New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

Upgrading to a Plus in a couple hours. Let's hope this works...

We just have to be patient grasshoppers

IT is disgusting savagery that iMessage message styles are disabled if you have "reduce motion" turned on. But if you turn it off to see them, you have to put up with those bullshit 1-second swoopy-app homescreen animatinos and all the rest of the junk

― stet, Saturday, 17 September 2016 01:55 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the core accessibility requirement addressed by "reduce motion" is probably the same core accessibility requirement addressed by removing the swoopy homescreen animations (apple is not explicit about the category of users who benefit from "reduce motion" afaict). i haven't seen the new imessage effects because i have no friends only one person i know uses it instead of telegram/whatsapp/wechat/vanilla sms, but it seems that the imessage swoopiness would be equally disruptive to the springboard.app swoopiness purely in accessibility terms.

really the problem is that apple won't give us a simple "don't swoopy the homescreen" setting that addresses personal taste. loads of friends people i know found "reduce motion" on day one and left it switched on.

How's the "raise to wake" thing working out?

― early rejecter, Saturday, 17 September 2016 05:46 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not available on the iphone 6. planned obsolescence?

Still haven't reliably figured out how to interact with notifications though. The old swipe method was great, this new "sometimes force touch sometimes pull" thing is bloody stupid

― stet, Saturday, 17 September 2016 06:00 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also not on my iphone 6; in fact notification functions i had in ios 9 seem to have been taken away. did apple shuffle it into the 3d touch realm to leave some of us feeling like we need new hardware? tap-and-hold does nothing and should just do this.

previous late-model exclusives felt necessary (e.g. always-on "hey siri" using battery, visual transparency slowing down old models), but now it just feels like apple's being dickish to sell more phones.

hmm, this says otherwise but it still doesn't work for me

my SE wakes on raise just fine, notification interactions are hurting my brain a bit (I liked swiping to get to the app in context just fine thanks) but I imagine I'll forget it was ever different within three weeks

the se is newer than the iphone 6 which is probably why.

also multilingual typing doesn't work, even though my languages are on the list and i've downloaded the dictionaries. this is the sort of thing that should Just Work.

iOS 4 4 life

the no carrier/unlocked iphone 7 will not be available til another 6 months or so

maybe not in the Apple Store but some prepaid carrier will likely have one, I would think

I shoved a cricket sim in a "Verizon" phone today and it works just fine

All Verizon 4G/LTE phones are sold unlocked (due to a legal agreement with the FCC when they obtained additional bandwidth), and the "Verizon" iPhone can be used on any GSM or CDMA carrier in most of the world.

this: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-unlock-your-iphone-without-using-ios-10s-press-home-to-unlock/

Neglects to mention that Raise to Wake is not available for phones prior to the 6s.

the new music app is weirdly glary/blocky but glorious. everything is in its place and it's loads more efficient to use. it feels like apple's ~frontier designers~ were reassigned and some people who listen to music took over.

They took away star ratings though, the bastards

you can do it through siri ("rate this song five stars" ... "here's what i found on wikipedia for 'fainted on live cars'") but it's clunky. you also can't heart/non-heart songs from the control centre, which seems to de-emphasise all the super-funky algorithm stuff that once defined the service.

the current app isn't perfect by a long stretch, but i'll take it over the homer that was last year's app.

They took away star ratings though, the bastards

Wait, are you kidding? No more ratings?! All my synched smart playlists are mainly ratings-based

Yeah that will nuke entire libraries worth of finely tuned smart playlists

Not nuked if you can still edit the stars via iTunes and Siri?

Anyone else feel like the lightning-to-3.5 adapter produces inferior audio quality? That plus the annoyance of the dongle plus the annoying taptic feedback home button plus the lack of other obvious benefits is making me think about returning mine.

I mean faster processor and higher resolution camera are nice, but that's all I see so far.

i wonder if apple's skimped on the DAC now that they expect the DAC to be external via bluetooth headphones

I put on a podcast when I set up the new phone and felt like something vaguely irritated my ears and the voice lacked a little bit of oomph. So I did a back and forth test a few times with podcasts and different music, and I definitely feel like something is missing in the low-mid frequencies. Also like there was some kind of compression or data reduction, like something was just "missing" from the sound in a way that actually was mildly uncomfortable to my ears.

I do have to say, I have the regular black one, and it's fucking PRETTY. It has this sort of matte finish and the antenna lines aren't visible anymore, and it's just really nice to look at.

the built-in cirrus logic dac chips are there

someone will figure out soon if there's actually a tiny usb-like dac in the adapter by chopping it up, but if it is, it's tiny.

the lightning-to-3.5mm adapter has this requirement:
Works with all devices that have a Lightning connector and support iOS 10 or later

which means either there's a chip in there (and the wired earpods) that has support in iOS 10, or iOS 10 is using software to drive an analog signal through the lightning pins. the lightning-to-30 pin adapter had a dac in the actual adapter.

third possibility is that the onboard dac is still doing all the major work and it's throwing a decoded signal inside a digital packet to the adapter and it has a very specific chip that just strips it back to analogue

ok thought about this too much going to listen to music

Oh, I can live with having to use Siri thanks for the tip. Bloody annoying though

I haven't actually used the voice-activated siri before, since my old phone was one that required it to be on the charger to use. Has it been decent at voice recognition? It had me say "hey siri" a few times to train it and my friends weren't able to get it to respond but it knew me every time.

siri is terrible imo

it was when siri understood my french that I knew I'd really made it here, so I love you siri forever

Has anyone done one of these "free iPhone 7 with trade-in" deals? My wife's 5C got smashed so I've set her up on my old 4S for the time being with the thought that we'd get her a 7 when the Black Friday deals roll around, but looking at these deals it seems like it makes sense to buy a good used iPhone 6 for around $350 and trade it in for the $650 credit on a new 7. We're on Verizon and don't have any plans on leaving so the credit being spread over 2 years isn't an issue. Is there any other reason not to do this? Anything I'm missing?

wrt siri I find it useful for a few simple things: (1) setting a timer or alarm (2) sending a text while driving (3) doing "what song is this"? (the shazam function). The concept of using it for anything else is kind of repugnant though and it doesn't do many other things well.

$350? I have a 6 I'm working on selling and I'm guessing that's a little high. xp

maybe not!

hmm

They really give you $650 credit? Is that only for new lines?

Here's the Verizon offer:

https://www.verizonwireless.com/landingpages/iphone/#trade-in

Doesn't say anything about new lines or other restrictions. Apparently other carriers have similar deals, but this is the only one I've looked at.

mh: $350 was based on a quick check on what's available through Swappa.com -- haven't really looked into it any deeper than that yet. Would rather buy from a place like that than eBay or Craigslist.

if you're just trading it in immediately, I'd figure out what the verizon people are going to check and then just do that

was at verizon in santa monica this weekend and ended up switching to them (from tmobile) and getting the iphone 7 128gb "matte black"

as far as trade-in with them, i think it depends on your contract/plan. if you log in to your account you can see if you qualify

but if i recall correctly an iphone 5 trade-in is ~$300; iphone 6 is ~$400; and they give you a verizon gift card

https://twitter.com/_beewes/status/776451704350998533

well then :/

https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/20/apple-3-5mm-to-lighting-adapter-teardown/

Why is that :/ inducing

probably the part of me that looks at headphones forums expressing disbelief that a decent dac is in such a small connector for $9

Oic

Yeah this was not the teardown result I would have expected either

it turns out occam's razor was correct all along

it's not a decent dac, it sucks

they obviously really, really want to push people to wireless. the headphones that use apple's proprietary tech may wind up sounding great, IDK, but I just don't want to invest any more money in crap to use with my iphone. Back to the store goes my 7.

ok you've got me, I'll actually use the dongle to formulate an opinion

I have no idea if the earpods sound any different because I never really used the old ones. I have a bluetooth receiver and a headphone amp at my work desk so nothing's changed, here.

afaict the "proprietary tech" is just a new bluetooth chip that they're the first-party provider for

it's using the exact same technology as all other bluetooth headphones on the market as far as streaming goes

saw somewhere that the airpods have the same drivers as the regular apple earbuds (i.e. they suck)

btw I figured out a cool hack, you can make the earpods more closed by putting your fingers over the little holes on the back #earpodhacks

(was going to say "slits" but idk I feel weird typing "put your fingers over the slits")

This seems really weird. You'd think when dumping the headphone jack they'd go all-out on quality for the replacements (only to cheap out later of course).

Going for crap DACs and shitty drivers straight out the gate seems like basic arrogance here

I mean I think there was probably no way to fit a very good DAC into that tiny adapter, but more broadly, yeah I think it's arrogance. IMO they're just getting rid of the jack too early, before wireless options are good enough and widely adopted enough to make up for it.