In my very limited experience with my 5400rpm SMR WD disk, it’s perfectly capable of writing at over 100 MB/s until its cache runs out, then it pretty much dies until it has time to properly write the data, rinse and repeat.
40 MB/s sustained is weird (but maybe it’s just a different firmware? I think my disk was able to actually sustain 60 MB/s for a few hours when I limited the write speed, 40 could be a conservative setting that doesn’t even slowly fill the cache)
But it’s a design for designs - it tells you how to design your own UIs, it doesn’t dictate what for example a calculator app should look like. You can follow Material Design and still end up with a terrible UI design.
Surely that’s enough for some distinction, right?
Your mileage may vary - your experience might be different for one reason or another
I know people say that you don’t NEED an SD card if you buy the most expensive version and rely heavily on cloud services but it’s definitely an intentionally worse customer experience.
Honestly, this depends entirely on the user. My previous phone had 64 GB internal storage and an SD card slot, but I never felt any reason to use it - all I need is enough storage to hold the photos I take until I get home and copy them to a hard disk (which then periodically gets backed up to another hard disk stored at a relative’s house). Then I can delete most photos and videos and keep only a few that I think I might want to share.
I’m not saying this is a workflow that everyone would find acceptable, just showing that different people can have vastly different needs. I personally definitely don’t need an SD card if I have 20 GB+ available for my photos, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem with 128 GB being the baseline for current Pixels.
Of course that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop ragging on Google for taking away features with obvious intention of creating problems for a portion of the userbase and selling the solution. There’s no reason Pixels can’t have an SD card slot at their current price.
Now it feels like I’m limited to Samsung or Google if I want a flagship SoC…
Google’s Tensor is definitely not a flagship SoC (Tensor 5 is rumored to change that, but its launch is still far in the future and there’s no guarantee it actually lives up to these rumors), so it seems like deciding on the vendor should be pretty easy if you don’t mind Samsung’s OneUI
By taking away the MicroSD slot to force users towards expensive cloud storage?
No no no, that’s what the crappy modem is for
There are cameras and physical buttons that you might want to use on the phone, and the fold might make it nicer to hold in one orientation. Also, the limitation exists because splitting the apps across the shorter side can make very awkward layouts, at least on small phone screens - no such problem with a square. I see no reason not to have the option of both layouts no matter its physical orientation.
I’ve never used a foldable though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Yeah, even the TLDR makes it sound more like Qualcomm is yielding to the pressure from OEMs who want to be able to offer longer updates
If it doesn’t come at the expense of battery wear, then sure, lower charge time is just better. But that would make phone batteries the only batteries that don’t get excessively stressed when fast charging. Yeah, phone manufacturers generally claim that fast charging is perfectly fine for the battery, but I’m not sure I believe them too much when battery degradation is one of the main reasons people buy new phones.
I have no clue how other manufacturers do it (so for all I know they could all be doing it right and actually use slow charging), but Google has a terrible implementation of battery conservation - Pixels just fast charge to 80%, then wait until some specific time before the alarm, then fast charge the rest. Compare that to a crappy Lenovo IdeaPad laptop I have that has a battery conservation feature that sets a charge limit AND a power limit (60% with 25W charging), because it wouldn’t make sense to limit the charge and still use full 65W for charging.
Cheap Bluetooth might have connection hitches
Fair enough, but I’ve only ever seen this happen with cheap wireless cards / chipsets that do both Bluetooth and WiFi and don’t properly avoid interference between these two (for example, I can get perfectly functioning Bluetooth audio out of my laptop with shitty Realtek wireless card if I completely disable WiFi (not just disconnect)). I think this is less of an issue for dedicated Bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode although I think most airplanes these days aren’t actually affected or we’d have planes dropping out if the sky daily.
Yeah, that’s true. As for the second part, AFAIK there was never an issue with 2.4 GHz radios (which is the frequency band Bluetooth uses) interfering with planes, it was more of a liability / laws thing - the plane manufacturer never explicitly said that these radios are safe (so the airline just banned them to be safe) and/or laws didn’t allow non-certified radios to operate on planes.
Also, does Bluetooth get saturated the way WiFi does?
Eventually yes, but it’s much more resilient than WiFi - 2.4 GHz WiFi only has three non-overlapping channels to work with (and there’s a whole thing with the in-between channels being even worse for everyone involved than everyone just using the same correct three channels that I won’t get into), while Bluetooth slices the same spectrum into 79 fully usable channels. It also uses much lower transmission power, so signal travels a shorter distance. And unlike WiFi, it can dynamically migrate from channel to channel (in fact, it does this even without any interference). 100 people actually seeing each other’s devices might be a problem, but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario - Bluetooth will use the lowest transmit power at which it can get a reliable link, so if everyone’s devices are only transmitting over a meter or so, there shouldn’t be any noticeable interference on the other side of the plane.
