Get it replaced again now, they’ll cover another replacement but not for long.

I really like my FineWoven case, I was hoping they would revise them rather than do away with it entirely. I had to get a replacement for my first one because the sides were peeling (which Apple replaced for free) but the replacement has been fine.

However they don’t age well, especially the ones in any colour other than black, so I can see why they did it. Still, I prefer it over any other case I’ve owned. Feels nice in hand, thinner than any previous Apple case while still providing great drop protection, smooth but not slippy, it had a lot going for it.

If it’s the size of an Apple TV it will definitely only have a few ports. I can’t speak for anyone else but I’m personally fine with that, 1-2 USB-C, 1 USB-A, Ethernet, Power and HDMI would be fine IMO.

I think this was more of an issue when USB-C docks were less compatible and more expensive. Now you can get all the ports you need for $20. Just doesn’t seem like much of a big deal to me, when 90% of them are going to be connected to a monitor, wireless KB & mouse and WiFi and the occasional USB key or printer.

I can only assume they see it as a double edged sword. Rights-holders (read: publishers, labels & studios) would have the power to sue here, not creators (read: artists, musicians and filmmakers).

These rights-holders also want to use AI so they don’t have to pay or deal with creators, so while they don’t love that other companies are making money off their content, they’re more just mad that someone else did it first before they could exploit their own content in the same way.

Sue and set precedent, and they might accidentally make it impossible for them to turn around and do the exact same thing once they have the technical know-how.

Entirely speculation, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

EDIT - As another commenter mentioned, I broke my own rule and commented without reading and this was discovery as part of an ongoing lawsuit. I did say it was entirely speculation though, and I still think this is why you don’t see so many AI related lawsuits in all the areas there is just tons of content generation. I also still think this is a “mad they couldn’t get there first” situation.

Sonos. Recent app troubles aside (it’s really not that bad, just kind of clunky for certain tasks), the longevity alone make them so worth it. Despite being essentially computers/smart home devices, they support 10+ year old devices in their latest app, older devices in their S1 Controller app, and the sound quality & setup ease is amazing.

Plus, they have pretty good Black Friday sales and make it easy to build piece by piece if pricing is too high. You can also used replaced pieces to build a sound system in another room.

Over ~3 years I started with a Beam, then bought a Sub and two Play:1s as rears. Bought an Arc, moved the Beam to the bedroom. Just recently I bought 2 Arc 300s as rears/upward firing Atmos speakers, and moved the Play:1s to the bedroom. Resale value stays high so if you have no use for a piece, you can sell it and get 50%-75% of what you paid out of it easily.

There are cheaper devices with better sound quality out there, but nobody else can compete on the whole package with Sonos.

I said the complaints you listed had fixed in the new one. I didn’t say it was suddenly as good as a dedicated calculator app.

Doesn’t have much appeal if you pay for YT Premium. I also used to sideload Cercube so I get the appeal, but yeah. I would count that in the category of “++” apps that pretty much exist to circumvent ads or avoid paying for subscriptions.

I don’t have anything against them but it doesn’t help the image of open access being only useful for piracy or avoiding paying for stuff.

That’s true I suppose, but there pretty much isn’t anything I’m like “damn I wish that was on iOS but Apple’s rules won’t allow it” anymore.

I can think of a few examples that I have on my Android phone. TouchHLE, Mario 64 decompiled and Yuzu come to mind. But those are just fun to play with and not exactly things I care deeply about.

Just to be clear, this didn’t used to be the case. I used to jailbreak & sideload for years. But I just… don’t need to anymore. It’s all there. I figured it was worth asking if there was something I didn’t know I was missing.

Not only that, there is an upside too. The fact that IPAs can’t be easily installed on iOS drastically reduces piracy, and companies are more apt to release non-ad-supported, premium titles on the platform.

I have RE Village, RE4 and Death Stranding on my phone right now. I don’t see those coming to Android any time soon. So I would say it’s a double-edged sword.

I think there was an internal rule change a while back because there are a few others as well. Ruddarr is shaping up every well, and LunaSea has been there for years now.

All of that has been fixed in the iOS 18 calculator, they just didn’t talk about it in the keynote. It has history, multi-line, and your can place the cursor anywhere and edit expressions.

Give it a shot, you might be pleasantly surprised.

