The key convenience here is the lack of battery/cables required. Sure, I could do it as a powered setup many other ways, but going with the NFC powered route ticks off the final item in the list I was waiting for.
I do a lot of repair work ( computers/electronics/laptops ) and one of the common pains is that when you take the device from the holding slot, you either have written notes, or a job-id that you then have to look up on the computers so you can catch up on what has happened so far with the repair. What I'm hoping this device will provide for me is a summary of the device situation for me to read when I check the slot and that I can wirelessly update at the end of the next time it's on the workbench being further serviced (or completed).
Seems like a lot of money to put towards what is little more than a fancy sticker or perhaps a sheet of paper but often in workflow situations it can be small things like that which make all the difference ( though $75 is still a lot of stickers/paper! )
Correct, it is. I originally was using Sylpheed, the moved to Claws, and even with the HTML options they provide, alas, the lack of HTML composing forced me to end up going with Thunderbird due too many email filtering systems now flag plain-text emails.
Thunderbird is magnitudes slower than Claws and consumes quite a lot more resources. Can't be all down to the HTML composing.
That's definitely an interesting point, yes. Another reason I prefer to stick to MIT/BSD/X11 type licences.
With a lot of projects, you sink a considerable amount of time and effort in to them, and while you're happy to do that, often there comes a time when you're dealing with other pressures in life and you make the decision to fork the project, leaving the OpenSource for the rest of the world to take over, an going ahead with your own commercial version.
It's a bit of a reality slap to even the original project people - many of us would love to continue to code but at some point you have to still feed yourself, and almost no manner of community support will truly cover your hard financial requirements, regardless of how many promises are made; promises are nice cheap words and rarely pan out.
Many times the last-open-source version just dies off, and to be fair, if the community is upset that the project dies, then that's the community to blame for that if it does. You cannot expect a group/person to continue a project that the community itself wouldn't.
Nice to live in a feel-good world where there's support and bills covered by doing what you love for free, but eventually reality comes knocking.
Agreed. At best, it'll mean access to a supply of screens/batteries. I doubt we'll see any stuff like schematics/boardviews. Of course, I'll be keen to see if they do release boardviews/schems and if they can be read using something other than what ever custom system they've got ( it's already been a nightmare trying to wrest out the iPhone boardviews... that'll be changed in the next week or two ).
I doubt he'll be happy about this to the point of dancing of celebrating.
Most likely it'll be just another bit of Apple bait and there'll be something requiring undue restrictions / limitations of activities (that are not relevant to Apple) in order to partake in the programme.
Access to things like SMC programming tools, T2 tools, and maybe some original boardviews/schematics would be nice; though I suspect the level of things that'll need to be given up will be too costly.
Likely what'll happen is that there'll be shell fronts generated to acquire the goods/information from Apple, and then offloaded to others.
Also a "long time IT professional" (as well as electronics engineer and manufacturer).
People like to beat on Apple pretty hard, because it's the cool geeky thing to do, but in spite of all that, overall I find their gear to be of better quality than PCs and Androids ( to be fair, I'm talking macbook and iPhones ). Yes, I know full well about how "one little drop of liquid on a part will kill a macbook", same is true of all devices. It serves the narrative nicely for the likes of Rossmann to highlight such events, as if they were unique to Apple (it's not, plenty of PCs serviced with a single drop of liquid causing the whole machine to die).
Are they expensive, with a significantly higher margin, yes, hell yes! That said, I have converted over to using their gear over the last couple of years ( which provides me endless amusement to taunt Louis Rossmann with ). Specifically their 2012~2015 era stuff was excellent, sadly their 2016~2018 stuff dropped the ball -- however, quality wise, they're still physically good devices in general.
I do agree with the OP in that Apples main drive does seem to be to make the computer/phone a generic item and keep your data in the cloud; their constantly progressive lock down leaves less areas of viable repair.
5V and 20V is standard on USB C, and it's enough for laptops as most bricks are 18~19V and all the required lower voltages are generated through the various buck converters within the laptop/machine ( and usually a boost for the LED/LCD backlight to get up to 30~50V ).
The initial voltage is 5V and then the system negotiates the higher voltage to be supplied.
At least now that it's open source someone can finally add the features that a lot of people have been asking for in their forums for the last 5 years.
I'm suspecting that they (BlueCherry) simply didn't have the inclination to fix bugs or add features in spite of the requests, so it's easier for them to turf it to OpenSource and hope for the best.
Definitely was/is a lot saner to use than ZM (maybe if ZM merged in features more often, instead it seems we've now got a choice of a dozen forks of which none have everything needed
Seems since the release of the A1502, things have just gone downhill. Losing useful/viable ports and declining options for repairs (both consumer and microsoldering). The MBPro Retina 13" / A1502 covered all areas well, and you could still change your SSD and still connect to items without requiring dongles. We should have seen Apple bring out the next one with USB C + USB A (3.x) but instead we ended up losing everything, even the laptop-saving magsafe.
Likewise on the iPhone market, iPhone 6S/6S+ was mostly the peak in balance, but since then the devices have become increasingly difficult to repair.
Yes, had this very same argument with some locals. Farmers/Beef-industry/diary
Except the balance is against that of the creator, because for every tier of creator, there's probably 10~100 more of similar quality who are ready to take the place of who ever bows out.
The limited resource in the YouTube creator-view-advertiser balance is viewer eyeball-hours.
eBay is much the same; sellers can be culled in droves and there's always more to replace them, but buyers are the ones you need to stick around.
That's a separate but still important issue, relating to the internal resistance / health of the pack.
You can have a pack that still has plenty of energy left in it but if it's internal resistance is too high relative to the demand you're imposing on it then the voltage output will drop significantly and subsequently your device shuts down. As the cells get older their Ri increases and for a given load and requirements then the pack effectively "fails" at a higher charge% state from the observer's perspective.
If you're just having a once-off voltage sample only, then yes, predicting the current % capacity of a lithium pack is quite tricky given their fairly flat discharge curve and the fact that depending on what load you're imposing the voltage swings a fair bit depending on the pack internal resistance; however, in its place we use coulomb counting, with coulomb counting you're measuring the energy being put in and taken out, and as such you can track with a far greater level of predictability.
Here's a quick stater guide - https://www.digikey.com.au/en/...
A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.
