Battery-pack cases, and spare waterproof battery-pack chargers, are rampant. You're afraid the battery will "wear out" before your phone does?
Well, a USB-C port was first placed on a smartphone only two years ago. Your desired connector standard is so new that any phone you bought supporting it has not had a proper chance to "wear out" its battery, and half of those phones are still under warranty.
And yet, this port standard is a deal breaker for you now that it's around?
Perhaps you need to admit that you are just as susceptible to the fast pace of innovation in the smartphone world as all the other people you scoff at. Perhaps those people you think are acting based on "marketing" have their own list of must-have features that is just as arbitrary as your own.
Because I dunno about you, but I am really grooving on the fact that I am typing this on a two pound MacBook that will remain absolutely silent, even while it's still fast enough to edit HD video in Final Cut Pro...
I think his real mistake back then was to attempt to please CPU-hungry users and quiet-hungry users with the same machine. A "MacBook Pro" without any fans would be repeating the same mistake for sure.
Since that headphone jack was removed, the iPhone 7 has sold well over 200 million units.
The iPhone 8 and X together will sell not even God knows how many more before the end of this year alone, and lo and behold, the Google Pixel 2 doesn't have a headphone jack either. (And whereas Apple has included a jack adapter for free in every box, just in case you want to use it, Google has the brass balls to charge you 20 fucking dollars for one.)
If you don't want to give up your headphone jack, then don't ditch your 6s. It's only about one year old. Personally, I just snapped the dongle that came with the 7 onto my headphones, and have stopped worrying about it. (Frankly I'm surprised the little thing hasn't broken, after a year of very heavy use.) The water resistance is worth the very minor hassle.
"It just works." -> "It just doesn't really work _for_me_ any more."
I suspect you've been around the computer industry at least as long as I have. If so, that makes you a power user who has a very well-established set of tastes for the way things should behave.
You and I have not been the target market for Apple for about ten years now. Basically ever since the iPhone came out and Apple realized that it was a digital appliance company and Steve dropped the " Computer" off the name "Apple Computer". It wasn't a subtle move; he did it in front of the largest press event Apple hosted, directly following major product announcements.
For ten years Apple has been veering away from the customer base it always had. You and I have taken a journey, from VIP seats at the restaurant, with the ear of the maître d'... to a bench in the back alley next to the dumpster, waiting for scraps.
Or hey, let me put it in even stronger terms. We're the engineers working at the local mill. Apple used to love living in our modest home and folding our laundry exactly the way we like it. But then, on a whim, she took part in a variety show, and Ed Sullivan happened to be in town, and he put her on live TV for five minutes and she wore a killer dress and sang with an incredible voice and now, ten years later, we are a long distant memory, still punching the clock at the local mill, while Apple lives in Beverly Hills behind a very tall fence designed to keep her millions of ravenous fans at bay.
That is our situation.
You can call the current range of Apple products "disappointing in terms of actual usability", but that strikes me as the perspective of someone who is used to interacting with their machines a certain way to do certain things, and doesn't actually care about all the other zillion things people use their machines to do.
The Apple restaurant no longer cares about our tastes in food. The Apple girlfriend no longer cares about what we do at the steel mill. She's gone, man. We can watch her sing on TV and hopefully enjoy that and wish her well, and recognize that it doesn't matter that she can't fold laundry worth a damn any more, because her laundry days are done. But that's the extent of our involvement here.
Even a MILLION geeks, all screaming in unison about the headphone jack,... is irrelevant now. Last year Apple passed the one BILLION mark for iPhones sold, before introducing the iPhone 7. Then, in the ensuing year, they sold A QUARTER BILLION MORE. Those devices are "working", for many people. It's senseless to even try arguing the other way. But are they working for us? For you and me?
Well, perhaps if we get docking stations. And if bluetooth audio quality stops sucking...
These devices are assumed to last forever, because they are allegedly "solid-state". Why, I have a television from the 60's that still works! Smartphones are the same thing; why don't they last 50 years?
