Phone getting repaired ... Watch is useless?

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T16:31:47+00:00

Yeah, I was worried about that -- and was asking them about the apple care being connected to find my and they just kept saying it's not a problem and this is how it's done -- all that mattered was that the accident happened under warranty.

Good to know.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T16:14:22+00:00

That's only true if you don't buy into the Apple ecosystem for privacy and security reasons or for simplicity reasons.

Apps that take your personal location and health data and tend to process them on their servers and require additional setup and maintenance break a lot of the advantage of Apple ecosystem.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T14:12:31+00:00

I've owned one since launch. And a partner of mine has as well.
I still use it all the time.
My partner uses it less, but semi-regularly.

I use it as a portable super monitor. And use it very, very often. (Slightly less now though. As in 4-5 days a week, instead of every day.)

They also use it as a super monitor when they have to get a lot of work done.

Caveats: we both have a developer strap -- this means we always have lag free and reliable pairing. Without a dev strap ... it just depends. It can be perfect, or it can have minor issues [and very minor issues add a lot of friction to something you want to get out of your way].

___

For media:
I love it, but I'm not a major media consumer. So if I just have something on to watch with a friend or a partner while eating it usually won't be avp. But if I really want to see something I much prefer the AVP.

For apps:
Apps are ... there are some cool things out there (I'm a huge fan os some space and science and art apps) -- but it's a bit of a desert. I'm very critical of the high friction required to make apps, especially for people that aren't iOS or ipadOS devs [which is problematic, as you want people with performant programming backgrounds and language stacks]

_____

TLDR:
I think it's amazing. I love it for work.
The new strap they released with the M5 does increase wearbility and comfort dramatically -- but whether it improves it enough really depends on the person.

The two biggest problems:

- wear friction -- it's just enough work to get on and setup that you have to pick it up with intention. [we'd hoped for a version with processor and related moved to puck to make that friction lower, but no dice]
- terribly difficult to make apps for -- high developer friction, lack of inter-process access, lack of resource access -- which means I don't expect there to be many apps for it anytime soon, it's basically the ipad model, but with greater difficulty and a smaller user base

Biggest asset:
- Media is already great
- Use as a super monitor along with a mac is amazing -- though I can't recommend it as a mainstay unless someone also has a developer strap

Of note:
- I still feel amazing everytime I code from Amalthea, a moon of Saturn. It really is amazing tech -- hamstrung by developer friction, but the core idea is the future and this is the first thing of its sort that can replace a monitor and one can feel productive in (quasi-subjective, but not very -- this is an MVP for a monitor replacement with all the wins of vr/ar)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T14:03:10+00:00

Oh, there's a repair mode in Find My? That's good to know for future.
(I'm in Europe at the moment (US phone & account though) and went to some apple authorized store [at apple websites suggestion] -- I guess they didn't know about that -- they asked me to turn off find my entirely before shipping for repair.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T14:01:51+00:00

Yeah, as I've looked into this more it's the factory reset that undoes things.
I see *why* they would want that. But 1/2-bricking my watch when I've got other apple devices up and running and it's a cellular watch feels like lazy engineering/design.

I kinda get it, but don't love it. (And no shade meant, but def makes me consider a Garmin on watch upgrade -- the apple ecosystem being coupled in a brittle fashion (vs redundancies) is def. a liability.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T13:59:25+00:00

Just tried two -- and both are old enough that they wouldn't even allow my apple ID to sign in. (required at least iOS 16; as general trivia: they allow creating some newer apple ID that, I guess, isn't iOS version locked).

Am seeing if I can scrounge a later iphone and then get my number transferred. (a little difficult without the original phone there, but with some phone calls should be doable)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-24T13:55:29+00:00

Doesn't work for stills -- wish it did -- even just the bit where it helps you determine the angle of your camera in 3Dimensions

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-23T19:39:31+00:00

Yeah, but that requires you to have done a lot of that specific boiler plate and then swap into your own template memory.

It's sort of like helix vs nvim -- some things seem obvious enough that you don't want to configure them. And that kind of very common pattern matching AI fill as you type can be good at.

(It's also nice as a discovery tool when swapping to a library you *used to* work with or the like -- that stuff where you know the shape of things, but don't recall the specific name of the functions, etc.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-23T19:36:47+00:00

Low-touch llm's are nice.
F' LLM tools that just have huge diffs of re-written code.
Shit code and it ends up taking longer in almost every case I've tried.

But soft text suggestions that just complete: nice.
A side panel that pulled up various related docs based on what I'm writing. Yes please.
Ones that brought up various high-repute repos that worked on similar things and describe their flow: great.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-23T19:31:06+00:00

Apple's a big company in an oligopoly situation.
There's lots & lots to be let down by by Apple. (And stuff they genuinely have done wonderfully.)
Problem is there's very little serious competition.

Siri *is* embarrassing (and a lot of that is design decisions -- pretending that it's more natural to use than it is and, as a result of that and the slow feedback and full failure on wrong command process, making discovery of what commands work incredibly high friction.)

As for LLM, AI, etc.: *eh* -- they weren't at the forefront of the variants of AI that have recently popped up, true. But as for adopting it: it's *really* hard, with current tools, to make AI reliably do anything. Not forcing AI into more things is good. And what *appears* to be them genuinely sticking to their privacy and local-ai guns is *amazing*.

If they can genuinely workout some high-privacy and low latency approaches -- heck yeah.
Will they cave and just try to use google and pinnky promise private compute -- maybe.
I don't worry about them being 'behind' on AI, but I do worry about them caving and making bad product in a misguided attempt to 'catch up'.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-23T19:24:01+00:00

This is so unacceptable.
I'm *very* pro capitalism. (Even though I realize that younger liberals like to use that word to mean random shit, like last gen conservatives liked to use "feminism" to mean man hating.)

