Be Excellent To Each Other

Good point. I do this too.

It's a very good point that if the technology has been around forever, then it probably works just fine.

This is reminding me of the uproar when the GBA SP came out and ditched the headphone socket. You could buy adaptors but I don't think it plugged into the charging port, but I could be wrong. It didn't matter anyway as the GBA SP battery lasted for years on a single charge.

Glad the 7 is out.

I can look at swapping my 5s for a 6(something) now.

Excellently, I get to say:

No headphone jack? Big deal, there was no headphone jack on my G1 back in 2008!

That's not true; cameras are a key use case and are still getting better every year.

Not sure how much this matters to most people. The cameras have been "good enough" generally for quite a while.

I agree with tbis

But have slowed in terms of meaningful improvement.

Good point... When was the last time you heard someone say that the camera on their phone was rubbish?

I haven't done that since I had an HTC phone I think... and that was years ago.

I only ever want a new phone when the one I have starts pissing me off/breaks. Really can't understand getting excited about them any more. But plenty of people are obsessed with the things and not nerdy/IT types but actual, normal people. It's not that uncommon for someone to ask what phone you've got and then to start wittering on about when their contract's up and what they're getting next.

Grown adults try to out-phone each other in the way kids used to try and out-trainer each other when I was 15.

You need a little button where you can pump up your phone.

Would make it more floaty.

Good point on plugging the phone into other appliances, such as stereos and cars. I assume there's an iPhone to aux lead that'll be available, right? Or is the Apple solution to buy a new car?

An adapter comes with the phone. (for now, at least)

New iphone costs more than what i paid for my car!

The all-new iCar.

A couple of years ago there were a lot of bad ones around, I had a couple that just stopped working after a week. Then I had a women in our sales force who had an issue where her "generic" charger caught fire in the car. Her young daughter and an ice cream were involved as well so I never got to the bottom of it

So I had to issue an email telling 100 people to chuck out any generic kit and go and buy Apple stuff.

So until a couple of months ago I was all apple cables etc, then I put in 8 or so new sockets with USB in the house and want to have cables in them all the time for convenience, so I took a punt on a cheap pack of 6 from Ebay, the seller has shifted 1000 of them so figured they must be ok.

They have been great, so not sure if the Chinese or whoever can rip these off with DRM or if Apple license them to people??

There's a converter, but if you're on a long journey you're not using the lead and charging your phone at the same time, which is a completely standard use case.

The iCar already kinda exists with the Apple Car integration systems.

edit: CarPlay

http://www.apple.com/uk/ios/carplay/

My car has been using Lightning-USB input for audio since November 2014. I don't see why Apple should accommodate losers with crap cars.

I have Aux for input in my pre 2014 car

But the stero\sat nav has a 30GB HD and also I can put 32GB SD cards it, so thats really all the music you would ever need

Ha ha. Shuffling music around onto memory cards like some sort of a fucking caveman.

You're using a cable? That's like a baby's toy.

AE approves.

Working together for a cable free world.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ?CMP=fb_gu


Looks like some options, to charge and listen to music, not elegant though.

Seems to be the way apple likes to do things now. One port in a device? They try to make it look elegant, seamless, whatever - and not really care about the fact you'll need adapters and whatever to actually do anything, utterly ruining the effect.

I am amazed that they didn't put a second lightning port on the head of the charger, or at least offer that as an accessory. That would fix a lot of the problem of only having one port, although obviously not having 3.5mm support is still a loss.

Belkin have this, but a charging cable rather than an adapter to use with your charging cable would be preferable.

Edit: Oh right the Belkin one was linked above. That Lightning dock looks like it would break very easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGCv7Q41C8

Quite funny and true in places!

There's an article in today's FT that Apple are in talks to buy or take a significant stake in McLaren

McLaren have publicly denied it which according to general rules for listed companies should mean it's absolutely untrue.

Have they? I read that Dennis had said that Apple weren't going to invest...

Meaning the Apple rumour is untrue.

Under general takeover code rules a company that would be a material investment (or the investor) can't make any public statement that is untrue.