Answer: Solid-state ain't really. Aside from the obvious cumulative physical damage from handling a small object constantly every day for years (something no other machines in our lives are subjected to except wristwatches and motor vehicles,) smartphones suffer from an internal degradation of their thermal handling. Put simply, they get worse at transmitting waste heat away from the things that make it, primarily the CPU and GPU.
In a laptop, the culprit in this effect is usually thermal paste. It just flakes away, and a machine that used to run beautifully five years ago now has Main Fan Turn On syndrome all the time, even sitting "idle". What's changed? Supposedly just the software. So, people blame the software. Even people who really, really should know better; people relied upon as experts by industry and family members alike. Many's the time a techie has wiped an old machine clean and installed old software only to discover that it still runs like crap, then shrugged their shoulders and moved on.
In a phone it's more likely to be microscopic fracturing of the heat piping and microscopic distortion of the circuit pathways, causing heat buildup, causing the chip to throttle down. This distortion has not been eliminated by the lower power usage of modern chips, it's only been counterbalanced, if that, because of reductions in pathway size. (The Apple A8 CPU that powers the iPhone 6 was produced using a 20nm process. For comparison, the first Intel Pentium P5's released in 1992 were made with an 800 nanometer process. Remember, that's not just a 40x smaller chip, that's a 40x reduction along each axis, making a chip with _1600_times_ more circuitry in the same area.) Then that phone is wedged into a pocket and dropped and kicked around. For an iPhone 6, that's 3 years of kicking around since it was released. It's no surprise that some people are seeing slowdowns. What should be surprising is test results like above: Tested across a range of devices, the slowdowns disappear. These devices are holding up remarkably well.
That leaves software. Specifically, since these benchmarks still run on the frameworks that comprise the OS, that leaves _application_software_.
In May of 2013, the Facebook app took up 32MB. Now it weighs in at 382MB, over _ten_times_ that. Snapchat was 4MB around that time. Now it is 212MB. Is this Apple's fault? Do you think there is a secret email chain from Apple management to these companies, ordering them to add more API calls and screen art to deliberately obsolete old devices? No. Apple actually works fairly hard to optimize for old hardware, and has done so for years, especially after the internal uproar over what happened when they released a poorly optimized iOS upgrade onto the iPhone 3GS. Their internal "dog food" users were outraged, and management was forced to take heed.
Meanwhile, find me a four-year-old Android device that can take an upgrade to the latest OS. Find me _ONE_. No need to optimize for old hardware when you just straight-up don't acknowledge it exists at all, aye?
You are seeing the result of: * me typing a comment on an iPhone 8 running iOS 11, * realizing I need to log in to Slashdot, * copying the comment text to the clipboard because logging in to Slashdot on a mobile device dumps you onto the home page and the back arrow in Mobile Safari trashes your comment form, * logging in (with the above result), * locating the form again and pasting in my comment text from the clipboard, * submitting the form.
Any guesses on whether the resulting un-editable shit sandwich was Slashdot's fault, or iOS 11's fault?
Describe to me the exact year you refer to, when macs didnâ(TM)t need additional software?
I mean,... itâ(TM)s an operating system, not a tardis.
Remember when OS X first came out and no one could print anything?
Or all those years when âoeTextEditâ was your best option, until you installed Word?
Or all those years when OS X did not ship with a web browser, and step 1 post-install was to download Camino, Firefox, or Internet Explorer?
Should OS X still come bundled with a custom-built Java? A custom build of X11? With 5 gigs of dev tools on an extra DVD? Now those are all things you download later, if you decide you want them.
Perhaps youâ(TM)re confusing your memories of OS X and your memories of the Galaga machine in the pizza parlor...
but there's this free application called VLC for the mac that'll play all kinds of video formats, and if you hit command-F it goes full screen, and stays full screen if you tab over to, like TextEdit, and edit a note. The note window just appears over the video like you'd expect.
I hope you haven't been doing without this for too long!!
Apple has not changed a damn thing about the way they identify, develop, advertise, and ship new products, in about 15 years. They have, however, moved on to different targets (no more "I'm a mac" ads required these days) and increased in scale massively.
For example, they are now shipping FOUR distinct OSes (macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS) each with its own set of development tools and growing legacy of hardware, running entire suites of applications that intercommunicate very deeply with each other across each platform and the internet. The fact that very few pundits even acknowledge this quadrupling of their output is telling. Instead, they get all sarcastic about notches on phones that haven't shipped yet, as though they are now masters of design, and make the usual fashionable declarations about how Apple isn't the same Apple it was three years ago, or five, or eight, or when Big Steve was around, or in the 80's, or whatever.
Some people say Apple is successful only because of their fashionable marketing. You know what's fashionable marketing -- what never gets old? Loudly declaring that Apple is finally on the decline, or has been for years despite absolutely sky-high profits. And letting the ad impressions and the comments roll in, because hey, maybe THIS time, maybe we'll be right. And maybe THIS time congress will repeal Obamacare. And maybe THIS time, when we toss the poodle out the window, it'll fly.
Apple is less concerned with connecting your phone and laptop together, than it is with giving you a cable that will connect to the vast, vast majority of charging ports available in the rest of the world.
These days (for better or worse) you are not expected to ever need to tether your phone to your laptop. You get music from Apple Music, apps from the store on the phone, and photos and backups go through iCloud.
I disagree with this new paradigm and it looks like you do too. I have many gigabytes of music in playlists on the desktop, for example. Syncing that over wifi would be a pain. But you and I are in the minority.
That said, no reason why Apple wouldn't include TWO cables, or a cable with an adapter...
All previous iPhones have been able to pull ~10 watts out of a USB port by looking for a proprietary signal from Apple-brand chargers. (A "voltage cascade" on pins 2 and 3, a.k.a the USB data pins.)
With that signal, the iPhone draws 2 amps (at 5v) out of the connected USB port. Without that signal, the iPhone assumes it's a USB port from some other vendor, and uses the standard USB power negotiation signals to ask for the maximum power available from the port (usually 1 amp).
This "voltage cascade" signal is trivial to recreate in any USB wiring setup by adding two resistors. Put those in, and you signal to any Apple device that your port can supply 2 amps without problems. Many, many manufacturers have sold USB devices with "fast charging" ports containing these resistors over the last ~10 years, from USB hubs to USB ports on laptops to USB chargers that go in cars to USB charging stations at airports, et cetera. They've become so common that there's now confusion over exactly who came up with the voltage cascade signal idea.
Now that the USB spec has given us a good standard for supplying lots of power at lots of voltages, the earlier fast-charging signal can (very slowly) be phased out.
Any charging brick that supports the USB PD 2.0 usb power delivery standard will charge a MacBook, new MacBook Pro, or iPhone 8. You don't need to buy a brick from Apple for this.
The only detail to consider is the maximum wattage the brick can put out. That's why Apple sells a larger brick for the MacBook Pro.
Any brick - from any vendor - that can fast-charge a MacBook will fast-charge the iPhone 8 as well. The one I use is the Anker PowerPort+, but there are a number of others.
Your audiophiles with their setups are listening in a pristine environment and have trained their ears on hundreds of repeated listens to the same tracks to detect subtle variations in that
A. Do not represent "quality", but only difference from their own setup, which they assume is of the highest quality. B. Simply do not matter in a typical listening environment.
The DAC in the iPhone dongle is good enough to drive a pair of Sennheiser HD 650s at high volume, converting from 48khz 24-bit lossless. Stick your audiophile friends in some random room and give them a double-blind test with those same headphones on their own amp and they WILL FAIL IT HALF THE TIME. I absolutely, 100-percent, GUARANTEE IT.
