Posts by Dave 126 10664 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Almost every charging surface is Qi compatible these days. There are still three types of phone cable commonly in use.
USB C is more common in pubs and homes than Qi these days... Even Apple-using households might have a newer USB C MacBook, Nintendo Switch, or some other gadget which uses USB C for charging.
- wireless charging saves wear and year on the USB socket
- should the USB socket become unusable, wireless charging allows the phone to remain usable
- wireless charging allows a damp phone to be charged without delay (phones will often announce the USB socket as being moist if just a drop of rain has fallen in it. Why would the USB socket be facing upwards? Because the headphones plug in next to the USB socket and the cable can only exit my pocket at the top)
I rarely use wireless charging, but it's nice to know it's there.
I was just thinking about the processes involved in managing an Air BnB property - some owners clean houses and wash bedsheets themselves, but many will employ a cleaner and take bed linen to a nearby commercial laundry. Some of these laundries will have their own pick up drop off service. There are processes here where a bit of thought has the potential to make things easier.
Some customers might desire a quirky and interesting property for a weekend, others might just want a simple place to stay where they can easily work out how to operate the shower, the TV and the coffee machine.
It used to be good form if, when staying in a holiday rental, one uses the local shops, cafes and pubs. These days some villagers would rather out of towners stay in their rental property and just have food delivered to their door... does AirBnB act as a portal to local services? Can the AirBnB interface act as a repository of local information left by the property renter?
Dunno. Just musing.
That's from Phillips, I can't remember the what they call it... ' AmbiLight' possibly. They also make a stand alone LED lighting strip, but it's pricey for what it is. It's not in TVs badges as Phillips sold in the USA - the name is licenced out there.
There are also instructions on Instructables for making a DIY version, probably involving an Arduino. The tricky bit is deciding the HDMI signal (through IIRC the SD part of the signal shouldn't be encrypted).
Ultimately televisions will end up with no bezel at all - they get smaller every year. That really only leaves the stand (if the set is not wall mounted) and the sound bar / speakers.
As for what the wall behind the television looks like, that depends upon the owner. To illuminate the room at low level, a lamp behind the TV is sensible as it can't cast reflections upon the screen. Then there's the people who like Phillips' TVs which illuminate the wall behind the TV in sympathy with the displayed video.
For watching TV during the day, buy Samsung. For watching movies in dark rooms, buy an OLED from LG or Sony. (Samsung's invention of the term QLED would appear designed purely to confuse consumers - it's just an LED set with a quantum dot filter).
For many home owners, their chief question is 'how can I make the television disappear when we're not watching it?' - a large black rectangle doesn't sit well with many decor schemes. Jony Ive used the term 'black mirror' when designing the 20th Anniversary Mac and was considering ways of hiding the screen when the computer was not in use.
I guess people already have a lot of laptop-compatible headsets / earbuds with mics / true wireless earbuds kicking around, either bundled with, or bought for, their mobile phones. Either 3.5mm or Bluetooth.
Infact, 'quick device switching' is a feature on Bluetooth headsets / headphones used to tempt consumers to the more expensive model.
My friend is generally happy with his VM fibre connection on the outskirts of a big city... though there used to be an issue after heavy rain which the VM customer services said was due to a damp junction box.
My PlusNet isn't great, but the last issue was with the external telephone line, which they had BT OpenReach fix within a couple of days. The thick stone walls in the house don't help WiFi, but I suspect the PlusNet modem isn't great... I should be more scientific and methodically reduce the variables, but really I should look at when fibre is coming to the street.
Okay, I can see why you're confused.
Some of the quantum computer research is in 'qyantum annealing' which is showing promise for finding optimised solutions. The DWave computer is of this type. Not useful for cracking public private key encryption, as you point out.
However, thetes another area of quantum computer research which does have the potential to run Shaw's algorithm and quickly factorise large numbers. Currently the number of qubits that can be entangled isn't large enough to be break public private key encryption, but researchers make progress every year.
No computer can break a properly used One Time Pad, but that involves the communicating parties having once been in the same room. Not practical for the purposes for which we currently use public private key encryption.
Quantum encryption is a method of ensuring that only the person you wish to communicate with has the encryption keys - evesdroooers can't escape detection.
> I find it odd that people can be excited for a company selling stuff at an higher margin, and therefore ripping its customers off more than its competitors do.
