MyAppleMenu is dark this week. Regular updates will resume on Monday, November 14, 2016.
I have been using USB-C for a year now, on the non-Pro MacBook, so I thought I should share some of my experiences. And I want to tell you that the #donglelife (yes, it’s a hashtag) is not all that horrible for me, day-to-day. That’s in large part because I am smack in the center of Apple’s target market: I don’t need to plug stuff beyond power into my computer all that often, so when I do it’s not too big a hassle to use a dongle. And much to my surprise, I don’t miss MagSafe as much as I expected to. If I were a photographer or video director who needs to use SD cards constantly and who already has a cache of hard drives that require different ports, it might be a different story.
I feel strange defending dongles, because you can and should count me among the people who think that removing the headphone port from the iPhone 7 was a user hostile mistake. But for me, the big difference between needing dongles for your laptop and needing dongles for your phone is that you usually carry your laptop around in a bag, which has pockets that can carry dongles.
The good news for those people is that the new MacBook Pro actually has a second-gen version of the butterfly mechanism. The keys don’t actually travel any further, but they feel as if they so.
It may still feel a little odd at first, but I was at home with the MacBook Pro’s keyboard within five minutes and within 30 was convinced that it’s the nicest keyboard I’ve ever used. It feels mechanical, has a really satisfying clack to every press, feels perfectly laid-out and reduces typos thanks to the extra space given to each key.
Like IBM, Apple is in a bind. Its future and primary revenue source is mobile devices. Yet we can’t make these products without the horsepower provided by the Mac.
Apple has enhanced its iOS accessibility features for users with hearing impairments, adapting its enhanced Bluetooth-based streaming to Made For iPhone hearing aids while introducing Live Listen, a feature that uses an iPhone's mic to focus on conversations in loud environments.
The rise of WhatsApp diplomacy is transforming the negotiating chamber. There are countless groups of allies and virtual huddles, exchanges over policy statements and fine print, and fair amounts of banter and even emojis (Vladimir Putin is referred to by widespread use of a grey alien avatar).
“You can form small groups of like-minded allies, take photos of annotated documents, ask people what they think without the whole room knowing,” a senior western diplomat said.
Today, Microsoft and Salesforce are archrivals that recently battled each other to buy the social network LinkedIn — hungry for its troves of highly personalized data about businesspeople. When Microsoft won, Salesforce threw cold water on the acquisition by saying it would violate European antimonopoly laws.
But not long ago, the two software giants were tight. They even talked about merging their businesses — not once, but twice. The second round of talks hasn’t previously been reported.
A behind-the-scenes look at the fight between Salesforce, which upended business software by pioneering a rent-by-the-month model, and Microsoft, which is racing to adjust, exposes an awakening in corporate America about the value of social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. The data stashed in their servers has elevated services like these from an amusing distraction to an essential tool that helps big businesses understand their customers.
I will be away for work for this week, so this little web site will be going dark. See you next Monday.
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Thanks for reading.