Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Thanks for the help, guess I'm not so bad off afterall.
Thinking it over, I don't really have any video or audio files on my phone anymore, most is spotify or podcast which is streamed so it'll be OK.
On the other hand : no 3,5 mm plug?
 
On the other hand : no 3,5 mm plug?
That one never bothered me, personally. Do you actually use a 3.5mm headset/headphones very often? If so, and they're special enough that you want to keep using them and not take this opportunity to go BT, there's still an adapter you can use. Yes, it'll keep you from charging simultaneously (unless qi)...
Can't have everything I guess :D
 
You could when it had a 3.5 mm jack :p

I am still a bit salty about it, tbh, and I've already been caught close using the lightning earbuds and running out of battery. this is before my concerns about increasing waste as BT earbuds essentially come with an expiration date. There are a number of dongles available to fix this problem of course. They work but I still do not like that I have to buy yet another piece of plastic for this.

This is also true of the type-C only Macbooks, but I tolerate it a lot more (now. I was still annoyed AF when first launched) there as I come from pre-USB "let's all have a different standard" times and which ports you need on your computer will differ a lot more as compared to the ones on your phone.
 
The lack of 3.5mm has never bothered me in the 2.5 years I've owned an iPhone, I was using Bluetooth headsets long before that. I'm not sure I'd agree that wired earbuds last longer as everyone I know (me included when I used wired buds with my MW600) breaks them every couple of years if used every day, however BT headsets clearly have a bigger environmental cost when building them as they contain batteries.

It does do away with the cheap shitty earbuds that come bundled with phones and inevitably go straight in the trash (evidenced by the unused sets I was taking out of 5-6 year old Nokia Lumia boxes at work this week and binning) but I don't know what's worse.

USB-C only is not a good option, I don't see a good reason not to have a USB type-A socket - making it thinner is not a good reason.

Edit: I should say that despite using Bluetooth with my phone or integrated Spotify in the Tesla, the 3.5mm jack option of my Sony WI-1000X headset is great, at the moment it's always plugged into my PC via and will run passively unless the noise cancelling is turned on. It uses a proprietary 3.5mm to micro-USB cable but thankfully these were available aftermarket and I bought a few. Still available too, might buy a spare before they disappear from the market...
 
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The only time I'm annoyed by not having 3.5mm is a couple times a year when I'm sound-checking a newly built PA system. I dabble in pro audio every now and then and it's annoying to not have a 3.5mm analog sound source readily available in my pocket anymore. My car hooks up via USB and my headphones are all wireless.

As for losing USB-A, well... someone has to move the industry forward and Apple have a good track record of doing that. I'm old enough to remember when the original iMac came out, using USB-A for everything, and everyone kept cracking jokes about it not having legacy ports requiring adapters for legacy stuff. I wasn't anywhere close to being a mac user back then but I do remember when every peripheral manufacturer suddenly came out with USB versions made from translucent plastic to match the silly little all-in-one computer made by a weird computer company that was near bankruptcy. I probably still have a translucent USB cable in a box somewhere.

Sometimes I imagine that if Apple wasn't around and the PC market was calling all the shots, the latest and greatest Microsoft Surface Pro would be made from creaky beige plastic and have a 25-pin printer port on the back. :LOL:
 
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Sometimes I imagine that if Apple wasn't around and the PC market was calling all the shots, the latest and greatest Microsoft Surface Pro would be made from creaky beige plastic and have a 25-pin printer port on the back. :LOL:
Well if you buy a brand new Optiplex 7070 from Dell it does still come with a serial port on the back and for some reason they re-introduced PS/2 ports. Those are standards we don't use much any more, USB-A is everywhere from every non-Bluetooth peripheral to charging any device you should have with you. It didn't need fixing, not yet anyway.

Anyway, old school plugs and sockets leads me neatly on to the problem I've just been facing. See, on (in?) this huge pile of technology I call a desk I have two VCRs and a CRT TV. I've shown them before. Well while watching a new livestream from LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER we got joking in the chat about watching it on a CRT. So I pulled out the old Roku 2 XS and hooked it up to the VCR, surprisingly after not using it for years it just worked straight away and didn't even need a software update.

However, it turns out that the Roku 2 XS only supports NTSC on its AV output, something I never knew before but that pisses me off now. My VCR happily passes the NTSC through itself, down the SCART lead to the HDMI upscaler that detects the NTSC signal and converts it... but the TV is black and white only. That's not the absolute end of the world but I tried to record it to VHS for shits and giggles and that just didn't work. It couldn't record the NTSC signal so just had a fit when I tried to play it back. Neither VCR can handle it.

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So because my hunger for assorted black boxes on the desk and more cable spaghetti can never be satisfied, I bought a mini HDMI to AV converter from Amazon. Along with some 4K Blu-rays. They must've thought I was mad.

