Understood. My point being that the net $100 saving isn’t enough to stop me holding my nose and buying the Apple upgrade.
Apparently I didn’t read that part of your post. I withdraw the comment.
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FYI, I understand from various YouTubers that the access speed of the 512GB memory chip is faster than that of the 256GB chip. Not anything that I’m going to notice but ‘tis a thing apparently.
I might be wrong but I think that was only with the M2 256GB Macs. Those used just one 256GB NAND flash module instead of two 128GB modules, the latter of which is more performant. They went back to two modules on the M3 series. If there’s a performance difference on the M4, it’s probably not very noticeable.
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I have to have a Surface laptop for work. I never use it because it’s total dogshit.
Watching the latest Apple presentation, and there’s a lot of repainting the deckchairs on the ship that is Siri. I mean, it’s all fine and dandy, but many of the promised AI features from last year are not yet implemented, while Siri still sucks ass.
I thought the emphasis on the new translucent “glass” interface was pretty funny. Windows has already done that (Aero Glass UI in Vista, 2007) and kicked it to the curb (Windows 10, 2015).
This video does a good job of explaining the boondoggle that is Apple Intelligence.
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The whole “liquid glass” thing is just a design aesthetic. Sure…fine.
Siri not being late-stage Hal 9000 would be a better use of their time.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that Ray.”
Still not going to buy a new iPhone to get the AI features that still don’t exist.
Liquid Glass
The transparent look isn’t my cup of tea either but from his tone you’d expect some substantive examples of how the update is actually bad, right? Like “here’s this menu that doesn’t work because of the update” or “this feature is broken now” and so on. But this is just a guy saying “I don’t like the transparency” for eight minutes.
First they came for the headphone jack. Then they came for the iPhone mini. When they introduced “liquid glass”, there was no one left to speak for me.
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I’m still carrying a 12 mini with a new battery. I’m not giving it up until it stops working.
I have the 12 mini as well. So far battery is hanging in there, but it may well be the last iPhone I own, so a new battery may someday be in the plan.
I think the issue here is that they already showed how bad the liquid glass looked in an earlier piece, and assumed people had seen that first.
YouTubers seem to agree that, in its current form, liquid glass is unusable because you can see what’s on top because it’s impacted by what’s underneath. Basically Apple needs to decrease the opacity, but that destroys the glass look.
Basically as Waldo pointed out above, it’s been tried before and discarded before because it’s unusable.
I never said it was unusable, just that Microsoft got tired of it and their design philosophies migrated toward flat colors. I actually quite liked Aero: it looked nice and gave you controls to adjust the opacity and color bleed of your windows to your liking. If you wanted no transparency effects at all then you could simply turn it off.
I haven’t tried the macOS 26 beta and haven’t watched any videos about Liquid Glass, and I can say with 100% certainty that Apple will include a way to turn it off if you don’t like it, at the very least in the accessibility options if nowhere else.
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Apologies for mischaracterizing your comments.
Absolutely Apple has included a way to turn off the glass effects. The sad thing about that is that the glass effect is basically the be- all, end-all of iOS 26, so if people don’t want that then it’s a barren year for software upgrades.
So I finally bit the bullet and bought a new IPad. Got the Air 11 inch. It was easy enough to copy my old iPad to the new one. Got the wireless pencil too. That will take some getting used to, though I suspect it’ll be lost within a few weeks. Oh well.
Put it behind your ear.
My sister, who is an excellent pianist, gave me an 11-inch iPad for guitar music several years ago. It’s brilliant, and I use it all the time just for that. Sometimes I make notes on the music with the wireless pencil, though I’ve never quite got the hang of it. The app I use is forScore. I scan the music I’m working on from physical sheet music into pdf, then upload it to forScore. It is the most amazing thing.
I lost the pencil twice within the first 15 minutes of owning it. I don’t have high hopes.
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