The full phrase is "Not fit for the purpose *for which it is sold*". I can legally sell you a chocolate fireguard, as long I clearly point out that it is for novelty or decorative purposes only. Heck, a few times I've searched Amazon for a vacuum cleaner and it has returned results for a child's toy vacuum cleaner. It is fit for the purpose of being a toy, but it doesn't clean carpets.
I've got at least half a dozen pairs of wired earphones and headphones that are awaiting my tender ministrations with a soldering iron - cable failure, every pair. I'm not in a position to analyse the environmental impact of headphone cable failure (especially with regard to wireless headphones) other to note that it is not zero.
(I should really start looking at 'chi-fi' IEMs with replaceable cables, rather than grabbing a pair of whatever is cheap from the supermarket... but then I'd only lose them).
I'm not sure you're correct about the lack of economic return of dismantling Airpods for recycling. The chances are improved by being a popular model (similar dynamics apply to mass dismantling as they do the mass production)
> The ORIGINAL iPhone used a Samsung ARM and bought in GUI.
No. Elements of the UI (some multitouch gestures) came from the capacitive keyboard company Fingerworks, but most of the UI came from a two man team inside Apple who had been exploring touchscreen interfaces for years - and largely overlooked until the iPhone project.
Yeah, Samsung galaxy might have fabbed the chip, but someone had to. And ARM... remember that Apple had a big role in their history.
Cuts down down shipping weight (saving money and emissions), and the lower packaging volume allows shops to carry more stock / more choice of phone. Silly Samsung (for not supervising the
children in their their marketing department)
And really, who doesn't already have loads of phone wall chargers, fag socket chargers, computers, TVs, etc they can plug a cable into? For those few people who don't, wall chargers are available from every supermarket or online.
The Lightening > 3.5 mm dongle is included with iPhones, and when tested is found to have very good sound quality compared to many more expensive third party DACs. Replacements aren't very pricey.
If you want the best sound quality on earphones from a phone, you either buy an LG phone with an ESS Sabre DAC - or else you pick a USB C / Lightening DAC of your choosing.
Samsung's fast charging system predates USB C, and therefore USB C Power Delivery. It ups the voltage, not the current, upon handshaking with the phone. At the time, other phone vendors choose another proprietary fast charger method that upped the current. I don't see what this has to do with Apple.
'Innovation' does not mean putting in every latest hardware feature.
2G was sufficient for the purposes of the original IPhone - rather than visit a website of Mbs to find, say, train times, an app would fetch just the Kbs required. 3G would have consumed too much power in a device made using off-the-shelf chips.
That's a time honoured path. Sony's design and engineering teams express it as MK I - make it any way you can. MK II, refine it. The original IPhone, like the original Walkman and iPod, wasn't made in huge numbers.
I see the advantages of a streamlined product range (in terms of design, manufacture, warehousing and logistics), but I don't associate it specifically with fashion goods. Indeed, it's often fashion brands (clothes, bags, watches) that tend to have sprawling, ever-changing product ranges.
For high fidelity music, you'd want to choose a phone with a good DAC and amp... LG are famous for including such goodies, but oddly not the LG Velvet
The DAC and amp in the Apple Lightening > 3.5mm adaptor is said to be very good (and it's cheap) but others are available ranging from cheap to audiophile. So you don't have to take a hit on audio quality if you don't want to.
Yeah, using a dongle can be inconvenient if you want to charge the phone at the same time as using wired headphones and you don't have a wireless charger to hand.
I use a micro SD card in my Galaxy phone, but one can only really use it for storing music and app data (put it in phone and leave it there) or for juggling data between phone and cameras (often swap it in and out) - but not both. Attempting to do so confuses apps and music music data bases. For importing data from a camera, a USB C > SD card reader is a safer option, and full size SD cards are harder to fumble and lose. Carry such a dongle in a laptop or camera back is no hardship.
I can see someone using using a phone as a data repository - because though we carry them with us everywhere, we do tend to be mindful of them so are less likely to misplace them than we would an SD card.... but if redundancy is key then copying to two SD cards and keeping one in wallet and one in suitcase is also an option.
I'm not saying your way of doing things is the wrong way, just that there are other ways of achieving the same end results - with perhaps different pros and cons.
I'm on record here for being excited about LiDAR / Laser Time of Flight / Whatever the Hell that Qualcomm Reference Design Was A Few Years Back ( real time 3D mapping of a pianist's fingers). But I'm a weirdo. The idea of using a phone as an accurate 3D scanner so that I can svan a room and then have timber cut by my local timber merchant's CNC router is exciting - more so than any plastic 3D printer.
