Most people get their oil changed at a shop, and drive through a car wash. I wouldn’t really consider those additional skills.

It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch tech enthusiasts are. How much does your average person know about their car? That’s how little they know about their computer.

They might not know what an OS even is, or how to identify where “Windows” ends and applications begin. They do what they bought it for, and if that doesn’t work, they take it to someone who knows how to get it working again. They know how to charge it, and to plug in a headset or USB key or something. If that functionality doesn’t work automatically or they encounter any issue, it might as well have exploded in their hands.

There are people who have been using Windows for 30 years that know literally nothing about it. Putting a “years of experience” metric on it is hilarious. It’s like assuming that if someone has been driving for 50 years that they know anything about cars besides how to drive it and where to put the gas.

For anyone on iOS, you can do most of this there too. On older iPhones you need a lightning to USB-A adapter you can get on AliExpress for like $3, but on USB-C iPhones it works directly.

The Files app has become like a full file manager, with local storage, unzipping, archiving, SMB connections, as well as most cloud storage services connect to it. Download Keka from the App Store and you can even unpack 7z, ISOs, everything you can do on a desktop.

I said the complaints you listed had fixed in the new one. I didn’t say it was suddenly as good as a dedicated calculator app.

Doesn’t have much appeal if you pay for YT Premium. I also used to sideload Cercube so I get the appeal, but yeah. I would count that in the category of “++” apps that pretty much exist to circumvent ads or avoid paying for subscriptions.

I don’t have anything against them but it doesn’t help the image of open access being only useful for piracy or avoiding paying for stuff.

That’s true I suppose, but there pretty much isn’t anything I’m like “damn I wish that was on iOS but Apple’s rules won’t allow it” anymore.

I can think of a few examples that I have on my Android phone. TouchHLE, Mario 64 decompiled and Yuzu come to mind. But those are just fun to play with and not exactly things I care deeply about.

Just to be clear, this didn’t used to be the case. I used to jailbreak & sideload for years. But I just… don’t need to anymore. It’s all there. I figured it was worth asking if there was something I didn’t know I was missing.

Not only that, there is an upside too. The fact that IPAs can’t be easily installed on iOS drastically reduces piracy, and companies are more apt to release non-ad-supported, premium titles on the platform.

I have RE Village, RE4 and Death Stranding on my phone right now. I don’t see those coming to Android any time soon. So I would say it’s a double-edged sword.

I think there was an internal rule change a while back because there are a few others as well. Ruddarr is shaping up every well, and LunaSea has been there for years now.

All of that has been fixed in the iOS 18 calculator, they just didn’t talk about it in the keynote. It has history, multi-line, and your can place the cursor anywhere and edit expressions.

Give it a shot, you might be pleasantly surprised.

What IPAs do you want to install? This is a real question, I know there are a handful of apps that you need to install from outside the App Store but over the years as restrictions have loosened that has dropped to almost nothing for me.

I used to install nzbUnity which has been fully replaced by LunaSea at this point, and with the rule change allowing emulators they really took a ton of wind out of the sails of the 3rd party App Store push.

Apple Intelligence. The image generation and bullshit text generator aspects I’m over (although Genmoji looks cute), but the ability to process complex natural language requests using an on-device LLM so I can perform tasks via voice without laborious specificity?

I’m in. If they nail this it will be the biggest leap forward in human-computer interaction since the GUI.

The other features I already like in DB1 aren’t on this feature slide either:

• The new Calendar app with a proper multi-day view is great and has already replaced the “list” view I’ve used since 2009. I like “list” but it makes every day look busy visually, and makes it difficult to see gaps in your day.
• New Calculator app finally has most features people would like. Multi line, easy editing of mistakes, a history, etc. They only talked about the handwritten stuff for iPad in the keynote but the whole thing is vastly improved across all iOS platforms.
• This one is on the slide but the new Photos app is great, although some don’t like it I found most features in Photos were buried and people never used the tabs in the app, just scrolling down to see everything actually works quite well. Most users seem to think that the first tab is the only one you need to use and everything else is just settings and whatnot so it’s best to just adapt to that at this point.

you certainly won’t regret being bitten by 50 asps

If this kills Fandom/Wikia, that would be amazing and somewhat realistic.

Yeah but with modern thin & light mobile devices, that’s a bad solution. Then you need multiple holes to serve multiple purposes, which impacts waterproofing and requires extra space & hardware.

One port to rule them all makes sense. But it should have had a way to identify cables capability at a glance. I still prefer having one cable that can charge all my devices, even if the trade off is some confusing situations when it comes to cable capability.

Agreed, but not requiring labeling or some sort of method to identify was a real fuckup on their part.

My problem isn’t the existence of different tiers of cable, it’s that there is literally no way to know if the cable you’re using supports something until you try it.

This is absolutely not a “US under regulation thing”, that makes no sense. What “regulation” would dictate what a connector carries over its cable? That would be compliance with the spec, and the spec is a connector.

USB-C can carry USB 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, PD, DisplayPort, wattages from 5w to 100w & Thunderbolt 4. No one cable would be required to carry all those or all cables would be $50/ft.

Just because you’ve never encountered a USB-C power only cable doesn’t mean they don’t exist in your country. They’re made by the bucketload in China, and you’ll encounter one soon enough.

“I say your purple kitchen goes too far!”

“And I say your purple kitchen doesn’t go too far enough!”

To be fair the jacket could have also been from one of her brothers. She had 15 brothers so she knows how to handle herself.

Oh yeah I know, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. More clearly:

1. Apple Card is slow to expand because of the requirement to have a bank partner in the region you want to expand to, and Goldman pulling out of the Apple Card partnership has probably delayed the expansion plans because stabilizing the US operations are probably the priority.

2. Apple Pay didn’t expand for years because they were stabilizing relationships in the US and convincing partner networks to give them their cut, which eventually they did.

3. I suspect once operations are stable, they will start to expand Apple Card and Apple Pay Cash.

Expanding Apple Pay Cash is way easier though, because it’s stored value. That’s business that everyone wants to be in. They’re just holding your cash and earning interest on it. Apple Card is more complicated because there is debt and risk.

The incentive to expand to Canada specifically is low as well because “cash apps” like CashApp, Venmo, etc have no presence here because we have a robust, fast and free Interac e-transfer system which is so embedded, people paying $1 to send money isn’t much of a market.

I still think we’ll see it eventually, but yeah I’m not holding my breath.

You need to have a partnership with a bank to run Apple Card in another region, it’s not a simple thing to expand. However Apple Pay was US exclusive for a long time and it still expanded. I think it’s possible, I just think the fact that Goldman pulled out in the US has delayed their expansion plans.

Privacy.com is also US only.

So is Apple Cash, but I have more hopes of Apple expanding that to other parts of the world, as their US-only services don’t usually stay that way for too long.