I was very fortunate that my school had a computer lab. We had a dozen Commodore Pets, each with its own cassette tape drive. It was a banner day when they got daisy-chained to a dual, 5 1/2” floppy disk drive and a dot matrix printer.
We also had a stand-alone Apple II, which was color! And we had a dot matrix terminal that was linked to an alumnus’ bank mainframe computer. He was quite senior and we used his login, until they got miffed that quarterly accounting runs were being usurped for processing time for us to play Star Trek.
When I was a freshman in high school (97-98) our computer science lab had these junky old PC-XTs on a very basic network. We had network logins, a home folder that popped up on any computer we logged into, etc. But everything in that lab was criminally obsolete, since by then most of us at least had a computer at home capable of running a GUI.
The class, almost a pre-computer science class, was mostly a blow-off class - very self-guided and the teacher had no fucks to give - so we farted around a lot trying to break things. A few weeks in we learned that you could type “send [username] [message]” and it would pop up that message on the bottom of that user’s screen. The receiving computer would beep and the system would actually halt until the user pressed a keystroke to clear the message. Then we learned how to terrorize each other by putting those commands into a batch file running an infinite loop. As long as that batch file was running it didn’t matter which computer you went to - as soon as you logged in your machine was slammed with messages.
On a whim, one day I tried “send all [message]” and it popped up on all the computers in the lab whether they were logged in or not. Two of my friends made the short logical leap to throw that into a batch file on infinite loop, and a new brand of evil was born… until another CS teacher walked into the lab and called out my friends’ usernames. We thought it was just our computer lab on the network, because our logins didn’t work in the big lab downstairs. Turns out the network also included a lab across the hall, a lab around the corner… and the school office. So students in other labs doing “real” computer science learning, as well as school administrators doing “real” work, were constantly being interrupted by very juvenile messages from that batch script - basically the dumbest denial-of-service attack ever.
No one got in any trouble as long as we promised not to use “send all” anymore, so we just went back to committing focused acts of electronic violence against each other. All of those old shitboxes got replaced the next summer with Pentium II machines running Windows 95 and, sadly, no “send” command (we tried).
We used the do-nothing loops to set up delayed actions too. Halfway through a class, the machines would beep and flash up messages, or endless “page forward” on the printer. Or we’d lay a “press any key” boobytrap for the teacher.
Didn’t have any messaging capability though; it was the early 80s.
I prefer wired headphones too, and I was not happy when I was forced to upgrade to an iPhone 8. But mine came with a Lightning-to-headphone adapter and I bought another two or three to just keep permanently on the ends of my headphones and that’s worked out fine. And then I got one of these overpriced splitters because I found myself wanting to charge my phone and listen to music at the same time when traveling. I haven’t missed the headphone jack since.
Received my iPhone 12 mini today. Of course, it’s huge, and there is no headphone jack, but it’s been pretty straightforward and easy to transfer everything from my Android. I guess I’m back in the cult…er…club.
I’m not sure about the MagSafe charger though. Benefits seem pretty minimal.
Just to close this loop, the upgrade went flawlessly. I pretty much had to deconstruct the entire workings to get to the SSD, as it’s on the underside of the motherboard. So, while I was at it, swapping out the HDD was a breeze.
The 2019 is infinitely easier to work on than the 2010, save that the screen is glued on - instead of being held by magnets - so you need a new set of stickies every time you open it up.
Got it all up and running and it’s currently “inheriting” my old Time Machine backup. That’s taking forever because I updated the metadata on all my movies (to look better on the current Apple TV interface) so it’s re-saving the whole bloody lot!
Once the backup is complete, I’m going to upgrade to Big Sur, which is exciting.
This goes back to a year or two ago, when Apple gave up on developing a charging pad - that they’d touted for years - that would be able to charge multiple (Apple) devices at once, like your iPhone and your AirPods.
They just gave up because it was too hard, and I doubt Jobs has stopped spinning in his grave since.
Qi chargers work fine. MagSafe on the iPhone is a superset of Qi: backward compatible with standard Qi chargers, but with a few extra features for the MagSafe ecosystem to take advantage of.
I also didn’t take the plunge on MagSafe, mostly because of the cost and I already have 3 Qi chargers, but also because if I were to have my phone plugged in while using it I’d prefer the cable hang out the bottom of the phone and not the back.
If the rumors are to be believed, then Qi/MagSafe will be the only charging options on the 2021 iPhones.
The MagSafe Duo charger (for iPhone and Apple Watch) costs $129without a USB-C power brick. Even if Apple had overcome whatever the technical challenges were on the AirPower, it would have cost well over $200 and no one save the fanboy-ingest of fanboys would’ve bought it.