Here's a nice collection of similar studies done over the years: https://www.head-fi.org/thread... Your "musician friends" are just messing with you.
You're not getting it. The _whole_point_ is to only enter the house when there is no one home. Contrary to what Hollywood feeds you, burglars have zero interest in dealing with hostages or committing murder. They want easily shiftable goods, not an armed confrontation and a bloody mess followed by huge police scrutiny.
Convoluted technical means to get your internet devices to "open the back door" are not the go-to tactic for any burglar. Nor will they be.
The go-to tactic is to kick your door really hard or break a window, then retreat. This is a basic test for a real security system - with window switches, motion sensors, a battery, a failsafe, and a separate cellular connection. Getting Alexa or whatever to "open the back door" would only act as another test for this, and actually be _harder_.
If the cops don't show up within half an hour, they enter again some other time, and grab whatever looks good. (Ideally after finding the electrical service panel on the exterior of your house and flipping it, shutting off your geeky aftermarket recording setup.)
So. Get a real security system, and/or a large dog, and/or a housemate who's always home. Do whatever you like with Alexa.
The knowledge that you make gears for $1 each, and buy springs for $2 each, may be useless. The knowledge that there are 50,000 people like you, may also be useless.
But, add the knowledge that there are 50,000 other people making springs for $1 each and paying $2 for gears, and now you can place a bunch of orders, make a deal with a shipping company, sell gears and springs for $1.75 each, and make approximately $70,000 from one round of sales... And you've saved everyone 25 cents and given the shipping company more business.
All you had was information - and all you did was make some calls. Aggregate information, ESPECIALLY when it's exclusive, can be translated almost directly into money. Just takes some lateral thinking. Knowledge of what people do, think, want, and feel, is not just another way to find new ways to profit. It is THE ONLY WAY that there has EVER BEEN to find new ways to profit. The more concentrated that knowledge becomes, the more concentrated opportunity and profit becomes. It's a pretty direct correlation.
Right now as I type this, an iPod Classic is playing next to me, hooked to portable speakers. Inside it is a 3rd party board with two SDXC slots, each containing a 512GB card. The board treats them as JBOD volumes and concatenates them automatically into one for the iPod, which - while still running the original Apple firmware - now holds 960GB of audio.
In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done. If it gets smashed or dunked in a lake, the SDXC cards can be recovered and put into another iPod.
I used to have a 300 CD carousel made by Sony. It was the size of a pizza oven, and switching between CDs took ages. Now those CDs are all ripped into ALAC and sitting on the iPod. Same with all my audiobooks, and an enormous backlog of podcasts, because why not? I've got room...
That leaves about 300GB, which I have stuffed with backups, since the iPod makes a decent external drive.
Added bonus: It's so old, no one tries to steal it!!
Who needs lossy cloud music, that vanishes the instant you travel out of cellular range? The iPod is still the one essential music listening tool for me. Long may it survive, until third party battery suppliers all lose interest and the warehouses run dry.
Either way - big camera or smartphone - you are putting up an almost literal wall of separation between yourself and your friends, when you raise an object between yourself and them, and especially when you ask them to move around and get in the frame.
The big camera has two advantages that can mitigate this:
1. If you leave it in stand-by, a decent dslr can go from power-on to FOCUSED and taking the photo you want in less than a second, and often with a fraction of the exposure time in a low-light situation. You can raise it, compose, snap the photo, and lower the camera almost before anyone has time to react.
2. You can stand 35 FEET AWAY and do the same thing.:D
Slashdot Mirror
You want a removable battery because ... why?
Battery-pack cases, and spare waterproof battery-pack chargers, are rampant. You're afraid the battery will "wear out" before your phone does?
Well, a USB-C port was first placed on a smartphone only two years ago. Your desired connector standard is so new that any phone you bought supporting it has not had a proper chance to "wear out" its battery, and half of those phones are still under warranty.
And yet, this port standard is a deal breaker for you now that it's around?
