ubermonkey

Because of a very, very last minute AppleCare replacement (like, 35 months after purchase), I have a year-old iPhone 14 Pro.

I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.

This is, in my experience, absolutely true.

"It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today."

I'm trying very hard to understand what you mean specifically here.

The AirPods Pro I use every day for casual listening are far and away better headphones than the wired earbuds I used in that context in 2005.

The regular Airpods I bought my wife 3 months ago were a categorical improvement over the ones she'd lost in a move this summer, and they barely have ANC.

Even the first iteration of Airpods exceeded the quality of equivalent wired in-ear buds available at the time. I recently came across my old Etymotic in-ear headphones, which were at one point a gold standard. The sound from my AirPods Pro is better, and the Apple option is FAR more comfortable in my ears.

I'd argue that cost per unit of fidelity is lower now, in 2026, than it's ever been before. The level of playback a person can enjoy for, say, $500 today is wildly better than what was available for an inflation-adjusted equivalent amount of money in 2016 or 2006 or 1996.

I also have Headphone Acquisition Disorder, for which there is no known cure. As a result I've had a number of fancy wired setups over the years, sometimes requiring a headphone amp.

Owing to a lot of air travel, I bought the AirPods Max soon after they were introduced. I intended them to be airplane accessories for the most part, but the fact of the matter is that my $500 Sennheiser setup that required cables and an amp wasn't obviously superior to the Maxes. Once you factor in convenience, the Apple over-hear setup won the comparison in a walk. In the runup to our x-country move last summer, I sold off or gave away nearly all of the rest of my headphone horde; now, if I'm using headphones, it's one of the Apple options.

Your average HN reader is very very bad at understanding that they are NOT the mass market.

Ha! I remember reading this in print.

In other news, I am old.

You know why.

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

"Southern Baptists officially teach that eternal damnation is a literal, conscious, and everlasting punishment in Hell for anyone who dies without personal faith and salvation in Jesus Christ. If the threat of eternal torment is not coercive control, I'm not sure what is."

You have to be careful with blanket statements like this. Southern Baptist churches are entirely self-run enterprises with no top-down doctrinal control from anyone else. Consequently, there are congregations who would qualify as high-control, culty organizations and there are congregations who welcome LGBTQ folks and such (although it's increasingly true that welcoming / progressive congregations are self-sorting into their own categories/groupings such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship).

I don't know of any SB churches that preach specifically that THEIR church is the One True Church, which is usually what that kind of control requires.

Certainly many folks in the SBC church of my youth moved from church to church, or even to other denominations, and nobody thought that was soul-risking behavior. A central tenet of MOST Baptist churches is the primacy of the adherent's personal relationship to the almighty, which is unknowable to others by default, so this tracks.

DHH means this is, for me, a hard pass.

These aren't problems I face often. I especially don't get random push notifications about Apple (or any other) services, so I'm not sure what's going on for you.

Maybe iOS just isn't for you.

>Why would one computing platform be different from the other?

Are we really still having this discussion? I feel like you KNOW the answer, and why the market rewards Apple for its position here.

The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.

I self-hosted for a while in the early 2000s. It was a hassle. My box got hacked -- I'm sure I missed a security update or something -- and while I didn't lose any data because of my obsessive backup paranoia, it was enough of a Thing that I just punted.

I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).

I am 56. I have been married for almost 21 years. I will not be reading this link, but I am glad it exists.

Midlife brings many things, some good and some bad and some just part of life. One of these is the more visceral, serious understanding -- replacing the mere intellectual knowledge you had before -- that the ride you're on will end.

You will, in your middle years, have friends whose own rides were far shorter than any of you imagined.

You will see people's partners die, and the emotional wreckage that leaves behind. My friend D. is, right now, navigating his first summer alone after losing his wife of nearly 40 years last spring (fuck cancer).

You will realize it could be you, on either side of the sod.

May Elise's memory be a blessing. But I'm gonna go hug my wife now instead of reading Stephen's piece.

My own gripe is that, at least in a good-sized city, the late "physical rental" era provided a more complete menu of available films for the consumer.

Now things flutter in and out of availability, and are fragmented between countless different services. In 1999, though, a visit to Blockbuster and/or my well-stocked film-geek local store would get me pretty much anything I wanted to watch.

