I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple stuff and get out of the way.
iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.
I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.
The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.
1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).
2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.
3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.
4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app
This seems like an argument for picking something third-party, perhaps Signal. It's probably not going away any time soon, and it supports both major mobile operating systems.
12 to 15 years ago, when I was teaching the elders in the family how to video call, there were only two reliable options, Google and Apple.
Google kept changing their solution, so we ended up with Facetime.
Whatsapp did end up coming out with video calls, and Whatsapp would have been an alternative had it been available on iPads sooner (is it even available today?). Signal also came out too late.
But once everyone was trained on Facetime, I, nor any of my cousins was going to put in the time to re-train on any other solution. Plus, if anyone has a problem with Facetime, or their Apple device, they can pop into an Apple store to get it fixed themselves. Or they can chat with an Apple tech support rep who can remote into their phone.
both iOS and Facetime are super slick and baked into the device. The end user doesn't even have to really know how to the app to use the feature as it were. It shows up on a contact as a button click.
Signal does not, even on Android. You have to deliberately use it.
That small friction isn't great when you're likely one of few people using it in day to day life of others.
>Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
Being able to unlock my password manager with the fingerprint, rather than putting in the vault password every time was great, but my iPhone got too old for the other apps I needed and now I'm stuck typing in a gibberish 30-char password every time I need to use it on my phone. When are we going to get under-the-screen fingerprint sensors?
I miss having a small phone. My iPhone 16 ironically seems small compared to lots of phones my friends have. But I wish they bring back the mini. I would buy it immediately.
You can buy a mini on secondary markets. Some are even new in box, though you might need to replace the battery.
Until about a year ago, Apple had 13 minis in their refurb store.[1] That's where I managed to get one. I'm going to hang on to it as long as possible. Previously I had an iPhone SE (the one that looks like an iPhone 5), and I still slightly regret upgrading to the mini. The mini's camera and display are significantly better, but it's a little wide for my hands.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls
Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp these days. Both of which are cross platform, even web (so can use on a desktop browser).
Also, the current Google thing, Meet, doesn't need the person you're calling to have the app. You invite them, they get a link, it opens in their browser, mobile or desktop.
My 13 mini is also not great on battery. I've been debating ordering an iFixit battery and doing the swap, but in the past I've felt it was kind of mixed results from that. I don't think those batteries are newly manufactured units, but rather leftovers from the original production line that have been sitting on the shelf for 2-3 years. So although they'll be an improvement over one that's been through 1-2k cycles, they won't be like it was when it was brand new.
For now I'm just making do with having a power bank in my bag when I'm out and about.
I don't think the iPhone Air will actually be smaller in the dimensions I care about, just thinner which I assume will compromise battery life.
My mini is holding up ok. Battery needs replacing but I haven't done it. Like mikepurvis, I carry power banks around if I'm doing anything where I'm not going to be able to recharge easily. I use one like this https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Magnetic-Slim-B2C/dp/...
I was able to get a new battery and screen for my 13 mini via AppleCare, but even the new battery won't get me through the day. Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.
Even with all that, I'm keeping the mini as long as possible because every year brings bigger and heavier iPhones.
> Recent OS updates also make my camera shooting experience really slow for some reason.
I’m on a 16 pro and it’s bad. It’s worse if I use the side button or do it from lock Screen, quicker from actual camera app. However it’s by far the slowest camera I’ve had on an iPhone, and I find the speed and quality a disappointing.
I have a 13 mini for about 3 years now - still holding up for most of the working day (about 15 hours). The trick is to reduce the number of apps you have on the phone, reduce the number of apps which like running on the background, and not watch a lot of videos.
I figured it out that treating it as a communication device + payments device + maps + very occasional content viewer, ie mostly as a utility will make the phone last much longer.
FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face.
I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.
Face ID is not terrible. Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc. They check to see if you’re looking at the screen and your eyes are open, so they can keep the screen on regardless of the auto lock setting. It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.
> It’s a smart and useful feature which you can turn off if you don’t like it.
If they hadn't gotten rid of the fingerprint sensor, I'd believe in the sincerity of that statement.
> It is not terrible
The fingerprint sensor was at the perfect location, it worked perfectly. FaceID has the downsides I have outlined and therefore in my opinion absolutely terrible.
> Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc.
I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.
The rotation doesn't help anyway, it is technically capable of detecting it is sitting still on my desk but it still does the FaceID dance first before showing me the passcode prompt which I also don't appreciate along with scanning my face every 30 seconds even when unlocked.
If it can scan it so rapidly, why not show me the passcode prompt or design the UX better so that I can already input my passcode before waiting for the device to decide it sees no face in there?
It can do it better but by design it is too eager to just perform the FaceID unlock and then turn itself into a user presence and attention sensor.