Perhaps you need to admit that you are just as susceptible to the fast pace of innovation in the smartphone world as all the other people you scoff at. Perhaps those people you think are acting based on "marketing" have their own list of must-have features that is just as arbitrary as your own.
Is that stubbornness in a bad way, or a good way?
Because I dunno about you, but I am really grooving on the fact that I am typing this on a two pound MacBook that will remain absolutely silent, even while it's still fast enough to edit HD video in Final Cut Pro...
I think his real mistake back then was to attempt to please CPU-hungry users and quiet-hungry users with the same machine. A "MacBook Pro" without any fans would be repeating the same mistake for sure.
Sure. All you need to do is travel to an alternate dimension where Mr. Cook was actually wrong about the headphone jack.
Since that headphone jack was removed, the iPhone 7 has sold well over 200 million units.
The iPhone 8 and X together will sell not even God knows how many more before the end of this year alone, and lo and behold, the Google Pixel 2 doesn't have a headphone jack either. (And whereas Apple has included a jack adapter for free in every box, just in case you want to use it, Google has the brass balls to charge you 20 fucking dollars for one.)
If you don't want to give up your headphone jack, then don't ditch your 6s. It's only about one year old. Personally, I just snapped the dongle that came with the 7 onto my headphones, and have stopped worrying about it. (Frankly I'm surprised the little thing hasn't broken, after a year of very heavy use.) The water resistance is worth the very minor hassle.
"It just works." -> "It just doesn't really work _for_me_ any more."
I suspect you've been around the computer industry at least as long as I have. If so, that makes you a power user who has a very well-established set of tastes for the way things should behave.
You and I have not been the target market for Apple for about ten years now. Basically ever since the iPhone came out and Apple realized that it was a digital appliance company and Steve dropped the " Computer" off the name "Apple Computer". It wasn't a subtle move; he did it in front of the largest press event Apple hosted, directly following major product announcements.
For ten years Apple has been veering away from the customer base it always had. You and I have taken a journey, from VIP seats at the restaurant, with the ear of the maître d' ... to a bench in the back alley next to the dumpster, waiting for scraps.
Or hey, let me put it in even stronger terms. We're the engineers working at the local mill. Apple used to love living in our modest home and folding our laundry exactly the way we like it. But then, on a whim, she took part in a variety show, and Ed Sullivan happened to be in town, and he put her on live TV for five minutes and she wore a killer dress and sang with an incredible voice and now, ten years later, we are a long distant memory, still punching the clock at the local mill, while Apple lives in Beverly Hills behind a very tall fence designed to keep her millions of ravenous fans at bay.
That is our situation.
You can call the current range of Apple products "disappointing in terms of actual usability", but that strikes me as the perspective of someone who is used to interacting with their machines a certain way to do certain things, and doesn't actually care about all the other zillion things people use their machines to do.
The Apple restaurant no longer cares about our tastes in food. The Apple girlfriend no longer cares about what we do at the steel mill. She's gone, man. We can watch her sing on TV and hopefully enjoy that and wish her well, and recognize that it doesn't matter that she can't fold laundry worth a damn any more, because her laundry days are done. But that's the extent of our involvement here.
Even a MILLION geeks, all screaming in unison about the headphone jack, ... is irrelevant now. Last year Apple passed the one BILLION mark for iPhones sold, before introducing the iPhone 7. Then, in the ensuing year, they sold A QUARTER BILLION MORE. Those devices are "working", for many people. It's senseless to even try arguing the other way. But are they working for us? For you and me?
Well, perhaps if we get docking stations. And if bluetooth audio quality stops sucking...
Relatinship != friendship. Just ask any brothel madam.
These devices are assumed to last forever, because they are allegedly "solid-state". Why, I have a television from the 60's that still works! Smartphones are the same thing; why don't they last 50 years?