I'm still trying to figure out why you didn't see that coming.

The thing is: It's kind of irrelevant for most theatergoers, as there are only 24 IMAX 70mm venues in the whole country. And many of them don't even show theatrical releases.

For example, I used to live in Houston, and we tried to find a 70mm theater for OPPENHEIMER. There aren't any there despite being a city of nearly 8 million.

I want to be a civil as I can here, but you managed to post 3 sentences that are all completely wrong.

1. Seiko is huge. If you are snoozing on them, that's on you, not them. They have a HUGE presence in watches, from low-end affordable pieces to their gorgeous and expensive high-end watches under the Grand Seiko name. Jewelry stores where I live usually devote at least one of their window displays to Seiko (as you see with Rolex and Tag, for example).

2. Seiko is not owned by Epson. Epson do produce some of Seiko's watches, but they're not part of the company. Seiko are a public company primarily controlled, still, by the Hattori family.

3. In the 1980s Seiko was nowhere nearly as prestigious (or expensive) as Rolex or any other high-end Swiss maker. Then as now, the nicer watches were definitely nice watches, but they weren't jewelry like a Rolex or an Omega. The rise of Grand Seiko has leveled that playing field quite a bit, though. Today, at least among watch people, a spring-drive GS would be as fawned over as a Submariner or Explorer.

(edit: I left extraneous text while writing the post. That's now removed.)

I'm a watch nerd, but generally I'm only interested in mechanicals. Spring drive is the first quartz-driven movement I'm actually interested in.

If I won the lotto tomorrow, I'd buy a Grand Seiko with it.

I'd love to read this. A shame it's on Substack.

Counterpoint: No.

I mean, be skeptical all you want, but at least TRY it.

I know I retain more if I handwrite notes. It's my lived experience, so that's what I do in meetings, generally. These notes get transcribed back into some orderly data store for later reference, but the initial notes are pen and paper.

I can try to answer for US.

We're small (< 25 people). We maintained a single rack in a colo, and all the servers were showing their age. We weighed lease cost for replacement (along with hassle of actually doing it), and migrated into AWS last January.

It's been ... messy. I'm not certain we'll stay. It's easier in the sense that we can bring up arbitrarily many new machines without needing to call Dell when a host gets full, but it's definitely not cheaper. And weirdball AWS-only things get in the way. Oh, and literally nothing is simple or easy in administration or setup.

If I had it to do over again, I think I'd have bitten the bullet and leased more boxes instead.

>If it drops, then I am not sure what the implication is exactly?

Surely you understand it's inverse of an IPO that jumps after intro, right?

SpaceX is not seen by investors as worth its price. This is because it is not.

>My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

I feel that for sure, but as a kid who grew up in the rural US South, the fact that as a middle-aged person I can read a mention of some random act and listen to it right now is still a staggeringly great experience.

We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.

Then I subscribed to AppleMusic, and I did so almost exclusively to avoid having to cable-sync music anymore. Turns out, my wife was just using a free Spotify account instead of downloading music to her phone b/c she saw it as too much hassle, and she wasn't wrong. The modest monthly fee was, to me, a way to buy a sync-free existence.

But then the whole "all you can eat" thing hit, and the way it hit the most was in encouraging me to listen widely again. I read a profile of Phoebe Bridgers early in the pandemic, for example. I'm a middle-aged dude, so I'm absolutely not her core demo. I read it b/c it was in The New Yorker, and generally those profiles are worth reading even if you have no idea who the person is, and no real connection to their work. But the author made her work sound interesting.

If it had been twenty years prior, I might've thought "huh, I should check her out," and then forgotten about it. If I was REALLY motivated I'd have put a note in my Palm Pilot that I'd probably neglect to consult the next time I was in a record store. But because it was 2020, I could just pull up her album on my phone and listen as soon as I finished the profile.

That's AMAZING.

>I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums,

I am 100% an album bigot. I admit that sometimes when driving, when I know I won't be able to curate actively, I may ask my phone to play a "station" based on a song whose vibe I like in that moment. This, too, has lead to discovery, but and it usually works at least ok for keeping my ears happy.

But at home, doing intentional listening? It's albums.

>I bought a record player as my protest

I'm 56. I feel like, most of the time in the US, people who were a couple years older than I am DEFINITELY had records growing up, and people who were a couple years younger ABSOLUTELY DID NOT. (There's weight on the scale either way for the presence of music-fan parents or hip older siblings.)

I didn't. When I first heard a song I definitely wanted to have, it was about 1982, and I bought it on a cassette. By the mid-80s when I was well into my teens, CD was already on the horizon and getting cheaper fast, so I bought cassettes sparingly -- I didn't want to buy "The Queen is Dead" on cassette and then have to REbuy on CD a few years later.

CD had completely taken over my music by 1988 or 1989.

But then the dot-com crash happened, and money was TIGHT. A former roommate had abandoned a turntable at my house. Thrift shops had records for like $1 or $2. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) could make a pretty great Saturday afternoon out of cheap tacos and a $5 budget at the used record store.

Now, if I buy physical music, it's probably on vinyl. It doesn't sound better than hi-res digital or CD, but it's more FUN to pull out a record and drop the needle. It's more intentional. And while they're harder to find now than they were 20 years ago, used record bins still have treasures.

I mean, if this isn't the place to share this video, I'm not sure where IS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLJETZyfb7I

I have made my peace with the fact that, unless I'm willing to replace otherwise perfectly functional items just to change the port, USB-C nirvana is a long way away at our house.

The Lightning holdouts:

* My wife and I both still have Lightning phones with plenty of life left in them. My 14Pro was actually replaced under AppleCare not quite a year ago, so it's nearly new!

* I have two sets of headphones that are Lightning: Airpods Pro and Max. Both still have great battery life despite years of use. If either failed tomorrow, I'd buy a new example, but I'm not spending that money without good reason.

* I have a full suite of Apple desktop peripherals (trackpad, mouse, and keyboard) that I swap in from time to time for variety. Like most Apple kit, they're all very well made and will last a long time -- and all charge by Lightning.

MicroUSB holds on, too:

* The battery charger for my bicycle's derailleurs is MicroUSB -- and SRAM still isn't selling a USB-C version, which is crazy. I could by an aftermarket one, but why?

* Likewise, the charger for my camera batteries is Micro.

* My bicycle headlight and taillight are both Micro.

* We have two Kindles that are both Micro.

All these things work just fine. The MicroUSB stuff is less annoying, since most of those things don't need to travel, but the Lightning holdouts are the ironic downside to Apple's generally high level of hardware quality.

Interesting idea, but honest to god I don't really have that big of a spam problem anymore.

O365 is handling 90% of it on our corporate mail; my personal address (which is far older) is hosted at Fastmail and it traps nearly all the spam there, too.

In 2026, I'm much more annoyed by PHONE spam -- though Apple's "who the hell are you and why should ubermonkey take your call" feature has done wonders. (I assume something similar exists in Android.)

Yeah, this.

In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999.

Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane.

There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us.

The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family.

Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.

>What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace.

ooof. I'm 56. I got an Internet email address before most people knew email existed (1987). I belonged to virtual communities on usenet and listservs well before the web as we know it took root.

Consequently, I feel your comment in my bones.

>I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them

Having studied Russian in college, I assumed that all Cyrillic script included a line over the т, because otherwise readability goes to hell. Is my impression here based on (a) an opinion of my Russian prof expressed as a universal rule or (b) a thing that's universal in Russian specifically, but not Belarusian Cyrillic or other similar contexts, or... something else?

I'm inferring from your post that you are a native user of Cyrillic who has also learned English. I'm the reverse (well, at least I took Russian in college; I was never fluent then and remember almost nothing now). Something interesting happened to my cohort of Russian learners back then, and I wonder if it's common for folks going the other way.

After we got comfortable with writing Russian in cursive, we found that Cyrillic letters worked their way into our English script. Often, we wouldn't even notice, even when reviewing our notes later. I discovered I'd done this when I loaned some political science notes to a friend, and he couldn't read them because I'd unconsciously mixed Cyrillic and English script. I could read them fine, and so could my Russian-class friends.

We mentioned this to our Russian prof, and he laughed and said it happened to people every year, but he could never figure out who would be prone to it. Sometimes it was top students; sometimes it was people who were struggling.

(It was in this era that I ended up pretty much abandoning cursive, because Cyrillic never crept into my printed handwriting. 35 years later, my cursive is abysmal.)

Did you end up mixing script in your native handwriting inadvertently?