Talking about a 5nm chip (TSMC) highlights the issues that Intel have had with their sub 10nm processes. Apple would be missing a trick if they didn't use this announcement to build the groundwork for their upcoming 5nm ARM Macs (as indeed the snappy performance of current iPhones and iPads helps the public perception of the upcoming Macs). Apple rarely miss tricks - they pay very competent people good money for this reason.
> One restriction I find particularly annoying is the block on taking a screen shot from an iTunes movie.
Not just an iOS thing.
I surprised the other day when a website in Chrome Android prevented me from taking a screenshot. Didn't know it could. Searched for solutions, but they involved rooting or some other hassle.
@Screwed
Those aren't insane ideas. I had similar ideas when the iPad was first released - 'why the hell didn't they make it work as a secondary monitor / graphics tablet for a Mac straight out of the box?!'*
But if I'm understanding you correctly, your talking more about a dumb big screen than an iPad. Or rather, an iPad that acts as a big dumb screen for an iPhone. With seen similar devices in android world - tablets into which a phone docks. The trouble with that approach is trust - the user might end up with a useless big dumb screen if no future phones adopt the system. Apple might end up having to support the system or else face backlash for leaving users with an obsekeye big dumb screen.
If you're talking about using an iPad to do your phone things - that's largely with cloud accounts and software these days - emails started in the phone can be completed on the iPad or Mac.
Two fully capable and discrete devices keeps things simple for the user and more profitable for Apple.
* I guess the answer is messaging: if Apple had pitched the original iPad at a small niche of graphic artists, it might have caused mainstream punters to think it was *only* for graphic artists. As it happened, software allowed some useful features - Adobe made an app that mirrored a Mac's Photoshop tool palettes to an iPad.
RAW files are a different beast in this age of multi-sensor computational photography. Of course RAW files always varied by vendor (eg, Nikon, Canon, etc) and would require different plugins on your desktop software. Apple's new RAW files are in the same vein, including raw camera sensor data as well as depth data from the LiDAR chip and processing results from its SoC.
There are different forms of restriction. An Apple user might feel restricted at not being able to run software not obtained through the App Store. This was especially evident before Apple allowed 3rd party keyboards on the App Store. An Android user - as I am - might feel restricted because some of the better third-party productivity software is only made for iOS and not Android. Similarly, some third party hardware is only made to work with iPhones / iPads. After several years, I might feel that my supply of software updates has been restricted as well.
I think its important to look at restriction as a principal, vs how it impacts a workflow in practice. I suspect a great many people's actual workflows aren't impeeded by Apple's artificial restrictions.
Apple aren't 'switching' immediately - there's a roadmap of two years in which both ARM and Intel Macs will be sold - starting with an ARM Macbook Pro in 2021.
The choice of using a MacBook Pro to demonstrate MacOS on ARM could be to distinguish Apple's efforts from the bad smell of Microsoft's Windows on Arm efforts ( which were seen as being slow, with poor compatibility and poor software availability, and confusing). It's also possible that they will release a Mac Mini type ARM machine as a lower cost option for MacOS software developers to test on (just as lots of cross-platform developers once used iPod Touchs as a low cost way to test iOS software).
Yeah, the AirTags were notable by their absence, as were the Apple over-ear headphones.
I've recently taken a punt on a TrackR Pixel tag to attach to my keys and I've found it to be handy on a few occasions. The core functionality - use my phone to page my keys if they're within range - appears to work well. The extended function - cloud based, using other TrackR users to locate my keys should they walk past them - depends upon there being enough other TrackR users, and I suspect it is their small market share compared to Tile that led to me picking up a packet of three for five quid in TK Maxx. Definitely worth a punt at that price!
Of course Apple have enough critical density of iPhone users that they could make a distributed find-my-keys service work.
Also, I tend to keep my (Android) location services turned down in order to preserve ailing battery life - though I should look at that again because the Serco Track and Trace app won't work without it (which is weird, because its built upon a Google / Apple Bluetooth token system that shouldn't require location info to work)
Maybe, but the iPhone 6 only had 1GB of RAM whereas as the 6S had 2. The 6S, whilst looking near identical to its predecessor, had a significantly faster processor. I think these factors might explain why support for the 6 has been dropped.
It's hard to imagine the iPhone 12 S boasting such a leap in specs over the 12 that it will have a significantly longer period of support.