I don’t really see the big problem here? Like sure, it’s silly that it’s cheaper to make wireless headphones than wired ones (I assume - the manufacturers are clearly not too bothered by trademarks and stuff if they put the Lightning logo on it so they wouldn’t avoid wired solution just due to licensing fees), but what business does Apple have in cracking down on this? Other than the obvious issues with trademarks, but those would be present even if it were true wired earphones. It’s just a knockoff manufacturer.
Cheapest possible wired earphones won’t sound much better than the cheapest possible wireless ones, so sound quality probably isn’t a factor. And on the plus side, you don’t have multiple batteries to worry about, or you could do something funny, like plugging the earphones into a powerbank in your pocket and have a freak “hybrid” earphones with multi-day battery (they’re not wireless, but also not tethered to your phone). On the other side, you do waste some power on the wireless link, which is not good for the environment in the long run (the batteries involved will see marginally more wear)
Honestly the biggest issue in my mind is forcing people to turn on Bluetooth, but I don’t think this will change anyone’s habits - people who don’t know what Bluetooth is will definitely just leave it on anyway (it’s the default state), and people technical enough to want to turn it off will recognize that there’s something fishy about these earphones.
Are you sure you didn’t set DNS directly on some/all of your devices? Because in that case they won’t care about the router settings and will use whatever you set them to.
Also as the other commenter said, DNS changes might not propagate to other devices on the network until the next time they connect - a reboot or unplugging the cable from your computer for a few seconds is a dirty but pretty OS agnostic way to do that.
I feel like the ingest system will be sophisticated enough to throw away pieces of text that begin with a message like “ChatGPT says”. Probably even stuff that follows the “paragraph with assumptions and clarifications followed by a list followed by a brief conclusion” structure - everything old has been ingested already, and most of the new stuff containing this is probably AI generated.
Yeah, it’s not practical right now, but in 10 years? Who knows, we might finally have some built-in AI accelerator capable of running big neural networks on consumer CPUs by then (we do have AI accelerators in a large chunk of current CPUs, but they’re not up to the task yet). The system memory should also go up now that memory-hungry AI is inching closer to mainstream use.
Sure, Internet bandwidth will also increase, meaning this compression will be less important, but on the other hand, it’s not like we’ve stopped improving video codecs after h.264 because it was good enough - there are better codecs now even though we have the resources to handle bigger h.264 videos.
The technology doesn’t have to be useful right now - for example, neural networks capable of learning have been studied since the 1940s, even though there would be no way to run them for many decades, and it would take even longer to run them in a useful capacity. But now that we have the technology to do so, they enjoy rapid progress building on top of that original foundation.
Mandatory XKCD
I’m pretty sure all of those entries are in the same /12 network - 172.16.0.0/12. Apparently there’s nothing wrong with it, but I think you can significantly simplify that config by just removing all the extra ones
Because of the built-in SSD, I could also sell the external SSD and buy an 8-12tb HDD instead.
If you’re going for a 3.5" HDD, then you’ll most likely have to look for a bit bigger form factor than TinyMiniMicro (Lenovo Tiny / HP Mini / Dell Micro series) - these computers can’t fit a 3.5" HDD.
If size isn’t a major concern, I’d go for the SFF variants of these computers - they are often cheaper than minis for same specs, but probably have a bit larger idle power draw and take up more space. As a bonus upside, you get some small PCIe slots in these computers, so yay for expansions.
They seem too small and consistent in size to just be bundles of system apps that got security fixes
Correct, just one note here: system apps (both APK apps and APEX system modules) are updated through Google Play like all other apps, the monthly security patches are a layer below that - it updates the base OS files like firmware and kernel modules. More info about APEX
Are they like differential patches or something?
Yes, that’s exactly what they are. Small differential patches (often called delta patches / delta updates) to the files.
Btw apps are also getting delta updates through Google Play for at least a few years now (5-ish?)
And what happens while the ‘finishing system update’ notification is shown?
Android Runtime (ART) works by compiling the Java bytecode in apps to native code before running them - it’s called “ahead of time compilation”. This compiled native code is specific to the device, OS and system modules, and some of the modules probably changed during an update - that means the OS has to recompile all the native code against the new updated modules, and that takes some time to do for all installed apps. There can also be updates to the ART module itself that improve the way ART compiles code, and that also requires recompilation to have effect.
as far as I can tell the phone remains unlocked while updating, so why do they need it to be booted to finish the update? Is it just to turn on the phone faster?
There’s a mechanism called A/B partitioning where there are actually two copies of the OS installed. To update, you copy the current OS into the other slot, then apply all the updates to it and finally mark it as the active slot. When you boot your phone, the bootloader looks up the active slot and boots it (and switches the primary slot back if it fails to boot a few times in a row).
The OS can be updated during a reboot and that’s how some vendors still do it, but the downside is that the phone cannot be used during updating. With A/B partitioning and background updates, you can use your phone like usual and then reboot as quickly as any other reboot to apply the updates.
On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that newer RAM generations are less and less susceptible to this kind of attack. Not because of any countermeasures, they just lose the data without constant refreshing much quicker even when chilled / frozen, so the attack becomes impractical.
So from DDR4 up, you’re probably safe.
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