NEWS 369: Apple 'Spring Loaded' Event

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

I hope they nuke iOS and iPad OS. The Files app is such trash it cannot reliably delete off local storage—minor bug (ahem!!!), there. They don’t even “deign” to support optical drives, no matter what adapters and hubs you use! User-empowering, my foot! Can’t used console controllers wired—you know, the way gamers who actually care insist on since it’s lowest-latency! Want to use wired headphones but not monopolize your port? Extra dongle for you, or a full-on hub! Picture-in-picture blocks Smart Keyboard input half the time. I can’t listen to a podcast while playing or streaming anything at once without audio stuttering because iOS is too stupid for simultaneous audio channels let alone controlling their volume independently because oh my god that’s more complicated than email and grandma can’t feel scared that better is possible—itself a facile condescension to grandmas! Such an irredeemable and indefensible, disastrous, insulting mess. I refuse to believe that security requires this kind of baby-brain B.S. (as much as that blanket refusal may sound like baby-brain, in and of itself). Now that M1 is in iPads, the fig-leaf is gone. Run Mac OS, period, already! Grafting in touch is not exactly an insurmountable hurdle. The blue-sky, lobotomized arrogance that we’re rebooting what it means to compute just because a computer has a touch-screen is a self-absorbed and ultimately dangerous delusion that must finally die! Basic user empowerment IS DEFIED by allowing apps to gate-keep access to and control over our own files. This is a lesson the mobile folks at Apple failed to absorb, so eager were they to pander to the neophyte in the name of user-friendliness and tell themselves they were “disrupting” computing history contemning, derisive sneer Actually, we don’t even need text, because everything will be video and speech, right, so why bother with filenames and file management no matter what disempowerment that results in? scoff How friendly is it to lock us out of our own files? Not at all, is how friendly; decidedly unfriendly! It’s taken what, almost 2 decades? I hope Craig finally chlorophorms then at last, finally, buries it—sooner rather than later!

The iPad Pro’s XDR doesn’t matter since thermals force it to dim so much. My 2010 A10X Pro holds full brightness for 30 seconds at most just playing a movie. It’s a joke. Even the iMac’s 1600 peak/1000 sustained I seriously question the practical significance of, due to thermals. The design clearly treats it, other than for the CPU, as an after-thought. They need to take it much more seriously considering the screen is such a key part of the user experience and their value prop.

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I want that blue iMac so bad. I’m just sad the M1 iPad Pro doesn’t come in that same blue. I also have to remind myself that I don’t need either of them. Though I might want some air tags. The Apple tv is kind of meh, the non-4k apple tv I have works fine, and the current Siri remote doesn’t bother me. But back to that blue iMac.

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The link to YouTube only loads the general feed page, the video of the event is not available…

Correct, because Apple doesn’t like it when TWiT does their play by play, so it wasn’t aired to YouTube.

No there’s something wrong with twit.tv for that video. We host it ourselves so it’s probably something we did.

Working on it… Sorry!

UPDATE: It only seems to be Safari on Big Sur. Anyone else getting an error playing the video at Apple 'Spring Loaded' Event ?

Apparently the base model only comes with 2 Thunderbolt ports and no ethernet.

Ethernet is now built into the power cord: the Ethernet cord plugs into the power brick instead of cluttering up your desk or table.

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Ethernet is now built into a dongle and not every model includes the dongle. It costs an extra $250Cdn according to what I saw.

FWIW, that extra money also gets you an extra GPU core, two extra USB 3 ports, and Touch ID on the keyboard; oh, and three additional color options. This is all probably a little too rich for me, but if I did decide to get one I think I’d go for that middle option myself.

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Am I the only one that finds the iMacs ugly? I get weird Soviet Union housing bloc architecture vibes from these things. I really hope the larger version eliminates that terribly outdated chin and these pastel bland colors! Why is there still a chin??

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A port on the power cord isn’t exactly a dongle: the common understanding of “dongle” is hardware that is dedicated to its data function; the power cord is as fundamentally required as it gets (until wireless (GaN?) power), so calling it a dongle to integrate into that is a bit of a stretch, IMO. Anyone needing Ethernet is actually saving money by not paying for the new brick and instead getting their Ethernet through a hub of their own choosing: it’s not that Ethernet isn’t supported on the lowest end model, but that there’s no dedicated port and it is shipped with a standard power brick, so you get Ethernet through the USB ports in conjunction with a hub.

No need to split hairs or to defend yet another dumb idea from Apple. A dongle is something you add on to your system to add a function to it. As the power cord will work without the Ethernet add-on dongle, it is pretty clear that the add-on that adds Ethernet capability, that is otherwise missing, is a dongle.

By that standard the power cord is a dongle, because without it the system needs “functioning electricity” added to it shrug

Which dumb idea? To have just 1 unavoidable physical cord for power that now also eliminates the need for a separate Ethernet cord, or to prevent even the most budget conscious customers from finding themselves obliged to take on the cost of that new amenity to the tune of a 1/4-grand less in price?

Works for me (Big Sur/Safari).