What IPAs do you want to install? This is a real question, I know there are a handful of apps that you need to install from outside the App Store but over the years as restrictions have loosened that has dropped to almost nothing for me.

I used to install nzbUnity which has been fully replaced by LunaSea at this point, and with the rule change allowing emulators they really took a ton of wind out of the sails of the 3rd party App Store push.

Apple Intelligence. The image generation and bullshit text generator aspects I’m over (although Genmoji looks cute), but the ability to process complex natural language requests using an on-device LLM so I can perform tasks via voice without laborious specificity?

I’m in. If they nail this it will be the biggest leap forward in human-computer interaction since the GUI.

The other features I already like in DB1 aren’t on this feature slide either:

• The new Calendar app with a proper multi-day view is great and has already replaced the “list” view I’ve used since 2009. I like “list” but it makes every day look busy visually, and makes it difficult to see gaps in your day.
• New Calculator app finally has most features people would like. Multi line, easy editing of mistakes, a history, etc. They only talked about the handwritten stuff for iPad in the keynote but the whole thing is vastly improved across all iOS platforms.
• This one is on the slide but the new Photos app is great, although some don’t like it I found most features in Photos were buried and people never used the tabs in the app, just scrolling down to see everything actually works quite well. Most users seem to think that the first tab is the only one you need to use and everything else is just settings and whatnot so it’s best to just adapt to that at this point.

But those end up being the same in practice. If you have to put up a disclaimer that the info might be wrong, then who would use it? I can get the wrong answer or unverified heresay anywhere. The whole point of contacting the company is to get the right answer; or at least one the company is forced to stick to.

This isn’t just minor AI growing pains, this is a fundamental problem with the technology that causes it to essentially be useless for the use case of “answering questions”.

They can slap as many disclaimers as they want on this shit; but if it just hallucinates policies and incorrect answers it will just end up being one more thing people hammer 0 to skip past or scroll past to talk to a human or find the right answer.

You don’t need to cut up your credit cards, never go to a bar or never visit a casino to curb your spending, drinking or gambling addictions either.

But is it hard to understand why people choose to? Not really. This is the same thing.

Yep. I used to upgrade my iPhone every year just because smartphones were moving fast in the 2010-2020 era. Now, I’m on a three year cycle and barely even notice.

I’ve resold every iPhone I’ve ever owned for 50% of the value or more, and I manage a fleet of iPhones for my job and we still have 5Ses in the wild for people. Apple still provides critical security updates for those devices and we’re at 11 years for those devices. Most people have 7 year old iPhone X era devices and I get almost no complaints or dead devices.

iPhones have ridiculous longevity and hold resale value better than any other device.

No it doesn’t require it but it can make it easier. Especially for people that don’t have a robust and centralized way of controlling their smart devices, or only have 1-2 of them. I think the appeal is still obvious.

The switch part will still work. How are you not getting this?

The appeal is remote and centralized management, easier programming and more features. If that’s not worth it to you to replace your thermostat every 16 years, then nobody is forcing you to get one.

But being able to change the temp from my phone from anywhere is worth it to me, as well as including it with other automations for all my connected devices. The appeal is honestly not hard to see, even if it’s not worth it for you personally.

Matter’s biggest problem is that it launched behind everything else. You’re already starting to see a lot of support for it just because it allows companies to support Apple Home without implementing the whole HomeKit stack & pay the licensing fees to Apple. SwitchBot, Hue and IKEA already have Matter support in their hubs in beta.

But it won’t be relevant to non-Apple users until Thread radios start being more pervasive and the spec reaches v2 and supports more stuff. Then most devices will be Matter, because a company can support all 3 major vendor apps with one standard. Right now it’s:

• Amazon/Google - most low end devices or devices made by those companies
• Apple Home - devices specifically for homekit
• Amazon/Google/Apple Home - devices for all 3
• Amazon/Google/Matter - devices for all 3 that use Matter to support Apple Home

Some will still go those routes, but eventually it will just make sense to support Matter and do away with all of those separate devices and support paths.

I think the analogy is faulty because none of what exists is any sort of standard. It’s just a bunch of proprietary vendor implementations. Matter is the first front end Smart Home standard.

ScummVM is not an emulator. It’s a reimplementation of game engines, but nothing is being emulated. It appeared in the App Store before this rule change.