Answer: Solid-state ain't really. Aside from the obvious cumulative physical damage from handling a small object constantly every day for years (something no other machines in our lives are subjected to except wristwatches and motor vehicles,) smartphones suffer from an internal degradation of their thermal handling. Put simply, they get worse at transmitting waste heat away from the things that make it, primarily the CPU and GPU.
In a laptop, the culprit in this effect is usually thermal paste. It just flakes away, and a machine that used to run beautifully five years ago now has Main Fan Turn On syndrome all the time, even sitting "idle". What's changed? Supposedly just the software. So, people blame the software. Even people who really, really should know better; people relied upon as experts by industry and family members alike. Many's the time a techie has wiped an old machine clean and installed old software only to discover that it still runs like crap, then shrugged their shoulders and moved on.
In a phone it's more likely to be microscopic fracturing of the heat piping and microscopic distortion of the circuit pathways, causing heat buildup, causing the chip to throttle down. This distortion has not been eliminated by the lower power usage of modern chips, it's only been counterbalanced, if that, because of reductions in pathway size. (The Apple A8 CPU that powers the iPhone 6 was produced using a 20nm process. For comparison, the first Intel Pentium P5's released in 1992 were made with an 800 nanometer process. Remember, that's not just a 40x smaller chip, that's a 40x reduction along each axis, making a chip with _1600_times_ more circuitry in the same area.) Then that phone is wedged into a pocket and dropped and kicked around. For an iPhone 6, that's 3 years of kicking around since it was released. It's no surprise that some people are seeing slowdowns. What should be surprising is test results like above: Tested across a range of devices, the slowdowns disappear. These devices are holding up remarkably well.
That leaves software. Specifically, since these benchmarks still run on the frameworks that comprise the OS, that leaves _application_software_.
In May of 2013, the Facebook app took up 32MB. Now it weighs in at 382MB, over _ten_times_ that. Snapchat was 4MB around that time. Now it is 212MB. Is this Apple's fault? Do you think there is a secret email chain from Apple management to these companies, ordering them to add more API calls and screen art to deliberately obsolete old devices? No. Apple actually works fairly hard to optimize for old hardware, and has done so for years, especially after the internal uproar over what happened when they released a poorly optimized iOS upgrade onto the iPhone 3GS. Their internal "dog food" users were outraged, and management was forced to take heed.
Meanwhile, find me a four-year-old Android device that can take an upgrade to the latest OS. Find me _ONE_. No need to optimize for old hardware when you just straight-up don't acknowledge it exists at all, aye?
You are seeing the result of:
* me typing a comment on an iPhone 8 running iOS 11,
* realizing I need to log in to Slashdot,
* copying the comment text to the clipboard because logging in to Slashdot on a mobile device dumps you onto the home page and the back arrow in Mobile Safari trashes your comment form,
* logging in (with the above result),
* locating the form again and pasting in my comment text from the clipboard,
* submitting the form.
Any guesses on whether the resulting un-editable shit sandwich was Slashdot's fault, or iOS 11's fault?
Careful picking that cherry; it's so far up on the tree that your ladder might snap!
Describe to me the exact year you refer to, when macs didnâ(TM)t need additional software?
I mean, ... itâ(TM)s an operating system, not a tardis.
Remember when OS X first came out and no one could print anything?
Or all those years when âoeTextEditâ was your best option, until you installed Word?
Or all those years when OS X did not ship with a web browser, and step 1 post-install was to download Camino, Firefox, or Internet Explorer?
Should OS X still come bundled with a custom-built Java? A custom build of X11? With 5 gigs of dev tools on an extra DVD? Now those are all things you download later, if you decide you want them.
Perhaps youâ(TM)re confusing your memories of OS X and your memories of the Galaga machine in the pizza parlor...
Four billion years of evolution politely disagrees with you.
Um, hey, not to burst your bubble,
but there's this free application called VLC for the mac that'll play all kinds of video formats, and if you hit command-F it goes full screen, and stays full screen if you tab over to, like TextEdit, and edit a note. The note window just appears over the video like you'd expect.
