disagree that it’s the lack of the mouse that means that the iPad Pro can’t be used as a desktop/laptop replacement. If that’s so then why the hell is Adobe bringing over full Photoshop? Why is AutoDesk bringing over the full AutoCAD engine? The issue is not lack of mouse support but lack of software support and we are starting to see this changing now thanks to the original iPad Pro.

The iPad Pro combined with the Apple Pencil is a very precise device and those decrying its abilities just don’t understand how computing is going to evolve because they’re stuck in the past. It’s Final Cut Pro X all over again and that was a moronic debate back then as well.

My iPhone 6 Plus does the same thing but it physically brings a message about needing to be unlocked and when I do it charges fine.

My thinking is that it’s due to the USB Restricted Mode purely from the messages I’m seeing.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

It is built in obsolescence. Windows will run on 15 year old computers while Mac OS will refuse to run on any Mac built more than six years ago. There is really no technical reason why Mac OS could not run on a 2010 Intel CPU. These are decisions made at the top of the company. Apple does what is best for Apple and not for its customers. The reason developers are not up in arms about Apple dropping OpenGL and OpenCL is that it really happened years ago when Apple stopped updating it. Mac OS is now about five years out of date. When you look at the extremely poor library of AAA games available on the Mac, know that it is Apple's poor hardware features and lack of cross platform software support that is the major reason. Of course people don't buy Macs to play games. Pretty soon people won't buy Macs at all.

BULLCRAP. When Vista came out it barely ran on one year old machines. Windows 7 increased that to about 2 year old machines and Windows 8 got to 5 year old machines. The only machines that run Windows after fifteen years were machines that when new would have cost close to $10,000(NZ) due to beefy graphics cards and CPUs but your average home computer barely ran XP with any performance.

I know this because trying to get two year old machines to run Windows 7 was a freaking nightmare because manufacturers decided that they didn’t want to write drivers for the new OS they preferred people to buy new machines. The headaches I had trying to get some big name machines running even Windows 10 was more than Neurofen could even handle.

My Early 2011 MBP has been running the latest OS all that time which is great for a machine that is 7 years old and it’s actually nice to know that the only reason it won’t run Mohave is literally because of a hardware limitation.