I'm about to pull the trigger on some way too expensive bluetooth headphones, and during my research I came across these two articles that are worth a read if you care about bluetooth audio:
Headphones or earbuds that support the latest bluetooth audio options link the volume changes made on the headphones and computer/phone, will show a battery indicator on your iPhone, can do calls using reasonable audio quality (16 kHz, old ones use creaky phone quality at 8 kHz).
And last but not least, can accept AAC audio. With that, there's no difference in quality between wired and wireless playback of AAC-encoded music such as iTunes+ songs. Unfortunately, only a few headphones support AAC over bluetooth, and many don't bother to mention this on their website... (You can check on your Mac by alt/option-clicking the bluetooth icon in the menu bar.)
Permalink - posted 2016-02-13
I got my Philips Hue starter kit two or three years ago. For those of you who have been living under a rock: Hue is a lighting system. The original Hue lights are power-efficient LED lights that can display a large range of colors: deep red, blue and purple as well as not-so-deep green and all the colors in between, which includes both cool and warm white light. There's a phone app to control the color and brightness of the lights. Unfortunately, the minimum brightness of the colored Hue lights is 5%, which is still relatively bright. This is especially annoying when you tell the lights to come on or go off slowly. The jump from off to minimum or minimum to off is somewhat jarring.
At the introduction of the iPhone 7, Phil Schiller explained the removal of the 3.5 mm headphone jack as follows:
Maintaining an ancient, single-purpose, analog connector doesn't make sense because that space is at a premium.
This makes sense at first blush, but then how is it that until a week ago, all iPhones and iPods had a 3.5 mm headphone jack. Every single one of those except for the iPhone 6s and 6s+ are smaller than the iPhone 7. The iPod nano has only 9% of the volume of the iPhone 7+:
But somehow, Apple found room in there for the 3.5 mm jack. Even if there were no room for the jack in the iPhone 7, they could have made the device a few percent bigger to make room. Or at least keep it on the much bigger iPhone 7+.
The simple truth is that Apple solved their problem by making it our problem. Just carry the extra adapter. Or two different headphones, one for the the iPhone and one for everything else (including your Mac). Or use bluetooth and hope you don't run out of power unexpectedly.
Permalink - posted 2016-09-11
Unless something extremely unexpected happens, on the 27th, Apple will be announcing new MacBook Pros. These are long overdue, the last update was a year and a half ago. The rumors and leaks point towards the following:
There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about much of this. But not all of it is is necessarily well-founded. Let's have a look at the possible issues that such a machine may have.
Read the article - posted 2016-10-26
The introduction of the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pros has kicked off a lot of discussion. How is this better than the function keys, those are touch typable, unlike the Touch Bar which pretty much requires looking before touching. And how is the Touch Bar better than a touch screen, where you interact with the stuff on the screen directly?
That's missing the point. The Touch Bar isn't a replacement for function keys—in functionality, that is. Nor is it a replacement for a touch screen. It's something completely new!
I did it: I ordered a new MacBook Pro.
So now I need a bunch of USB-C dongles and cables. Turns out that there's quite a bit to consider when shopping for USB-C cables. Here are some notes on what I learned.
Read the article - posted 2016-10-30
I'll probably have more to say about some of these later, but here's my list of USB-C adapters, cables and other devices I've collected the past few weeks:
