Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

This seems like very good news. Internals of iPhone 14 redesigned to make it much more repairable:

https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown

That is pretty interesting. Also funny they didn't do it with the higher tier 14s, only the low end one.

the theories on ifixit (A team, B team or being risk adverse on newer hardware tweaks) seem good

easier repairability on the mainline phone is good

i think i'll try the new airpods as a requested xmas gift

Got the new Airpod Pros. Transparency mode has an unsettling, uncanny quality to it. I keep taking an earbud out to check what I'm hearing against real life.

Also, the recreated ambient noise seems louder than real life to me. You can change this, deep in settings, by turning on partial noise cancellation. Not sure why you can't just turn down the volume on the recreated ambient noise.

I’m about to throw every Apple device I own in the garbage because one of them keeps muting notifications across all of my devices

I have not encountered that, but lol

gotta force sign-out from icloud on all of them maybe and add them back one by one?

reminds me of the hilarious windows auth glitch where I’d have a remote desktop session or something still active on one of many servers, have to change my password, and somehow that session would keep locking me out. when I tested a windows service by running it under my credentials…. boy, it was a real bitch figuring that one out

I lost my AirPods Pro case and am annoyed they don't sell replacements. Having to choose between buying a new third-party one with all the varying reports from people about whether they're any good or not, and a secondhand one on eBay that might itself be a third-party one for all I know.

v strange they don’t sell those.

on the other hand the new lock screen customisations have made my phone look fucking lush.

I can't figure them out. I wanted the existing photo I have with the weather on top, but it seems to be one or the other

It refused to allow me to keep my current photo, I had to create fresh wallpaper to use the new design.

When I couldn’t find (scowling diptych of surly teens 2021) in my roll, I just grabbed (adorable poppets on rail adventure 2013) and threw the widgets and graphics over that and it’s like I have a new phone, albeit one which is deeply nostalgic.

Yeah I’ve had this problem before with iOS - you can’t seem to retrieve the wallpaper photo from anywhere if it’s not in your Photos library any more. I’ve definitely got this photo on a hard drive but pain to have to find it again. Good to know you can combine photos and widgets though

Not feeling the lockscreen excitement.

Checked out a youtube on 'coolest os 16 lock screens '. I wonder if half the excitement is in techie-style tweaking of lock screens itself - as I'm not getting much out of looking at them.

I set up two different lock screens with work / not work focus modes, which has been a nice life upgrade.

goddamn this is going to improve my life right now about 1000x

macOS Ventura - Image Capture app enables OCR for PDF creation

Here is a small, well-hidden novelty from Ventura: an OCR option in Image Transfer, Apple’s application for importing photos to your Mac. This offers to transform the text of a scan into an exportable layer that can be more easily extracted on other platforms.

Image Transfer is not only used to recover photos from your iPhone: it also allows you to scan documents, for example using a scanner or a connected printer. By scanning a document via the app, it is now possible to check a new OCR option, which will extract its text in passing.

that’s great but i want it to automatically add the OCR text to the file metadata and make that available to spotlight and Photos search

I think you can do most of that with Shortcuts? I haven't gotten involved with Ventura yet to see what's changed in shortcuts or how addressable OCR / Live Text is. I use a shortcut to remove all metadata from files - I think you can write into those attributes also?

I'm an old man here because I still think in AppleScript/shell script combos. i never found Automator helpful (prob that robot icon)

i just want the OS to do the recognition and metadata enrichment on import

OCR is awesome when it works!

Personally I am still using my 2007 Macbook at least for Garageband

with Ventura this apparently works now ^

Guys can i say i am a MASSIVE fan of Stage Manager?? i have it set on the left side of the screen. i have my Dock set to self-hide. so if i need to drag from one app to another i can still do that via the Dock. it plays nicely with Spaces and Mission Control if you use those things. suddenly my computer feel fuckin… Marie Kondoed. elegant. clean. simple. visible. really feels like the first (baby) step outside the flat 2D overlapping desktop window paradigm (for Macs at least)

i mean like all UI experiments some will hate it but it’s extremely.. calming to me somehow.

i’ve hidden my desktop as well, and starting to wonder why it exists at all. there should just be one massive pile (“Downloads” probably) and then anything else you want to create, possibly with the help of Hazel. but Stage Manager isn’t really about files it’s about apps, which makes sense for the app-centric view of the world that Apple’s been pushing ever since the advent of iOS

I had Stage Manager running for a couple of weeks but I was also having huge system slow-downs and I noticed I often had kernal_task using ~1000% cpu in Activity Monitor - possibly this is because I am on an Intel mac and it hasn’t been optimised and bug fixed properly yet.

