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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
iphone
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
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Apple's Unofficial Jupiter Wallpaper 2022
As I've done before in 2017 (twice, even!!), I wanted to take the chance to create a new
Back to Spark
Apple’s Mail app is getting some much-needed features this year in iOS 16, and I’ve been using it all summer as my mail app on my iPhone and iPad, but sadly I just removed it from those devices and have gone back to Spark.
For all the talk in the Apple enthusiast
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The One Thing Republicans Care About
Charles M. Blow: Republicans Are America’s Problem
However, her loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.
As far as
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Not That Sort of Club
Nexus Mods is a great site for finding fun mods to PC games, and I use it all the time. It's where I got the "easy mode" mod that turned Elden Ring into one of my favorite games of the year, for example.
They were in the news this week which
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Gaming on a Mac is Still Blah
Digital Foundry does the best technical gaming analysis out there, and it was awesome to see them take a rare look at Mac gaming this week. They compared a maxed-out Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra and compared it to several PC systems to see how it stacked up.
You should watch the video,
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Our (maybe) Metaverse Delusion
John Gruber on Meta:
I take Zuckerberg at face value that he’s more or less betting the company on “the metaverse”. But to me their efforts on that front feel less like “We know exactly what experiences we’re trying to create that will be more compelling than anything that exists today and will
