Battery throtteling on the iPhone 6s; The sandboxing / sideloading discussion; The no-iCloud experience; The way that regular bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work even better; How unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click.
Safari suggestions are also a great example: So far, I like them in iOS 17, since they can also provide direct links to useful sites such as Wikipedia. But don't doubt for a second, that taking traffic away from Google was the primary goal here.
Microsoft isn't so smart. Most users, including non-technical, can see through their attempts.
and lack of user profiles on ipads so they cannot be easily shared among family.
No I don’t want to install your shit browser on my phone Google. Kindly frick off.
"iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones" -- an actual quote from the SVP of Software Engineering in charge of iOS, revealed in Epic Games v Apple court discovery
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Of course, if you really cared about green bubbles, you'd switch to Android because there you can adjust outgoing message color to your heart's liking :-)
What do you mean by this? I have an iPhone but don't have airpods, just "regular" BT headphones. Under windows, they're hit or miss (sometimes they don't reconnect), but they work pretty well under iOS and mac os. They work best under linux (!), especially since it's the only one to support LDAC (though I understand some non-sony android phones may support this now).
So, if somehow apple came out with a way of making BT headphones work even better (what do they do better?), I don't see why you'd hold that against them. Should they not innovate just so that the competition doesn't get upset?
It is a difference for Google to advertise their browser on their properties (eg Youtube) versus Apple hijacking the search bar of some other browser, and in general not allowing third parties to provide full browsers in the Apple App Store (and not just a shim which mandatorily has to use Safari behind the curtains)
Airpods automatically try to pair with a nearby iphone when opened, if one of your own devices isn't around. All of this is through a pretty fancy UI, just for Airpods and Beats
AirPods are always accesible via the AirPlay-menu, which is prominently featured in many media apps.
Again: still fine, but just bad enough to partly influence my next buying decision.
So if Apple figured a way of bypassing this limitation, it's really not clear to me why that should be considered "bad", even if it's clearly better than what the competition does. It's on the bluetooth standard to do better.
Or is your point that apple should have standardized the protocol they use to make this happen?
But once they're paired, they connect automatically to my iphone, and I can select them easily from a list when e.g making a phone call, though they're usually selected automatically when connected.
Apple has a “select audio out” menu thats on a lot of music and video apps. It shows “Apple airplay enabled” devices and makes switching easy. If it’s just Bluetooth it’s harder (you have to go into setting…)
In general, Apple has lowered contrast throughout the UI over the years. There's an accessibility setting for high contrast if you need it.
Either way, the user experience is still better than on Windows. Whenever I start up my PC it steals my headphones, even if I’m currently listening on another device (or worse, making a phone call). I’ve searched online and it seems there is no way to switch this off. The only solution seems to be to manually unpair or disable Bluetooth after using it.
But with Bluetooth I believe Apple is right to forge its own path. The standard is convoluted, built on old methods, still cannot pair two buds in a sane manner, and can’t provide enough bandwidth for Apple’s uncompressed format.
I expect Airpods to leave Bluetooth behind sooner rather than later.
Yes, one could argue that the default should provide high contrast for everyone, but once this setting is enabled, it effectively becomes just that going forward for those that need it.
Some headphones support connecting two devices simultaneously, which is great... unless you have 3 devices :)
Anyways, if I was Apple, I would have added paired headphones to the speaker menu.
With white foreground text, this gives a contrast ratio of 2.15:1 for SMS and 3.79:1 for iMessage. WCAG 2.x AA level compliances requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and at least 3:1 for large text.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum...
Whereas for black on green it's 9.72:1 : https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=000000&...
Those devices really should have been recalled or offered a generous trade-in value to account for the fundamental design flaw
A difference that's moot because it never happened.
| iOS 5-6 | iOS 7+ |
---------+-------------+--------+
SMS | 11.3 - 13.4 | 2.2 |
iMessage | 11.8 - 14.1 | 3.8 |Apple just pushed design to far and underestimated the cooling/heat dissipation required
People generally want their gadgets to be as lightweight as possible, cheap as possible, last as long as possible, and be reliable. There's tradeoffs in balancing those. eg: overbuilding the battery to make the device run longer in the face of degradation adds weight, size, and cost. Somebody has to make a call on where the balance should be.
