I HATE APPLE

To do a

Does she have an Apple ID? Has she logged into it in the Settings?

"Apple ID" is now "Apple Account", that much i know.

and yes, signed in. it's giving me the option to sign out, that's how i know.

i'll try signing out and in again, see if that helps. the pain though is that touch id is set up so i need their finger every once in a while.

Add your finger. I think you can have up to 10.

(Not a joke about how many fingers a person can have, you can have multiple fingerprints for Touch ID)

out and in again and the app store is happier. (although lol at getting 2 factor auth on a landline. dad reads out 4 numbers, there are 6 spaces...)

that said, we've just tried 3 random world clocks and they are all shit in their own way. '24 hour clock' setting just makes the font bigger. digits are truncated in widget view. full screen video ads, for google chrome randomly. 'in app purchases' that actually means "3 day trial, then a recurring payment". the one we ended up with does exactly what we want in lock-screen view ("live mode?" did it call it) and at least isn't in the way all the rest of the time.

(my finger is going to be 100 miles away 51 weeks of any given year)

thanks for your help

The built in clock app has widgets that allow you to show the time in any city. Did you try that?

i don't even SEE that. i've searched for ipad clock and ipad world clock on the internet and it's right there, but i've never seen it.

https://smartipadguide.com/world-clock-on-ipad

this was a complete surprise. i keep looking at the dates on these pages figuring they are for an old version of ios, but no.

I need resolution here - so the iPad does have the default Clock app? and you do see the World Clock within the default Clock app or no?

i cannot see a default clock app, as odd as that sounds. there's a date and time top left but it's not a clock app. there's a date on the calendar app, but it's not a clock.

I've added a thing called World Clock from the app store that runs unskippable adverts for Google Chrome every time you look too hard at it, but it's behaving itself on the widget screen so we can live with it.

How odd that you can't just see (or invoke) the default clock widget.

I don't have an iPad to hand, but in iOS on a phone this is just a long press on a blank bit of a home screen, Edit, Add Widget, then choose from about 10 different Clock options (two of which are four-clock grids which you can assign to different cities; if you only want two clocks, add the single clock of your choice twice and assign to time zones accordingly).

For example, Darwin and Copenhagen in "City II" style...

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54230990384_de3d36407d_c.jpg

(I'd need to ask the 18yo about iPadOS and she takes about a day to respond to a text so...)

Yeah this is all built in. It’s technically possible to install the first party “clock” app which might cause all those widgets to disappear. Any chance you did that?

*uninstall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf1bvxxdPhw

if that's not where you want it, this might be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIAH75zKLjA

(starts at 5'50")

I just dragged from the left side of my iPad home screen and there is the four-clock time comparison widget there by default, I didn’t set it up on this device.

well i figured the inexplicably missing clock app would be available via the app store if i was careful what i looked for, and there it was, and is now safely reinstalled.

i couldn't edit the location for one of the copies in the widget view, right panel thing, it just ignored me pressing on it desire being another copy of the one i could change. I'm obviously using it wrong (c) Steve Jobs

desire / despite

Vision Pro reportedly out of production
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/31/vision-pro-may-be-out-of-production/

In the music app when I search I hate how it defaults to “Apple Music” instead of my library

they do this sort of thing constantly. sermonize about being user-centric and then self-preferencing or directing to a paid partner even when it’s clearly not what the user wanted.

cf search the app store for, say, “CNN” and you get a paid rival’s listing above them.

My shit ain’t on Apple Music

I can't stop thinking about the new pro headphones making a marketing point out of acting like a low-level hearing aid.

1. Hearing aids are SO EXPENSIVE, like $4000 or 10,000 and don't necessarily last all that long.

2. Insurance doesn't cover or covers them poorly, so people who can't pay are already going without a whole sense (and there's research aiui linking hearing loss to dementia, and it definitely makes a person less able to participate in society and be close to other people)

3. Apple "steps up" and makes a product that performs for 1/10th of the price -- hallelujah! Great, an enormously wealth tech company solving a health problem for profit, what could possibly go wrong....

4. The hearing function only works for a certain range of mild to moderate hearing loss, it's not a medical-grade solution for all situations. Now it splits the hearing-disabled into camps who can benefit from this accessible device and those who can't...the more "profoundly" deaf, I guess? But now there's even less urgency to find a health care option that works for them because a big chunk of the people who need hearing assistance are paying Apple for their solution.

Blah.

I've been boring people at parties for at least 3ish years about realizing one day that my bluetooth ear pods were the same technology (or at least related) as my elderly neighbor's hearing aid, but I got mine for $200 on the internet in like a week and his were $$$ and he had to wait months for an appointment to help him adjust them. Mostly I was struck by the stigma of using an assistive device. My ear buds came in wild colors for the discerning consumer and his were intended to be "invisible" so no one would know he was using them...how much of the cost was a function of making them smaller, less visible, less stigmatizing?

