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.

Looks awesome! 7 boards too, which I think ties for most ever?

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.

But those end up being the same in practice. If you have to put up a disclaimer that the info might be wrong, then who would use it? I can get the wrong answer or unverified heresay anywhere. The whole point of contacting the company is to get the right answer; or at least one the company is forced to stick to.

This isn’t just minor AI growing pains, this is a fundamental problem with the technology that causes it to essentially be useless for the use case of “answering questions”.

They can slap as many disclaimers as they want on this shit; but if it just hallucinates policies and incorrect answers it will just end up being one more thing people hammer 0 to skip past or scroll past to talk to a human or find the right answer.

AliExpress isn’t the problem here. This is fake Shopify sites spun up and down in a matter of days that only exist to harvest info and payment. I’ve placed dozens of AliExpress orders, I always get what I ordered even from new stores.

You don’t need to cut up your credit cards, never go to a bar or never visit a casino to curb your spending, drinking or gambling addictions either.

But is it hard to understand why people choose to? Not really. This is the same thing.

The bar and Tinder are not the exclusive domain of hookups. I met my partner of 5 years on bumble, my friend met his wife on Tinder.

I think the advice others are giving is true to some extent, work on yourself and good things will come, but for most people you also have to go the extra mile and put yourself out there.

Put yourself on the apps. Go to clubs, leagues, meetups, socials, events, parties etc. In general, say yes instead of no and talk to people instead of not. If something starts to develop you can give out those vibes that you’re looking for something more serious, and people will self-select.

Yep. I used to upgrade my iPhone every year just because smartphones were moving fast in the 2010-2020 era. Now, I’m on a three year cycle and barely even notice.

I’ve resold every iPhone I’ve ever owned for 50% of the value or more, and I manage a fleet of iPhones for my job and we still have 5Ses in the wild for people. Apple still provides critical security updates for those devices and we’re at 11 years for those devices. Most people have 7 year old iPhone X era devices and I get almost no complaints or dead devices.

iPhones have ridiculous longevity and hold resale value better than any other device.

No it doesn’t require it but it can make it easier. Especially for people that don’t have a robust and centralized way of controlling their smart devices, or only have 1-2 of them. I think the appeal is still obvious.

The switch part will still work. How are you not getting this?

The appeal is remote and centralized management, easier programming and more features. If that’s not worth it to you to replace your thermostat every 16 years, then nobody is forcing you to get one.

But being able to change the temp from my phone from anywhere is worth it to me, as well as including it with other automations for all my connected devices. The appeal is honestly not hard to see, even if it’s not worth it for you personally.

Matter’s biggest problem is that it launched behind everything else. You’re already starting to see a lot of support for it just because it allows companies to support Apple Home without implementing the whole HomeKit stack & pay the licensing fees to Apple. SwitchBot, Hue and IKEA already have Matter support in their hubs in beta.

But it won’t be relevant to non-Apple users until Thread radios start being more pervasive and the spec reaches v2 and supports more stuff. Then most devices will be Matter, because a company can support all 3 major vendor apps with one standard. Right now it’s:

• Amazon/Google - most low end devices or devices made by those companies
• Apple Home - devices specifically for homekit
• Amazon/Google/Apple Home - devices for all 3
• Amazon/Google/Matter - devices for all 3 that use Matter to support Apple Home

Some will still go those routes, but eventually it will just make sense to support Matter and do away with all of those separate devices and support paths.

I think the analogy is faulty because none of what exists is any sort of standard. It’s just a bunch of proprietary vendor implementations. Matter is the first front end Smart Home standard.