What nobody really talks about in the context of device longevity is wear levels in the onboard flash. A battery replacement or three doesn't extend that clock. It's pretty good but it doesn't last forever. This is more of an issue on devices with smaller amounts of flash storage with a lot more storage churn.
The throttling feature still exists in iOS. All that’s changed is that you will be made aware that it’s happening and you can switch it off if you prefer a brownout when your battery is degraded.
Other manufacturers are happy to let your handset reboot, it could lead to another sale for them. Some would call that planned obsolescence.
I argue that they are blatantly anti-consumer, but have created a brand identity association that causes people to pretend (and argue) they are not. Try using an ipad without handing over your credit card details. Even google is better in this area.
You can’t do this with a regular Bluetooth audio device that doesn’t have the W2 chip, because according to the Bluetooth spec, you can only be paired to one device at a time; there is no separate concept of “known” devices; devices that auto-connect stay auto-connected on sleep+wake; and devices that connect (therefore devices that auto-connect) must stop announcing themselves as available over BT discovery. (BT is essentially a protocol state machine — a device can be either idle, in pairing mode, searching for its paired device to auto-reconnect, or connected, and none of these states can overlap.)
These are all limitations of the audio device, not of the host OS. Limitations required for Bluetooth conformance! Apple can only work around these limitations by having the device and host both run a completely separate, second discovery protocol over completely separate hardware, that just forces the BT hardware into certain states as a result of its own negotiation. They can’t magically make audio devices that don’t have a W2 chip do this out-of-BT-band negotiation.
yawn Why my 8 years old Moto XT910 eat the battery like cookies but did not reboot? It's battery wasnot only old, but swollen a bit, it's USB port was damaged so sometimes the charge didn't actually happened... but it still could survive a couple of hours with enabled radio and GPS, serving a navigation app with 3G updates? And didn't reboot?
When batterygate happened my wife’s phone was throttled but mine wasn’t. She didn’t care and never got the battery replaced but she definitely would have upgraded sooner if it was rebooting.
Are you saying that Apple use different battery technology to everyone else? Or what is your point?
Also worth noting is that the color only applies to sent messages. When you receive a message, it's just gray in either case. It makes a certain amount of sense to let the user know which transport their outbound message went on since it will affect your expectations.
This is one of the ways I can tell what preconceived opinion someone has. The only problem with the battery throttling was PR. The engineering solution was correct and objectively better than not throttling. Should they have told users their battery was failing? Sure. But keeping the phone from crashing was better than letting it.
> unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click
I've never had to do that.
Which isn't to say that things like the 30% app store cut is entirely defensible, though you can certainly make some halfway plausible claims in that direction (based mostly on how retail works, especially at the time iPhones were invented). Or sideloading. There are legitimate gripes. But a lot of crap spewed regularly on HN turns out to be exactly that, crap.
To my eyes, the green/blue doesn't make much difference in terms of legibility. I obviously find the reduced contrast throughout iOS annoying and keep increase contrast turned on.
Apple just has a history of prioritizing design asthenic and they're willing to push the limits on thermal regulation.
Probably because it's a simple, slow dual core Cortex A9 with low enough power draw that it doesn't stress the battery enough to matter.
Original: https://ronstauffer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/taking-a-pic...
Current: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...
generally I try to avoid SMS since the photo quality is bad, there’s no delivery guarantee, and it doesn’t work over wifi.
But let's run with that for a moment, and assume many people do in fact find that more difficult to read. I still have trouble calling that particularly hostile given that it's sent messages, received ones are the same color no matter what.
I'm more open to the green vs blue argument than the old-green vs new-green one. Apple definitely wants you to know you're using iMessage. It just happens to be useful for me as a customer, too -- I'm glad it's prominent when I send a text message instead of an iMessage. It aligns my expectations for what features will work in the conversation.
In the terminal it has a nice "search with Google" option and I can not figure out how to get MacOS to stop opening Safari with that.
Every time I use Apple products I get frustrated at how it blocks me from doing what I want to do.
Using OKD (OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution) because I just dealt with this morning:
https://github.com/okd-project/okd/releases - download the MacOS installer and unzip it.
Then try to run it from the command line. Be told that it "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified". This is NOT the "is an app downloaded from the Internet, do you wish to run it?" dialog.
Go to Finder, and double click it. Get the same message.
You have to go to Finder, then right click the app, specifically hit Open (which will open a terminal that will immediately exit), and only now can you run this app in your original terminal.
I'd much rather have a slow phone than a phone that doesn't work at all (or worse, bursts into flames in my pocket)
For small developers there's checker tools and simulators, but Apple is huge and has a responsibility to get this right.
Android does the exact same thing now, but I don't see people boycotting Google over it.
The problem was that Apple didn't communicate this to the user. People didn't know why their phone was slow.
Most accessibility problems aren't things that those without some sort of sensory disability (beyond mild long-sightedness) can detect easily - at least, without using tools to do so.
Surely though there is some sort of "accessible" mode you can put it into that does improve the contrast?
Increased heat when operating near the current limit is a symptom, not a cause. Adding a fan or a chonky heatsink to your iPhone wouldn't magically raise this limit.
You can see and configure all available services by going to the app menu in the menu bar and selecting Services -> Services Settings
1. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-services-in-app...
But for some reason Apple's fans are way more insistent in defending everything and sticking to the PR department's arguments. No criticism is allowed to stand.
I think this is one thing a ton of people don't realize. Apple doesn't want to sell you individual devices. They want you to sell an entire electronic ecosystem that serves all of your technology needs and seamlessly integrates all of it for you.
It's why they put effort into things like handoff, copy & paste on iPhone/mac, AirDrop, iCloud photo sharing, et al. Sure there's a profit motive in having you use all their stuff, but they really do make a genuine effort to make things work together better than disparate devices, companies or manufacturers do.
I still have to use a private channel in Signal to share things like pics or links from iOS/OSX/Windows because there just isn't a good cross-ecosystem app that I've found. Discord and slack sort of work, but they're not E2E encrypted like Signal is.
And really Apple should have made a generic service using the default browser, rather than this being a Safari provided thing. I guess the OP's "edge of anti-consumer" theory has some merit.
I worry this a subjective matter, i.e. if the colours were reversed some people would make exactly the same complaint.
The actual argument really should focus on whether phone providers should use some interoperable standard more capable than SMS. If they can't come to consensus then the telecommunications regulators should involve themselves and force one.
In fact, it is much better than what iOS6 had.
Yes, you get the “developer cannot be verified” error if the code isn’t signed. Which is perfectly fine, I don’t see how this is anti-consumer.
It’s $99 for a code signing cert (per developer account) on macOS/iOS, which I believe is less than what they cost on Windows.
Also, an individual Microsoft Store cert is $19 (one-time, not per year), and a company account is $99.
HN isn't perfect, but it's so much better than a lot of other online discussion forums these days.
Again, thanks for the link. That's probably the only time I'll run into that, it clearly isn't my usual use case, but I'm glad you could back up the assertion with something I could see for myself.
I do agree that it should be clearer how you can run the executable if you really do trust it.
The hardware and software were shipped with performance optimized to the initial voltage curves of the battery. Once that voltage curve decreases slightly the device will either reboot when the processor attempts to run at a higher clock speed than the battery voltage can support, or the battery can technically keep up though begin to overheat as the operating voltage is a higher draw than the battery can safely handle.
Dont get me wrong I'm not aware of any concerns over the phone actuary catching fire like that one generation of Samsung years ago, but the degraded battery would either lead to reboots or excess heat.
A two year old lithium battery under normal use will hardly degrade at all. Any design that pushed the limits so far that a degredation of a few percent over promised and under delivered. In Apples case it could be remedied with a software update, but that doesn't mean the device held up to the original performance claims over a standard life cycle of device use.
Granted this happened because glue in the battery was compromised by excess heat because Steve Jobs preferred heat over the sound of a fan, but the machine never rebooted or shut down due to heat or decreased max voltage.