> You'd think Apple could mix it up every now and then.
What would you like to see? :)
Samsung and others are breaking the mold with foldable phones, but all reviews suggest they're not ready for mass adoption yet. Novelty for novelty's sake.
LG have a twin-screened twisty phone - but the market has punished their weirdness ( such as modular phones) ever since their G2.
Motorola's Mod system looked genuinely useful, but they didn't have the market share to sell it on their own - Apple do, and indeed have implemented a similar concept on iPads. However, the main use of the Moto Mod system - a battery 'back pack' - Apple have achieved with the Lightening connector. Indeed, there's a healthy 3rd party market in Lightening accessories for iPhones from high end microphones to Leica laser scanners.
Apple's 14% market share doesn't bother them because they have a majority share of the profits in the sector.
On the sensor thing: nobody will use the sensor fully untill a third party dev creates a killer app for it. No dev will do so untill the hardware is available. Because iPhone buyers are less price sensitive, they are more tolerant of buying hardware they might not use - but should a useful application be developed they know they can use it. Additionally, by taking a punt on a specific sensor, the cost per unit comes down.
Many people are still working in logistics, food production, healthcare etc.
Others have been furloughed, and have more time for hobbies than might include taking long walks and snapping pictures.
But for sure - there's been no 'must have' new feature for a few years now; improvements are largely incremental. Still, for those who are in the market for a new iPhone at least these new models are placing an emphasis on durability (improved water and dust resistance on the iPhone Mini, new ceramic-infused glass screens) so should see a few good years service.
Glass is stiffer than polycarbonate. Male a plastic back too thin and it will deform, risking strain on internal components.
Not that it matters in a good case, though. And I suspect that it is the more budget conscious buyers who will want to protect their investment.
Indeed, the flat screen of the S20 FE allows glass screen protectors to be used more easily than on the curved edged screens that Galaxy S Phones usually sport.
I think the cost cutting design choices that Samsung have made here are the correct ones.
Li-ion batteries are most damaged by heat when they are more fully charged. Fast chargers start charging an empty battery quickly but then slowcas the battery fills up.
The charging controller does things intelligently, and the temperature of the battery is one of the factors that it measures.
You'll likely find your phone getting far hotter in a car in a summer's day, especially if it's doing duty as a sat nav.
Ideally you would only charge up to around 85% at night, in order to maximise battery life span. (Some Sony phones would allow you to set a value at which charging stops). Additionally, its best to keep the phone charged above 40%, for the same reason.
A fast charger can make battery-preserving top-ups more convenient for the user.
I used £25 Alactel Pixi 3 for a couple of months... fine for calls, maps, WhatsApp, podcasts. Merely usable for web browsing. Not really viable for watching video or for taking photographs. It was nice, though, not to be worried every time I dropped it.
Then I used a £45 Huawei Something-or-other, sold at half its normal £90. Very usable all round, though all attempts to get a decent launcher to stick would fail. Much nicer than the Alactel though. Again, no worries about breaking it.
Upgraded to a second hand Google Nexus 5 and cheaply and easily replaced its (never really big enough) battery. Superb in all departments except battery size and camera. Everything was easier to do than the two really cheap phones.
Sod it. Bought a Galaxy S8 for around £500, ten months after its first release (a time period at which Samsung flagships are usually reduced by a third) and glad I did. No real compromises in the hardware side, no software issues that took more than ten minutes to sort out. Consistently not irritating to use for the last thirty months, and likely to remain fit for purpose for many months to come. Fitted big case and glass screen protector to add to its robustness.
All three phones have proven to be good value, but in different ways.
Some people are disabling Simultaneous Multi-Threading because of security concerns. Benchmarking suggests disabling SMT typically decreases the performance of a CPU by 25-35% - though they didn't test an 8 core Intel CPU because it was unlikely to impact gaming performance (and that the impact on productivity workloads would be expected to be in line with those chips they did test)
https://www.techspot.com/article/1850-how-screwed-is-intel-no-hyper-threading/
There may well be situations that dangerous for humans but fairly safe for dogs, due to their speed and low silhouette. There may also be situations that become safer for a dog if it is not tied to the immediate vicinity of a slow-moving human. Then of course there are situations that aren't immediately risky, and this system allows a dog to cover a larger area in less time - again, by not being tied to a slow biped.
Dogs and other animals, such as horses and pigeons, have been used in wars, and their handlers don't treat their lives lightly.
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