The little converter is so generic I can't be bothered to find a picture of it, but needless to say it didn't work. Still B&W on the CRT. I tried it with my ~8 year old Samsung LCD and of course that works fine, lots of people online are saying the same thing and suggesting an alternative. It's annoying because I didn't think for a second that this thing would have an issue and it technically works so I can't send it back. Oh well, might be useful someday. For a cheap giggle this is adding up.

I still need to re-do the wiring diagram for this desk one day, it got somewhat out of hand a long time ago and I now have a 4K display splitter, HDMI recorder, AV switch and mini 4 channel audio mixer added to it...
 
I mainly use BT headsets most of the time, but when riding my bike I like to use earbuds because 1 I cant lose them and 2 if my phone falls out of my pocket it's still tethered.
Also, yet another thing you need to charge etc.
It's not a massive disappointment, merely a small inconvenience. Never understood why they did this, it's still widely used, it doesn't take a whole lot of space. Yeah form factor and sleek phone rulez, but really?

Also since we're talking about Apple being silly, I am obligated to post this video

 
My wife's laptop died after 45 days of use. Dead SSD.
We took it to the store, expecting them to take it for a few days, call us and say "Yep.It's dead. You should have it in a week."
Instead, guy at store takes a look, calls other guy. Other guy looks at it, says "Yep. Dead SSD."
Guy #1 signs a paper and hands it to us and say "There you go. Store credit for the amount you paid. Choose whatever you want."
We just stood there looking at each other. This is how customer service should be everywhere. Thanks MediaMarkt.
 
My wife's laptop died after 45 days of use. Dead SSD.
We took it to the store, expecting them to take it for a few days, call us and say "Yep.It's dead. You should have it in a week."
Instead, guy at store takes a look, calls other guy. Other guy looks at it, says "Yep. Dead SSD."
Guy #1 signs a paper and hands it to us and say "There you go. Store credit for the amount you paid. Choose whatever you want."
We just stood there looking at each other. This is how customer service should be everywhere. Thanks MediaMarkt.
That's great service. We had some Dells turn up with bad M.2 SSDs, Dell sent out replacements that we are fitting ourselves.
 
Wait, good customer service at MediaMarkt??
So that's a Portugal thing and not the standard for MediaMarkt?

That same day I bought some USB-C headphones. Arriving home I found out that it didn't work with neither my Pixel 5 nor the aforementioned laptop. Something about not being a digital device...next day I went again to MediaMarkt and they just told me "You wanna grab another one or just your money back?"
 
I got similarly great service from Gigantti which is one of the big chains in Finland. They’re called Elgiganten in Sweden and IIRC Elkjøp in Norway. I had them refund two different pairs of headphones - first because the Jabras I bought had something wrong with them, and the second time because the Sonys I got to replace them proved to be difficult to move between devices and had a crappy microphone. I also got a partial refund on a Dyson vacuum cleaner when they went on sale a week after I bought mine.
 
That's great service. We had some Dells turn up with bad M.2 SSDs, Dell sent out replacements that we are fitting ourselves.
Meanwhile over here, I've encountered a few where they've forgotten to attach them in place at the factory (I'm assuming at least).. So, surprisingly they work themselves loose eventually on machines that get moved often around the factory.
 
First day with the iphone, so far so good. Kinda bummed about usb a though, I’ll have to get another cable for the car.

Any ideas if Apple carplay is better than android auto? I thought android was better but I havent really compared in 2 or so years
 
First day with the iphone, so far so good. Kinda bummed about usb a though, I’ll have to get another cable for the car.

Any ideas if Apple carplay is better than android auto? I thought android was better but I havent really compared in 2 or so years
I tried android auto once on my moto G5. Admittedly, it is an older phone therefore hardware not the best, but AA I found to be unusable with how slow it operated on that phone. I was able to use CarPlay with barely a hiccup on iPhone 5, SE, and now an 8. Movements were fine and the worst was waiting for map data to download on whichever navigation I used.
 
My 12 Pro Max turned up today. Other than not having the case until tomorrow and the screen protectors I bought being a bit crap I'm trying to figure out why the photos are downloading from iCloud at half of the resolution of the ones I take with my X. Very odd. The phone is still downloading the originals of my existing photos so maybe it's that.
 
I think it'll also depend on your car. I paid to have the hardware and software upgraded in my car by Mazda in my 2015 3...however, it's not super easy to switch back and forth between AA, and the other functions of the car that are within the same single screen system.

And frankly, I prefer the way the car's map and audio interact by default in the car's "stock" system, even with all of its shortcomings.

So in my car, I actually end up NOT using it. Also, and this is a niche scenario...I'm a terrible person and listen to some youtube channels, and will often search for and play videos while at stop lights (before tosing my phone in an obscured cubby...so no, I'm not watching the videos). Switching from AA to YouTube (since there isn't a AA YT app, as you can imagine), is really cumbersome, especially if I also want to navigate at the same time.

In the end I can't say if AA or ACP are better than each other, but find myself just not using it.

But one big question: Will ACP allow you to use Google Maps, or do you need to use Apple Maps?
 
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