indefensible: john gruber

i think that's it

oh god dude is already talking like he's a watch expert

its too bad he didnt have any time to get into watches and now he just has to think the apple watch is the best

A few days into testing the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, I accidentally left my personal iPhone 5S on a desk next to the iPhone 6 Plus. While my back was turned, the Plus tried to eat my 5S. It’s a monster.

cant tell if serious..

I kid, but only sort of.

oh

Only sort of kidding that his demo phone is an actual living breathing monster

now im scared, great

It’s been a while since I used a rounded iPhone. It’s nice. With the iPhone 6, I’ve found myself reverting to a habit I formed back in 2007 with the original iPhone: slowly spinning it around in my hand, over and over, side over side, like one of those “worry stones” that were popular back in the 1990s. It just feels nice in your hand. (The 6 Plus is too big for me to do this with.)

Ah, but then there’s The Bulge. Both iPhone 6 models have a camera lens that protrudes from the back of the phone. It’s noticeable, and, let’s face it, a little gross. But this was foreseeable given that the presciently-designed iPod Touch from two years ago had one too. (The iPod Touch is just 6.1mm thick, thinner even than the iPhone 6.) This is a conflict with the laws of physics: image quality improves when the lens is further away from the sensor (which allows for physically larger sensors), but devices feel better in hand and weigh less when they are thinner. Apple’s only options for the iPhone 6:

Use a camera with worse optics that would sit flush with the rest of the case.

Make the entirely device thicker to sit flush with the camera lens.

Allow the camera lens to protrude from the back of the camera.

The first choice is unacceptable. Image quality is too important to allow it to suffer — and Apple certainly couldn’t allow image quality on the iPhone 6 to be worse than on the 5S. So the choice was between #2 and #3, and as a fan of smaller thinner devices, I can’t say I disagree with Apple’s decision to go with #3. It’s reasonable to argue that the iPhone 6 would have been better if Apple had gone with #2 (and filled the additional volume with a slightly thicker battery), but that’s not really Apple-like.

omg why didnt they do this drives me fn nuts mane

they did it to drive you nuts iirc

They could have made the camera thinner if they went super wide angle, and then used post processing to fix the image / crop

omg why didnt they do this drives me fn nuts mane

― lag∞n, Wednesday, September 17, 2014 1:21 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know!!

They could have made the camera thinner if they went super wide angle, and then used post processing to fix the image / crop

― 龜, Wednesday, September 17, 2014 1:33 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jony ive, browsing ilx, facepalms

cropping does not have the same effect as a longer lens tho, iphone lens already way too fn wide imho impossible to take pictures of anything far away

There are probably too many DSLR purist freaks on the design team to ever go for a flat solution tho

the watch post...

what kind of monster is he?

I seriously had a dream this morning that he posted something with some vaguely rape-apologist elements and then Jason Kottke called him out on it, so I should probably get better dreams and spend less time thinking about John Gruber.

lmao otm

that is an incredible internet dream tho

$80 for a steel watch band is a “hefty price”. That’s adorable.

fuck you, basically

Well, if you're pulling down something like $260k a year mainly posting links and the occasional longform article, $80 is adorable.

this http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/09/19/iphones-6-line

made me think of this http://www.theonion.com/articles/william-safire-orders-two-whoppers-junior,3351/

lmao

"thoughts on" is not necessarily a good way to start a title. this is an apple blogger tic, and yes i know abt jobs, obv

also: one word titles like matt gemmell's "portable" or w/e

that "iphones 6" shit is also ridic

if you have to stick with the super simple format, at least go with "iphone 6 and iphone 6 plus" or something

"layer tennis"

hah i was just looking at that

didn't read past the first sentence of what I presume is saccharine nonsense about Derek Jeter

i don't know if i finished it, but i didn't think it was bad at all

http://i.imgur.com/I2DMUWL.png

sounds very fun

http://blog.fawny.org/2014/10/10/gruberbucks/

http://i.imgur.com/IdaRhNv.png

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/09/ive-xiaomi

pretty good gruberzing here

I have a coworker with one of those t-shirts :/

when they say something dumb in a meeting and are wearing the shirt you shd tell them youre filing it to claim chowder

hahahaha

lol

or just knock em out with one punch and when someone tries to ask them to explain their comment you can say "UPDATE: fireballed"

lol

http://instagram.com/p/NXX_dDvVjn/

lool

lmao

I do actually enjoy Grubes' callouts of that "finally" tic.

(The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are so nearly identical in Geekbench results that I simply averaged the two together under “iPhones 6”.)

Look at how long the title is for his iPad Air 2 review. Couldn't he have called his iPhone review "iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus" instead?

That’s how much the banks like Apple Pay. They’re giving you money just to try it.

http://crooksandliars.com/files/vfs/2013/01/10105.jpeg

First, the headline. I think it’s clear that Apple Pay is siding with the credit companies and banks — but they’re not pitted against consumers, they’re pitted against retailers. It’s retailers who want to reduce the use of credit cards (and the resulting fees). Not consumers. Any consumer who doesn’t want to use a credit card can simply not use a credit card. (They can still use Apple Pay with debit cards.) Apple Pay is only allowing us to more easily and securely use the credit/debit cards we already have. For consumers, nothing is worse post-Apple Pay (transaction fees are not higher — the banks pay Apple’s 0.15 percent cut), and much is better (security, privacy, and convenience).

I understand the argument that the 2-3 percent processing fees that retailers pay for credit cards are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, but for consumers that can be offset by cash back and reward programs from their card providers.

I don’t understand how this article amounts to anything more than “Apple should have used magic” hand-waving. What could Apple have done differently that would have actually worked, without involving credit card processors? Remember, Apple Pay doesn’t require retailers to install Apple Pay-specific POS terminal hardware. It famously works with the standard NFC hardware that’s been out for years. Building atop the existing credit card infrastructure is fundamental to people’s willingness to try Apple Pay and to retailers’ ability to accept it. Pressman is implicitly arguing that Apple should have somehow reinvented the entire retail electronic payments industry, without the help of the banks or credit card companies, and presumably with the cooperation of retailers. But we see with CurrentC/MCX the sort of things the retailers would have demanded of Apple in such a hypothetical systems.

Eagerly awaiting Felix Salmon, et al. to smack Gruber down re: interchange.

Re: “Apple should have used magic." Apple can't, but the Fed can (and is): http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regii-average-interchange-fee.htm

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/03/filevault_2_mac_users_unsaved_files_and_screenshots_are_automatically_uploaded.html

gruber defense of this as "why wouldn't you want your stuff to be recoverable from a secure backup, idiots" in 5...4...

Wait, so people are upset that "temporary files" e.g. an unsaved textedit document are backed up to iCloud? I don't quite get what's so alarming about it.

Uploading what has always been local-only (hell, what had always been in-memory-only) to US servers without notice is pretty bad news. Depending on what you happened to be typing (eg personal data) you could be breaking all sorts of laws, from data protection to HIPAA.

I was quite surprised to hear about it, yep.