Disagree. Only the prevalence of lower specced devices keeps hardware requirement inflation in check. If all new devices had more, you'd be making e-waste out of old ones.

They do rub me the wrong way too and I've been using Apple computers my whole life, since our family's first computer in 1991. I use a more powerful desktop PC for my more RAM/multicore heavy tasks and a NAS for mass storage now so I can get away with "just" a 16/512 GB Macbook Air to avoid the most egregious upsells. It's a great laptop but Apple's predatory business practices make me want to not rely on them TOO much.

Nerfing the least bad option isn't really a positive. The alternatives getting better would be.

I love that you had to use an example as contrived as Prime95 to justify the moving parts that suck in dust to cool a mobile device. You've convinced me, Apple got it right.

Now if only they would stop with the 8 GB RAM nonsense, that hasn't been enough for normal computer usage in a decade.

There's less microphonics from the cable rubbing against your neck, this is a very big deal with sealing earbuds, and don't even try to pretend looping the cable over your ear fixes it entirely. It doesn't fix other similar issues such as thumping noise from walking or any other internal body noise such as breathing but it's one step on the long journey towards making sealing earbuds usable at all.

Apple used to ship their phones with Lightning-to-3.5mm adapters, is this no longer the case? Also Apple's wired EarPods come in 3.5mm, USB-C and Lightning varieties and they're excellent and cheap so it's not like there's no good wired option.

I'm probably an atypical user but I only use wireless earbuds with my laptop, with a phone I prefer wired because I can more easily pop them in and out of my ears with less risk of losing them and a phone fits in my pocket anyway negating almost all of the negatives of having a wire. Maybe it'd be worth it for sealing ear buds just to reduce microphonics from the cable but I strongly prefer open.

Add to that the price of replacement batteries to make use of their gimmick feature. At that point you'll have to consider if it's even worth it because technology will have moved on and you could be using that money on a current model instead.

iPhone 6S came out 8 years ago. I'm surprised it still gets OS updates. For the kind of user who thinks that level of performance is acceptable I'm not surprised 70% of original battery capacity is plenty to get through the day. I'm on iPhone 8 and it holds enough juice for me to not need to charge it every night with typical usage. Why pay for a new battery when you don't need one?

Disagree, the move to ET tuning enabled all kinds of crazy modulations on instruments without dynamic tuning capabilities. This opened up a huge door for new musical ideas. All autotune did was make people who didn't practice singing and do 20 takes sound more passable.

But this, too, is just a subjective take from an amateur instrumentalist who would never have seen any benefit from autotune anyway

Pythagorean tuning has been out of style for so long it sounds wildly off-key to most listeners today. We've been using mostly Equal Temperament tuning since the 1800s.

Your link doesn't even dispute that Apple was deliberately incompatible with their messaging app, just that they announced they will support RCS messages at some future date, and tells people to just get some other messaging app on the app store. If you think this is a reasonable defense you're crazy.

Even just the UI changes are a clusterfuck, that it also deletes your data is just a cherry on top. Apple needs to repeat their Snow Leopard "no new features but it actually works now!" act.

That's how I see this "AI art" thing playing out, too, audiences will quickly get desensitized to anything AI models create too easily just like audiences got desensitized to photorealism in paintings. AI art without the messed up fingers etc. is already much more valuable than the usual AI stuff in my eyes. Likewise for careful brush- and linework. The part that AI can properly do (smooth shading) isn't just worthless but already has negative value.

AI art has this terrible tendency to look fine at a first glance but when you spend any time looking at it you start to see the messed up fingers and other body horrors and logical inconsistencies. It feels like you're having a stroke with how little some parts make sense. It is very stressful to look at and its mere existence makes it harder to enjoy art in general since the paranoia builds up.

It matters if the person looking at it does, that's all there is to it. Mona Lisa's value isn't determined by the person who values it the least.