Smartphones with active cooling? You must live in world that's very different from the one I live in.
Also, as mentioned in other replies, your whole point about "overheating and rebooting" is a straw man. Throttling was introduced to address battery aging. Again, a problem that affects every device with rechargeable batteries.
> Apple just has a history of prioritizing design asthenic and they're willing to push the limits on thermal regulation.
Except they do have thermal controls...
iMessage is apparently a differentiator for them.
https://www.soundguys.com/how-does-apple-h1-chip-work-21049/
That only works if you use two Apple devices together. You don't get those functions with other Bluetooth on a Mac, or using Airpods with an Android. It doesn't really make that big of a difference IMO but it's there.
bluetooth headphones work to the best of their ability on Apple devices. Apple invented a better technology for their own headphones to improve problems inherent with bluetooth. I’m struggling to understand how improving upon a flawed technology is anti-consumer? Apple devices still support bluetooth, and Apple headphones work with non-Apple devices over bluetooth.
It was a rhetorical question, yet a Jobs' fanboi couldn't resist, see the neighbouring comment.
> each system is different
Except in that part it's pretty much the same. Or your battery, even discharged, can keep up with a full load from a CPU, GPU, WiFi and GPS modules eating amps, or it couldn't even when it's fresh.
If at 3V your battery couldn't power the system then you shouldn't show 3V as 30%, you should show it as 0% and adjust %/V curve accordingly.
It's simple, it's about momentary load in amps, but "only some iPhone 6S models manufactured in September and October 2015 had suffered from a battery manufacturing defect" yet millions of iPhones were slowed down ~~totally not beacuse Apple needed to sell the next iPhone~~.
And as an anecdote - even after the years of abuse, the last time I used my XT910 it was literally showing 10% when I enabled the radio so I could receive a SMS from my bank on it. I really expected it to just shutdown (because enabling radio means data too, so all that bullshit rushed to update their things and using data => more power draw) and for me to be stranded in a remote city without money. But not only it did survive that, it kept chugging for another 4 hours, with radio disabled, ofc. *shrug_emoji*
> Or what is your point?
What people would eagerly drink any Koolaid what would make them feel entitled or standing out. Which most Apple fanbois vehemently deny.
NB: there are people who just use iPhones/Macs/whatever and don't engage in defending 'their favourite brand', of course they aren't fanbois.
Or you drunk your Koolaid and ignored "GPU, WiFi, GPS" parts.
> yet millions of iPhones were slowed
Citation needed. Only handsets with degraded batteries were slowed, and only after the first brownout. Replacing the battery brought it back to full speed. This is the main point people don’t understand. Every phone got the software update. The feature still exists today. But not all phones were slowed. My iPhone 11 will slow if the battery degrades.
If they wanted to sell you a new phone, was that the best way to do it? Couldn’t they… have just done nothing instead? Like the other manufacturers? Instead of prolonging the life of resetting handsets?
https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/16/apple-tv-iphone-required/
Or sherlocking stuff without acknowledging anyone, e.g. game porting toolkit.
It’s not like Apple is stopping you from running it. 1 quick google search and there you go. It’s a good design, in my opinion.
> the no-iCloud experience
What?
> The way regular Bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work better.
I… I don’t see how this is apple’s fault. Bluetooth, as a standard, is obviously limiting. Apple, making both headphones and the devices that play audio, had an opportunity to offer a better product to their customers if you use other apple devices. That’s fine, and I would argue, eminently reasonable. I just don’t get what you’re driving at here, would love to hear more.
The reason I like apple is that, in vague general terms, their interests as a company often align with my interests as a consumer.
Yes, you can argue that apple has made changes in safari detrimental to google for business reasons. But shit, I’m happy about that. The less data my phone silently sends off to google, the better.
Maybe I’ve just fallen for their ploy, but I do actually really like the apple products I own (and I often try the non-apple alternatives because I love tech). No company is perfect, and I know they aren’t my friend or don’t care about me. But until I feel apples interests diverge from my own significantly, I’ll find alternatives.
