iPhone 16 Pro Review
The iPhone 16 'Camera Control' button doesn't quite click
Thoughts on the button that isn't a button
iPhone 16 Pro Review
Thoughts on the button that isn't a button
New
In Australia the AirPods 4 without Noise Cancellation are available for $219 AUD. If you want the main new feature of Active Noise Cancellation it'll set you back $299 AUD. From Apple: AirPods 4 feature an entirely new acoustic architecture, low-distortion driver, and high dynamic range amplifier, and
New
The iPhone 16 Pro 128GB is $1799 AUD, 256GB is $1999 AUD, 512GB is $2349 AUD and 1TB is $2699 AUD. The iPhone 16 Pro Max 256GB is $2149, 512GB is $2499 and 1TB is $2849 AUD/ From Apple: With Apple Intelligence, powerful Apple-built generative models come to iPhone in
New
The new iPhone 16 and 16 Plus is "built for Apple Intelligence", which is likely code for a slight RAM increase to 8GB from 6GB in the previous model. There's also a processor bump, the 'Camera Control' camera button and "a big boost
iOS 18 and iPad OS 18 release September 17.
Though Apple Intelligence won't be included in this release. That's expected to arrive in Australia by December.
New
Probably the biggest news of a (quiet) Apple morning, the Apple Watch Series 10 is joining the renewed Apple persuit of thinness over all else. The new model is 10% thinner than the previous 3 generations. In the US Apple is promoting new Sleep Apnea detection features, though it'
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is also now available in "black titanium".
Available next Friday, September 20 from $1399 AUD. Pre-orders up today.
New: AirPods Max in new colours and USB-C.
From Apple:
AirPods Max are available in five beautiful new colours, including midnight, starlight, blue, orange, and purple, and offer complementary finishes alongside other Apple products like Mac and iPad. Additionally, AirPods Max now feature USB-C charging capabilities, making them more convenient than ever to charge at home or on the go.
The AirPods Max are up for pre-order today for $899 AUD, or you can pick them up in-store starting next Friday, September 20.
Apple
So far I've been able to install Windows XP on my new iPad Pro M4. Does it run well? Not really, since Apple isn't allowing JIT compilation on the App Store. It also doesn't support 3D accelerated graphics, though I am going to see
Gruber, Copyright and LLM scraping.
John Gruber, noted Apple access journalist, is back defending the company after its launch of Applebot-powered Apple Intelligence. There's some interesting treatment of Apple Intelligence and more specifically Applebot crawling the 'public web' and then 'transforming' that crawled content, via this post from Louie Mantia:
From John Gruber today:
It’s fair for public data to be excluded on an opt-out basis, rather than included on an opt-in one [...]
No, no it’s not. This is a critical thing about ownership and copyright in the world. We own what we make the moment we make it. Publishing text or images on the web does not make it fair game to train AI on. The “public” in “public web” means free to access; it does not mean it's free to use.
The idea that being on the public web means that content can be actually taken and recreated with no human contribution is bizarre. If a music video is published on YouTube, does that suddenly mean it is no longer a Copyrighted piece of work? Absolutely not. Does a paywall on a site, like Netflix for example, suddenly mean that the content is different? No.
It's insulting that Apple now claims its crawler is opt-out, after already training its AI on content without warning.
I guess Gloss republishing a quote from Mantia's blog above is also a recreation, maybe some might even say theft or copyright infringement. But I'm adding to it, linking back, and the original article is still its own viable piece. You might want to read the rest, in which case the original creator can receive pageviews.
BeReal
BeReal, a French once-a-day photo sharing app, today announced that it is being acquired. The new owner, Voodoo, is a French "hyper-casual and casual" app and games company that "has over 7 billion downloads and entertains over 150 million people per month." I’m thrilled to
G/O Media sells Gizmodo.
Keleops publishes four consumer tech websites: Journal du Geek, 01net, Presse Citron and iPhon. Jean-Guillaume Kleis, the chief executive of Keleops, said in an interview on Tuesday that the company had been looking to make an acquisition in the United States for several years and Gizmodo was “an obvious choice.”
G/O Media, owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners and comprised of former Gawker Media titles, doesn't actually own its namesake publications anymore. The O stood for Onion and the G stood for Gizmodo.
Over the past 4 years the firm has sold ClickHole to Cards Against Humanity, Lifehacker to Ziff Davis, Jezebel, The A.V. Club and Splinter News to Paste, Deadspin to Lineup Publishing, The Takeout to Static Media and The Onion to Global Tetrahedron. All that remains is:
business news site Quartz, African-American culture outlet The Root, gaming site Kotaku, gearhead publication Jalopnik, and commerce site The Inventory.
Australia
There's a growing sentiment in Silicon Valley that the solution to our overabundance of tech is more tech. Last Friday the Daylight Computer Company introduced the DC-1 - a 10.5 inch tablet with a heavily guarded and non-specific "LivePaper" screen technology. In a comment on
I just wanted the camera bump to go away.
I'm all for the new iPad Pro being thicker for battery life or for less processor throttling, but the camera bump? Ridiculous. Would love an iPad that can sit on a table and be used with an Apple Pencil without wobbling.
Tech
For the past 5 days UniSuper has been inaccessible by members, unable to check their Super balances and use the platform as a whole.
New
Half of my love for this browser comes from the company name - The Browser Company - it's so classic. And now it's available on Windows. This is not the end of our Windows journey — it's just Day 1. Now the real work begins.