They appear to have delayed the "forced upgrade" which probably (mostly) accounts for this. Most users don't upgrade manually, they just take whatever their phone offers automatically. I've been watching my wife's phone. She got the iOS 17 update in November 2023, and the iOS 18 update in November 2024, in both cases without interaction, it just installed itself one day. iOS 26 didn't drop onto her phone until the end of December, almost a month and a half later than "normal".

I think that Apple knew that this was a shaky release and thus waited a bit longer before pushing it out as a fully automatic update.

I've been wondering about this. I've had to switch my card number when it was "stolen" a few times, and I have noticed that some merchants are still able to charge me after the change — somehow, they get hold of the new credit card number without me having to provide it.

A "convenient feature"... maybe... but what is to stop nefarious actors from also using this to continue to charge me?

I've been running into this myself. I *do* have various Apple devices, but I have our Apple TV connected to a "family" account and not a "personal" account that our iOS devices are connected to. At some point I'll have to sign one of them into the family account and accept the terms, and then switch it back to its regular account.

I do have some old iPhones sitting around that I could use, but none of them supports iOS 16. I saw on the Twitter thread that someone recommended trying iTunes for Windows to get the terms & conditions prompt. I tried that but it did not give me such a prompt.

You can also get a commercial display (intended for hotels, restaurants, airports, etc.). It'll have the same panel as a "regular" TV, and it'll cost a little more, but it will not have the "smart OS".

On Windows you can use Pageant as an SSH agent (comes with PuTTY). Most SSH apps can talk to it. Same thing, type the key once per session.

Err, they have released photos of it. 64 2GB DRAM chips on one board. It's listed as an option on the Precision 7670 and Precision 7770 spec sheets. Seems like they're pretty serious about selling it. Should be on sale in about two weeks, check back and see.

Just funny that this comes after another Slashdot article just yesterday, about Intel's Alder Lake i9-12900HK laptop CPU beating Apple M1 Max in both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance (but probably not power efficiency). Granted, the Alder Lake CPUs are not out yet, but Intel's is supposedly making an announcement on that tomorrow, so M1 Max's overall performance domination might not last that long.

Competition is good all around and Intel definitely needs pressure from all sides (...they got a little bit complacent for a few years before AMD started catching up to them, I think) but I doubt that they are "panicking".

Just a funny reversal. Apple supports their Macs with new OS versions for, what, 8 years or so? Support for PCs running Windows usually lasts much longer than that — basically anything that can run Vista can run Windows 10 with a similar level of performance, and as mentioned, even XP-era systems are eligible if they were reasonably high-end. But here we have Microsoft cutting off support for Windows 11 at systems that are 3 years old.

Wild speculation — There have also been multiple reports that NVIDIA is looking to switch over to TSMC or use them more heavily for Ampere GPU chip production next year and has put in a hefty order to lock in capacity with them. Possibly because of yield issues with the 8nm chips coming out of Samsung. Maybe these cards were cancelled as plans have shifted to launch upgraded cards with TSMC-produced 7nm chips next year instead...?

iPhone 11 phones have A13 CPUs, not A12. This one appears to be derived from the A12 chip used in the iPhone XS/XR phones, and the prior-generation iPad Pro (just going off of the name).

Nothing here says that they're getting rid of the MacBook lineup. Those are still quite popular, and if you need a desktop computing experience for productivity, there's no reason to pick an iPad over a MacBook. You even need a Mac to make iPad apps. They've been making the iPad better but there are still tons of things that would be really painful to do if that was the only computer you had.

A box? I have several drawers full of cords that I never use. Really handy for the once every two or three years occurrence of someone asking me "Hey, do you have X cord?" and I can go pull it right out. I could probably get rid of most of them, but keeping them isn't really causing me any problems...

Agree. Assuming that, say, the lock and the thermostat can operate at least at a basic level "offline" then can't you just unplug/disable the hub? If the smart devices can't communicate upstream then the privacy issue solved.

"Other formats have tried to replace it, notably HEIF which will never by universal due to its patent licensing."

Patents expire, right? I know that 20 years is a long time, but some of that has elapsed already, and look how long the other formats listed here (JPEG, GIF, PNG) have lasted.

Windows 10 workstation-class laptop. I reboot it once or twice a month for updates and that is it. It stays on when I am sleeping. It stays on when I am not home. If it is traveling with me then I will put it in sleep mode.

I just finished watching a television show on my laptop, with my headphones plugged into the laptop check, when I stopped by Slashdot and saw this post.

Actually I did try Bluetooth headphones but quickly realized that there is an audio delay of around 300ms. Fine for music, but for something more interactive like gaming, it's a no-go. I understand that some headsets support a low-latency Bluetooth codec that avoids this, but I didn't know about this at all when I picked up the headset. Fortunately, it also offers a wired option, so that's what I will (happily) use for now.

It's not like a headphone jack and the (audio controller chip driving it) take up more than a trivial amount of room in a laptop anyway. A smartphone, sure, I get that space is at a premium. But for a laptop you'd really be stretching it to claim that you need the space.