Casey Newton on Facebook going Meta:
It struck me, given the recent conversation around how old and out of touch Facebook has been lately, how strong the Boomer vibes were coming from those reacting to Thursday’s presentation. A surprising number of people seem to think that technological progress ended with the smartphone, and that augmented reality, virtual reality, and connected experiences between platforms will never come to pass.I’m not into all opinions that seems a little bit like an old man shaking his fist at the sky being labelled ‘boomer’ but I completely understand where Casey is coming from here.
I go backwards and forwards about what I want gr36.com to be. Over the years it has been a portfolio of sorts, an attempt at being a news website, a podcast host and lots of things in between. Nowadays it’s decidedly more amateur and more of an extension of myself that evolves over time depending on what I am up to and an extension of myself.
I don’t even have a ‘thing’ I want to write about.
As much as I love 1Password, I don’t love having to pay yet another subscription. So when Apple overhauled their password manager I was intrigued to try it out as fast as possible. Sure, using a fully integrated system probably isn’t the safest way to do things, but given 1Passwords move away from OS specific apps these improvements could be exactly what I needed.
At first look it works well enough to get most people going.
Lee Peterson on his lack of trust in #giftfromgoogle reviews:
As part of the Pixel 6 rollout Google gives out their latest devices to YouTubers and they are encouraged to share their thoughts via this hashtag. Don’t trust these reviews, it’s a gift so it’s already in the name they will mostly be a biased view point showing the positives not a real work review.So just like pretty much every review then.
Without getting too much into the tools I use (yet again) I have been enjoying using Notion lately for all of my productivity needs. It’s not perfect but the power and flexibility it offers me for free is pretty crazy. One of the downsides is using it on the go as the iOS apps leave a little to be desired, but seeing as my usage on mobile is limited now I built a shortcut to help out.
Matt Birchler with some comments on the MacBook to buy:
I would argue the only Apple Silicon Mac I can’t recommend is the 13” MacBook Pro. It’s several hundred dollars more than the Air and gets you the same performance in a larger body.My first thought was of course you wouldn’t buy the 13″ model when something so good has just launched. To be honest I wasn’t really aware that the ‘older’ model (can’t really call it old now can we) was still available but sure enough there it sits starting at £1299.
Jon Porter on Apple being ready to admit it was wrong about the future of laptops:
Whether that’s because Apple is more dominant when it comes to smartphones or just because the benefits of wireless audio were more obvious to people than USB-C accessories, people seem to have been far more ready to roll with Apple’s annoying headphone jack decision. There’s a valid debate to be had about whether Apple kicked off a trend towards wireless audio or whether its move just turbocharged one that was already taking place, but either way, Apple made a bet that the future of smartphone audio was wireless, and for all intents and purposes, it seems to have paid off.
Jason Snell on the Exile from Dongletown:
Apple’s argument for getting rid of the SD slot was that the future would be wireless, and we wouldn’t need to use cards to transfer data anymore. It wasn’t true back in 2016, and it’s still not true. Sure, some devices equipped with SD cards now offer wireless data transfer, but let me tell you—it’s not as fast or reliable as just plugging in a card and transferring the data!