I'd easily pay $100 extra for an iPhone that didn't solely rely on FaceID to log me in and instead gave me a fingerprint sensor it had from generations ago.
> I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.
Waiting for the day when Apple announces supporting recording videos horizontally and the Apple fanatics to go wild as they show off how amazing videos can be when the view is wider than it is tall.
Touch ID had a ton of downsides. It didn’t work with wet or dirty fingers, didn’t work with gloves, if you have clammy hands it would constantly fail. Plus it has a higher false positive rate than Face ID and has less features. Not to mention the speed and UX of Face ID is significantly better for MOST people than Touch ID.
I also meant landscape Face ID recognition, obviously not landscape device orientation.
I remember my iPhone, on my desk, turning up because of a notification, then hearing the vibration for a failed FaceID unlock. This very smart system wasn't able to understand that it was looking at a ceiling. So I always ended up having to type my password due to too many failed FaceID attempts.
FaceID was highly ranked in the reasons why I disliked iPhones.
I'm also holding tight on an iPhone 13 Mini (5.18 in x 2.53 in) and I'm honestly not thrilled that even that is a size up from the 5s (4.87 in x 2.31 in).
Pixel 10 is yet another step up, at 6.02 in x 2.83 in, and I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
More annoyingly, they'll beep intermittently with no other indicator.
I have a house with ~15 fire alarms and when one is making an intermittent chirp every 30 seconds, it takes forever to figure out which one is low on battery. This could be solved with an LED that is lit when in a good state, and turns off when the battery is running low (or vice versa). For some reason I can't find a fire alarm with such a feature.
> If I were a law school professor, I’d probably also say that.
Or more likely a jaded B-student who has been around the block a few times.
The reason this works is that the C-students include students who have always known that their social network would facilitate them being rainmakers, while B-students are often middle-class try-hards who don’t have the right social network and don’t have the social skills to develop the right one.
> Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, among others, were stored in a file. The database also contained credentials for bank and financial accounts, health platforms, and government portals.
I'd love a source that at least gave the full list of compromised services.
I spent my whole life only breathing through half a nostril on a good day. About 10 years ago I got surgery and Sublingual Immunotherapy drops, and the results have been life changing.
I sleep better, my mind is clearer, I feel like an entirely new person. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still occasionally think about how nice it is to be able to breathe clearly.
I tried nose strips but I don't like disposables. I now use silicone nostril openers - two little tubes attached at the base that you stick up your nose. It came as a set of 4 sizes so a bit of waste there, but one size fit me and one size fit my wife.
These work well, but I wonder about hygiene. I keep mine in a glass dish on my desktop and attempt to cleanse them in hydrogen peroxide on occasion.
Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
Flonase (fluticasone) has been a life changer. I have taken for granted how valuable breathing is in terms of speech, let alone sleep and general fatigue.
Same for me. I spent the first 45 years of my life breathing almost entirely though my mouth. Then I tried some nasal spray that was great, but made the situation worse when I inevitably overused it, so I went to a doctor. I had been told when I was a kid that I had polyps, so I went to see about getting them removed. She put me on Flonase, which at the time was prescription, and since then I've been able to breathe through my nose unless I'm sick. It has been a significant quality of life improvement for me.
I have had bad allergies for a lot of my life. I probably have some sort of histamine intolerance behind it all.
Recently my allergist gave me a tip with regard to nasal congestion. First, you can use Flonase and Astepro together, apparently they work better when used together. Astepro has an antihistamine in it that can help. Second, moisturize the interior of your nasal passages with a drop of muciprocin in each nostril applied inside your nose at the tip of it, then squeeze your nose gently to distribute. This lets you use get the benefits of Flonase without drying out your nose (which can trigger congestion).
Moving to the coast made me feel like I finally woke up, after growing up perpetually stuffy and sniffly. Turns out I'm not a mouth breather after all!
Just moving away from what your body decided to be allergic to when you were a kid with a bored immune system seems to help a lot, I moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and my allergies receded a lot. I eventually moved back to where I grew up and they didn't really return except on days when the whole city's collective nose is running because all the trees are having an orgy up in there.
I’ve taken it for over 30 years now. It has indeed been a lifesaver and so much better than all the pills. One side effect is blurred vision and I have definitely noticed a slight blurring in the last couple of years. I gladly accept it as a small price to pay for decades of relief.
I feel like this is a trade-off not always understood and accepted in modern times; we expect our medicines to be perfect and our bodies to be restored to new condition, and when this isn't the case we feel betrayed.
I had a turbinate reduction, a deviated septum adjusted, and a balloon sinuplasty. I'm unclear on what the drops are specifically but they're sublingual immunotherapy.
