rnb2

Great, now do “For All Mankind”, which has surprisingly not been renewed yet. With the news that production on “Foundation” has been halted amidst budget issues, it’s starting to look like Apple is becoming more budget-conscious with its big sci-fi franchises. If they can maintain the quality of the shows at lower budgets, that’s great, but it would be sad to see such big creative swings hobbled or even cancelled because Apple wants to see an even bigger profit margin on Services revenue.

While the 3x optical zoom on the rear camera is correct, I don't believe that the iPhone 14 Pro has "ProRes 4K 60fps with external recording". I believe this was announced as a new feature on the 15 Pro, since the lightning port doesn't have enough bandwidth for that.

I currently have the 13 mini, having owned the 12 mini before it. I'm in the Upgrade Program, and the 13 mini is the first iPhone I've kept for more than one year since the Upgrade Program started with the iPhone 6 in 2014. I'd already broken myself of the "latest and greatest" pattern by getting an iPhone 8 Plus instead of a X (I didn't want to pay that much for a phone and wait for developers to figure out how to work with the new design), then an 11 instead of the 11 Pro. The XS was actually the last high end iPhone I owned, between the 8 and the 11.

I've loved carrying a small iPhone for the last (almost) three years. I love the way it slides easily into a front pocket, even with my wallet attached. I love how light it is, and how comfortable it is to hold, especially with the wallet adding some depth. I've never used a case with my minis in order to maintain the "small as possible" footprint, and have never regretted it.

That said, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to keep the 13 mini for a third year, and the small screen has started to feel cramped and limiting. This might just be my brain trying to trick me into accepting the tradeoffs I'll experience with my next phone, though. When I got the 12 mini, I was all about smaller devices: first, the tiny iPhone in 2020; then, replacing my 11-inch 2018 iPad Pro with an iPad mini 6 in 2021. This year, I decided that I just had too many things that would benefit from a larger iPad screen and grabbed a lightly-used M1 iPad Air (and sold the iPad mini), and now I'm debating between a 15 Pro and 15 Plus. On the one hand, most of the high end features (but not the longer zoom of the Max), which I haven't really experienced in a few years; on the other hand, a really big screen and lighter weight. I'm leaning toward the latter - if I'm going to lose out on the pocketability of the mini, I might as well go big, right? - but won't be able to completely decide until after the event.

With any context at all, this is a rather pointless review (I get it - everybody has bills to pay). Until last year, the only options for desktop "Retina-class" displays were the sad collection of LG Ultrafines — usually described as "nice panel; shame about everything else, including the price" — and the $5k Pro Display XDR. It's nice that Apple is back in the game, but the Studio Display is hardly feature-rich for its price, and the number of people with an extra $1.5-2k on hand after spending a lot less than that on a Mac mini/MacBook Air or a lot more on a MacBook Pro/Mac Studio can't be huge. It certainly wouldn't be at the top of my list if I was looking to buy today, even with the extra pixels over the vast majority of the competition, and it seems a bit silly to suddenly decide that 4k isn't workable (either at the default "looks like" 1920x1080, or the scaled "looks like" 2560x1440 that I've used on my 4k screen for over 4 years) when the available 5k options were so mediocre for many years. Apple's expensive option doesn't automatically become the best for everyone just because of the extra pixels.

This specific BenQ display is a bit odd, as Thunderbolt adds significantly to the price, but doesn't bring a ton of benefits these days. It probably makes the most sense for a MacBook Air owner looking for a 1-cable solution that also charges the laptop, since the 65W limitation is a bit low for the MacBook Pro (though it will certainly work, depending on how hard you're working the CPU/GPU). For anyone with other easy connection options - USB-C, DisplayPort, or HDMI - you can get similar features for a lot less, or more features for a similar price. The review would have been more useful by concentrating on that issue and comparing it to similar displays without Thunderbolt than spending so much time on it not being "Retina".

Mike Wuerthele said:

rnb2 said:

According to a Reddit thread, the SMB issue seems to be connected to custom icons on the network shares. Once I mapped my shares directly to folders instead of the drives (which have hard-coded custom icons via SoftRAID), hunted down any custom icons within the shared folders, and removed any custom icons from the backup jobs that copy from my MacBook Pro to the shares on my Mac mini server, SMB started working reliably for me again. I only encountered the issue after upgrading to 13.2. 

That may be one aspect of it, but the small businesses we spoke do don't have any custom icons at all, for anything.

Yeah, it sounds like some are experiencing something different that started with 13.0. Maybe only the 13.2 issue is connected to custom icons?