I did quite like it, although I wish there was an option to open new apps in the current stage rather than always opening a new one. I’ll try it again next time the OS is updated.

Lol I don’t even use it properly I don’t think. I’m just using it as an app switcher. I’m on an Intel Mini and it seems fine. In fact the whole computer feels a teeny bit quicker. Kind of wild how the windows update in real time in Stage Manager. If there’s an annoying animated ad it will keep plowing along over there.

The thing that annoys me most about stage manager is how I couldn’t figure out how to just have the calculator floating in front of my window so I can still see the numbers I’m adding. I ended up getting this app that puts a pop out calculator in the menu bar.

Yeah I can see that being annoying. Could you add it to the same “stage” as the thing that has the numbers or something?

I tried it but 90% of the time I'm using an external monitor as an additional display and stage manager requires each display to have separate spaces which kind of breaks my whole workflow

that’s dumb if you’ve extended your desktop

Was like "what is this Stage Manager thing?" Then realized my iMac just got dropped for support. I guess Apple is not so subtly nudging me to get a new computer...

Yeah I have no idea what it is either
I need fewer screens in my life, not more

ok

seems like it'd be great for domain-specific stuff

really selling it hard as a general purpose device

it looks way better than any of the other headsets

god damn bob iger?

tech nerds where everyone in the office is wearing them.

Porn.

They'll sell if they actually look/work as well as they say. Obv curious about eye control, like maybe I'd rather just point at stuff? Wonder how weird that will be. Of course I never thought touch typing on a screen would take off.

think they just admitted to extensive phrenology

I was joking with a friend that there was a cable coming out of it for the 20lb battery pack

and...

apple engineering is so nuts

I assumed it was going to fake your appearance in video chat so you wouldn't see the goggles, and yup

$3,499!

I was thinking it would be like $500 and that would feel like a lot.

Apple's new Vision Pro will deliver new immersive experiences to users

for example, in the photos below, these two women are experiencing for the very first time what its like to be a huge ass loser pic.twitter.com/eVlFztsPTc

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) June 5, 2023

I was expecting $5k tbh

I mean, PSVR 2 has 1080 resolution, a fraction of the cameras, and requires a whole-ass PS5 to work at all and it's $550

This sucker has the hardware equivalent of several iPhones in it. $3500 ain't no bargain, but

Were they just completely vague on whether the new Mac Pro will have any support for third-party GPUs? My guess is that they left it vague because that's completely based on whether hardware vendors will collaborate on drivers.

Ars Technica's coverage was claiming that adding ARM driver support would be very arduous and I was thinking "hmm, citation needed"

Not that the driver model is similar, but NVidia has ARM Linux drivers, and they already have a long in the tooth macOS driver

https://i.imgur.com/eF4JLUZ.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/PKNqsIw.jpg

I know that they're definitely still working on the deepfake-style video conferencing appearance but I reeeeally want to see more footage from whatever stage the prototype is at

Were they just completely vague on whether the new Mac Pro will have any support for third-party GPUs?

“Nothing to announce today.”

lol

My friend who tracks pc hardware more assiduously than me was explaining that 24GB ram modules are becoming a thing as the new budget compromise and guess what? The new Macbook Air maxes out at 24GB of memory!

They're still trying to sell the base model with a criminal 8GB

I was a bit sceptical of 8GB, but I do some quite heavy lifting as a FE developer with just 8GB on the 13" Air. It isn’t meant to be a “Pro” machine anyway but it smokes the old i9 2019 16" Pro machine I had with 16GB - and without running any fans.