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The Stacked-the-Deck Edition Saturday, May 21, 2022

Apple Shipped Us A 79-pound iPhone Repair Kit To Fix A 1.1-ounce Battery, by Sean Hollister, The Verge

I don’t think Apple expects anyone to seriously take it up on the offer of self-service repair kits. It stacked the deck in favor of taking your phone to an Apple Store, where it can tempt you to buy something new instead. The real victory will come months or years down the road, though. That’s when Apple can tell legislators it tried to give right-to-repair advocates what they wanted — but that consumers overwhelmingly decided Apple knows best.

Stuff

How To Use Your iPhone As A White Noise Machine, by Allison Johnson, The Verge

There’s nothing quite like settling into a hotel room bed and dozing off to sleep — only to be woken up by the sound of your neighbor in the room next door trimming their nails at a hundred decibels or doing some late-night furniture rearranging.

For just these kinds of occasions, seasoned travelers will sometimes pack a travel white noise machine or use an app to help get a little peace. But if you’re carrying an iPhone running iOS 15, you’ve already got a white noise feature built right into your phone’s operating system.

Why 1Password Is Now The Best Password Manager For Mac, by Khamosh Pathak, Lifehacker

The app feels at home on Mac, and offers unique features the competition simply doesn’t. Mac’s built-in Passwords tool is excellent (and it keeps getting better every year), but 1Password now integrates seamlessly across all Apple products, Windows, and Linux, providing feature parity and instant sync.

App To Provide Verified Sightings Of Sharks Off New England, by Patrick Whittle, AP

Shark’s in the water. But is it near swimmers? Soon, New England beachgoers will know.

Notes

This New Technology Reveals Classic iPods From The Inside Out, by Harry McCracken, Fast Company

For Tony Fadell, however, memories of iPods are just as likely to involve their insides. Fadell is one of the creators of the iPhone, the cofounder and former CEO of Nest, a busy investor, and—as of this month—a book author. But he’s probably most often described as the “father of the iPod.”

Consequently, looking at a picture of any particular iPod model’s innards reminds him of the design challenges it presented. “You go, ‘Oh, I remember we had to move this because of this reason, we had to move that, or we had noise issues,'” he says. “When you see those things, it just takes you back.”

Bottom of the Page

Apple: the company that (tried) to sell us over-engineered products such as the G4 Cube, Mac Pro (trashcan edition), HomePod, and AirPod Max. The company that (re-)invented machineries to make products to be more precise and more beautiful. The company that uses non-standard parts just to get devices to be thinner and lighter.

And you are surprised that the self-repair process requires out-of-the-ordinary expensive tools?

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Thanks for reading.