Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

Has anyone got the new SE? Wondering whether to just replace my current SE with a renewed old model – as the camera is broken and I have an eight-month old daughter to take 12,000 pictures of every day - or go with the 2020 version. If anyone’s got one, what’s the camera like? Sufficiently better than the previous SE? I don’t use my phone for much else.

yeah, the camera is top notch

It's really very good. You'll get a lot of mileage out of Portrait mode with a kid around! If it senses a face, it applies a graduated blur to everything not in the same plane as the face; you can mess with this after the fact too - simulating deeper or shallower depth of field, studio-style lighting, etc. (Or turn it off). The Smart HDR of non-portrait mode is impressive too. These are two things (fake bokeh, HDR) which I'd always thought were cheap and nasty effects on phone-cams, but they've really improved. The back-camera itself is slightly better specced on the new model, and the front-camera is much better than the old SE.

Pretty happy with this. Get a grippy case though. Thing will slide off any surface.

yeah - really a vast difference w the camera

i got a nice 'tweed' case for it - actual cloth which i guess is glued to a form-fitting piece of plastic - and it's v nice so far

Cool. Ordered one. Thanks! Yay consumerism

Good to know about the camera!

Also (and I hope this isn't a dealbreaker, as you've just ordered it), there's no headphone jack, and no Lightning-minijack adaptor in the box. They do bundle in some Apple EarPods with Lightning connection, obv. They're better than I remember, but I did have to buy an adaptor (£9) to carry on using my third-party earbuds. And, for some strange reason, the adaptor only worked one way round initially. Ok now.

Wireless charging is nice too. I have a Qi pad on my bedside table (bought when the kids wrecked the USB port on my tablet), so I just lay it on that.

Ah earplugs thing is no bother, I have tinnitus and never listen to headphones anyway!

can someone recommend a wireless charging pad that takes advantage of the SE's fast charging?

do you want one that charges well at a reasonable price, or do you want to peacock it

I've got one of the Samsung Fast Charge wireless stands that holds the phone at an angle on my work desk so I can poke at the phone while it's charging

I've got the insanely overpriced Nomad charger that looks luxe on my nightstand, but it has two charging spots, a couple discreet extra usb ports on the back, and they have a model with a stand for the watch if you have one

i think fast charging is a wired-only proposition? could be wrong here tho...

yeah, it's not the "fast charge" standard, it's just uh... a charging pad that has higher than the lowest amount of charge for a charging stand

and yes, no charging pad will do actual fast charging

just plug it into a good charger that supports it, or if it supports even faster charging, get a usb-c charger and a lightning-to-usb-c cable

and get a good cable, too. I got a seemingly-OK Amazon lightning-to-C cable and it sucks: lots of "not supported" errors and charging failures.

buy Anker stuff as default imo

fs thought this was a simple question

go to thewirecutter.com and buy whatever charger they say

Fast charging requires a USB-C power adapter that offers at least 18 watts.

got it

thewirecutter lads are a bunch of yankee scoundrels who always cite model names that don't exist in the world's greatest country, blighty britain

yeah, I was going to add a caveat about that but then was like, eh who cares :)

If I'm really bored one day I might see how quickly the Qi pad charges vs regular Lightning cable vs the 12W iPad charger (which, seeing as it's <18W, may do nothing different). Can't really see fast charging being a major need tbh. Esp atm.

I just want fast charging because I often forget to even charge my phone - so when I do remember, it would be nice to give it the max amount of juice possible...

This is where I admit I’ve been abusing the fact usb-c lets devices tell the charger the maximum they’re allowed to charge at

so I‘be been using the ridiculous Macbook Pro charger that’s like 96W or something for everything from my Nintendo Switch to my phone to my laptop

(xp) Fair enough. I usually have a spare battery and cable in any bag I take out of the house, a habit formed in the summer of Pokemon Go. Of course that's now no good if I want to use earbuds too. I can see how zapping a nearly-dead phone up to 50% with a high-wattage charger would be handy if you're about to head out and not be near a power source for hours.

get a Qi charger than does 7.5W (not 10W, Apple products don't support that yet) and make sure it comes with a wall charger better than 5A so it can handle that mode, otherwise it'll be stuck at 5W.
usually the decent chargers will include a USB-C port, even if your Qi pad doesn't use USB-C.

altogether you don't need to spend more than like $30-40 on it

mh you haven't been abusing anything, this is the world we deserve, the world THEY said we couldn't have

do any of you know how to use an iOS device as a webcam for a mac laptop in clamshell mode using an external monitor?

There's an app I tried a while back – iView or similar (sorry, I've totally forgotten but will look it up). It was though, a bit crap - the image is good but there's an unavoidable lag

hmm, yeah I need this to be crisp and fast. I can just use the laptop camera but I'd rather be able to look forward than down.

I have bought a dodgy HDMI capture stick off ebay to see i can usably hook up my DSLR for the same reason, yeah

i'm getting a new Mini and it's occurred to me i could use the old one as a.... NAS? has anyone here ever done this?

stick something under your laptop

well I'd also like to be able to use the external screen because it is so much bigger. I've been just using my iPad for videoconferences where I don't need to be looking forward all the time, and just putting it to the side: good for faculty meetings and the like. but I have a couple things coming up where that won't be as good (I have teleprompter like needs for those). the laptop screen is big enough for that, I'll just put the video window to the side, it's not crucial that I see them particularly well, it is crucial that they see me and that I can see the text I need to read.

not exactly stoked for the madness today tbh. Maybe they'll make macos worse idk

seem like they're getting back on track little by little - hopefully they can continue down a positive path. don't have my hopes up too much tho

have been waiting for the ARMBook for like 5 years at this point, hopefully they make it smol

Maybe they'll bring back Rosetta.

hah, it's already possible to build ARM binaries on x86, see: iOS apps. There's no need for emulation in common cases. Another LLVM payoff I think.

I agree from a developer standpoint and as someone who generally uses new apps, but the #1 complaint for most people is “my program that I bought no longer works and I don’t know why”

kind of a hard balance between “things should just keep working” and “apps need to be updated to be modern in regards to platform/security/etc”

I’m generally on board with the second because oh boy remember what a mess Windows became when everyone wanted to run their apps from eons ago on every new Windows version

it's cool that we can so easily run dos programs on mac os though.

there's some real good Raymond Chen posts about that sort of thing xp

i feel like i only just got used to intel, my last computer still had unrunnable powerpc binaries on it somewhere

this has definitely become less of an issue over time now that virtualization and emulation have gotten better!

and, iirc, now macs have been on intel longer than they were on powerpc

yeah but powerpc didn't feel like going over to the ENEMY it felt like a cool new superboost

ah yes, the weird apple cult thing where processors from motorola/ibm (!) were magic

there were some genuine perks of powerpc at the time but the idea that any component that deviated from standard Windows boxes was part of the “apple magic” was always a weird take imo

A Mac Pro on a many-core POWER9 sure would be something tho huh?