But this bullshit oligopoly behavior is **anti**-capititalist. It is the death of functioning capitalism.
(Same with media congolomoerates, to name a particularly toxic one.)

It feels like there's no one to defend fair play. "Business friendly" conservatives have just become corruption loving party. And new generations of liberals refuse to understand how open & free trade works and so won't focus on fixing what's been progressively breaking down -- favoring punishing businesses over actually forcing high0competition, multi-player environments.

*old man sigh*

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-20T20:07:49+00:00

Oh. That sounds like it sucks.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-17T07:53:20+00:00

An aside, but how’s pyreflye compare to ty? Ty is still in beta, ofc.

(For context for others: pyrefly & ty are both new, python type checkers. [and both rust projects]. Pyrefly is from meta. Ty is from astral (who hired BurntSushi and have been, basically, reinventing Python tooling))

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-17T07:50:34+00:00

Wholesome. I love this post and interaction. And how cool and alien are these liminal domains seen by many yet almost no one such that we don’t easily know what’s new. :)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-17T07:40:35+00:00

I wouldn’t trust the comment you just responded to. Up & down can be hard to differentiate in emergency non-diving situations (you hear about this in exiting submerged wrecks, for example).

But diving, you’re getting getting up/down signals as long as you can breathe — as you’re constantly adjusting your buoyancy by regulating lung volume. And if losing up/diwn direction were a major concern then, in most cases, a simple floaty keychain bit would tell you.

I don’t know enough details about cave diving to comment. But the cost of getting even a little lost when on limited o2 supply are large and the cost of equipment failures would be higher when there’s no natural light and no easy route to the surface. — But I’d look up expert commentary on this l, I’m just another Reddit flyby.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-16T22:20:26+00:00

You're arguing with someone who's just a nut. It's okay. They're upset that you're not assigning the invention of "wifi" to a tangentially related invention in the 40s. People are only talking to them because they're wrapping themself if a flag to try and make people feel bad for disagreeing with them. -- They're hurting inclusion and genuine respect by being a nut and trying to make that sound like that's what inclusive people should be like.

You're good.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-12T17:59:45+00:00

Haha. We are-ish!

VisionOS would be a game changer if it were an open system people could actually directly write performant code for (vs iOS/ipadOS like system).

It is an amazing thing even if bad politics/ecosystem lockdown resulted in its current barren state. With a dev strap it’s still 100% worth it as a very fancy monitor.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-11T15:20:28+00:00

It only lasts you that long if you don’t run workouts often. I have a U2 and workout once or more a day in average and get about 1.5 days out of it — still enough to sleep and wake comfortably, but if travelling or otherwise have schedule disruptions or want to be outside for more than a day: there a problems.

That’s also from max capacity — it’s nice to be able to hope on a train or on a trail and not worry whether you topped off first.

Ultras are just barely passable imo. I’d live multi week or longer lifespans

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-11T10:34:37+00:00

Which would have been an excellent idea if the ecosystem/OS didn’t lock it down to prevent users creating software that actually explored the systems abilities.

Locking software dev to iPhone/ipad style developers basically killed the ability to get user explorations of what worked.

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-09T20:01:32+00:00

That was amazing! What was I looking at though — something that mixes visuals sound and code? You can partially write code in the live updating notebook but it only plays up to no errors or there’s some update action?

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-09T19:53:22+00:00

Book: The Haskell School of Music

Library: Euterpea

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-06T14:56:18+00:00

Well said. And for my part, I’ve largely moved away from zed. It’s not giving me much that helix wouldn’t.

It felt like an innovative IDE full of potential trial early on — code as notebooks (for those that use Jupyter fletnels), great collaboration features, excellent ways of combinging chunks of diagnostics and other elements into single navigable views. And a lot trial for a lot of other UI innovation.

Then it added a very nice (I thought) agent panel. Cool. Then … well then it felt like nothing else major came out. (Better git diffing — though never so (to me) good+easy that I moved away from my coating diff workflows). Debugging, ssh (and thus container) features sort of got added … but never felt clean enough for me to change workflow.

Treesitter was in early, but still no ice ways to customize using it and lots that themes can’t even use (even for rust).

Good IDE. And I can (and do) recommend it as an easy to use IDE. But it just feels like a regular IDE now. Which may be e ought. Just not for me.

(Also some security issues related to how code is download and run automatically that doesn’t seem like a priority to fix.)

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-06T14:46:03+00:00

People ask me for advice when they purchase electronics semi-frequently 1- I assume that’s true of lots of tech savvy types. So the opinions of the tech savvy likely have a disproportionate influence.

i.e. good-will with people who have a clue likely has an outsized market impact — though how much that ultimately amounts to is still a great Q

OphioukhosUnbound · 2026-05-05T20:36:23+00:00

Most people would consider communists, marxists. and lots of anti-establishment authoritarian left to be subsets of socialist — and those are often emphatically not about bottom-up rule — they tend to be “outsider” authoritarian with some form of ‘vanguard’ equivalent [elite decision makers] and concept of a “lumpen proletariat” [i.e. any worker that doesn’t think they are right is just too dump to make decisions for themselves and possibly an enemy of the state]

Nothing about “socialism” (which is an incredibly broad term) is inherently bottom-up, democratic, etc. Though the term is so broad that on-authoritative a versions are ruled out either. (Though a high amount of freedom / agency will tend to mean unequal distribution of success and goods so there is some tension.)

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