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The Ask-To-Buy Edition Saturday, December 23, 2017

Parents Can’t Use The iPhone X’s Face ID To Approve Family Purchases, by Samuel Axon, Ars Technica

iPhone X owners have found that Face ID isn't available as an authentication method for the "Ask to Buy" feature, which allows parents to approve their kids' iOS purchases and downloads. Instead, the parent (or any other "family organizer," as Apple terms it) must enter their entire Apple account password to approve each individual purchase attempt.

Radeon Pro Vega 56 Vs. Vega 64: Which iMac Pro Video Card Is Better?, by Serenity Caldwell, iMore

"You're unlikely to see a massive difference between these two cards if all you are doing is gaming, but if you're using tools that tax the card in ways that are not actively shown on the screen at 90fps (as graphic artists/game devs tend to do) the difference is a great deal more substantial."

"Visual artists/developers will see a significant performance difference between these two machines, but general consumers likely would not."

Apple Slows Your iPhone As The Battery Ages, But Doesn’t Give You A Cheap Way To Replace It, by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post

The battery replacement problem is an example why a growing community of gadget lovers are calling for laws to ensure consumers have a legal “right to repair” their own electronics. Laws proposed in a handful of states would help prevent tech companies from locking down devices with software and make repair manuals available to the public.

Guess who has lobbied against those laws? Tech companies, including Apple.

Stuff

Scrivener, by Jill Duffy, PC Magazine

Whether you're pounding out endnotes for a nonfiction book or slowly crafting characters to set loose in your next novel, Scrivener provides a place to create, edit, and organize all your work, especially long-form pieces.

Notes

At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote The Book On Adult Supervision, by Steven Levy, Wired

Schmidt’s departure from the executive chair role ends Silicon Valley’s most successful execution—ever—of the dilemma that Google’s funders were coping with in the firm’s early days. How do you bring in an authoritative leader without dimming the brilliance of the callow founders who made the company valuable in the first place? Though Schmidt won deserved plaudits for his tenure as CEO, his most impressive feat was a delicate balancing act of being both the boss of Google’s freewheeling founders—supplying so-called “adult supervision”—and enthusiastically assuming the role of their student as well. All too aware of how similar situations wound up in continual boardroom spats between a hoodied founder and a khakied executive, Schmidt determined early on that exercising authority over Page and Brin would lead to disaster. He never missed an opportunity to ostentatiously proclaim the genius of his younger colleagues. (When I questioned him once about using that word, he ​replied, “I wasn’t using it deliberately, but now that you’ve pointed it out, it is what I believe.”) And he didn’t let his own ego lead him to put his mark on the firm just because he could. “My opinion is that the culture of companies is set very early,” he told me in 2004, “It would have been foolish for me to try to change them much, because it wouldn’t have worked, and it would’ve been bad. It’s sort of a given that this is how the company works now. If you changed it you’d lose all of its great things.”