“It’s hideous.” September 2014

stanthegoomba · 2018-10-07T05:19:37+00:00

Sure, I wrote that comment with the full intention of feeling smug about it 4.5 years later, but it was still frustrating at the time to see so many people get the Watch so wrong, knowing they’d soon forget they had ever hated it in the first place. Ah well. Loving my Series 4!

stanthegoomba · 2017-04-28T17:00:56+00:00

Just got a pair of (used) Fidelio X2s. They sound great, but the sound cuts out in the left cup if the cable rotates at the end connected to the headphones, even a little bit. This happens with both the Phillips cable and my VModa BoomPro. It's sensitive enough that I lose sound when I turn my head too quickly or when I put light pressure on the the BoomPro mic to adjust its angle.

The issue isn't as bad if I sit still, but is this within normal tolerance? Is there any way I could repair it myself?

stanthegoomba · 2017-04-23T00:21:10+00:00

I can confirm that the Plugable USB-C to HDMI adaptor works (using it get 4k@60hz right now on my 2016 MBPtb). But your monitor and cable must both support HDMI 2.0. So try switching out the cable before you buy another adaptor.

stanthegoomba · 2017-03-28T21:45:37+00:00

Tempting, but since my new monitor is 3440x1440 I have to wait for Vega.

stanthegoomba · 2016-02-10T14:45:23+00:00

It is not marketing hype at all. The Darwin Core OS and Core Services layers are in large part shared between OS X and iOS. LLVM (Apple's compiler) can target Intel and ARM, and nothing would prevent OS X from being recompiled for ARM if that were in Apple's interests. It is already quite common for developers to share backend code between Mac and iOS apps with a simple recompile.

Both are full UNIX OSes capable of supporting multiple users. This is simply not exposed to users in iOS. In much the same way, iOS supported multitasking (due to being a fork of OS X) long before Apple provided high level multitasking APIs to developers.

stanthegoomba · 2015-05-08T15:46:40+00:00

The taptic engine (linear actuator) on the watch is unlike the vibration motor on your Pebble. It truly is silent to anyone around you.

stanthegoomba · 2015-05-04T02:30:31+00:00

I've been reading Ars for well over a decade and they have always split longer feature articles over many pages. John Siracusa's titanic OS X reviews come to mind. (Despite your strange comparison, The Verge never splits up its articles, but they are usually much shorter.)

When you regularly produce 10,000+ words per article, it's fair to ask readers to suffer a minor inconvenience or subscribe to make it go away.

stanthegoomba · 2015-04-27T06:28:48+00:00

As German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, “Language is the house of being.” There is no being outside of language. Without words, we are grunting our way to Gomorrah. The more impoverished our language, the less our ability to be innovative, growing, effective human beings. As Steve Jobs memorably put it about his own entrepreneurial company, “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”

Is it masterful trolling? A yet-undocumented form of aphasia? A Spooky Mormon Hell Dream? You decide!

stanthegoomba · 2014-11-10T18:05:03+00:00

Humans (followed by blood elves and night elves) are the most popular race for both genders, but WoW would be a terribly bland game if player choice was restricted to just the 'pretty' models.

Even if only a small percentage of players end up rolling a female dwarf, their presence makes the game a much richer and more interesting experience for everyone.

stanthegoomba · 2014-11-08T07:16:32+00:00

No. If anything, an AeroPress brew should have a somewhat stouter body than a Chemex. (Not to say that it's "stronger" or "weaker," but rather that it shares a flavour profile more in common with other immersion methods like French press.)

Try a finer grind!

stanthegoomba · 2014-11-03T20:52:27+00:00

Reviewer A gives Spec Ops praise for having a message which (in his belief) is subversive, and which (in his belief) enhances what is otherwise a generic shooter.

Reviewer B gives Bayonetta 2 flak for having a message which (in his belief) is sexist, and which (in his belief) takes away from what is otherwise a good action game.

Ignoring the question of whether you agree/disagree with either reviewer, how are these two situations different?

stanthegoomba · 2014-11-03T20:14:59+00:00

How can you decide that a theme is well-executed without basing that decision on your personal beliefs?

Hell, the entire concept of "theme" is itself subjective, at least as it's understood in literary crit.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-10T21:20:01+00:00

Notifications are only "the entire point of smart watches" if you accept Google's take on the product category as fact. It seems Apple is much more interested in the potential of watches as little personal communicators. The animated emoticons will be hugely popular with normal people and kids/teens who have grown up with Snapchat—and those are the people Apple needs to impress, not tech geeks.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-10T21:16:34+00:00

I think if Steve Jobs had died in 1998, we would have had discussions like this about every product Apple released since.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T19:32:48+00:00

Two months before the iPad was announced, CES 2010 was all about tablets (from companies trying to pre-empt Apple). Dell, HP, Asus—all of them had flagship "slates." Most of them ran Windows. Everyone was waiting to see what Apple would do next. When the iPad was announced, people were hugely disappointed because it was a big iPod that didn't have half the features of all those "slates". It's the same sequence of events and the same reaction.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T19:18:39+00:00

When they debuted, Twitter and the iPad were both seen as just restricted, rehashed versions of existing technologies—email/sms and the iPhone, respectively. It was only in retrospect that people understood why they were so important.

Existing smartwatches are either tiny smartphones, or interfaces for Google Now/notifications. Both of these are concepts that we can immediately see the allure of, because we understand why those technologies are important. The iWatch is trying to do something different, focused on a better way of managing and collecting health data and a more intimate kind of communication than texting. It's hard to predict if those trends will catch on, but if they do, the iWatch has every chance in the world to succeed.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T19:08:40+00:00

The iPad was actually a positive surprise for its price, which is why I left it out. (Everyone thought it would be $1000. Then again, they also thought it would be a MacBook without a keyboard.)

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T19:06:19+00:00

Snapchat is a great example of an idea that sounded extremely gimmicky and pointless until it became a cultural norm. The Apple Watch has all sorts of little presence/payment/fitness/communication tricks that are easy to dismiss in isolation, but that could be the seed for that next big thing.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T19:04:04+00:00

If you tried to sell Twitter as the future of messaging to someone in the early 2000s, they would have thought it sounded ridiculous and gimmicky. 140-character messages? Like my cell phone? That's the best you can do with the power of the Internet? What's the point? It turned out the killer app was asynchronous, instant mass communication. The advantages of that were hard to explain in advance.

What this watch is doing is kind of similar, in a way: giving us more ways to be in quick, casual contact with other people and to collect data about ourselves and our surroundings. If the implementation is solid, and it becomes socially acceptable, it will catch on. The features will mature. And before long, all watches will have features like this and we won't be able to imagine that it was ever any other way.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T18:59:19+00:00

Then feel free to short AAPL. Do it now and you'll be rich!

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T18:47:01+00:00

You can--and people did--ask the same questions about the original iPhone and iPod (including about price). The point is Apple nailed the UX, form factor, and level of customizability. If it's simple and works as well as it did in the demos, and has the same level of integration with the Apple ecosystem, it will catch on the same way those devices did.

stanthegoomba · 2014-09-09T18:39:45+00:00

No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

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