It’s more a statement of how they operate IMO. I’ve watched them be extremely conservative over the years to see which ideas stick and wait until hardware has matured.
My HTC thunderbolt was one of the first “4G” phones, but was barely useable more than a few hours.
Yes, Apple has made some insane design constraints in the past (butterfly keyboards, the whole thin-ness thing), but their chip choices are usually pretty sound and grounded in reality.
*edit: I wanted to throw in how frustrating the lack of push email was for so long (and still kind of is), but I get it. From their standpoint, they control APNS & can use that for energy efficiency benefits to make a grandma-friendly device
I think the UL/DL is more due to the design of the network (I’m talking about Iridium data packets). The connection isn’t persistent like a computer in many cases. For example, a handset does both passive and active checks at some interval rather than the satellites pushing messages down as they’re available.
edit: It’s also worth mentioning that the bandwidth is very limited, but I thought it worth calling out the above
Thats true, but aircraft engines also run harder, must be lighter, and more reliable. It has been discussed elsewhere, and is a technically harder problem.
On top of that, general aviation makes up a much smaller part of the population motoring around every day, so probably less of a priority to gain political traction (until now).
That being said, I’m very happy to see an unleaded standard. It was my understanding that 100LL was not able to be transported via pipeline, which was part of the contribution to its higher cost.
This isn’t entirely true. If you have WiFi calling enabled, you can also send SMS over WiFi if the carrier supports it. I use this extensively when traveling internationally.
I certainly hope not. I've been fully remote working a single job in a tiny, mountain town since 2016 and have been more productive than ever.
I'm happy to travel for work, but will never give up my morning coffee on the continental divide for an office again. I'll switch professions and work at the local hardware store to keep this up :) (I do very much enjoy software work FWIW)
It's quite gratifying being in an environment surrounded by what you love. It's not for everyone, and I'm very grateful it all worked out. Unfortunately, the little towns like this just don't have economies to support my profession, and I'm incompatible with the big cities.
I can answer this for my use case. I often go for a run and leave my wallet/phone at home. I’ll play music off my watch to keep things light and minimal.
Sometimes I might take a break for a coffee with friends, and I have used this numerous times to checkout since my watch is on me rather than paying them back.
I’m also looking forward to losing the keys soon with NFC locks. I hate needing to carry around a bunch of accessories.
I use it for cash back. It helps to significantly offset sales tax for me.
Yes, the money is always coming from somewhere and arguably products might be cheaper without credit cards. However, it’s the game we’re in, so why leave money on the table?
In effect, it's not much different than how IPv4 works with unstable WAN DHCP addresses from your provider, and I don't have the headaches that NAT brings with it.
It's a different way to think about the problem, but I've actually found it to be pretty nice.
Granted I’m rural, but ours took a week and a half to get back online when a forest fire burned a microwave tower. It took out Charter cable to our house & Verizon. I am a fully remote tech worker, and this was bad (I had to work remote-remote during this time).
On another topic, I have had Starlink since early 2021. A lot of the people I see complaining are not the target audience. We live 3 hrs from the nearest airport, and it’s night and day difference for everyone outside our “town” who were either using a local WISP or Hughesnet. There are more of those people out there than you think ;)
IMO Starlink is not going to replace hardwired connection options or local 5G, but that’s okay. At least in the USA, there is a lot lot land not covered by cell service. I carry an Iridium messenger in the car just in case I break down in one of these areas (it has happened to me, and is not fun trying to get a tow truck).
This is why a recently calibrated altimeter is used for the altitude axis on GPS approaches. They also must have a constrained error margin to be certified, and it is factored into the buffered region around the approach.
My HTC thunderbolt was one of the first “4G” phones, but was barely useable more than a few hours.
Yes, Apple has made some insane design constraints in the past (butterfly keyboards, the whole thin-ness thing), but their chip choices are usually pretty sound and grounded in reality.
*edit: I wanted to throw in how frustrating the lack of push email was for so long (and still kind of is), but I get it. From their standpoint, they control APNS & can use that for energy efficiency benefits to make a grandma-friendly device