Before game companies earned all their profit through selling cosmetics and premium currency nobody cared if you cheated at your single player game and nobody SHOULD care if you want to give yourself extra money.
It's only now that single player progress is profitable to sell that video games have taken save game encryption to be default.
The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported. Maybe you spend a bit more time defensive coding around what inputs it reads from the file, maybe a certain proportion of users doing the save edit see bugs in an apparently unrelated part of the game and seek support (and their bug report might not be complete with all the details), developers spend time to chase down what went wrong, maybe they bad-mouth it on forums which affects sales - there's going to be some cost to handling all of that.
One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest developed by Iron Lore is that their copy protection had multiple checks, crackers removed the early checks to get the game running but later 'tripwires' as you progress through the game remained and the game appeared to crash. So the game earned a reputation for being buggy for something no normal user would hit running the game as intended.
>The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported.
What? No. What even are you suggesting? Hell, games with OFFICIAL MODDING SUPPORT still require you submit bug reports with no mods running.
Editing game files has always been "you are on your own", even editing standard Unreal config files is something you wont get support for, and they are trivial human readable files with well known standards.
>One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest
Any actual support for this anecdote? Lots of games have anti-piracy features that sneakily cause problems, and even could fire accidentally. None of those games get a reputation for being buggy. Games like Earthbound would make the game super hard and even delete your save game at the very end. Batman games would nerf your gliding ability. Game Dev Tycoon would kill your business due to piracy.
None of these affected the broad reputation of the game. Most of them are pretty good marketing in fact.
Game Dev Tycoon even later added Pirate Mode to the game, for people who wanted to experience super-hard-mode. Complete with random mail they got telling them why people pirated their game, framed as why people were pirating the game you just made.
Interesting hypothesis, is it based on anything specific? I think refined/added sugars in general are probably something best avoided, but admittedly still eat plenty. The idea that one sugar is materially worse than another feels off, but I can't quite put my finger on why.
The GI of sugar (sucrose) and HFCS is largely the same. Indeed, the HFCS-55 used in colas actually has less glucose and more fructose, and fructose actually doesn't lead to a blood sugar spike (or, more correctly, a much lower impact), leading to HFCS-55 having a lower glycemic index. HFCS and sugar are both just combinations of glucose and fructose molecules.
HFCS is not worse than sugar unless you're consuming such an outrageous amount that the fructose leads to a fatty liver (which does happen). But if you're consuming that much HFCS, it's only a small amount more of sucrose to yield the same outcome, as of course both have loads of fructose.
The one viable argument to vilify HFCS is simply that it's so convenient and inexpensive (courtesy of massively subsidized corn production) that it led to many more products having added sugars. But people who carefully pour over ingredients looking for HFCS, but treat sugar as wholesome, are usually operating on ignorance.
It allows me to look at individual posts which lets me search and view specific answers, but blocks the lists of posts. I get the benefit of Reddit without getting sucked into the time wasting feed.
New job (or browser), first look into Stack Overflow, glance through "Hot Network Questions", install uBO, new custom rule (via the Block Element tool), edit it to apply to their millions of subdomains...
> This conservative non-holonomic system has a seven-dimensional accessible configuration space and three velocity degrees of freedom parametrized by rates of frame lean, steer angle and rear wheel rotation.
I always adore the split between how my brain does things instinctually, but making it arbitrary completely demolishes the 'natural' flow of it. Same with complex ball throwing / bouncing trajectory calculations.
It also immediately makes me angry about how we teach math. When you learn about powers (squares, cubes, roots, etc), these things are just written out as arbitrary concepts instead of displaying them geometrically.
Hell, when I was first taught the Pythagorean theorem, it was just explained by drawing a triangle with A² + B² = C², without also drawing out the related squares of each side. Immediately doing that would instill so much more intuition into the math. In general, mathematical concepts gain so much clarity by doing them geometrically.
Sounds like a problem with your early math tutors: especially with geometry, all the examples you bring up have been taught with "what it means".
I mean, squares and cubes are just multiplication by the same factor: I distinctly remember even trapezoid surfaces, pyramid volumes being demonstrated by chopping and piecing parts together.
In the US especially, too many programs have an insistence that doing things with symbols and doing things with shapes and solids are completely different things and don't relate the two.
Primary school programs? Secondary school programs?
I could understand that in high school and uni when you need to move past "intuitive" maths into abstractions, but I'd be perplexed if this is really the "program", and not just an individual teacher (and surely, a big chunk of them too)!
We've started to swing back towards visual and geometrical models with common core/new math.
But I have a big collection of math textbooks from all over the world, and math 6, pre-algebra and algebra texts in the US have far less geometrical content and pictures than the non-US equivalents that I have. I also think that the increased emphasis on getting students through standardized tests ended up dedicating a lot of class time towards rote with short term benefits.