Mrs Hearthly's birthday is coming up and I've decided on getting her a new tablet, she's currently on an original iPad Air and I was really rather hoping the Air 3 would be out by now, but Apple's latest offering remains the antiquated Air 2. I appreciate the 9 inch Pro is an option but that costs, like, a million pounds for something that's largely just a 9 inch iPad. (And the 'Pro' stuff would be of no real use to Mrs H. I don't begrudge the cost of the Pro it's just not delivering anything worthwhile beyond a normal iPad.)

Then again things don't exactly seem to be thrilling in the Android sector, with the Pixel C still apparently the preferred high-end tablet. (Complete with the same AWESOME GRAPHICS POWER that you get in a £150 Nvidia Shield.)

In many regards her iPad Air is still fine, although the 16GB storage is dreadfully limited now she can sort of work around it. However Hearthly Jnr's old iPad 2 is pretty much end of life now, so the idea is the iPad 2 will finally be allowed to retire, Jnr will get the iPad Air, and then Mrs Hearthly will get the new tablet.

I'll probably just get her an iPad Air 2, despite the fact that Apple will most likely announce their next tablet about 4 days later. I do note they have finally ditched the 16GB option so 32GB is now the baseline, but there's no 64GB option, so it's 32GB or 128GB.

A move to Android would be feasible and in some regards desirable, as she's been Android on her phone now for a while, so is split between the two ecosystems, but I guess they can continue to co-exist.

If you're after something light, the Sammy Galaxy Tab S2 is a very good piece of kit.

It probably won't set on fire.

Probably....

Enut with a lithium battery can be verily combustible. Impressively so.

Happy 30k DavPaz!

I didn't notice! My 30kth post was about Dungeon Keeper.

I'm OK with that.

My wife got an Iphone 7 today so I was backing up the old one etc in Itunes

Whilst I was doing this the TV and Media Center (Kodi) where on.

When I was checking my wife's old phone for music I noticed an option to play music through the TV speakers via Kodi from the laptop

Worked a treat quite cool, although I doubt I'll use it again as Itunes is used once or twice a year by me

Surprised no one's mentioned this in here yet - Apple has hiked MacBook and iMac prices by 20%
Telegraph Article

Given how crappy the USD exchange rate is at the mo, that's not a great surprise, and we aren't paying over the odds compared to the US.

From that article "The low-cost 13-inch MacBook Pro, without the Touch Bar, will cost Apple's British customers £1,449, including sales tax. In the US meanwhile the laptop starts at $1,499 (£1,232) before tax."

Add 20% VAT to their price and ours is cheaper.

I'm not surprised by the move - if anything I'm just surprised they didn't include the iPhone and iPad in the increase.
I do keep forgetting how horribly low the pound is now compared to the start of the year, though.

The iPhone went up with the release of the 7, so I expect iPads willl do the same at the next update.
The Air 2 has been around for ages now so they probably felt they couldn't charge more for a 2 year old model.

Speaking of iPad Air 2s I got one from Currys for Mrs H's birthday. Apple only do the 32 and 128GB models now, whereas Currys still had a 64GB model in stock (I guess the 64GB has been discontinued by Apple so this was old stock Currys had hanging around?).

Anyway, the 32GB I feared might be a bit short on storage, and the 128GB was overkill, so the 64GB was perfect, and IIRC it only cost £30 more than the 32GB model at both Currys and on Apple's website.

But yes, Brexit price rises don't seem to have hit the Air 2 yet but as noted by DrZ it is very long in the tooth now.

Mrs H is very happy with it anyway, and Jnr is also chuffed as the original Air 1 is hers now.

Oh yes and how fucking much for those Apple smart cover things? £79.99! For a fucking cover!

Currys often do very good prices on recently discontinued Apple products. I got a 128gb iPad Mini 2 for about £50 less than the new-at-the-time 16gb Mini 3, and the only functional difference was the Touch ID sensor on the 3. I didn't really need all that space, but it was rude not to.

Moral question, comrades.

Is an (functional) iMac without a screen, still an iMac?

Hmmm...

That looks funky...

Better than it did before I took the screen out. Broken backlight.

I would keep it like that.