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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.ziptoApple@lemmy.worldWould you say Apple is in a slump?
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    3 months ago

    Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.

    IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).

    The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.

    The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.

    Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.

    Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.

    I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.

    Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.

    You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.




  • There is nothing inherently wrong about food pictures but I feel like it is a symptom of the focus shifting from trying to take quality pictures to showing off a nice dinner/vacation/car you had to your “friend” group.

    There is a thin line between look at this cool thing and look at how much better my life is then yours. I kinda have a distaste for the second one. (That said I take food pictures all the time but mostly of stuff I made myself, though I don’t post it to social media)


  • I remember Instagram when it was new. It was an actually photography app. Of course it had the edgy filters (which ~15 year old me made full use of). But the pictures people posted actually had a bit of effort behind them.

    Then it started becoming another mainstream social media where most pictures were about people’s lunches. I didn’t stick around for it’s final phase of business ads and thots.

    I think it lost the cool factor by the time FB bought it but maybe it would’ve taken longer to become as ad-infested as it is today


  • Features out the wazoo and an insane amount of customisation available to the user via Goodlock, but also some quirks.

    Here are my highlights: limit charge to 80% to conserve battery health; custom shortcuts when dragging from the side of the phone based on the angle of your swipe; not sure what app just woke the screen or sent a notification that disappeared? You can get a log of all of these activities; add a dedicated 2x crop button to the camera app; send audio from different apps to different sound outputs simultaneously; a whole stack of s-pen features ranging from useful to very niche (quick lock screen note, screen crop, use pen as camera shutter); and many more.

    There are some annoyances also: you can’t have an infinite scrolling app drawer, it has to have pages; using icon packs from the play store is annoying and the Samsung theme store sucks.

    Overall I like one UI 6 but there is always some room for improvement.





  • Let’s be honest here, 4k never made any sense on a smartphone. It was just a way to sell it to people who had no idea. It actually might be straight up worse than 1440p because it draws more power.

    With that, I always wanted one of those 5 phones but they are just a bit too pricy for what you get. Getting an s23 ultra was cheaper than the 5iv at the time (that’s for 256 GB on the Samsung and 128 on the Sony btw).

    The 5iv also had the snapdragon 8gen1 which was plagued by overheating and bad battery life according to reviews. I like the Sony phones in theory but they have to take a more critical look at their position in the market.

    It doesn’t help that their hardware releases take so long all the other companies move on to next year’s SOCs by the time they release. Not sure when the 1vi will release so at the moment the 1v is still on the 8gen2 for example. You might say it doesn’t really matter at this point, these are all great chips, but when you’re paying a premium over other flagships it feels bad to get last years outdated hardware.


  • It’s really annoying. I was looking for a smart wearable with blood oxygen monitoring, and couldn’t find much useful info on reddit/Google so I asked bing chat. Instead of giving a useful answer it was parroting some bullshit about these gadgets not being medical devices. I know… if I wanted a medical device that’s what I would look for.

    It’s always been the case where you can research information that is plain wrong or even intentionally misleading. You have to take a measured perception and decide whether the source is to be believed.

    And I shouldn’t have to justify every query I make to the bloody computer. It’s not the AI’s job to give me a lecture about skewed ethics every time I have a technical question. We’re heading to a world where children will be raised by these answers and I think the constant caveats and safety nets do much more harm than help. Learning to be critical is much more important than learning to follow the forced ethics set by some corporate guidelines.

    (got the Ticwatch 5 pro btw - no thanks to bing. It works amazing, wakes me up with sleep as android when I forget to put on my cpap mask)


  • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.ziptoGaming@beehaw.orgWhat to play at after work?
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    6 months ago

    Not exactly sure what the server limits are but something like Valheim could work for a large group of people. It’s an open world sandbox so people can divide up and do whatever they want to on the same server (exploring, fighting, mining, building, farming, etc.) Not sure how far you can get in the game in 3 hours though…

    Alternatively you could play some sort of team based shooter but there might be a stark skill difference in a competitive setting.

    Apparently the star wars bf classic collection has a 32 player co-op mode vs ai which sounds amazing to me, but I’ve never tried it before