And now here we are, they are the same solution...kind of. Does this remove the stigma of being disabled? Does it just mask it?

I think you're on to it with the removal of stigma, or the normalization of assistive devices, being a boon

I think it's maybe a gateway to admitting you have hearing loss? There are a number of people who might not want to admit their hearing is going, but would do a little at home test and leave their earbuds in if it's normalized. I think half the problem with many assistive things, for seeing, hearing, walking, aren't used because people are in denial. I have the right AirPods Pro to do the test and will when I get a quiet moment and my sinuses aren't acting up and fouling the test a little. The other interesting bit to me is that you can use them as earplugs, but they do more screening than muffling. You still feel it in your body, but the volume's leveled out.

I just keep thinking about this former coworker who was overall a friendly, competent guy but had so many little quirks that irritated the shit out of me. One was that he needed reading glasses, but would always misplace them or not have them on him when he was at your desk so he'd be complaining about it or whatever. I suspect he really just needed to wear glasses but he was so wrapped up in projecting his competence that he didn't realize he'd seem much more so if he just used the tools at his disposal. I could see him making his lack of hearing others their problem in the future.

tl;dr I view them like reading glasses, you can get them many places and they work for people but it's not a universal solution nor does it work if you leave them elsewhere

good post in orbit.

I think apple deserves a lot of credit (or at least a lot more than any other big business I can think of) for making their products more accessible, but the unanticipated consequences of expensive general purpose devices being assistive tech for very common disabilities are going to be wide.

fwiw, I enjoyed using my iPods in noise reducing mode when my dreadful children made me take them to a monster truck rally at Barclays Center.

i dont know if its any more complicated than apple thinking it’ll help them sell more air pods. i imagine it was very easy for them to do, the airpods have like seven microphones built in or something like that. see also the apple watch and the lawsuit with massimo over pulseox… and of course the holy grail, glucose monitoring

technically easy to do but not obviously a good idea from a liability vs financial reward pov. see also AirTags.

well nobody ever listens to the lawyers (i speak from experience)

you should come and work at amazon we can't do anything

my dreadful children made me take them to a monster truck rally at Barclays Center

lololol

caek, you are truly an american now

hell yeah monster trucks

caek, I should try this one failure condition at work again. an automatic upgrade on a a managed service didn’t work correctly and the aws solution appeared to be “spin up more ec2s and see if it resolves”

I figured out what it was choking on, but it added 17 over my lunch hour when I walked away and decided to see if it’d resolve itself

amazing fall through condition

https://i.postimg.cc/W4Zdvk69/IMG-3929.png

got this ig ad literally an hour after reading about caeks monster truck lark

ok well not an hour as evidenced by the timestamp… but still

it's the loudest thing I've ever heard. toddlers crying their eyes out. it was great.

That's the kind of noise you feel in your chest more than hear. Literally in your bones. I went to similar as a kid...once. The exhaust in the indoor stadium made the air so foul we all got sick and had to leave early lol. HVAC systems were not ready in the 80s.

the one I went to as a kid featured the American Gladiators monster truck, and one of the American Gladiators guys was there to sign autographs. it turned out that he was the nephew of a neighbor from up the street and was very friendly when we mentioned that

I don't remember which dude it was, but it's made me wary of watching the recent documentary about the show because it'd be extra depressing if his experience was especially dire

i haven't taken many pictures in the past couple months, so i'm just noticing this now: they took away double tap to zoom in ios 18 photos! now it just fits to screen in whichever dimension it wasn't already, which who cares. if i'm thumbing through a hundred photos and want to check out some little detail, i'd prefer not to have to pinch to zoom. it also defaults to a smaller, white-bordered view with icons. when i look at photos on a phone screen i want them to take as much space as possible and editing and looking at metadata aren't usually important. maybe there's some grand theory to the changes, but mostly they messed with how i like to interact with the app without any benefits!

Current iOS (and iPadOS?) performs AI image analysis of landmarks in your photos, without your consent, unless you switch off something like "Enhanced Location" at the bottom of the Prefs list for Photos.

Yep, iPadOS too, and it's Prefs > Apps > Photos > Enhanced Visual Search at the bottom of the list. Not that they're tucking it away out of sight.

Do you think there’s something nefarious about that?

Apple finally has disabled the AI news summaries that resulted in totally wrong headlines appearing on lockscreens next to the logos of eg NYT and BBC

Siri stopped responding to “Hey Siri” after I declined Apple Intelligence, I had to root around in there to turn it back on.

If I make it to 65 I’m going back to binge drinking, smoking and I’m going to flatly refuse to use any post-smartphone technology.

Did you try saying “hey dumbass”

Do you think there’s something nefarious about that?