newsletter
The Birchtree Newsletter, October 2022
Hello and welcome to autumn! Big old mess of a month for me, but lots of good things as well. My biggest personal news was that I got LASIK in the middle of the month and I'm so happy I did it. It's a strange experience, and I'll write
goodie
Fitness Wallpapers
I've been rocking the Nike watch faces over the weekend lately, and I wanted to make some iPhone
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Improving Surround Sound and HDR Standards
Jakob Roettgers: Google wants to take on Dolby with new open media formats
Google is gunning for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision: The company is looking to introduce two new media formats to offer HDR video and 3D audio under a new consumer-recognizable brand without the licensing fees hardware manufacturers currently have to pay
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Bothsidesism
Max Witynski: False balance in news coverage of climate change makes it harder to address crisis
Bothsidesism — also referred to as false balance reporting — can damage the public’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and lead audiences to doubt the scientific consensus on pressing societal challenges like climate change, a new Northwestern University study
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Graphics Card Pricing Continues to Skyrocket
Alexandra Hall: Nvidia's New 4000-Series PC Graphics Cards Are Too Damn Expensive
So Nvidia has its viewpoint. But viewing events from the consumer side, it really feels like the costs of enthusiast PC gaming are continuing to skyrocket, and at a time when the costs of just about everything else are, too.
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This Isn't 2010, Don't Design Around Specific Devices
Thanks iPhone 14, designing for device sizes is dead
If it fits precisely on your iPhone Pro Max, it can now easily no longer fit on someone's iPhone Plus. You have to test both. And when a new device has another tiny change, you can add that one yet again.
Honestly, this is
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What You Choose to Speak Out About Matters
Kiona N. Smith: Cloudflare explains why Kiwi Farms was its most dangerous customer ever
In a short time, Cloudflare watched as Kiwi Farms mutated from a valid customer in need of Cloudflare’s protection from cybersecurity attacks conducted by people complaining about the “revolting content” it hosts to suddenly appearing to pose an “imminent threat
Enthusiasts Against Enthusiasts
It would be fair to say that a lot of us are “smartphone enthusiasts”, but a weird thing I’m noticing more and more is that many of us don’t act like enthusiasts.
We buy the iPhone, the most mainstream phone you could possible own, and we mock any phone that doesn’t sell
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Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?!
Jason DeParle: Expanded Safety Net Drives Sharp Drop in Child Poverty
In 1993, safety net programs cut child poverty by 9 percent from what it would have been absent the aid. By 2019, those programs had cut child poverty by 44 percent, and the number of children they removed from poverty more than tripled to
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The Oddest iPhone 14 Take I’ve Seen
Damon Beres: The iPhone Isn’t Cool
And—this is real—there’s a new “Emergency SOS” feature, which will allow an iPhone 14 to connect to a satellite and call for help if you’re lost or trapped, a victim of a crime, or imperiled by fire. Apple promoted this with a video of
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I’m Over the Mac App Store
Mac App Store: Mac App Store and investing engineering time
In the short term, I will definitely accept a hybrid solution. When faced with the choice, we need to focus our engineering time on the 90% of our users using the direct version. That reality is a bitter pill to swallow for a team that
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I am Totally Dependent on Everyone Else
The Steve Jobs Archive is a brand new site for making available numerous Steve Jobs-related things. Currently, it'
Apple
My Silly iPhone Event Predictions
Let's have some fun and predict what's coming tomorrow!
General Event Stuff
1. Absolutely nothing we see on the stream will be live.
2. Press will get hands-on with the new hardware afterwards.
3. Risky - Tim makes some comment that could be seen as a reference to current political affairs.
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I Want USB-C on the iPhone, but Not Like This
John Gruber: ‘Democrats Want to Outlaw Apple From Thinking Differently’
Charging-port-regulation proponents often tell me the regulations are no impediment to progress at all. If someone comes up with a better-than-USB-C charging port, they can just bring it to the industry’s USB consortium and it’ll get approved and
Apple
Ranking Every Apple Watch
On the verge of the 8th generation Apple Watch announcement, I thought it would be fun to rank all the previous models from best to worst. My criteria for this ordering is based on how good it would have been for an average person to buy a new Apple Watch when each of these was
newsletter
The Birchtree Newsletter, September 2022
Hello again! This month was quite busy for me, so I wasn't able to write of film as much as usual, but the rest of the world didn't slow down, so I've got tons of great stuff here to share!
Also, switching this newsletter to monthly was a perfect
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You'll Be Okay in a Post-Notch World
As we get closer to the iPhone 14 announcement, and basically absolute confirmation that the Pro phones will lose the notch in favor of a dual-hole punch design, I've seen a number of tweets expressing concern that hole punches are more obstructive than the notch. I've been using Android phones
