Other manufacturers did/do parts pairing as well.

Apple also removed a couple of roadblocks for third party parts and you can pair replacement parts on device now.

Is it perfect? No. My point is simply that most other major smartphone manufacturers are no better (remember Google’s Pixel 4a battery performance program?). But around these parts people seem to be prejudiced and maybe have outdated information. I just feel like it’s more of a “pick your poison” instead of a “grass is greener on the other side”.

I think iPhones have one of the best iFixit repairability scores among popular smartphones. The current iPhone 16 Pro scores 7/10, while the Pixel 9 Pro and S25 Ultra only achieve 5/10. Parts - first or third party - are broadly available.

Neither are “normies” “ready” for degoogled Android.

99 % of smartphone users don’t care about USB-C transfer speeds because they only use the port for charging. Maybe a fraction of these users uses wired CarPlay, which works the same with USB 2.0 speeds. Maybe some users use a USB-C to headphone jack adapter which works the same as well.

There’s a tiny fraction of users that’ll ever notice the speed difference (because they use the port for actual data transfer) but they won’t find reading a spec sheet confusing.

A Way Out is marked as “Playable” by Valve, mainly because of Origin (or EA App nowadays?) and some quirks with the controls. Should play just fine though and once in-game controllers should be well supported.

Same. It’s pretty cheap, comes with unlimited free traffic and is just simple to use. Supports many ways to access it, including BorgBackup.

I switched from a HP MicroServer with TrueNAS (the BSD one) to a Synology 8-bay system because of convenience, mostly (DIY 8-bay with hot swap, low idle power and all seems hard to come by).

Hopefully it’ll last for years to come but if I ever need to replace/upgrade it it’s not gonna be another Synology with this type of extreme vendor lock-in.

Not sure if I understand you correctly.

Your goal is to have a single (1) computer that replaces all computers you currently have by essentially virtualizing different systems?

You get downvoted because people here tend to dislike Apple (which is fine), but that’s actually what happened.

The iPad (and eventually Android tablets) basically ate up the market share of Netbooks very quickly. Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as a Netbook alternative as a device class between a smartphone and a (full-sized) notebook/desktop.

https://www.cnet.com/science/apples-ipad-nabs-netbook-market-share/

The PS5 was released more than 4 years ago.

The PS4 Slim was released 3 years after the original model and sold for $100/100,-€ less than the original.

The PS3 Slim released ~3 years after the original model and was significantly cheaper (to be fair, it also had a lot of features removed).

The PS5 saw a Slim model release with no price cut at all, and now they’re planning to actually increase the price of over 4 year old tech that is almost certainly a lot cheaper to produce than 4 years ago, especially the Slim model that saw a reduction in cooler size, lower-powered PSU and other cost-reduction measures.

Gaming is becoming less and less accessible and more and more of a luxury.

Keep in mind that the 569,-€ is for the DIY edition and does not include RAM, SSD (2230 form factor) or expansion cards. So assuming you’re starting with nothing the cheapest price would be about this:

• Framework Laptop 12 569,-€
• 8 GB DDR5-5600 22,-€
• 256 GB M.2 2230 SSD 34,-€
• 4 expansion cards, ex. 2 USB-C, 2 USB-A 40,-€ (other cards are more expensive)

So about 665,-€ at current pricing from Germany, not including individual shipping costs of the RAM and SSD. If you require/want Windows then that would need to be factored in as well.

Obviously quite a bit cheaper compared to the 13, but I doubt this will impact the education market that this is supposed to target (unless edu gets steep discounts).

The DSP firmware the code comment mentions is probably a proprietary binary blob, right? That means it’s pretty much a blackbox and it’s not possible to fix the underlying issue, hence this workaround.

The best Windows is Wine ;)

Yeah, GeoGuessr is an extreme example as Google basically did 95% of the work for them. Having to image large chunks of the world would mean a huge investment and I highly doubt GeoGuessr would even exist without Google Maps.

If Google would double their API pricing tomorrow there’s very little GeoGuessr can do except maybe switch to Apple Maps (they offer an API, not sure they offer one for their “street view” data though).

Nope, I enabled it weeks ago. YMMV of course but from everything I read, heard and experienced, the software quality is abysmal relative to what I could expect from an iPhone (or other Apple device) before.

Maps was them underestimating how much work it is to create good map material. The functionality was fine from the beginning if I recall correctly.

Apple Intelligence is them panicking because the rest of the industry started putting more ML/AI features on their smartphones and they weren’t just late to the party, they apparently barely even started working on it.

They put their own twist on it with “Private Cloud Compute” (make of that what you will, the theoretical tech behind it is an interesting read though), and they also want to process many features entirely on-device (again in the name of privacy, but to be fair Gemini Nano also runs on-device).

Then they realized that running somewhat complex ML models on device requires memory and that’s where they always cheaped out on their products, so when they announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC in summer (with new iPhones only being announced in September) they had ONE iPhone model that could even run Apple Intelligence: the iPhone 15 Pro. So you could’ve bought an iPhone 15 (non “Pro”) the day before and every single feature they announced aside from tinted home screen icons or whatever wouldn’t work on your brand new device.

They announced a whole bunch of features, the biggest one probably being a new Siri that has a “deep understanding” of the appointments, email, photos, messages etc. on device. This has now been delayed to iOS 19 or whatever.

The other (smaller) features have been drip-fed over the iOS 18.x releases. Also, Apple Intelligence works in the EU starting with the iOS 18.4 beta. They said that it was delayed because of EU regulations but I think it was just a convenient alibi and it just wasn’t ready earlier on their part.

I live in the EU, own a 16 Pro (so the “latest and greatest” iPhone) and installed the 18.4 beta to check Apple Intelligence out. And let me tell you “beta” is an understatement. I enabled Apple Intelligence and it said it needed to download models and that the phone should be connected to a charger. I did that and monitored network traffic in my router. Once major network activity stopped I checked but nothing. Waited for another 1-2 hours, nothing. Disconnected from the charger and then several hours later my phone shows a notification that Apple Intelligence was now ready.

So, what’s there? Hard to say exactly but it summarizes emails but only some of them and I can’t make out a pattern. The quality of the summaries has been okay for me, but often times not much more useful than the subject line.

You can hold down the camera button to open something resembling Google Lens, but the functionality seems to be limited to “send what I see to Google Images” or “ask ChatGPT about this image”.

I’m not sure if notification summaries are in Apple Intelligence already because I never got any summaries (I also think it’s pretty useless as most notifications are already a summary of something).

Then there’s an image generator (“Playground”) but it’s very limited. It is kind of neat to quickly put a portrait of yourself in a couple of different settings though.

There’s also an emoji generator called “Genmoji” and sure it kind of produces okay results, but my iPhone tends to completely shit itself when I use it, slowing to a crawl and killing background apps presumably because it’s running out of memory. They (pretend to) want to do the most ML stuff locally out of everyone but but the least amount of RAM in their devices (8 GB in the 16 Pro, 16 GB in the Pixel 9 Pro).

I switched to iPhone (from an Android device) in 2016 with the original iPhone SE (with A9 SoC), had an 8, 11 Pro, 13 Pro and now 16 Pro. They’ve all been a good to great experience including the latest software features, but iOS 18 on the 16 Pro isn’t it. Even if I turn off Apple Intelligence completely, iOS 18 is pretty messy: the icon tinting sometimes gets stuck so when switching light/dark mode some icons stay in the other mode, only fixed by restarting the device; Igot more random resprings than with any other iOS version; the front camera sometimes takes 10+ seconds to start working and then has a 1 second shutter lag from time to time, etc.

Make it uses 32-Bit PhysX /s

Let’s see how broad hardware support is. I’m planning to build a SFF PC for the TV and I know Bazzite exists but I like the slow and stable approach of SteamOS for a machine like that.

Why don’t they bundle the browser itself in the Flatpak and update it via the default Flatpak update mechanism?

Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).

Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).

TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.

I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.

I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.

Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.