If it starts at $499 or less and the specs are somewhere in the ballpark of what the rumors say then the iPhone 16 has very little reason to exist: same A18 SoC and 8 GB RAM, storage probably starts at the same 128 GB, OLED, same main camera, Face ID. So $300 more gets you an ultra-wide lens and a different display cutout (if even that)? Am I missing something?

Also, the upsell to the 16 Pro is suddenly quite steep.

This would/could be the best value iPhone since the original SE (2016).

Apparently, the inner screen will come in at 12 inches, suggesting it’s going to be larger than previously expected.

Okay but then the device would need to be at least iPad mini sized (depending on aspect ratio)? Unless it triple or quadruple folds. Probably a straight up wrong rumor.

I’m actually interested in a folding smartphone, ideally sized somewhere between a 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max, unfolding to something comparable to an iPad mini in screen real estate (aspect ratio would be hard to match though).

Main pain points with existing devices are durability, crease in the middle of the screen and weight, although we’re inching closer and closer to a more ideal device. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is something I’d almost want.

Makes me wonder how many people are subscribed to Kagi without using it. Then why would you have a subscription in the first place?

Makes me wonder if it’s faster than the USB 1.1 ports on the PS2. I used to load PS2 games from a USB drive but 1.1 speeds meant that some games had stuttering FMVs and some with texture/geometry streaming were more susceptible to pop-in.

I can’t imagine it’d be much better via memory card though, considering it was only ever intended for small savegames and for loading firmware updates (which is also what this memory card or rather FreeMcBoot exploits).

I used this primarily on a Palm (with Palm OS, not webOS).

I think it was v4 that introduced the view with the full desktop website zoomed out where you could then zoom in to an area.

Speculative execution seems to be the source of a lot of security flaws in many different CPUs. CPU manufacturers seem to be so focused on winning the performance race that security aware architecture design takes the backseat.

Also, it’s more and more clear that it’s a bad idea that websites can just execute arbitrary code. The JS APIs are way too powerful and complex nowadays. Maybe websites and apps should’ve stayed separate concepts instead of merging into “web apps”.

I also wonder if it’d be possible to design a CPU so vulnerabilities like these are fixable instead of just “mitigable”. Similar to how you can reprogram an FPGA. I have no clue how chip design works though, but please feel free to reply if you know more about this.

The researchers published a list of mitigations they believe will address the vulnerabilities allowing both the FLOP and SLAP attacks. They said that Apple officials have indicated privately to them that they plan to release patches.

So this’ll likely be mitigated soon, and while you’re probably right about the performance hit (which will likely be minor), I don’t think (most) Apple users need to be very worried about this.

I will die here

Kind of what you were sent there for :|

Apple was very late to add AV1 support to their ecosystem in general. As you state, support for hardware decoding was only added with the M3/A17 Pro chips in 2023. There’s still no AV1 hardware encoder on any of Apple’s chips.

I think they were waiting on H.266 and whether it succeeds for too long, they were/are big on H.265 (and all the other HEVC-related stuff like HEIC) so that’d make sense from that perspective.

This feature makes use of homomorphic encryption, so apparently the photo itself can’t be “seen” by Apple’s servers.

It’s still very confusing wording as in the Settings app it states “Allow this device to privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple”, which to me implies that the device either downloads the whole index and then looks up places on-device or at least queries it online without sending any photo data, but it seems to send some encrypted and/or hashed variant of the photo(s) instead.

It seems to be done in a privacy-respecting manner, but being on by default and primarily the poor wording in the Settings app is not good.

I do think the article is a bit over-dramatic though when the author starts mentioning “that Apple computers are constantly full of privacy and security vulnerabilities”, which - while not entirely wrong - is true for basically every (complex) system.

~EDIT: fix two typos~

I do, I feel like we desperately need some more competition/options in the browser engine space.

Hahaha that got me! I legit thought this could’ve been a PR stunt that actually may have happened until I read the last sentence … after which I thought it was even more likely to have happened.

It’s actually 10 years old when taking the original Wii U version of Mario Kart 8 into account.

One might even go as far as saying it’s morally not okay to pay for a Nintendo game because you are in a way financing their lawyers.

But consider that anything not honoring your time and attention is disrespecting you.

This is why I use ad blockers, switched to Linux and why I’m always quick to delete apps that continuously nag me to do something.

I’m not 100 % sure how it exactly works, but I think Microsoft recompiles/translates the games and you then download the changed binary instead of playing off your disc (which is also why texture streaming should be a lot faster).

This is most likely a process that’s automated for the most part though. And I highly doubt it’s recompiled from source, that’s why I called it “translated”.

Games using the id tech engine were often affected by visible texture pop in, and apparently the PS3 version was affected more than the 360 version, but the latter still was noticeably affected. Rage uses id tech 5, but I remember playing BRINK (id tech 4) on PS3 which had no mandatory install (it ran from the disc without installing anything to the HDD upfront), but used the HDD extensively for caching texture data. After I upgraded from the standard 5400 rpm HDD to a 7200 rpm HDD I remember texture pop-in was noticeably reduced.

Xbox 360 emulation on Xbox One or Series isn’t really accurately emulating the hardware, instead it translates the original code to something the One and Series understand.

Sounds feasible.

Clothing (or other things, clothing was just an example) does get you excluded from a group. The only reason a bully would want to “include” the bullied person in their group is so they can bully them more.

I agree that they could open up iMessage to competitors with relative ease and that this would be a good move. Not because it would seriously stop bullying, but because it would make it a little bit easier to find a common messenger to use (we don’t really have that problem in my home country, as most people use WhatsApp, which is multi platform).

What I’d hate is if Apple removed all indicators that what I’m sending or what I already sent is an SMS/RCS message instead of an iMessage. It shows me what features work for that particular conversation, and if I’m roaming in a region where sending SMS is not free, I want to know when I’m about to send one.

I doubt the bullying would be any different if it was a beautiful red (or whatever is considered a pretty chat bubble) instead.

And even if it was a blue bubble, the bullies would find another reason to bully someone.

I get the peer pressure part and sure Apple might be exploiting that in America, but in the past it was clothing brands or whatever it is now. Making the bubbles the same color (or even bringing iMessage over to Android completely) would get rid of a single symptom, not of the root cause.