I hope you haven't been doing without this for too long!!
Apple has not changed a damn thing about the way they identify, develop, advertise, and ship new products, in about 15 years. They have, however, moved on to different targets (no more "I'm a mac" ads required these days) and increased in scale massively.
For example, they are now shipping FOUR distinct OSes (macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS) each with its own set of development tools and growing legacy of hardware, running entire suites of applications that intercommunicate very deeply with each other across each platform and the internet. The fact that very few pundits even acknowledge this quadrupling of their output is telling. Instead, they get all sarcastic about notches on phones that haven't shipped yet, as though they are now masters of design, and make the usual fashionable declarations about how Apple isn't the same Apple it was three years ago, or five, or eight, or when Big Steve was around, or in the 80's, or whatever.
Some people say Apple is successful only because of their fashionable marketing. You know what's fashionable marketing -- what never gets old? Loudly declaring that Apple is finally on the decline, or has been for years despite absolutely sky-high profits. And letting the ad impressions and the comments roll in, because hey, maybe THIS time, maybe we'll be right. And maybe THIS time congress will repeal Obamacare. And maybe THIS time, when we toss the poodle out the window, it'll fly.
Apple is less concerned with connecting your phone and laptop together, than it is with giving you a cable that will connect to the vast, vast majority of charging ports available in the rest of the world.
These days (for better or worse) you are not expected to ever need to tether your phone to your laptop. You get music from Apple Music, apps from the store on the phone, and photos and backups go through iCloud.
I disagree with this new paradigm and it looks like you do too. I have many gigabytes of music in playlists on the desktop, for example. Syncing that over wifi would be a pain. But you and I are in the minority.
That said, no reason why Apple wouldn't include TWO cables, or a cable with an adapter...
All previous iPhones have been able to pull ~10 watts out of a USB port by looking for a proprietary signal from Apple-brand chargers. (A "voltage cascade" on pins 2 and 3, a.k.a the USB data pins.)
With that signal, the iPhone draws 2 amps (at 5v) out of the connected USB port. Without that signal, the iPhone assumes it's a USB port from some other vendor, and uses the standard USB power negotiation signals to ask for the maximum power available from the port (usually 1 amp).
This "voltage cascade" signal is trivial to recreate in any USB wiring setup by adding two resistors. Put those in, and you signal to any Apple device that your port can supply 2 amps without problems. Many, many manufacturers have sold USB devices with "fast charging" ports containing these resistors over the last ~10 years, from USB hubs to USB ports on laptops to USB chargers that go in cars to USB charging stations at airports, et cetera. They've become so common that there's now confusion over exactly who came up with the voltage cascade signal idea.
Now that the USB spec has given us a good standard for supplying lots of power at lots of voltages, the earlier fast-charging signal can (very slowly) be phased out.
Any charging brick that supports the USB PD 2.0 usb power delivery standard will charge a MacBook, new MacBook Pro, or iPhone 8. You don't need to buy a brick from Apple for this.
The only detail to consider is the maximum wattage the brick can put out. That's why Apple sells a larger brick for the MacBook Pro.
Any brick - from any vendor - that can fast-charge a MacBook will fast-charge the iPhone 8 as well. The one I use is the Anker PowerPort+, but there are a number of others.
What is "flagrant", is your grasp of language.
Your audiophiles with their setups are listening in a pristine environment and have trained their ears on hundreds of repeated listens to the same tracks to detect subtle variations in that
A. Do not represent "quality", but only difference from their own setup, which they assume is of the highest quality.
B. Simply do not matter in a typical listening environment.
The DAC in the iPhone dongle is good enough to drive a pair of Sennheiser HD 650s at high volume, converting from 48khz 24-bit lossless. Stick your audiophile friends in some random room and give them a double-blind test with those same headphones on their own amp and they WILL FAIL IT HALF THE TIME. I absolutely, 100-percent, GUARANTEE IT.
Here's a nice collection of similar studies done over the years:
https://www.head-fi.org/thread...
Your "musician friends" are just messing with you.
You're not getting it. The _whole_point_ is to only enter the house when there is no one home. Contrary to what Hollywood feeds you, burglars have zero interest in dealing with hostages or committing murder. They want easily shiftable goods, not an armed confrontation and a bloody mess followed by huge police scrutiny.
Convoluted technical means to get your internet devices to "open the back door" are not the go-to tactic for any burglar. Nor will they be.
The go-to tactic is to kick your door really hard or break a window, then retreat. This is a basic test for a real security system - with window switches, motion sensors, a battery, a failsafe, and a separate cellular connection. Getting Alexa or whatever to "open the back door" would only act as another test for this, and actually be _harder_.
If the cops don't show up within half an hour, they enter again some other time, and grab whatever looks good. (Ideally after finding the electrical service panel on the exterior of your house and flipping it, shutting off your geeky aftermarket recording setup.)
So. Get a real security system, and/or a large dog, and/or a housemate who's always home. Do whatever you like with Alexa.
Taking out the headphone jack was nothing compared to the sheer guts required for making this mandatory and automatic.
The power of this information is in aggregate.
The knowledge that you make gears for $1 each, and buy springs for $2 each, may be useless.
The knowledge that there are 50,000 people like you, may also be useless.
But, add the knowledge that there are 50,000 other people making springs for $1 each and paying $2 for gears, and now you can place a bunch of orders, make a deal with a shipping company, sell gears and springs for $1.75 each, and make approximately $70,000 from one round of sales... And you've saved everyone 25 cents and given the shipping company more business.
All you had was information - and all you did was make some calls.
Aggregate information, ESPECIALLY when it's exclusive, can be translated almost directly into money. Just takes some lateral thinking.
Knowledge of what people do, think, want, and feel, is not just another way to find new ways to profit. It is THE ONLY WAY that there has EVER BEEN to find new ways to profit. The more concentrated that knowledge becomes, the more concentrated opportunity and profit becomes. It's a pretty direct correlation.
Right now as I type this, an iPod Classic is playing next to me, hooked to portable speakers. Inside it is a 3rd party board with two SDXC slots, each containing a 512GB card. The board treats them as JBOD volumes and concatenates them automatically into one for the iPod, which - while still running the original Apple firmware - now holds 960GB of audio.
In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done. If it gets smashed or dunked in a lake, the SDXC cards can be recovered and put into another iPod.
I used to have a 300 CD carousel made by Sony. It was the size of a pizza oven, and switching between CDs took ages. Now those CDs are all ripped into ALAC and sitting on the iPod. Same with all my audiobooks, and an enormous backlog of podcasts, because why not? I've got room...
That leaves about 300GB, which I have stuffed with backups, since the iPod makes a decent external drive.
Added bonus: It's so old, no one tries to steal it!!
Who needs lossy cloud music, that vanishes the instant you travel out of cellular range? The iPod is still the one essential music listening tool for me. Long may it survive, until third party battery suppliers all lose interest and the warehouses run dry.
Well next time try asking.
Or was the point to just air your opinion??????
Man, you're just another trend-chaser. My sundial hasn't needed a charge since 7600 BC.
And it never lights up in the middle of the night destroying my night vision.
Either way - big camera or smartphone - you are putting up an almost literal wall of separation between yourself and your friends, when you raise an object between yourself and them, and especially when you ask them to move around and get in the frame.
The big camera has two advantages that can mitigate this:
1. If you leave it in stand-by, a decent dslr can go from power-on to FOCUSED and taking the photo you want in less than a second, and often with a fraction of the exposure time in a low-light situation. You can raise it, compose, snap the photo, and lower the camera almost before anyone has time to react.
2. You can stand 35 FEET AWAY and do the same thing. :D